The Reluctant Spy Read Online Free Page B

University of Pittsburgh, where he had studied for his Ph.D., finishing all the requirements except the dissertation—the price he paid for my birth in August 1964. Pitt, he said, had a fine Eastern European studies program; besides, it was a lot less expensive for a Pennsylvania kid than GW would be. But I didn’t want to go to college only an hour away from home. And, more to the point, I was more interested in another part of the world: My major would be Middle Eastern studies, which didn’t exist in the Pitt curriculum. GW was one of only a handful of schools with a quality Mideast program, I said, and it was in Washington to boot. Dad said we’d talk about it again, but he never raised it as I moved forward. I applied for early admission to GW and got applications from Georgetown and the University of Virginia as well. Iwas naïve: Georgetown and UVA would be my backup schools, I thought, not caring that they were more competitive than GW. In any event, my grades were good and my SAT scores were strong; GW accepted me and the other applications went into the trash can.
    I was ecstatic and told Mom and Dad of my good fortune. They sure knew how to deflate a guy. They sat me down at the kitchen table and explained the financial facts of life to their eldest child. They were happy for me and very proud that I had been accepted at such a fine school, but there was no way they could afford to send me—not with tuition of $4,600 a year, plus the room and board and books and everything else. I would have to go to Pitt.
    I walked away from the table like a whimpering pup whose favorite toy had suddenly been snatched away. But then I thought,
This can’t be! I’ve got to make this work
. And I did. Before I was done, I had applied for and won more than a dozen scholarships. Many of them were small—the largest were $500 and $1,000—but they added up to enough to make tuition. I took out college loans and my aunt Chrysanthie helped, too. When I got to GW, I ended up qualifying for a half-tuition scholarship so long as my grades remained good. They did. With that, cumulative scholarships covered my tuition, room, and board—just under $8,000 a year—and a job in GW’s music department covered the cost of books and incidentals.
    Washington for a college student who happened to be obsessive about politics was about as close to heaven as you can get in this life. Fortunately, my roommate, Ed Harwitz, was as fanatical as I was. We bought copies of
The Almanac of American Politics
and began to digest it, one congressional district or one Senate seat per night. The next day, we’d compare notes. We also used our copies as autograph books. This was the early 1980s, when security wasn’t the first order of business at the U.S. Capitol. You could walk around, buttonhole congressmen, even stroll right into the Senate cloakroom. It was amazing how few people turned us down. Ted Kennedy smiled slightly but said no, and Robert Stafford wanted to know ifwe were constituents. Neither one of us was from Vermont, so he just walked away. William Proxmire lived up to his reputation for crankiness and wouldn’t give us the time of day. But most everyone else was approachable and cooperative: Barry Goldwater, a gem of a guy; Bob Dole, very friendly; John Glenn, just great. Glenn and Gary Hart even stood for pictures with us.
    Those were the days when
The Washington Post
published a daily political calendar, listing all sorts of events, including receptions on Capitol Hill. So in our dogged pursuit of autographs, we became party crashers, too. We’d put on suits, head out, and make an evening of it. Security at these things was practically nonexistent. We’d walk in, act like we belonged, and seek out every face we recognized. Once, we spotted Al Gore and his wife, Tipper, talking to each other, with no one else around. We walked up, and I extended my hand and said, “Hey, I’m