Let’s All Say it Together- The International Spy Museum

What is your favorite place to go in your city?

If you’ve read me even twice, you probably know I love intelligence. I believe wholeheartedly that I could have been a spy based on my preacher’s kid upbringing (really, really not much different growing/maintaining a congregation and recruiting/handling assets), genetics (great uncle was C/DIA), and the fact that I’ve “done” news like cocaine since I was eight.

There is a direct correlation.

When I was eight years old, I came to Washington for the first time. It was love at first sight. A miracle dropped in my lap that the first offer Kathleen got out of school was from ExxonMobil, because we got to choose whether we lived in Houston or DC. Moving became a monotropic thought process in which I envisioned my life playing out much differently….. and it did. Absolutely none of the plans I made for myself materialized, but that didn’t mean I didn’t have a hell of a good time making them.

If you’re that kid, the one that grows up in a small town and travels so that they see how much bigger the world really is than 40 square miles, you become a “type.” By 10 I had been to Mexico, the UK, and The Bahamas. I noticed the highs and the lows, the looming cathedrals and the neighborhoods made with tin. Global issues become important early. News becomes important early. Politics become important early. You begin to see that working for the government might be a positive thing because instead of reading the news, you are helping create it.

Kids like me end up at State or at the Washington Post. Rarely do we want to be the story. We want to shape it, especially for writers who process “verbally” in stream-of-consciousness spaghetti code. Writing about my life in DC is learning how to say “Hello, World” in every language.

(Sometimes when I write, I imagine people’s faces as they’re reading and now I’m smiling to myself knowing my programmer friends. Just for them, that line should be “every language……….. except JavaScript. Fuck JavaScript.)

My autism and ADHD are why my plans haven’t come to fruition, and my bipolar disorder threw my first choice out the window. So, right now, I am trying to concentrate my energy where I feel it can manifest. I am a better writer than I am anything else, and I know that I’m not the best. What I do know is that by writing every single day, there’s no way to get worse. I am sure that this brings hope to many, many people. Living in DC is where I feel the most alive, because I’m tapped into The Source. The United States is a living, breathing entity, and I am deep within the carotid artery (or the vena cava, depending on administration).

When I go to The Spy Museum, it’s not about seeing the exhibits. I’ve done it 10 times, they don’t change it that much. I hardly ever go during the day anymore, because it’s more fun at night. After the museum closes, all the Bond mannequins…. kidding…. after the museum closes, that’s when they do book talks and record SpyCast, how I met Jonna Mendez and Tracy Walder.

Jonna is one of my writing heroes, because she writes about the stuff I like in the way I like to hear it. She’s got a very concise, no bullshit tone and the wit of someone like David Halberstam or Rachel Maddow, who have also written a wealth of political non-fiction thrillers. I should tell Jonna that if she sees an uptick in sales the next few days, merry Christmas. The post I talked about yesterday for reddit re: Spy Dust and Moscow Rules has had 471 upvotes in 23 hours. I hope I sold her a thousand copies, and I’m not even going to tell her about it because “Secret Santa” is a thing. Book sales are the best gift I could have picked.

A woman said her dad wouldn’t read a book about intelligence if it was written by a woman, and I think that if Jonna can’t convince him, he’s a misogynistic lost cause……. being Chief of Disguise at CIA isn’t impressive or anything (my eyes are rolling out of my head). I like Spy Dust better in terms of being able to pick out Tony’s voice from hers, but The Moscow Rules is my favorite of them all….. and I thought Argo was hard to beat. The book was made in reaction to the film, and it was still better.

I have a different relationship with/to Tracy than I do with/to Jonna because Tracy is so much younger, and in fact, is a bit younger than me (I think). Do you ever have a moment where someone says something and your heart just walks out of your body in empathy? I know it happens to people with their families, but Tracy was a complete stranger to me when she told the audience that she was born with hypotonia. I had never met another person who’d been born with it, she’d never met anyone outside her family. It was not just that kind of moment for me. The emotions we felt at seeing each other mattered. It is one of, if not the most intimate moment of my life. I wasn’t proposing or having a baby, and yet it was still that big because the chance of us connecting was so small, our affliction so rare. It’s one of the few times in a relatively unfamiliar situation in which I’ve been able to breathe that deeply.

However, there is a reason I chose Jonna over Tracy with the reddit comment. That dude is already predisposed to disliking female intelligence writers, so handing him a book with a sorority sister protagonist didn’t seem like the wisest choice. You get Jonna until you can handle pink coffee mugs without being an asshole about it. But make no mistake, he definitely needs to read it. There’s more dirt on scumbags like him inside FBI who don’t trust women in intelligence. To be clear, Tracy did not have problems at CIA. She had problems with FBI. Tracy has a problem with FBI, so they have a problem with me. It’s just that simple.

I am sure that Tracy appreciates the support in which I do legit nothing but talk shit about the FBI on my web site……… but hey, she has a great autobiography called The Unexpected Spy. It’s a thrill ride through her life having worked at both agencies, and thrilling to find out that CIA is actually as forward-thinking as I thought it was. Tracy also made an interesting style choice. When you write a book involving CIA (and I’m not sure if it applies to me, but it definitely applies to employees), it has to go through a publications review board. When Tracy got her manuscript back from the PRB, there were parts that were blacked out….. and she just left them in and published as is. Tracy’s is the one book I don’t have on my Kindle, and the one hardback I’m grateful to own, because the words come across the same on e-paper with Jonna and Tony, but the feel of the paper with its saturating amount of black ink looks official.

And in fact, I liked it so much that she signed my book after the lecture and as she was writing the inscription, I asked her if she would black out a word. Tracy understood the assignment. 😉 She blacks out one word, and you can still see what it is, so she asks around and finds a black Sharpie. She hands it back and it says:

To Leslie-

Go [redacted] the world.

Then she says, “there. Now no one knows what I told you to do to the world.”

We’ve (sort of) kept in touch- I should reach out and see what she’s up to these days. Last I heard she was in Dallas (went to SMU just like my dad, went back to teach at Hockaday). If she ever comes to DC, first coffee’s on me.

Here’s to hoping we can [redacted] the world together……..

because the Spy Museum is my favorite place in my city.

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I am including the link to both book talks, and I’m in them at the Q&A. In the Walder video, I’m wearing my CIA baseball cap. In the Mendez video, I am “Sir Not Appearing in This Film,” because the video cuts off right when Jonna stops speaking.

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