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  born under an assumed name

  THE MEMOIR OF A COLD WAR SPY’S DAUGHTER

  SARA MANSFIELD TABER

  copyright © 2012 by Sara Mansfield Taber

  Published in the United States by Potomac Books, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Taber, Sara Mansfield.

  Born under an assumed name : the memoir of a Cold War spy’s daughter / Sara Mansfield Taber. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-59797-698-5 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-59797-827-9 (electronic edition)

  1. Taber, Sara Mansfield—Childhood and youth. 2. Taber, Sara Mansfield—Travel. 3. Taber, Sara Mansfield—Family. 4. Cold War—Biography. 5. Daughters—United States— Biography. 6. Fathers and daughters—United States. 7. Intelligence officers—United States—Family relationships. 8. United States. Central Intelligence Agency—Officials and employees—Family relationships. 9. United States. Central Intelligence Agency— History—20th century. 10. Espionage, American—History—20th century. I. Title.

  CT275.T137A3 2011

  973.92092—dc23

  [B]

  2011028462

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standards Institute Z39-48 Standard.

  Potomac Books

  22841 Quicksilver Drive

  Dulles, Virginia 20166

  First Edition

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  for Maud and Forrest

  in memory of

  Charles Eugene Taber

  * * *

  The air rushes down my nose and throat—the cold air, the salt air with the smell of turnip fields in it. And there is my father, with his back turned, talking to a farmer. I tremble. I cry. There is my father in gaiters. There is my father.

  VIRGINIA WOOLF

  The Waves

  * * *

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  PART I. THE SEA

  Book 1 DRAGONS: Taipei, Taiwan, 1961–1962

  1. The Wall

  2. The Chicken Village

  3. Whispers

  4. Night Soil

  Book 2 GUM: Bethesda, Maryland, 1962–1964

  5. Cross My Heart

  6. Jap

  7. The Tomb

  8. America

  Book 3 RAINLIGHT: The Hague, The Netherlands, 1964–1968

  9. Klompen

  10. Dutchies

  11. My Father’s Bath

  12. The Pistol

  13. Nicole

  14. Home

  PART II. THE SHORE

  Book 4 WAR: Washington, D.C., 1968–1970

  15. America the Ugly

  16. Words

  17. Raspberries

  18. The Secret

  Book 5 ORCHIDS: Kuching, East Malaysia, 1970

  19. Colonial

  Book 6 MOSS: Kobe and Tokyo, Japan, 1970–1972

  20. Gaijin

  21. Tachikawa

  22. Tea and Bean Cakes

  23. The Emissary

  24. My America

  “Of Truth”

  About the Author

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  While I am not given to spy craft, in CIA tradition, I have changed the names of most of the people who appear in this book. They did not ask to be written about. I wish to preserve their privacy and acknowledge their own undoubtedly different versions of events. I thank them for their parts in my rich childhood and for their gifts of friendship and life lessons, however joyfully or painfully gained.

  I also wish to acknowledge those people vitally important to my childhood who do not appear in these pages, disguised or otherwise. A writer must preserve some experiences just for memory. Those unmentioned, too, have contributed crucially to my life and this story.

  I would like to say a word or two about the writing of a memoir. Because of the untidy and kaleidoscopic nature of life, memoirs are, in a sense, never really complete; this one is no different. Every time I thought I’d opened the last door in the story, another colorful door would appear. The story could also have been slanted any number of ways. Several quite different stories of my childhood might have been fashioned. Eventually one has to stop. Another critical point: I chose to write this book from a child’s point of view. I only report on my experience—what I made of what I saw as a child and what I’ve made of it since. I did not try to obtain CIA files or my father’s records. I don’t know much about what my father did or what went on, so, even when one takes into account the subjective nature of truth, there are inevitably vast limitations and flaws in my description of his work. Another book could be written about my father’s work and experience. Finally, there is one other very important fact about the writing of a memoir: in a sense, we are all fictions for one another. No matter how very hard we try to see the truth, owing to the shadings of our psyches, others are, in part, figments of our own conjuring imaginations; in a way, we—innocently and inevitably—assign all others assumed names.

  I won’t name them, but I wish to thank my parents’ friends and the people I grew up with for their friendship across continents. Friendships forged in far places and challenging circumstances are among the most enduring and precious. You know who you are.

  I must extend a huge thank-you to all my writer friends and advisors. A close reading of one’s work is the greatest gift anyone can give to a writer. Therefore, I thank: Beth Baker, who zoomed to my rescue right when I needed her; Ann Harvey for immeasurable gifts of the very best kinds; Elaine Klaassen, always there with musical notes; C. M. Mayo, compañera, for wise advice from near and far; Kate Phillips for generous, smart, and specific comments (the writer’s dream) while raising two very young sons; Alison Townsend for her in-the-bone understanding; Amy Troyansky for steady, lovely commiseration; Oliver Tessier for his belief in me and for always excellent counsel. I also thank, for writerly aid along the way: Sandra Dibble, Nadine Epstein, Bill O’Sullivan, and Mary Stucky.

  The Aislings, dear friends and co-conspirators, offered sustaining, sage, good-humored counsel.

  My erstwhile writing group—Jenny Brody, Mary Carpenter, Ellen Cassedy, Sally Steenland, and Natalie Wexler—offered unfailingly sound editorial advice as well as reviving chocolate cookies over the course of ten years.

  Consummate editor Bill Strachan, who edited my first book in 1989, continues to provide never-failing kindness, knowledge, and wisdom.

  I must also give my friends heartfelt thanks. They have helped me and this book, in countless ways, during its long gestation: Claudia Ahrens, Kristine Aono, Anne Marie Atkinson, Jana Belsky, Nancy Blum, Renee Burgard, Janna Butler, Madeleine Cardona, Susan Chase, Dena Crossen, Gretchen Cudak, Mary Diamond, Betsi Dwyer, Cindy Eyster, Juliette Fournot, Nan Fuhrman, Eiko Fukuda, Miki Garland, Val Giddings, Harriet Gordon Goetzels, Mary Gorjance, Anne Gray, Sheila Harrington, Mary Horton, Bruce Johanson, Marcie Jefferys, Linda La Pierre, Marielle Marsac, Selby McPhee, Breck Milroy, Kay Neer, Susan Perkins, Wendy Pollock, Snigdha Prakash, Fiona Reid, Greg Robb, Stasha Seaton, Cindy Snyder, Jim Symons, Jim Taggart, Wendy Weil, Bob Winship, Lauren Rader and all the women in her wonderful and nourishing classes, and those I h
ave unwittingly forgotten to include in this list. Dear comrades all: domo arigato, xie xie, dank je wel.

  Special thanks go to my old friend Sara Middleton, who generously agreed to appear without an alias.

  Dr. Ralph Cohen, the man who transformed my life and has continued as a treasured friend and mentor, also agreed to appear sans cover.

  Bob and Nancy Traer rescued me at the crucial moment. They remain wise and inspiring friends.

  In my father’s absence, John Horton, his dear friend, gave me the go-ahead to publish my story of the CIA.

  My professors, Henry Maier and Sharon Berlin of the University of Washington School of Social Work, and Robert LeVine, Sara Lawrence Lightfoot, and Max Katz at Harvard helped me to understand human development and behavior, and the fascinating intersection of personality and culture.

  My students—their honesty, and their brave and stunning work—endlessly renew my faith in the goodness of human beings.

  I also wish to thank members of the Foreign Service Youth Foundation, who very early on expressed enthusiasm for my perspectives.

  The Writer’s Center in Bethesda has sustained me in multiple and basic ways for over fifteen years. Sunil Freeman has been a wonderful, never-failing friend and employer.

  The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts provided residencies that allowed me to gather my thoughts in the fertile garden of other writers.

  Susan Schulman was an early, helpful supporter of this project.

  Elizabeth Demers at Potomac Books is a wonderful editor. She immediately “got” the book and helped me, through her wisdom and expertise, to make it do its job in the best possible way. Kathryn Owens efficiently and cheerfully ushered the book through its production phase, and Aryana Hendrawan was an expert copy-editor. I am very thankful to all three.

  I also wish to acknowledge my debt to these books: Ike’s Spies by Stephen Ambrose, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA by John Ranelagh, Vietnam: A History by Stanley Karnow, The United States and China by John King Fairbank, and The Espionage Establishment by David Wise and Thomas B. Ross.

  As for the Chinese romanizations used in this book, Taiwan has now adopted pinyin for most words, with some exceptions, such as for place names. To conform with this, I have used pinyin romanizations for simple nouns but the romanizations used during my time in Taiwan for the places and streets.

  Special thanks, of course, must go to my late father and mother, and to my brother, whose versions of this story, as in any family, would be very different. In what manner does one thank one’s family? This book is a testament to what my father gave to me. Oddly, my father, the spy, holder of secrets, was all in favor of my writing. He believed everyone has a right to his or her story. His endorsement in this and all things has made all the difference. He wrote his own book about his exodus from Vietnam: Get Out Any Way You Can: The Story of the Evacuation of House Seven, the CIA Propaganda Force in Vietnam, April 1975, by Charles Eugene Taber. My mother was a plucky Indiana farm girl who could make a community anywhere in the world. Among multitudinous gifts, she gave me a basketful of love, invaluable advice for life, and a wonderful helping of gumption. She deserves her own story. My brother, Andrew Taber, was my youthful partner in crime; and besides, he wore that floppy hat in high school.

  Last and most, giant hugs to Peter, both mate and sea anchor—and Maud and Forrest, my miracles. All three met my obsession with never-ending support and grace, and kept me ever-aware of the world’s best and ongoing delights.

  PREFACE

  The Secret and the Sea

  I was born under an assumed name.

  It was in Kamakura that my parents first went under. “Mr. Brown,” a colleague, met them at the Tokyo airport after the endless flights from Washington. As he was driving them the forty miles to Kamakura near the coast, he asked them to select a surname. Once they arrived at their new home, nestled into a mountain slope beneath an ancient, three-story-high Buddha, they settled into their new identity.

  Two years later, on that piney slope, I emerged into the world. It was 1954, and the world was seething. McCarthyism, Soviets, massive retaliation, Red China, Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh: these were the maelstroms of my first world. All through my childhood, my father’s shifting identities and covert missions ruled us, as we moved from continent to continent. During the first five years of my life, we changed locales five times—from Kamakura, Japan, to Okinawa, to the Philippines, Taiwan, Connecticut, and back to Taiwan.

  Always, the secret was there, like an invisible molecule suspended in the deeps of the sea.

  A person who loses worlds, whose truths are murky, whose identity wavers, is hungry and given to remembering—to tracking down and naming sensed truths, and to fashioning scenes and whole landscapes around an image of a pea soup-green Dutch canal or a dimly recalled whisper in the Taiwan night. To retrieve the girls I used to be, to stitch my life together and claim my own name, I collected half-recalled fragments of long-ago moments, cities, and people, and awakened from deep memory, with imagination’s assistance, the sights and sounds and smells that surrounded them. In order to understand my father, and thus myself, I had to fathom not only the kaleidoscope of my own life, but American soldiers, American spies, my country, and its role in the world. This was the only way I could sort out what it was to be an American, and even more, what it was to be human.

  PART I. THE SEA

  Book 1

  DRAGONS

  Taipei, Taiwan,

  1961–1962

  1

  the wall

  China—age seven, age of clear memory—was the place I became aware of my strange perch in the world.

  The sun was warm on my cheek. My legs shifted under the sheet. I squinted my eyes open, sensed a ray of watery shine, shut them again. There was the smell of cooking rice and the green-mud smell of padi—the smells of Taiwan, of “Free China,” as my father called it. Snuggling under my covers, I listened. There was a soft scratching sound. The scratching sound of earth being dug.

  I kicked off the sheets, opened my eyes, settled them on the soft grey, plain walls of the room. The air was cool and moist, playing on my flung-out arms and legs. It wasn’t hot yet. The atmosphere inside and around my body was soft and still. No one else was awake.

  Pulling my nightie down, I sat up. There was the scratching sound again. I tugged the filmy curtain aside and peered out the window. The guard was squatting in the dirt across the small patch of garden, wearing his sunny-side-up, straw coolie hat and his loose cotton pants. I could see his thin ankles and the thick, corded veins of his weathered, caramel-colored arms.

  The yard was ragged—a thin rectangle of dusty grass edged with a bare, tan bed of dirt. My mother had asked the guard, who was on round-the-clock duty but had little to do except twiddle his thumbs at his post near the gate, to plant some flowers. At the back of the dirt bed rose a high cement wall, with little chunks of clear broken glass on top like ice teeth. This was the wall that kept my family safe from thieves and other unnamed dangers. I often imagined what it would be like to be a thief trying to climb over the wall into my family’s yard and finding his fingers and the fleshy parts of his legs and his feet sliced by the glass shards.

  The guard was standing up now, his spade and pail lying on the ground beside him. He shifted slightly. The moves were quiet. Now he was staring at the earth; he was gripping his rake. All of a sudden, his skinny arms and upper body were twisting something, and, a second later, he was turned around, looking shyly into my face. He was holding, on his rake, a coiled, long, fat, dead brown-and-black snake.

  I was transfixed by the sight, but my insides shrank down very small with fear.

  During the time that the guard was standing, looking into my face, our bodies were only three paces apart, but it seemed like the old Chinese man and I, a seven-year-old American girl, were separated by a distance as large as three oceans. Even so, I wanted to open and climb out the window, to join the guard, to see the snake
. What would its eyes look like, up close?

  But I was frozen. I couldn’t go out the window to the guard and I couldn’t step back into the coolness of my room. I was at a juncture. I could stay in my room and remain an American girl with patent leather shoes and smocked dresses, or I could clamber out the window and become a Chinese girl who could kill snakes and spy dragons in the air. I stood at the opening, holding my breath.

  Then I heard my father’s voice calling. “Girl-child, time to get up. Time for breakfast.”

  A little while later, when our cook, Yuki, was clearing my sugared rice porridge, my father put down his Chinese newspaper and told me the guard had knocked on the door to say that a snake had slithered under the wall that morning.

  “It was a krait,” he said, beckoning me onto the lap of his khaki suit. “A twenty-stepper.”

  “You run inside, Sara, if you ever see anything moving in the yard,” my mother said, leaning her dusky-blond bob toward me and pulling her Japanese yukata around her, her voice trembling, vehement. “Besides kraits, pythons and bamboo snakes are about. They’re poisonous too.” Andy, my brother, two years younger than I, was born right after my father drove over a thirty-foot python that was sleeping in the road.

  “And,” my mother went on, uttering the words I had heard many, many times, “don’t ever, ever go outside the wall by yourself. It’s not safe beyond the wall.”

  “But don’t worry,” my father said in turn, as he always did. “Snakes are rare. Almost all the time Free China is a very safe place.”

  My father had told me that, like the king of the beasts, America was the strongest country in the world and could save us anywhere, anytime, from anything— even, as I imagined now, from poisonous snakes.

  My father had told me, too, that the Chinese thought of their country as ruled by a dragon—a wild and powerful dragon curled over a continent. I lived, thus, in a land of enchantment. Always, my father could change the look of something. He was my private magician.