His Father's Secrets

Little John is riding with his dad in that long black limo. Operating under diplomatic cover, a CIA station chief is nearly as powerful as an ambassador and has similar perks, like the car and the inscrutable driver in those mirrored sunglasses.

Soldiers stop ordinary cars at checkpoints, but they wave through the limos with the little flags flapping and the diplomatic plates. It's power on wheels -- American power afoot in Manila, Saigon, Seoul (and Vienna before little John was born and Athens when he was a baby).

Richardson's looking at his dad, seeing that suit, those horn-rimmed glasses. Inside his dad's formal world, all protocol and secrets and chauffeurs, it felt like "extreme grown-upness," he says, "like I was visiting Planet Dad."

Fathers as foreign entities: It's a familiar theme. But in his book, which is subtitled "An Investigative Memoir," Richardson, now 50, takes us deep into the life of a CIA agent, both professional and personal, noble and tragic.

He is the author of the 1996 Hollywood-murder novel "The Vipers' Club" and the 2001 work of nonfiction about dwarves "In the Little World." A former scribe for Premiere magazine, he now is writer-at-large for Esquire, where in 1999 he wrote the article that became the basis of his latest book.

Richardson talked about his father and his book during an interview over lunch while on book tour here. He is as casual and laid-back (but for the odd picking at his fingers) as his father was upright and formal.

He speaks ironically, even emotively about his dad, but scrupulously avoids judging the man who left him with so many mysteries. The fact is, he's been trying to write this book for years. He's been trying to unravel "the puzzle of paternity" for years. And he hasn't. That's the heartbreaker.

Employing personal letters, declassified government documents, recollections of ex-agents, and family memories, Richardson paints a portrait of his father as a masterful yet somewhat reserved Cold Warrior, recruiting spies for the United States in postwar Europe, manipulating governments in Greece, the Philippines, South Vietnam and South Korea.

He is the spy who quoted Marcus Aurelius and John Stuart Mill -- and made sure his son could too.

Yes, says the son, his father was hard to reach. But, he protests, "It wasn't like he was totally shut down and unwilling to talk. He just preferred to talk in abstractions and he preferred to talk about philosophy and grammar. . . . We would talk about John Stuart Mill and liberty and the rights of man. And that's what he was comfortable with."

And in many ways, the father became an abstraction to his children. They moved from country to country, from school to school, their lives a succession of nannies and drivers and embassies and a few hairy brushes with the cloak-and-dagger world.

Like the time their driver did not fetch them from an expatriate sports club in Saigon. So their nanny, Mercy, hailed them a taxi. But the taxi driver sped past their street, not heeding Mercy's shouts, which turned to screams. "Then Mercy pulled out her umbrella and swung it hard against his head, startling him so much he jerked the wheel into the curb. The cab stalled out and Mercy popped open the door, pushing us out," he writes. "Then the taxi driver roared off, leaving us standing in the dust in a daze of surprise and alarm. We never knew if he was a Vietcong agent trying to snatch the CIA chief's kids or just some random bozo swept up by an impulse for a big score."