4. After the air force, my dad worked for Disneyland, which you probably remember. Back then, I was at the age when everything your parents do seems lame, but I didn’t mind the Horseshoe Revue and even got to like it after I spied my dad with Slue Foot Sue, costar of the revue, with her breast poised above his mouth, and him on his knees, going for it like a circus seal.
I watched the scene play out. And realized, with some measure of shock, that I would not tell my mother or confront my father, but that I wouldn’t suffer the isolation secrecy brings it its wake, either. Quite the opposite. I felt closer to my dad for knowing he was in pain. I also felt closer to knowing what I wanted to do with my life.
5. Maybe I’m not doing a good job of this. But how can I explain my choices without explaining it all? God knows I didn’t tell you much when we were married. So, first my dad had an affair; then came my brother’s surfing accident. About that part, my family’s grief was private, even as its furnishings were hard to miss. We never spoke his name. I don’t know how it happened, but from one day to the next, his name was taboo. His photos vanished from the fridge, his trophies and gear, and all were deposited in his room, whose door stayed locked. I figured my parents had fondled each item and packed it gently in a box while I was at school. But no, they had hired a moving company to shove it all in a few plastic crates and pile them in the boy’s closet. That’s what it said on the order form I saw tacked to the fridge—The boy’s closet. After that, I figured they crept into his room at night, or maybe while I was at school, to go through his stuff and whisper his name. I tied a length of thread from the doorknob to the frame so that if it opened even an inch, the thread would break. Then I checked this thread, which never broke, every day for five years.
My mom took up with someone who worked at Disney’s rival amusement venue, Knott’s Berry Farm, while my dad kept on with Slue Foot. I bought books about satellites and radio waves. My dad lost his arm to a crossbeam in the theater where he worked; Disney paid him millions. My mom left Knott’s, and then it was like a contaminant had settled in the house. Something dark and horrible that confined us to our own lives and made it impossible for us to talk to each other ever again.
6. Any idea how hard it is to get security clearance when you have no fingerprints? It took months, and in those months I could have gone to grad school, changed paths, started fresh. Instead, it was three years of Korean and a year’s worth of NSA interviews, whose gist ranged from scenario to psych. A thousand questions. A thousand million. Your boyfriend threatens to break up with you unless you tell him what you did today; how do you respond? Do you think that family is more important than work, and if so, would you compromise your work to protect them? Already, these people seemed to know the grim stuff of my ambition.
7. My first job: Middle of nowhere, Australia. Eight hours a day listening to the North Koreans. Most tracking stations are remote, for the obvious reasons of privacy and uncluttered airspace, but what really matters is being within the footprint of a satellite’s broadcast range. Hence: Nowhere, Australia, under Intelsat 2, stationed over the Pacific Ocean and handling the equivalent of 1,100,000 pages of text per second. It was grueling work, and peculiar for its mix of boredom and anxiety, both of which verged on the unbearable.
8. When you eavesdrop, you have to probe what you hear for nuance and sarcasm, doublespeak and lies. You have to wonder if they know you’re listening. You don’t have the pressure of an analyst, who has to slog through what you’ve translated and decide what’s important, but you do have the problem of making sure you transcribe accurately the intent of what you hear. Old friends and colleagues share a language no one can fathom without initiation. It took me three years of listening to North Korea’s vice foreign minister before I could diagnose the timbres of his voice, because the man never said what he meant, and I mean never.
9. There are so many ways to die, it boggles the mind. But the thing that’s really going to get us, and what people don’t talk much about since the end of the Cold War, is nuclear proliferation. I was sixteen when The Day After aired; it wrecked me for months. Me and everyone else, though apparently the movie’s premise — that there would actually be a day after nuclear holocaust — was supposed to gladden our response to the prospect. It didn’t. In 1983, the Non-Proliferation Treaty was thirteen years old. Its gist: countries that have weapons should not help countries that don’t to acquire them, but if you do help, not much harm will come to you, because the NPT has no teeth. Join the NPT regime and you can leave anytime without consequence. If it’s in the interest of Consarc, Hewlett-Packard, and Honeywell to sell “dual use” nuclear equipment to the highest bidder, go right ahead. The International Atomic Energy Agency can inspect only nuclear facilities that declare themselves, and need permission from the host country to inspect anything else, and, on the crazy chance anyone gets upset about the nine thousand ways you have violated the treaty, it doesn’t matter, because the UN will not vote to impose sanctions for fear of reprisal. In short, Iran, Libya, Algeria, North Korea, Pakistan, India, South Africa, Israel, and Iraq — not to mention all the states that tumbled out of the Soviet Union — either had the bomb and weren’t talking about it or were getting there quick. There were some successes — Libya and South Africa, for instance — but all it takes is one North Korean twink with pompadour, and wham: the day after.
10. In 1994, things got hot in North Korea. That was the year they’d defuel the core of their reactor at Yongbyon, unload enough plutonium for about five nuclear bombs, and threaten war if the UN Security Council imposed sanctions. It was looking very bad, very scary, and all of us on the line were listening hard. And getting nervous.
11. Need some context for all this? I’ll give it to you. Two years before, things were on the up: North and South Korea were about to sign a denuclearization agreement for the peninsula. The North had agreed to the IAEA’s safeguard protocols; the South had agreed to suspend Team Spirit (which is, ridiculously, a series of war games between the South and the U.S., designed to flaunt their ordnance). The U.S. withdrew all nuclear weaponry from the region and had gotten past the flirting stage and into the first high-level talks with the North in forty years. An accord seemed likely.
But no. Delicate are the overtures between nations that hate each other. Suddenly, the South wanted access to all of the North’s nuclear facilities. The North balked. The South threatened to reinstate Team Spirit; the North balked. The IAEA insisted on special inspections of two undeclared sites; the North balked. Team Spirit went on as scheduled, the North announced plans to withdraw from the NPT, and everyone was screwed. What did North Korea want? Were they bluffing? Maybe the thing to do was to let them drop out of the NPT, because, though they had signed on in 1985, they didn’t seem to have much regard for the international condemnation that ensues when you are found in flagrante. Also, they were making the NPT look weak and setting a bad precedent for other countries inclined to violate the regime on the sly. Possibly they were just stalling while they worked on their weapons program. Maybe they were just testing the lengths to which the U.S. would go to keep them in line.
Do we reward misconduct with high-level talks? Isn’t that like negotiating with terrorists? Do we ask for help from the international community and watch it defang every resolution that comes out of the UN? What is the point of asking for things nicely? What is the point of making threats? If I were leading the free world, I would blow my brains out for indecision.