His Father's Secrets

"My Father the Spy" is an errant son's attempt to bridge the emotional divide, to find some reconciliation, to make amends.

"To some extent, this book is between two people, instead of between two covers," Richardson says.

Except that it's told against the backdrop of ex-Nazis and espionage and coups and the Cold War and Vietnam. And it features that very Valerie Plame-esque kind of scandal, the outing of an undercover man, apparently leaked in a political battle over a military war. Very familiar indeed.

Richardson was pitted against the Brahmin politico Henry Cabot Lodge, then U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, who wanted Ngo Dinh Diem ousted. The two Americans didn't mix well. Lodge felt that Richardson wasn't switching courses, from a past policy of attempting to win the war with Diem to a new policy of winning the war without him.

Lodge pressed for Richardson to be recalled. Richardson stayed put. And a short time later, in a rare unmasking of a CIA station chief, Richardson's name appeared in a Washington Daily News article under the byline of Richard Starnes, with the headline: "Arrogant CIA Disobeys Orders."

The world, until then, had never known what a classic CIA spymaster was like. After the Starnes piece, David Halberstam and Max Frankel wrote in the New York Times on the problems between Lodge and Richardson. There was no law back then prohibiting the revelation of a spy's identity. The stories boiled it down to a struggle between Lodge and Richardson; a struggle between philosophies on the conduct of the war.

Lodge won out, and Diem was overthrown. But Richardson's son says he can't help wondering what would have happened if his father had been bolder and fought harder to preserve Diem in power.

"If my dad was more arrogant, we might not have got into the Vietnam War," he says. Even before Vietnam, his dad had faced moral conundrums that pitted his instincts against the dictates of geopolitics and the spy game.

In postwar Europe, U.S. intelligence agencies secretly recruited and protected scores of former Nazi officials for use as agents in the new Cold War against communism. Some ended up in the United States with citizenship. And John Richardson was part of the operation, albeit peripherally, his son writes.

In Austria, his father ran, or handled, a former German SS officer, Otto von Bolschwing, who had been transferred from the CIA station in Germany. Richardson's discovery of his father's involvement, he says, was a "nauseous moment." But the fact that his father apparently managed one, not scores, of Nazis was some solace, he says.

To the layperson, the compromises that are made in the name of a national interest are inexplicable. But such was the stuff of the CIA man's life -- as the son discovered while researching the book, when he found a cache of his father's cryptic private notes.

"National interest -- cold-blooded. Cut our losses but written in human blood."