My interest in Cold War intelligence came from a real-life beginning. My maternal grandfather was hired by the Office of Strategic Services after World War II and stayed there as it became the Central Intelligence Agency, in a non-covert post, analyzing Soviet radio broadcasts. He and my grandmother settled down in the inner-ring suburbs of Washington, DC in the early 1950s to raise their family. Then history intruded in the form of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
McCarthy made his bones on the claim that a secret Communist conspiracy had infiltrated the U.S. government. As McCarthy’s accusations of Communist spies in the civil service grew broader and wilder, my grandfather’s bosses at the CIA began a review of all personnel files. In 1955, internal investigators turned up a number of things in my grandfather’s background that they found troubling.
Decades later, the memoranda they wrote detailing their findings, and the letters my grandfather wrote responding to them, are still in my family’s papers. The memos listed seventeen charges. He was accused of being friends, twenty years before and a thousand miles away in South Dakota, with a list of named Communists; visiting local party headquarters; handing out Communist pamphlets; and on one occasion, giving a known Communist a lift from Sioux Falls to Minneapolis. He was further accused of hanging around with two named women, also Communists, in Greenwich Village in 1943, and attending a Communist meeting there. More charges: he had founded a leftist newspaper in Sioux Falls, had started a local chapter of the Workers’ Alliance, and finally—this last one jarring with the more mundane activities around it—had joined the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War and been interned in France.
He responded meticulously to these accusations. In 1935, when he was twenty years old, he had been a socialist, not a communist, he said. He had known some of the people mentioned but could not recall others. He had never handed out any pamphlets. He admitted to the drive from Sioux Falls to Minneapolis. He had no recollection of visiting any party headquarters, unless—he began to speculate here, and his fatigue and anxiety is palpable on the page, all these years later—unless perhaps the Sioux Falls Communist Party was headquartered in the Communist bookstore operated by his friend, the one he drove to Minneapolis, which he had visited several times and where it was possible he might have bought some Communist literature, but probably not, because he was “poverty-stricken at the time.” He knew the two women in Greenwich Village, he said, but his relations with them were “entirely personal,” and they had never tried to convert him to their cause.
The rest—the Workers’ Alliance, the leftist newspaper, the Spanish Civil War? He confessed that he had made those things up in 1943 in an application for a journalism fellowship. He had been told that a leftist resume would help him get it. He deeply regretted the mistake. He had apparently been polygraphed already during the investigation; he referred to this in his statement, and repeatedly offered to be polygraphed again to confirm this or that part of his sworn testimony.
As he sat writing this defense in 1955, he was forty years old and had three young children to support. The charges that were true, he wrote, came down to one charge: that he was friends with Communists a long time ago, and had been a socialist himself. He was fired.
In 1961, my grandfather fell from the roof of the family home while making repairs. He died of his injuries. Sixty years is a lot of silence. It was partly to sound out this lacuna that I began to write about the professional middle classes ringing Washington, DC at midcentury, the intelligence services where they worked, and the way people lived and continued to live with lies—big lies and small lies, public lies and personal lies. What stands out more in his story—the socialist politics of a young man coming out of rural poverty in the midst of the Depression, clearly interested in the radical organizing happening all around him in Sioux Falls, South Dakota? Or is it the extravagant lies for personal gain—the fictitious service in a bloody war from which most volunteers did not come back? Was it about fantasy, glamor, social cache? Was it about justice for the injuries of poverty? Was it both? Who was he? What does any of it tell me about this person I never met, whom even my mother barely remembers? I have only this very small window into his life, this brief instant when he sat sweating over a typewriter with his career on the line, admitting to humiliating deceptions, wracking his brain for the names of passing acquaintances, summoning up a dingy Greenwich Village function hall filled with earnest young people hoping for a better future in the middle of a world war. I can feel him trying to make contact with that younger self, trying to remember what he wanted, who he told people he was, what he believed and when he stopped believing it. He confesses it all. It’s not enough.
Who is Vera Kelly by Rosalie Knecht (Verve Books) Published 21 January 2021
"New York City, 1962. Vera Kelly is struggling to make rent and blend into the underground gay scene in Greenwich Village. She's working night shifts at a radio station when her quick wits, sharp tongue, and technical skills get her noticed by a recruiter for the CIA. Next thing she knows she's in Argentina, tasked with wiretapping a congressman and infiltrating a group of student activists in Buenos Aires. As Vera becomes more and more enmeshed with the young radicals, the fragile local government begins to split at the seams. When a betrayal leaves her stranded in the wake of a coup, Vera learns the Cold War makes for strange and unexpected bedfellows, and she's forced to take extreme measures to save herself.
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