The spy who slept right down the hall

They touch down at Dulles at 2 a.m., a mother and two children, the family of a spy. The terminal is empty, feels cavernous. The boy, 9, sits on the floor while his mom figures out what to do.

He is used to airports. He and his sister, CIA brats, have flown all over the world. He even got left behind in an airport one time when his father, the spy, boarded a plane without him. John Richardson was like that -- so wrapped up in his work he could forget his little boy, his namesake.

Now the family’s flown in from Saigon to join him. There’s some trouble at the CIA. Eleanore Richardson is looking around for someone from “the agency.” But no one has come to greet them. No car. No driver.

“CIA Chief Recalled,” a headline has blared.

“Arrogant CIA Disobeys Orders,” shouted another.

It is 1963 and Richardson is the CIA’s embattled Saigon station chief. He managed the agency’s relationship with Ngo Dinh Diem as the South Vietnamese president’s regime was crumbling. After a reporter blew Richardson’s cover, the agency yanked Richardson out of Saigon and hid him in a Washington-area apartment until the storm could blow over.

But within a few weeks, Diem would be assassinated with Washington’s complicity. The United States would plunge deeper into the quagmire of Vietnam. And for the rest of his days, Richardson, a scholarly spy and master manipulator with a nagging conscience, would routinely drink himself into bouts of brooding. He’d torment himself with regret that he hadn’t stood against the Diem coup. He’d leave his children clueless about what made their father so melancholy.

So the family trudged through Dulles, finally finding a phone. Eleanore doesn’t have a contact number for her husband, doesn’t know where he is. So she calls his CIA supervisor, Bill Colby.

“How can I reach John?” she says.

“I can’t tell you,” Colby says. He calls John on her behalf.

Fathers as foreign entities: It’s a familiar theme. But Richardson’s new book, “My Father the Spy: “An Investigative Memoir,” takes us deep into the life of a CIA agent, both professional and personal, noble and tragic.

Richardson, now 50, is writer-at-large for Esquire, where in 1999 he wrote the article that became the basis of this book. He also wrote a 1996 Hollywood-murder novel, “The Vipers’ Club,” and a 2001 nonfiction book about dwarfs, “In the Little World.”

During a lunch interview while on book tour here, Richardson is as casual and laid-back as his father was upright and formal. He’s been trying to unravel “the puzzle of paternity” for years. And he hasn’t. That’s the heartbreaker.

Employing personal letters, declassified government documents, recollections of ex-agents and family memories, Richardson paints a portrait of his father as a masterful yet somewhat reserved Cold Warrior, recruiting spies for the United States in postwar Europe, manipulating governments in Greece, the Philippines, South Vietnam and South Korea.

Yes, his father was hard to reach. But, the son says: “It wasn’t like he was totally shut down and unwilling to talk. He just preferred to talk in abstractions and he preferred to talk about philosophy and grammar.... We would talk about John Stuart Mill and liberty and the rights of man. And that’s what he was comfortable with.”

In many ways, the father became an abstraction to his children. They moved from country to country, their lives a succession of nannies and drivers and embassies and a few hairy brushes with the cloak-and-dagger world.

Like the time their driver did not fetch them from a sports club in Saigon, so their nanny, Mercy, hailed a taxi. But the driver sped past their street, not heeding Mercy’s shouts, which turned to screams. “Then Mercy pulled out her umbrella and swung it hard against his head, startling him so much he jerked the wheel into the curb. The cab stalled out and Mercy popped open the door, pushing us out,” he writes. “We never knew if he was a Viet Cong agent trying to snatch the CIA chief’s kids or just some random bozo swept up by an impulse for a big score.”

Richardson hardly knew, as a kid, if his dad had such bizarre episodes. His dad rarely talked about his work. He learned from his father’s former colleagues that he was an understated man, persistent and persuasive in his spy craft. Joining the Army as a battlefield translator during World War II, his father had a military career that morphed into espionage.

The son longed for more of the dad he didn’t see. The dad he did see pressed him incessantly to be correct and responsible and patriotic and serious.

“He never taught me how to shave or ‘This is how you dress.’ Nothing normal,” Richardson says. “He told me to read books on anti-communism.”

One day in Seoul, the long-haired son gets into a fight with U.S. military police. The father forces him to apologize to the commander of U.S. forces in South Korea.

Then, the shock and disappointment deepen. The father receives a note from military intelligence that his 16-year-old son “is a known user” of LSD. Parents and son go to a psychiatrist, and it’s decided that young Richardson should go away to school. But things only get worse.

Acid is everywhere, and the son is dropping tab after tab and also trying to sell it. He is arrested. It is too much for his father, who believes the honor of the CIA is being smeared.

On hearing that young John is in a juvenile lockup for trying to sell drugs, the father calls in his secretary and starts to dictate a cable of resignation. The secretary refuses. They argue. He finally gives up.

“My Father the Spy” is an errant son’s attempt to bridge the emotional divide, to find some reconciliation. Except that it’s told against the backdrop of espionage and coups. And it features that very Valerie Plame-esque kind of scandal, the outing of an undercover man, apparently leaked in a political battle over a military war.

Richardson was pitted against Henry Cabot Lodge, then U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, who wanted both Richardson and Ngo Dinh Diem ousted. Lodge felt Richardson wasn’t switching courses, from a past policy of attempting to win the war with Diem to a new policy of winning the war without him.

Richardson stayed put. Soon after, in a rare unmasking of a CIA station chief, Richardson’s name appeared in a Washington Daily News article with the headline: “Arrogant CIA Disobeys Orders.”

The world, until then, had never known what a classic CIA spymaster was like. After the News piece, the New York Times carried a story on the problems between Lodge and Richardson. There was no law then prohibiting the revelation of a spy’s identity. The stories boiled it down to a struggle between Lodge and Richardson, between philosophies on the conduct of the war.

Lodge won out, and Diem was overthrown. But Richardson’s son says he wonders what would have happened had his father fought harder to preserve Diem in power. “If my dad was more arrogant, we might not have got into the Vietnam War,” he says.

An old friend of his dad’s let Richardson read letters written ages ago, when the two elder men were in college. The letters contained his father’s expressions of wonderment and thoughtfulness and feeling.

“I was jealous,” Richardson says. “I loved that he was like that” -- like the man in the early letters. “And yet that was not a guy I ever met.”

Only late in his father’s life did the two begin to communicate easily. The father, retired and living in Guadalajara, seemed pleased his son had become a writer. And as his health wore down, the son came in frequently from his home in Westchester County, N.Y., to visit.

One day, he and his father are chatting about Vietnam, and he decides to ask the big question.

“I asked him how he felt about the blood on his hands,” Richardson recalls.

In the book, he writes: “I’m thinking in a general sense about Diem and the war. But he looks hurt and puzzled and doesn’t answer. Later, mom gets angry at me. ‘He never killed anyone or ordered anyone to be killed. You know that.’ ”

But he didn’t know that. Not even at the very end in 1998, when his dad is dying and gasping for breath and the son is sitting on the edge of the bed. So much he would never know.