The CIA and Me

When my daughter Lauren was born we lived in Philadelphia and nine of our best friends were secretly working for the CIA.  

It was different then, in the early 60s: things were hopeful, the Vietnam war was a whisper, the government was not the enemy.  Working for the government wasn’t so…. suspect, wrong.  Government then was still ‘us,’ not yet ‘them,’ at least if you were a middle class white person.  John Kennedy and even Lyndon Johnson were generally seen as positive figures, and we were all working, we thought, for the same things.  Economic and social justice, civil rights, peace, progress.  But I certainly did not know that nine of my friends were secret agents, and that the office I shared with them was a CIA front, and that money I raised to support a national organization of campus newspapers was from the CIA too.  I thought my friends, while we had dinner, and they played with our baby daughter, and we traveled and argued and planned and shared, I thought we were all doing the same things.  I thought I knew them.

Yale Press has just published my friend Karen Paget's book, Patriotic Betrayal, about that time, and those people.   A history of the entanglement with CIA, why and how the lies were born and grew.  I have just a small piece, what happened to me. Because for three years or so, before I knew what was going on and after, it was a very large part of my life.