Million Dollar Baby
Do your mercenaries accept cash?
After his retirement from the Agency, my Dad lived in a variety of apartments in North Dallas. One day I took my paycheck to the bank and got all cash, in small denominations. It was not much money back then but it was still cool to have that much cash in my pocket. I happen to visit my dad at his apartment and wanted to show off. So I revealed my small pile of cash. He got this sudden gleam in his eye and helpfully and carefully counted the bills one by one, until the stack was all counted. Then he did the count again. The gleam in his eye was unnatural. I asked him “what was up”?
He finally admitted that it reminded him of the pile of money he saw in Laos. The COS (Chief of Station) Vientiane Laos had one million dollars in his safe of twenty dollar bills. Mind you this was 1968, so one million dollars would go a long way. I could see some Agency man with the temptation to grab the money and disappear and live like a King. He would use his Agency training to escape detection. I am sure that temptation occurred to more than a few. But since the Agency did a good job of screening their candidates, most Agency men would never even consider turning against the Agency or their country. Then my Dad said that when he went on an Agency covert operation, they were given a large sum of cash to operate with, usually a large stack of twenty dollar bills. So his explained why my Dad repeatedly counted of my small stack of bills. It brought back memories of covert operations gone by.
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An Insiders Look at the CIA. This online book about the CIA is like no other. It details the bizarre behavior of my parents during and after the time that they both worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Written from the perspective of a young man inside this family, watching the world around me. Imagine your Father being a top secret spy. As a family, we traveled extensively and met a wide range of Spooks, Diplomats, and Mercenaries.
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