The Wolf and the Watchman: A Father, a Son, and the CIA

by Scott C. Johnson

Overview

Longlisted for the National Book Award and named a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year.

Growing up, Scott C. Johnson always suspected that his father was different. Only as a teenager did he discover the truth: his father was a spy, one of the CIA’s most trusted officers. At first the secret was thrilling. But over time Scott began to have doubts. How could a man so rigorously trained to deceive and manipulate simply turn off those skills at home? His father had been living a double life for so long that his lies were hard to separate from the truth.

When Scott embarked on a career as a foreign correspondent, he found himself returning to many of the troubled countries of his youth. In the dusty streets of Pakistan and Afghanistan, amid the cold urbanity of Yugoslavia, and down the mysterious alleys of Mexico City, he came face to face with his father’s murky past—and his own complicity in it. Scott learned that his chosen profession was not so different from his father’s: they both worked to gain people’s trust and to uncover their secrets. The only difference was what they did with that information.

In the aftermath of 9/11, father and son found themselves on assignment in Afghanistan and the Middle East, one as a CIA contractor, the other as a reporter for Newsweek. Suddenly, an unsettled Scott was forced to keep his father’s secret all over again. As their professional lives collided, Scott and his father inched toward a personal reckoning, struggling to overcome a lifetime of suspicion and deception.

The Wolf and the Watchman is a provocative, meditative account of truth and duplicity, of manipulation and loyalty. It is also a moving, intensely personal portrait of a bond between father and son that endured in the shadow of one of the world’s most secretive and unforgiving institutions.

* PEN Center USA Award Finalist

Reading group guide available.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393240405
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	05/13/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Scott C. Johnson was a Newsweek foreign correspondent for twelve years, often providing exclusive war reporting from Iraq, Afghanistan, and other fronts in the Middle East. He also served as Newsweek’s bureau chief in Mexico, Baghdad, and Africa; was part of the team that won the 2003 National Magazine Award for reportage of the Iraq War; and received a 2004 Overseas Press Club Honorable Mention for his reporting from Latin America. He is now a freelance journalist and writer living in Santa Monica, California.

Table of Contents

Prologue xi

Part I

1 New Delhi, 1973 3

2 Belgrade, 1981 12

3 Islamabad, 1983 17

4 Williamsburg, Virginia, 1984 23

5 Southfield, Michigan, 1987 46

6 Madrid, 1992 64

Part II

7 Roaming, 1995 75

8 Paris, 1998 86

9 Washington State, 2001 92

10 Afghanistan, 2001 108

11 Mexico City, 1968 122

12 Mexico City, 2002 137

13 Southern Iraq, 2003 162

14 Sarajevo, 2004 178

15 Baghdad, 2006 189

16 Ramadi, 2006 199

17 Baghdad, 2006 214

18 Washington State, 2006 226

Part III

19 New Hampshire, 2006 239

20 Mexico, 2006 252

21 Washington State, 2007 259

22 Baghdad and Amman, 2008 276

Epilogue 301

Acknowledgments 303

Editorial Reviews

It all adds up to quite a story. Toggling between his childhood, his father's comings and goings, his poisonous love affairs and his increasingly risky assignments as a war reporter…Johnson evokes John le Carre's dark autobiographical thriller The Perfect Spy…To his credit, Johnson has transformed what might have been just one long, narcissistic howl at the darkness into the kind of psychological police procedural that might have been written by Camus.

The Washington Post - Jeff Stein

The bitter truth of his father working for the CIA years ago still haunts Johnson, a former Newsweek foreign correspondent, and that knowledge forms the spine of this revealing book of family discord, disconnection, and reunion. He never sugarcoats the sense of betrayal his father inspired due to the years of falsely claiming to be a diplomat; a betrayal of both Johnson and his adoptive mother, who felt tricked into a marriage of convenience and dark secrets. "e simply stopped trusting each other under the strain of the many lies." The consequences of this double life linger for years; even affecting his father's political ambitions as GOP smears derail a senatorial bid. Johnson despises his father's ongoing misinformation and misrepresentations, refusing to remain complicit in the necessary duplicities of espionage. Determined not to follow his father's deceptive footsteps, Johnson becomes a foreign journalist, mainly in the Middle East and Afghanistan, where he encounters an ex-al Qaeda agent and learns the arts of forgiveness and parental pride. Johnson's engrossing memoir, through the layers of subterfuge, uncovers many basic truths of familial conflict, allowing concessions and reconciliation to eventually win the day despite the years of lies and poor choices. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"Brave and memorable . . . a rare glimpse into the private life of a spy that digs into the love, lies, and ambiguities between father and son."

Megan Stack

"A fine book of unusual honesty; he grapples with the nature of his beloved father’s secret life and the profound consequences it has had in his own. This is an extraordinary story, astonishingly well-told."

Jon Lee Anderson

"Evokes John le Carré’s dark autobiographical thriller The Perfect Spy."

Washington Post

"An enthralling look at a complicated father-son relationship and a painful investigation of the messiness of truth in journalism, intelligence ops, and life."

Booklist

"This stunning memoir could be ripped from the pages of a John le Carré novel. . . . A fascinating and important book by one of the great American foreign correspondents of his generation."

Michael Hastings

"A beautifully written memoir, and a cautionary tale about double lives. . . . I couldn’t put this book down."

Robert Baer

"A mesmerizing book . . . beautifully written, deeply moving, and compulsively readable."

David Finkel

"Evokes John le Carré’s dark autobiographical thriller The Perfect Spy."

A Notable Book of the Year Washington Post

"[A] searingly honest memoir… [Johnson] deftly explores the eerie parallels between these professional worlds: the CIA case officer who labors to recruit sources to provide secret information to assist the United States in its pursuit of foreign policy objectives worldwide, and the journalist who also recruits inside sources, but ones who will speak for publication."

San Francisco Chronicle

"With rare emotional subtlety, and in finely etched prose worthy of Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene, [Johnson] captures the perspectives of people on various sides of [a] bloody equation."

The Daily Beast - Emma Garman

"An aching, lyrical father-son story of the spy world that is dark and intriguing."

Evan Thomas

A former Newsweek foreign correspondent reviews his often perplexing experiences as the son of a CIA operative. Now a freelance journalist, Johnson begins in 1973, his birth year, with a story about a snake charmer in India, where his father was stationed. The snake charmer proves an apt metaphor for the mysterious elder Johnson, a sophisticated persuader whose ability to charm was his deadliest arrow as he sought to flip other agents and foreign nationals. The author does not obey a strict chronology. After 10 chapters that deliver us to 2001, Johnson returns to Mexico City in 1968, wondering if or how his father was involved in the deadly violence that occurred there just before the Olympics. Rendering the question even more wrenching is his realization that Johnson père could have been involved in the arrest of the father of a woman Johnson fils was dating. About halfway through, the narrative arrives near the present with a summary of the author's sometimes-harrowing experiences covering the war in Iraq; he survived an IED explosion while riding in a Marine vehicle and had other brushes with death. We also hear about Sarajevo in 2004 and, in later chapters, about visits with his uneasily retired father in Spokane. They took some road trips, and en route, we learn about some of the missions and adventures of Johnson père, though he says he resents interrogations. Nonetheless, the author kept pushing him to impart as much family and professional history as possible, trying to understand a man with such a deadly past who nonetheless both professes and demonstrates a profound love for his son. Gripping, emotional depictions of the conflicts that rage in the interior and exterior worlds of a spy--and of a journalist.

Kirkus Reviews