My Daddy Was A Spy

I tell you, one can find a conspiracy theory about anything these days.

Conspiracy theory is a real growth industry. Everywhere you turn, there is a new conspiracy zine, book or story on the Internet, a virtual feast for the paranoiac. Boy, and the stories they’re telling! Everything from centuries of alien cultivation to bloodthirsty secret societies bent on world domination. Our popular culture has been rife with conspiratorial plot lines forever but mostly the conspiracy theorist has been and is a modern day heretic. Stories of “Commie plots” and “vital fluids” have put most conspiracy talk into kookdom. After studying every conspiracy theory I could; right-wing, left-wing or whatever-wing.

What I found was, it’s an interesting world out there. I got started about fifty years ago by my daddy. He was OSS/CIA and a couple of other alphas in between. He sailed for Shanghai on his eighteenth birthday as an exchange student to the University of Shanghai in 1936. This brought him into the orbit of American intelligence, where he stayed for over twenty years.

Eventually, becoming head of Research & Analysis for E. Asia. He left the CIA in the late 1950s. Dad, didn’t talk about his work much. Matter-of-fact, it’s different growing-up in a house where dad can’t talk about his work at home. Ah, but that’s another story.

In the late 1960s, when I was a teenager my father asked me what I thought about the Vietnam War. Being raised on John Wayne and WWII, I said, ”Well, let’s see, you’ve got a sack of grenades, there are some rice paddies and you throw the grenades and win it for the good guys”. My daddy says, “Let’s talk.” 

Sometime later a friend of his, Dr. D.F. Flemming, author of The History of The Cold War and It’s Origins, was in town and my father said it was time for that talk. We went into a bedroom and my father and Dr. Flemming talked for about and hour. I asked some questions but it was quite apparent that I was having a hard time comprehending what they we saying and there was frustration on both sides of the communication. What my father said:

1. The Vietnam War was about drugs;

2. There were these secret societies behind “it” all;

3. Communism was a sham; these societies were playing both sides of a “game”

4. “They” had a plan for the Vietnam war and he believed that “they” were playing out a “lose scenario” in a presidential assessment report, that he helped generate in the early 1950s.

5. That the news we heard on TV and read in our newspapers wasn’t the entire story and was more often “sway” pieces.

I was very confused. I was still back at numbers 1, 2, and 3. I thought Dad was talking about the Mafia and number three just didn’t make any sense to a teenager raised in the shadow of the BOMB. My father said his ten-year secrecy agreement was up and he was telling me because I was his son and I could be involved in the conflict. He said there were only a few people that he could talk to because very few people had the same frame of reference.

Well, I was floored; taking to your dad when you’re a teenager isn’t easy anyway. I mostly took it as an anti-drug talk and went on. Later on, I got interested in the JFK assassination and started a merry chase through thousands of books and magazines. And found out, my father was right.