From The Spy World Archives-The Day David Long Came In From The Cold-They Think

Back in the 1960s, back in the Cold War red scare days when it was an open question whether the world would survive or get blown to smithereens by some damn fool’s trigger-happy hand many young men, and a few young women, decided that they could best join the fight by enlisting in one of the national security agencies, FBI, CIA, NSA, the elite IYF units. Many did good and useful service and others rumbled along in some catacomb building far from the action. That latter cohort had a few members who did not get the word that the Cold War was over until recently and have only now come in from the cold. Clearly David was no James Bond figure in the great scheme of things, but this is the last known photograph of him when he was using one of his many aliases. Who knows what the bugger looks like now probably in serious need of assisted living or some such aid. 

I would not have thought much about the matter except I knew David Long in the old days, knew him in high school where he was alternately the class clown, the class dunce (I still don’t know how he passed whatever examinations you needed to pass to get into the IYF although he would eventually fail in that line of work) and the class loner, especially after he struck out with every girl he asked out even Hilda Malone, a transfer student, who seemed like she was made in heaven for him.

That was high school and even though I was in some disbelief when David told me he had passed the exams some years later l was glad that he was doing something for his country which was a strong motivating drive for him, had some kind of spook code-breaker for a girlfriend from what he said. I mentioned some of David’s other characteristics earlier but somewhere along the line he developed the art, and it is an art in the spook line of work, of bullshitting people. Trying to pull some wool over my eyes. Had me believing that he had been instrumental in neutralizing Kim Philby, had proof positive that the martyred Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were in Uncle “Joe” Stalin’s hip pocket, had been in deep in the decoding of the Russian nuclear codes and doing a deep six on Leonid Brezhnev which led to some instability in the Soviet leadership from which it never recovered.   

    

I did not see or hear about David for many years so I thought he was off on some super-secret mission and had to go to deep cover. How was I to know it was all a crock, that David had been so deep in some catacomb building in Arlington, Virginia that he only recently came up for air (reminding more than a few of the isolated Japanese soldiers still holding out for the Emperor many years after World War II was over) and the truth was exposed that he flunked out day one of IYF training and was deep cover assigned to the catacombs so and I quote, he would not be danger to himself, to others and to national security. That said it all.