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John H. Richardson |
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THE NEW YORK OBSERVER July 29, 2005 ... written from the gut, but as an Outward Bound adventure ... ... years of research, sweat and heart-wrenching reflection have gone into My Father the Spy ... ... There was no darker love-hate relationship in recent American history than the one between the United States and South Vietnam. John Richardson, the father who’s the subject of this book, was at the center of that relationship when it turned murderous ... -Michael Janeway, Columbia University professor and author of The Fall of the House of Roosevelt: Brokers of Ideas and Power from FDR to LBJ. |
IN BOOKSTORES NOW! ORDER MY FATHER THE SPY HERE THE WASHINGTON POST July 31, 2005 In the 1950s and '60s, the so-called golden age of spying, CIA station chiefs were not so much spies or spy runners as proconsuls. In the "third world," on the front line against communist insurgencies, they often had more influence than the American ambassador and sometimes more real power than the local strongman. With their bags of cash and imperial writ from Washington, their diplomatic covers and ties to the local secret police, they could prop up or bring down governments. They were moral authorities, though sometimes Machiavellian ones, in the long twilight search for benevolent despots who would stand up to the communists and -- one day, it was hoped -- usher in free-market democracy. John H. Richardson was one of the best of the breed -- or, depending on one's point of view, one of the worst. As Vienna station chief in the early '50s, he ran the CIA's first Soviet "mole," Col. Pyotr Semyonovich Popov of the GRU, or Soviet military intelligence. In Athens in the mid-'50s, he helped support the Greek monarchy against communist insurgents. In Manila, when Philippine President Diosdado Macapagal was inaugurated in 1961, Richardson was the shadowy man standing by the president's side on the reviewing stand. His reward for services rendered was the toughest job in the CIA portfolio: Saigon station chief in 1962 ...
...includes some wonderful snapshots, like the
CIA's super-spooky counterespionage chief James J. Angleton going fishing -- and taking along a pair of
"secret spy glasses that helped him see the trout ..."
When Esquire writer-at-large Richardson tried to learn more about his late father,
who was a top CIA agent working some of the major political hotspots of the past 65 years—Nazi Germany,
the Soviet Empire, junta-controlled Greece, Ferdinand Marcos’ Philippines, Park Chung Hee’s South
Korea, and South Vietnam in its final days—he made an unsurprising discovery: “My own father was
classified top secret.” In the face of that challenge, however, Richardson has pieced together
a remarkably full and literate biography of his dad, drawing on his father’s pre-
and post-Agency correspondence, conversations with his father’s former colleagues, and published
writings and testimony about the CIA. Equally compelling is the story of the author
himself, who lived a lavish and exotic life with his parents in most of their postings but rebelled against
what his father and the CIA represented. In the stories of father and son, readers will not only find
absorbing narratives but will also divine the early signs of America’s now highly
contentious culture wars.
... Richardson gives a clear-eyed account of both his father's achievements and failures.
In so doing, he relates a tale of a brave, complicated man who was devoted to the spread of democracy
- a cause America continues to cherish ...
John Richardson Sr. was an idealist: a man who loved great literature, Thomas Jefferson,
and democracy, a Quaker who undertook dangerous missions during WWII. He also witnessed Tito's slaughter of
Germans and Croats, as well as Stalin's pause outside Warsaw while the Germans went about their dirty work
in the city; these experiences led him to join the fight to thwart communism. As he shifted from the OSS
to the fledgling CIA, John Sr. essentially became a classified secret himself, and John Jr. lost his father,
who was out of the loop. The author pores over all the evidence he can find concerning his father's role in
various authoritarian outposts, endeavoring to make sense of an honorable man who helped facilitate a foreign
policy that increasingly relied on despots and thugs. He tracks Dad from Greece to the Philippines, Vietnam
during the cheery days of Diem and Nhu and strategic hamlets, and finally to Seoul under the thumb of the grim
Park Chung Hee. Richardson never learns exactly what his father did, but he does
artfully draw the family's home life in all its stress, distance, and disconnect
John Jr. and his sister were very much a part of the counterculture; their behavior could easily rub their
father the wrong way. John Sr. was patient and decent—he railed against the ugly Americans—but
he held the conviction that "we have to support vicious dictators because an authoritarian government
can evolve but a totalitarian government can only be opposed from the outside." He took his authoritarian
poison, Richardson notes, and "stored up the raw material for a lifetime of regrets."
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