levitated by the gases of decomposition, surfaced a week later, 40-odd pounds of scuba-weights belted to the waist, a 9mm bullet hole behind the left ear. In those halcyon Cold War years of CIA/KGB huggermugger, when such more or less deranged intelligence chiefs as the Soviet Unionâs Lavrenti Beria and the USAâs James Jesus Angleton saw or suspected moles within moles within moles, âthe Paisley caseâ received much local and some national and international attention, duly echoed in the novel. Had the fellow been done in by the KGB because he had discovered their Mole in our agency? By the CIA because he was the Mole? By one or the other because he was only apparently retired from counterintelligence work in order to scan covertly from his sailboat the high-tech snooping gear suspected to be concealed by the Soviets in their U.S. embassy vacation compound, just across the wide and placid Chester River from where I write these words? Et cetera. A few less intrigue-driven souls, myself among them, imagined that the chap had simply done himself in, for whatever complex of personal reasons and despite certain odd details and spookish unresolved questions (see novel)âbut by the end of the American 1970s one had learned that paranoia concerning the counterintelligence establishments was often outstripped both by paranoia within those establishments and by the facts, when and if they emerged.
Â
INDEED, MY U.S.-HISTORY homework through that decade for the LETTERS novel, together with our war in Vietnam, cost me considerable innocence concerning the morality of our national past and present, especially with respect to foreign policy and to such agencies
as J. Edgar Hooverâs FBI and Allen Dullesâs CIA, whose clandestine, not infrequently illegal operations I found to be rich in precedent all the way back to George Washingtonâs administration. Given our political geography, a fair amount of that activity turns out to have taken place in and around my tidal birthwaters (see novels).
During the long course of writing LETTERS , I happened to move with my new bride back to those birthwaters after a 20-year absence, to teach at Johns Hopkins, my alma mater, and to begin for the first time ardently exploring, in our cruising sailboat, the great estuarine system that I had grown up on, in, and around. It was sobering, in those high-tension times, to see the red hammer-and-sickle banner flying above the aforementioned Soviet embassy retreat across the river, and to note on our charts (abounding in Danger Zones and Prohibited Areas) the 80-plus Pentagon facilities scattered about this fragile tidewaterlandâincluding the Pentagon itself, the U.S. Naval Academy, and the Edgewood Arsenalâs chemical and biological weapons development facilities, not to mention several CIA âsafe housesâ and the headquarters of the Agency proper. Sobering too to sail past the odd nuclear missile submarine off Annapolis, packing firepower enough to wreck a continent, and to know that among oneâs fellow pleasure-sailors and anchorage-mates would be a certain number of federal employees including the occasional admiral, active or retired, taking a busmanâs holiday, and the occasional Agency spook, ditto, perhaps ditto. And sobering finally to be cruising the pleasant waters that a British task force had invaded during the War of 1812, burning Washington, bombarding Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbor, and inspiring our national anthemâwaters increasingly stressed by agricultural run-off ever since the first European settlers cleared the forests to farm âsot-weedâ in the 17th century; by military dumping
and residential development through the 20th; and by history, more or less, over that whole span.
Sabbatical glances at all that, perhaps even attempts here and there to stare it down, but itâs really only marginally about the Wonderlandish machinations of the CIA/KGB and the
Piper Vaughn & Kenzie Cade