The Reluctant Spy Read Online Free Page A

me to erect a forty-five-foot tower outside our house. Suddenly, I was tuning in to broadcasts from places that were thrilling and exotic, whispering in my ear in clipped British accents on the BBC World Service or in perfect, unaccented American English on Radio Moscow. There was a separate dressing room in our old house that I converted into my “radio room.” I pasted a big world map on the wall and put pins in all the countries whose shortwave stations I’d been able to verify. The alarm clock helped: I’d setit for all hours of the night so I could listen to some obscure station in Romania or the South Pacific or Africa.
Who are these people? I need to know more about them, what they look like, what they think, whether the kids are like me or different. And how different?
    School, for me, was a joy. The public elementary schools in those days were very good and New Castle High School was exceptional. We had teachers who had done things in life, who had had fascinating careers before they turned to teaching. One had been an economist, another a microbiologist with a Ph.D. Dorothy Poleno, my favorite, was a U.S. Navy intelligence officer before she retired to become a teacher. She taught a senior class called World Cultures, where we learned about the Soviet Union and its military. It was like taking a college course, with plenty of participation and interaction with the teacher.
    I was active in almost everything—the American Field Service program, the debating society, the Key Club, and more—and I played baseball, my one sports passion. But it was the combination of stimulating teachers, my addiction to those radio broadcasts, and a gathering interest in politics that began to shape my future. November 4, 1979, turned out to be pivotal for me: On that day, Iranian students seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held dozens of Americans hostage for what would be more than fourteen months. I was completely transfixed from the start: I listened to foreign broadcasts, read everything I could on Iran and its recent revolution, watched Walter Cronkite every night on CBS News—“And that’s the way it is,” followed by the date and the number of days since the hostage crisis began. I was barely fifteen years old, but there was talk of a military draft, and I wondered whether I’d be called up to go over there to free our people. The thought was at once exhilarating and frightening.
    In short, I was a news junkie, even in my middle teens. There was an essay contest at school that I won, the prize for which was to become mayor of New Castle for a day. The real mayor let me sit in hischair, walked me around city hall and introduced me to all the department heads, gave me a personal tour of the city, then popped for a big working lunch—at Burger King. I asked him whether, as mayor for the day, I could fix a ticket for my dad. He said no. Then it was five o’clock and I went home.
    With that I was hooked on politics, complementing my Iranian-inspired fascination with the Middle East. What sealed the deal was a one-week scholarship I won called Presidential Classroom. Two of us from my high school were selected to spend a week in Washington, D.C.—a full day at the Senate, another at the House, a third at the Supreme Court, and, of course, a tour of the White House. We joined kids from other schools and listened to speakers from government agencies—the CIA, the FBI, and the Defense Department. And we heard representatives of a labor union and a right-to-work group square off in a debate. We also met our senators and congressmen and visited both the National Cathedral and the Islamic Center of Washington. It was a fantastic hands-on week. And it convinced me that there was only one school for me: the George Washington University in the nation’s capital.
    I had already circled GW as a possibility, which didn’t exactly thrill my father. He wanted me to go to the