July 18, 2005
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John H. Richardson
Writer at Large
Writer at large John H. Richardson began his reporting career as a newspaperman and soon moved on to magazines, landing at Esquire in 1998 after writing for New York, GQ and Premiere, among others. He became the envy of men everywhere (and probably more than a few women), when he profiled the irrepressible Angelina Jolie for the February 2000 issue of Esquire. Richardson remains impressed by Jolie’s open, raw and honest interview, touched that she made a “human moment out of what most people would view as a commercial exchange.” But it’s the autobiographical and intensely personal “My Father the Spy” (3/99) that Richardson unhesitatingly names as his favorite Esquire story, saying the personal nature of the piece made it easy rather than difficult to write. He has found himself face to face with numerous leading men for Esquire, including George Clooney (10/99), “a no-bullshit sort of guy.” Richardson’s other work for Esquire includes “Dwarfs: A Love Story” (2/98) and “Scenes from a (group) Marriage” (5/99), a tale of polyamory in suburban New Jersey. Richardson lives in Westchester County, New York with his wife and two daughters.
July 17, 2005
Spies in the House
By JOHN H. RICHARDSON
It’s the summer of 1969, just before my father tells me that he works for the C.I.A., and I am beginning my own secret life. I’m 14 years old, and down in Georgetown, a few blocks west of the White House, a string of new shops burn incense, blast rock music and sell Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead posters. My friend’s older brother, Joe, is painting Blue Meanies on a wall of his room. I know something’s going on, but I’m not quite getting it. I’m convinced that grown-ups hide everything. Then Joe puts down his paintbrush and pulls out a plastic baggie. ”You guys ever smoke grass?”
I don’t even hesitate, and soon I’m noticing my peripheral vision and especially my peripheral thoughts. Before long, I’m sneaking down to Georgetown regularly. One day I buy some acid from a hippie in engineer’s pants. When I come home, my mother insists on talking to me, so I sit babbling about school or the weather or Mrs. Banfield’s azalea garden, and my lips seem to be moving normally even though the hair on my arm is growing at an alarming rate. After a while she seems satisfied, and I realize she doesn’t even see me.
A few weeks later, my father asks me to join him in the study. I sit down in one of the red leather chairs and he sits down in the other, tapping his cigarette into the crystal ashtray. He has been posted to Korea, he says. We will be moving there soon. And there’s something else.
”You’ve reached the age when you’re old enough to know what it is I do,” he says.
He keeps it vague. ”Special assistant to the ambassador” is just a cover story. Then he asks me if I want to go with the family or stay in the States at a boarding school. And that’s it. He doesn’t regale me with tales of chasing Nazi spies on the battlefields of Italy, or the time he recruited history’s first Soviet double agent. He doesn’t mention his role in the coup that overthrew Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam. He doesn’t explain why we’re going to live 30 miles from the most totalitarian country in the world, or why it’s so important to him. It will be years before I learn much of this. Maybe he thinks it’s all covered under his oath of secrecy, along with the rest of his life.
At first, it sounds implausible to me. My father, a spy? The guy wears a suit and horn-rimmed glasses. He goes to the office every day and reads all night. He worries about the ivy on the hill. He badgers me to cut the lawn. He’s a dad. There’s an unreality to the whole idea, an unreality that seems consistent with this strange new world where the song lyrics make no sense and you can watch the hair grow on your arm.
From TV and Time magazine, I have developed the vague impression that people think the C.I.A. is a bad thing, which is intriguing. And there’s James Bond and ”In Like Flint,” the movie in which James Coburn fights off an international conspiracy of playmates. Maybe the old man is cooler than I thought. Maybe our secrets will bind us together. It’s a natural reaction, I understand later. People can’t help thinking that secrets are a kind of magic, that only mysteries reveal the truth.
One night, a man from the C.I.A. sleeps at our house, something that has never happened before. When he and my father drive off in the morning, I snoop through the man’s luggage and find a reel-to-reel tape. Carefully peeling back the seal, I take it downstairs and put it on my father’s giant Teac tape player. It’s something about Kennedy and foreign policy. I’m meticulous about replacing the tape and repacking his suitcase exactly as I found it. (Tradecraft, Mr. Bond.)
Another time, I go poking for clues in my dad’s dresser drawers, and lo and behold, hidden under the perfectly folded handkerchiefs and boxer shorts, I find a loaded snub-nosed .38 with a gleaming oil-slick barrel and his initials — our initials — carved into the ivory handle.
A thrill runs through me. In my excitement, I show it to one of my friends. We sneak out to the woods, and I aim it at a tree.
In the years to come, I will want to know everything I can about my father. I’ll look for him in old letters and yellowing newspapers. I’ll even call the C.I.A. and ask for his personnel records. A pleasant man will ring back with the official response: ”Not only no, but hell no — and if you pursue this, we will have to contact John Richardson Sr. and remind him of his secrecy oath.”
But at 14, I’m not ready for whatever the gun has to tell me. When I pull the trigger, the crack of the gunshot explodes so loud across the hills that we take off running and keep running until I get the damn thing back in the drawer. This is a little too much reality. I’m happy to keep our secrets for now.
The next time I go to find the .38 in his drawer, just to take another look, it’s gone.
John H. Richardson is the author of ”My Father the Spy: A Family History of the C.I.A., the Cold War and the Sixties,” which will be published next month by HarperCollins and from which this essay is adapted.
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