A Need to Know

The Clandestine History of a CIA Family

H.L. Goodall Jr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315435671
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In scenes eerily parallel to the culture of fear inspired by our current War on Terror, A Need to Know explores the clandestine history of a CIA family defined, and ultimately destroyed, by their oath to keep toxic secrets during the Cold War. When Bud Goodall's father mysteriously died, his inheritance consisted of three well-worn books: a Holy Bible, The Great Gatsby, and a diary. But they turned his life upside down. From the diary Goodall learned that his father had been a CIA operative during the height of the Cold War, and the Bible and Gatsby had been his codebooks. Many unexplained facets of Bud's childhood came into focus with this revelation.The high living in Rome and London. The blood-stained stiletto in his jewelry case. Bud, as a child, was always told he never had "a need to know." Or did he? Now, as an adult and a university professor, Goodall attempts to fill in the missing pieces of his Cold War childhood by uncovering a lifetime of family secrets. Who were his parents? What did his father do on those business trips when he was "working for the government?" What betrayal turned a heroic career of national service into a nightmare of alcoholism, depression, and premature death for both of his parents? Slowly, inexorably, Goodall unearths the chilling secrets of a CIA family in A Need to Know. 2006 Best Book Award, National Communication Association Ethnography Division

CHAPTER NO. 01	TITLE My Narrative Inheritance
	DATES March 12, 1976–December 7, 2001

MY FATHER DIED, EITHER IN VIRGINIA OR MARYLAND, AT THE AGE OF fifty-three, on the night of March 12, 1976. My mother told me that he died at home in his bed in Hagerstown, Maryland, but the Social Security Death Index indicates that he was pronounced dead in Virginia, although it doesn’t say where in Virginia.

I had doubts, even then, that he died at home.

The reason for his death was a mystery.

My mother said that she requested an autopsy because three days before he died he had been told that he was run down due to a bad cold and just needed some bed rest. He was given “a shot of something” and sent home. A doctor he saw at the Veterans Administration hospital supposedly gave him this diagnosis and the shot, but my mother couldn’t recall the name of the doctor, and the hospital records do not show that he had any appointments in March.

Nor did I ever see an autopsy report. One year later, close to the anniversary of his death, my mother told me that she had been informed—by “the government”—that he had died of multiple bleeding abscesses on both lungs. This was about the time of a news report that Legionnaires’ disease was responsible for the deaths of several men in Philadelphia, all veterans, all of whom had also died of multiple bleeding abscesses on their lungs. My mother claimed that “the government” now believed that my father, too, had died of Legionnaires’ disease.

That may or may not be true.

My mother never showed me the letter from “the government” that supposedly provided her with this information. She told me she had thrown it away. I have no doubt that she had done precisely that, if, in fact, there had ever been a letter in the first place. But by then, by March of 1977, I was so disillusioned with the idea of truth in relation to my father’s life, much less his death, that I didn’t pursue it.

He had led a secret life. And even in death, she kept his secrets.

My disillusionment with the truth about my father began the day after his funeral. Gilbert Hovermale, my parents’ attorney, gave me a key to a safe-deposit box and said, “Your father wanted you to have this.”

My mother and I were in Hovermale’s small, cramped office for the reading of my father’s will. My mother was in bad shape, barely functioning in the daylight over the heavy sedation required to get her to sleep, and I worried that she might commit suicide. She had told me, repeatedly, “I just want to die.”

I took the key, put it in my pocket, and didn’t think any more about it. In fact, I didn’t visit the bank to open the deposit box until two or three days later, and I only went then because it was on my way to the pharmacy.

I don’t know what I expected to find. Papers, perhaps. Another insurance policy, maybe.

Instead I found two items. There was a diary and a dog-eared, heavily marked-up copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby. These two items, along with the family bible at home, were what my father wanted me to have. Why?

I opened the diary and recognized my father’s signature in the top right-hand corner of the first page. My father’s signed name, like his life, was a carefully constructed series of perfectly composed, by-the-rules actions, angled slightly to the right. To the casual observer, his handwriting was entirely ordinary, and his penmanship, like his life, easily readable. If it’s true that a man’s signature reveals something about his character, then the character revealed here is that of a man who cared what people thought about his handwriting and, upon further reflection, about his life.

If I thought anything was odd about his handwriting, it was only the raw fact of it being used to keep a diary. I didn’t know he kept one. As far as I knew, my father had never been a diarist. So the fact that he kept a diary, coupled with a well-worn copy of The Great Gatsby, and that these two items and the bible at home were the sum total of my personal inheritance from him—that was what I thought was unusual.

“Your father wanted you to have this,” Hovermale had said when he handed me the key. I had asked him if he knew what was in the box. “No,” he had replied.

I turned the page and began reading. What my father had given me was a story about his life. Not all of it—it was, after all, a diary and not an auto-biography—but enough of it to present me with what I would later learn to call “a relational identity crisis.” He had passed along a story of a man whom I had called Dad for the past twenty-three years but who was not really my father. My father had been an ordinary government worker who had retired on full disability from the Veterans Administration. The story I read was about an extraordinary man with my father’s name who worked for a clandestine organization, a man who ran illegal operations during the cold war, a case officer who communicated using codebooks.

The Great Gatsby and a Holy Bible were named as his “codebooks.” The former for London, the latter, appropriately, I thought, for Rome. I held his copy of Gatsby in my hands. The bible was more of a mystery. I knew there was one at home among his possessions, although the days of my father being a religious man seemed distant.

There were also names laced throughout the diary: J. Bert Schroeder. Frank Wisner. Allen Dulles. James Jesus Angleton. William Colby. Clare Boothe Luce. Abbe Lane. Bill Harvey. Kim Philby. Angleton, again. Philby, again. Richard Nixon. Frank Rizzo. Angleton, yet again.

There were lists of dates and places, as well as a name given in all capital letters that dominated the last few pages, something or someone called CHAOS. It sounded too much like an acronym to be anything but an acronym. brook lane, too, but I thought I knew what those letters referred to and it wasn’t an acronym at all. It was a psychiatric center located in rural Maryland. I had visited my father on that “farm” several times.

The last entry was difficult to make out. Maybe his usually fine handwriting had deteriorated with his illness, or perhaps he was just less sure of himself toward the end. I could only make out the words “Church committee.”

His diary didn’t come with a note to me or with any instructions. What was I supposed to think about it, or to do with it?

I had no idea.

I confronted my mother with the diary—and “confronted” is unfortunately the right word—and she denied knowing my father kept one. When I asked her how much she knew about his other life, she said only that of course she knew he worked for the government. Of course he did things he couldn’t talk about. That was the way it was when you worked for the government. “Your father was a patriot,” she said, tearfully.

I left it at that. She was clearly agitated by my questions. Unnerved by them. And she was lying to me. I knew it and she knew it. We had a history of mistruths between us.

I offered to lend her the diary but she had no interest in reading it. “If he had wanted me to read it,” she said, “he would have given it to me. But instead he gave it to you.”

For her, that explanation was enough. For me, it wasn’t.

Due to the sudden and unexpected nature of my father’s death, there were now unresolved tensions that weighed heavily on me, on my soul. I had moved away from home, away from him, and away from what he thought was right, in ways that he could not have failed to read as signs of a definitive rejection.

The last time we had spoken, I had said as much. He had dutifully walked me to my car after another one of our unhappy Christmas holidays and we had shaken hands, as if that settled something, just to keep up the public appearance of family peace. I remember that he held my eyes as if he wanted to tell me something else, but in the end he couldn’t manage it. Instead, his eyes teared up, and then, because it was embarrassing to both of us, he said simply, quickly, and now I realize finally, “I love you, goodbye.”

I don’t remember what I said. I wish I did.

Fathers and sons. What is it between us? That is an ancient question and it may never be resolved.

My father was a deep mystery to me. I was equally unfathomable to him. Or at least I believed I was. I had wanted him to end better than he had ended, but I also had wanted him to live better than he had been living.

He had once been somebody. I knew that.

But I had been merely a child during those seemingly halcyon days. By the time I was old enough to spell “vice consul of the United States of America” he had fallen from that high place to somewhere considerably farther down on the government totem pole. All the way down to something called an assistant contact officer for the Veterans Administration. It had been a slow, spiraling decline and seemed to me to be a tragic one. He had retired on full medical disability at forty-seven, and now was dead at fifty-three. In between, he had spent time in jail and in a mental hospital. He was addicted to heavy narcotics and drank as much as he could every day, couldn’t sleep, and lived in constant pain.

Yet, for all his misery, he was always kind to me. Unfailingly polite. Generous. Apologetic about his problems. He loved my mother with all his heart. And she, in turn, loved him. They were classically codependent and badly enabling of each other’s craziness.

I told myself that I felt sorry for him, sorry for my mother, sorry for their small, wasted lives. The alcoholism. His depression and her craziness. The past they longed for but could never reach. But really I felt sorry for myself because of what they had reduced themselves to, and because, at the sophomoric age of twenty-three, I thought I knew so much better.

And now this diary. This deeper story—his true story—that lived inside of the cover story I had lived with them. Why didn’t he just tell me? Why didn’t he let me in? Why didn’t we talk about it? Why did he wait until he died to reveal himself, who he had really been, and what he had been doing all those years? I felt as if my whole life was turned inside out.

I had been betrayed by the truth.

Knowing my father’s secrets, even some of them, even though I didn’t discover them until he died, poisoned my relationship to him. Like a lethal toxin released in memory, it killed whatever remained of my respect for him and tainted what I recalled of our shared times together.

For many years I refused to talk about it because I was deeply ashamed, not so much because of the clandestine work he did, but because he kept who he really was from me. Had our relationship become so fragile that it couldn’t handle the truth? Had I proved unworthy of his trust? Who was I to him? Was I anyone very much at all?

I never removed my father’s diary from what became my mother’s home—Naomi’s home—although I did change its location. When I returned to my teaching job in South Carolina, I shelved it—cleverly and ironically, or so I thought at the time—in between my father’s copy of John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and my own old copy of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale. My father had given me the Bond book a long time ago, back when we lived in what my parents referred to as “our exile” in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Recalling that memory brought back others I didn’t want to think about. I left the diary on the shelf. I walked away from it and all that it represented.

The following June I moved home to live with and to care for my mother, who had become clinically, and I think psychically, depressed. I left my job at Clemson University and, to support myself, became an account executive for a local FM radio station, WWMD. The call letters stood for “Wild, Wonderful, Western Maryland,” although these days, with our ongoing war on terrorism and a renewed appreciation for the power of acronyms, I read them as stammering out “W-weapons of mass destruction.”

Pardon me. I display an ironic sense of humor sometimes. That is, I’m afraid, part of this story.

Anyway, for WWMD, I was a lousy salesman. Instead of booking a lot of appointments or making cold calls, I drove around town aimlessly most of the time, took in afternoon matinees, and read a lot of popular novels. I convinced myself that this move, this lifestyle and job, was only temporary. I didn’t see a future in selling spots. I wanted to become a writer.

One day, cruising my mother’s bookshelf for something to pass the time instead of making sales calls, I came across the diary. I got it into my head that it didn’t belong there, so I placed it in an old cedar chest down in the basement that contained my father’s World War II Army Air Corps uniform, his leather flying jacket, and his medals. It seemed appropriate to store them together. It was as if I was relegating the artifacts of his life to a locked-down space away from my view.

I was a fool to believe it would be that simple.

My days living back home in Hagerstown and semi-working as an account executive were thankfully brief. Jerry Terlingo, who had dated my mother during the war and with whom she had broken up just prior to meeting and marrying my father, blew into our lives like a colorful Italian carnival and made Naomi smile again. The two of them regularly went off together and lived large together for a while. They toured the country by car and by train; they enjoyed cruises throughout the Caribbean and to Mexico; they flew to Las Vegas and San Francisco and Honolulu. One night, by long-distance phone call, my mother told me that I should get on with my life because she was certainly getting on with hers.

She was drunk but there was happy music playing in the background. Jerry was tugging her to do something. I could hear his loud voice urging her to hang up. She giggled like a young girl and told him to wait a minute. She was having a good time. I compared her life to mine. I hated Hagerstown. I was young and miserable and failing to become a writer. My job sucked. I decided to take her advice.

I quit WWMD. After a brief stint as a short-order cook, I was accepted into the doctoral program in speech communication at Penn State University. I threw myself into graduate school, blocking out my former life much as my father had before me. I was a good student and received a PhD in speech communication with a minor in creative and biographical writing in August of 1980. My first job out of the doctoral program was as an assistant professor of communication studies at the University of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. My Narrative Inheritance: March 12, 1976—December 7, 2001
• 2. Where He Came From: December 7, 1941, and Its Aftermath
• 3. Hidden Tales Within the Paper Trails: April—December 1946
• 4. What I Didn’t Know: October 1944—November 1946
• 5. Martinsburg: November 1946—September 1952
• 6. Appointment to a Cold War: June 1954—August 1955
• 7. Setup: Angleton, Colby, and Italy, 1946—1954
• 8. Rome: 1956—1958
• 9. Philby: 1956
• 10. Fragments: London, 1958—1960
• 11. London, Berlin, Washington: 1960
• 12. Wyoming: 1960—1961
• 13. Breakdown: 1962—1963
• 14. Recovery, Vindication, and the Night Road to Ruin: November 1962—July 1963
• 15. Trouble at Home: Cheyenne, 1963—1964
• 16. Better Living Through Chemistry: Cheyenne, 1965—1967
• 17. Philadelphia and Operation CHAOS: 1967—1969
• 18. Decline, Denouement, and Death: 1970—1976
• Postscript: Echoes from the Story Line
• Sources
• References Cited
• Index