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.
