John Hadden: Conversations with a Masked Man. My Father, the CIA, and Me. NY: Arcade, 2016. 268 pp. ill.
Spoiler alert: Like all my reviews, this one presumes you have already read the book.
Let’s face it: Most people will not buy Conversations with a Masked Man because of John Hadden, the author; they will read it to learn more about John Hadden, the author’s father. I too wish this book had a slightly different focus, but it is what it is, so I’ll try to take it on its own terms.
The setting: A long-time CIA operative, who knows secrets he cannot reveal, is confronted by his son, who appears to have no such restrictions. The son is struggling to understand why his garrulous father is so evasive, and looks for the answer in the life choices his father made. In this effort to pin down a man whose whole career has been an exercise in elusiveness, who’s adept at throwing up mirrors and disappearing behind them, the son ends up talking largely at cross purposes with his father. “… I was looking for a connection, or more specifically, an acknowledgement of my existence and what it meant to him. I was always looking for a personal meaning in these discourses that he didn’t at all intend.” (pg. 207)
So the plot involves a man trying to reach out to someone who has been trained to avoid direct answers, even when approaching death. Here, a single sentence stands out – or rather, a sentence fragment: “His watchful untrusting eyes.” (pg. 237) Hadden senior seems to have remained a cuss until the very end. And when it comes to the description of his last days as a cancer patient brought home to die, the word “oversharing” comes to mind, though probably we are not told the half of it.
Why was the father so lacking in trust? While the son seems to have harbored no secrets, the father apparently thought otherwise. One reason the Hadden senior was not exactly forthcoming with junior is that he suspected his son was spilling secrets to the Soviets. Dad believed, or at least suspected, that he had been recruited, knowingly or not, by a childhood friend from the Bronx, here called Lenny Friedman. The whole notion was so obviously absurd, in the son’s eyes, that he fails to comprehend its full significance. He complains at length about his father’s distance and unwillingness to trust people, particularly him, and these complaints may well be justified. But they were also amplified by his father’s doubts about his loyalty – doubts that were only worn away, to some extent at least, by the sustained effort his son put into interviewing him for this book.
Even apart from his habits of suspicion, the father appears to have been unpleasant enough, unless one’s taste runs to sardonic pessimism. “I think you have to be very tolerant of the human being to stand him – to move around among them. ‘Cause they’re pretty awful.” (pg. 224) When pressed, one of the few historical figures he admits to respecting, somewhat surprisingly, is Erasmus. “I admire the hell out of him. But I don’t think enough of the human being to think he’s worth saving.” (pg. 222) He was not a complete cynic, though: Dickens’ A Christmas Carol brought tears to his eyes year after year.
Writing this book was in large part a kind of therapy for the son, who kept trying to figure out why his father would not or could not connect with him. He and his siblings were all artists of one kind or another, unlike their father. Yet Hadden senior loved to pontificate on matters he was less informed about than his offspring, who knew their way around painting, theater, sculpting, music and boat building. It was, says his son, like a white man explaining what it means to be black to an audience made up of black people. (pg. 217) The word “insufferable” comes to mind.
The fundamental problem with this book is that the interest of the author in establishing a line of communication with his father does not necessarily align with the interests of the reader, who wants to hear about the elder Hadden’s exploits in Berlin in the early ’50s (“the one period in my father’s life when he was part of something that felt right,” pg. 73) as well as Cairo and Jerusalem and other hot spots, and what he thinks about those adventures now. We get some of that, but more would have been welcome. Hadden senior had a unique perspective as an eyewitness to history – and I suspect that is what most readers are curious about.
Here’s a taste: An agent has to know how to get people to confide. “If someone thinks you know more than you do, he wants to prove that he knows as much as you do, so he’s not betraying anything by telling you – because you already know. It’s human nature, camaraderie. At its best, no one even knows they’re working for you.” (pg. 101) Though the author does not make this connection, this could obviously relate to his own relationship with Lenny Friedman. It also helps explain how some people in East Germany, for example, could plausibly claim never to have worked for the Stasi, even though they were listed in the State Security’s own files. Such people did not consciously betray secrets, they simply were bragging about what they knew. Which for the Stasi’s purposes amounted to much the same thing.
Another example. “There is no solution to the Arab-Israeli problem. It might be solved when some greater problem swamps it. World War III, say, or nuclear war in the Middle East. Then we’ll be nostalgic for the old problems, won’t we? … It’s about the feeling of the people, the mythologies. Both sides have impregnable moral positions. People are wrong when they think they can solve it.” (pg. 112) Indeed, it seems we would do well to accept the fact that this is one conflict that will never end, or if it does, it will be after some catastrophe so violent that both sides will look back to the current period, bloody as it is, as some sort of idyllic, golden age.
He explains why most soldiers dislike discussing their experiences in combat: “… because how many of them behaved properly? How many of them didn’t really do everything they could to save their own skins? That’s the human instinct… There aren’t any heroes in my book, no.” (pg. 225)
In sum, this book should not be read primarily to find out what really happened in the career of John Hadden, CIA agent – for that, it contains too many omissions and unanswered questions. Its value lies elsewhere, in the record of an honest, even valiant attempt by a son to reach out to his father and overcome decades of estrangement. The effort is to be admired, even if it does not quite wind up in a Hollywood happy end.
Drawbacks
One thing this book definitely fails to do is get all the details right. Hadden senior’s memory, at this late point in life, was not the best, and his son’s fact checking leaves much to be desired. I suspect St. John Philby, father of the famous spy, would be pleased to find himself described as a “mentor” to Lawrence of Arabia; “colleague” would be more like it. (pg. 148)
One could argue that this is a memoir not a history, and the author does sometimes mention that other participants may have a different recollection of events. In my view, he says this neither often enough nor everywhere it needs to be said. For example, telling us that Kim Philby “passed around an obscene cartoon of [Bill] Harvey’s wife” gives a rather distorted impression of what happened at that memorable post-war cocktail party in D.C., as it completely leaves out the main character and cartoonist, Guy Burgess. (pg. 71)
By the way, even today there is some debate as to why Burgess defected along with Donald Maclean. The version offered by Hadden senior is that it was Burgess himself who decided to “scamper” to the USSR “at the last moment.” (pg. 147) This would make some sense – for one thing, it would explain the lack of preparation. Hadden’s theory sounds a bit more plausible than Philby’s explanation: “Some things just happen.”
A good editor should have caught the following mistakes: The northern German town of Cuxhaven appears here under its phonetic spelling as “Kuckshafen,” which at least is amusing. (pg. 82) “Miniscule” is still not an accepted spelling for “minuscule.” (pg. 132) Jack MacGowran, the Irish character actor best known for his work with Samuel Beckett, appears as MacGowran in the Works of Beckett, as though his name were part of some offbeat title. (pg. 172) The list could be extended. Small stones in the shoe are no less annoying for being small.
The index is less than adequate. By my estimate, only about half the proper names mentioned in the book are included. Nor does it take in the Appendix, which should be consulted by anyone interested in the history of Israeli efforts to build a nuclear weapon.
Update
Hadden’s book, with all its drawbacks, is still better than Maura Conlon-McIvor’s FBI Girl. How I Learned to Crack My Father’s Code (NY & Boston: Warner Brothers, 2004), an earlier contribution to the burgeoning sub-genre of agent-offspring coming-of-age memoir. This one is even more heavily tilted in the direction of “this is what I felt about what I think happened.” Here, it is not a son but a daughter who attempts to talk to dad about his work, which at the very least he was not supposed to do, and probably didn’t want to either.
Conlon-McIvor has an uncanny knack for remembering dialogue from her childhood, conversations that are remarkable both in terms of their length and utter banality. Perhaps she tape-recorded a diary in which she faithfully preserved every word she exchanged with family members, no matter how inconsequential.
Her book does feature some mighty fine writing. “I hear his words echo, and they slowly fall down my throat, like the sweetest apple pie in the world.” Words that first echo and then fall like pie down the throat must be pretty darn impressive. What were they about?
Well, we read this sentence just after her father has told her, a schoolgirl, how to avoid revealing that you know you are being followed: Always shift your eyes from the road ahead to the rear-view mirror without moving your head. By holding yourself unnaturally rigid and just moving your eyes, your tail won’t know they’ve been spotted. Advice on how to lull the enemy into a false sense of security – isn’t that the cutest thing? Makes me think of apple pie and teddy bears too.
Echoing and falling sweet words – this is straight out of the Iowa summer camp for aspiring authors, which Steven King so memorably skewered. Some of the techniques the writerʼs workshop teaches include: Write in the present tense instead of the past. Use dialogue instead of description. Keep your paragraphs short. Above all, add a seemingly useless detail here and there (not too often), to create the illusion of reality. Donʼt say you imagined you lived in a bungalow with leprechauns out front, but with nine of them. Donʼt say you have read a framed letter from J. Edgar Hoover that hangs on your wall countless times, but thirty times. Donʼt describe events by saying, “We drive up to a brick church, with a basketball court and a rectory next to it, as the bells ring” but “as the bells ring six times.”
Conceivably, noticing such detail is something her father taught her, just as he himself had once been taught to do at Quantico. In the hands of Flaubert, the petit fait vrai lends a touch of realism; in the hands of Conlon-McIvor, it seems artificial, calculated, or willfully cute.
When the author attended junior high, she was cast in the schoolʼs production of “Twelve Angry Women” as the immigrant juror (Nr. 11). This was the role played by George Voskovec in “12 Angry Men,” starring Henry Fonda and directed by Sidney Lumet, based on the play written by Reginald Rose. All of these artists go unmentioned by Conlon-McIvor, who instead attributes the play to her drama teacher at Arbor Junior High. “My lines are beautiful. They roll off my tongue like sweet hay” (pg. 239).
When FBI Girl was reprinted in 2017, Conlon-McIvor noted: “The book became a Los Angeles Times bestseller and a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. Noted playwright Tammy Ryan adapted the story for the stage, and it had its theatrical debut at the Pittsburgh Playhouse. The play is published with Dramatic Publishing.” And last time I looked, all eight customer reviewers at Amazon give it five stars. The cover features blurbs by luminaries such as Alexandra Fuller, Karen Karbo, Beverly Donofrio, Tom Hallman, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Mike Rose and Frances Kaffel, author of “Passing For Thin.”
So maybe your reviewer is just overly sensitive.
Related reviews at this site: William Hood: Mole; Steven King: On Writing.
© Hamilton Beck
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