At first, we couldn’t find the conference room. Like me, Vivian wasn’t allowed to bring her phone into the main building, but even if she had, I don’t know who she would’ve called for directions. CIA officers generally don’t know their coworkers’ last names. (The Starbucks at Langley is the only Starbucks where baristas aren’t allowed to ask for your name.) So I am without photos or notes, but walking through the main building at Langley, is, in my memory, like walking through an airport terminal in a major metropolis, crossed with a hospital, crossed with an American mall, crossed with an Eastern European university. It’s big and gleaming and cold and brutal, all at once. There was a hall of presidential portraits with notes from commanders in chief to the Secret Service, all of them written in elegant fountain pen, except for Donald Trump’s, which was written in Sharpie and said “I’M SO PROUD OF YOU!”

They blocked the road with boulders and palm fronds. They unraveled a long canvas sign, bringing the vehicles to a stop — a traffic jam that would end up stretching for miles. Drivers stepped out into the oppressive August humidity, annoyed but not unaccustomed to this practice, one of the only ways poor Hondurans can get the outside world’s attention. Several dozen people, their faces wrapped in T-shirts or bandannas, some wielding rusty machetes, had closed off the only highway on the northern coast. It was the first protest against the Pinares mine — and the government’s failure to rein in its operations — since Castro came to power eight months before.

Things weren’t going well. That Castro’s campaign promises might not only go unfulfilled but betrayed was made clear that afternoon last August when, as a light rain fell, a truck of military police forced its way through the jeering crowd of protesters and past their blockade — to deliver drums of gasoline to the mine.

Since their creation in 2013, the military police have racked up a reputation for torture and extrajudicial killings as a part of its brutal Mano Dura, or iron fist, strategy against gangs. Though it earned them a modicum of popularity among those living in gang-controlled slums, they also became notorious for their indiscriminate violence against protesters, as well as the security they provided for extractive projects. They’ve faced accusations of working as gunmen in the drug trade and selling their services as assassins-for-hire. The unit was pushed by Juan Orlando Hernández, now facing trial in the United States for drug trafficking, while he was president of the Honduran congress, in his attempt to give the military power over the police — his “Praetorian Guard,” in the words of one critic.

Castro had been a critic of the unit before her election. But after a series of high-profile massacres last summer, she decided that — promises to demilitarize notwithstanding — the unit would be kept on the streets. And here they were, providing gasoline and armed security to a mining project mired in controversy and blood.

His gifted hands move with remarkable precision. Each brush stroke is calculated. Each piece he sculpts is meticulously crafted, and sometimes re-crafted, to reach perfection.

Some of the tools he uses seem wildly out of place: two pasta rollers, orange peels, and dozens of large-gauge syringes filled with fluids of various colours. That’s what it takes to make this art imitate life.

Barron’s medium of choice is silicone.

His finished pieces will be worn as facial prosthetics by people who have been visibly disfigured through birth defect, disease or trauma — people like Steve Butler.

“I mastered the technique of making silicone look like skin,” explains Barron as he picks up the half-face with the moustache.

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Zan Romanoff | Longreads | June 2019 | 13 minutes (3,591 words)

The story of how Tom O’Neill’s CHAOS: Charles Manson, The CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties came to be is almost as crazy as the story of the book tells in its pages. Twenty years ago, an editor at Premiere magazine asked O’Neill to write something about the 30th anniversary of the Manson murders — whatever he thought would be interesting. Now, on the 50th anniversary, that magazine story is finally being released in the form of a 400+ page book.

The intervening years take O’Neill from the backyards of LA drug dealers to the offices of CIA agents doing research on the drugged out hippies in San Francisco’s Haight District. At one point, he gets four haircuts from a barber who intimates that Manson might have been involved with the mob. And as the story spins wildly out of O’Neill’s control, defying reduction to a single, simple narrative, only one thing seems certain: that the settled story of what happened in Los Angeles in the summer of 1969 might not be as straightforward as we’ve all been lead to believe.

O’Neill and I spoke by phone a few months before the book came out, on a gray Los Angeles Monday. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

*

Zan Romanoff: So usually I start by asking about how a book came to be — what inspired you, and how you started writing. But the story of how this got written is really part of the book itself. What I’m curious about in your case, because getting this written was such a long, complicated, incredibly drawn-out process is: at this point, do you feel like you’re done?

Tom O’Neill: No, I don’t, unfortunately. I wish I did. I don’t want to give spoilers, but there’s a lot of loose ends. But I just didn’t want to do it forever. I’d love to do something different next, and I probably will. I’m looking forward to not waking up in the morning and having Charles Manson on my mind ahead of anything else.

As a person who’s not really into true crime per se, I actually really appreciated that you didn’t wrap the book up neatly — that it was more like, the truth is maybe not always totally knowable, and at a certain point, I have to just decide to leave this.

And that didn’t come easy! That didn’t originate with me — that was my agent, my various publishers, saying ‘Hey, you know, you’ve got enough compelling stuff here. You don’t have to answer everything.’

I started getting worried that it would never get out there; if I got run over by a car or something, it would just languish and end up in a dumpster. So I feel really relieved knowing that 60% of my reporting is going to be available to people who are interested.

You talk a lot in the book about how you’re worried that the material, the research, the obsessiveness, will make you sound crazy — and then at a certain point you had to bring in a co-writer, Dan Piepenbring. What was it like to let him see everything you had?

I was a little hesitant about him because he’s really young, and his focus at the time, two years ago, was music. He famously got the job writing Prince’s memoir. My agent, who I’ve known a long time, said ‘Trust me on this one; he’s really intuitive and smart.’

They sent me clips, and the first one I read was this long, detailed story about obscure almanac that goes out to people in engineering and farming. He made this 3000-word story fascinating, about a subject I had no interest in. I thought, if he can make me that interested in an almanac about jet propulsion parts and oils and stuff like that …
He’s just a really fascinating, quirky guy.

I wrote two different proposals that were 200 pages each, so once he read all that stuff he knew what he was getting into. All it took was one meeting, and we immediately realized we were on the same page about everything. I got lucky; I got a really great collaborator. I’d gone on a couple of blind dates with some, and they were really frightened by the amount of material. I don’t blame them at all.

And then how did you work together? How did you start shaping what you had into a workable book-sized thing?

What I really valued about him, and what I needed — I had to reconcile myself to the fact that by 2016 or ‘17, I was way too deep in the weeds. I had a difficult time understanding anymore what was important and what could go.

We did it a chapter at a time. He would do a chapter using material that I’d already done, and then he sent it to me. He was really good at stepping back and doing the big picture paragraphs about what was going on in the world at the time; I was much more interested in the details of the investigation of the details of the crimes and the people.

We found this rhythm. It took a couple of chapters of back and forth and back and forth. The first 5 or 6 chapters we probably did 20 drafts, meaning he’d send it to me, I’d revise it, I’d send it to him, he’d revise it, and on and on. By the last three or four we had it down. We pretty much knew each other’s instincts.

I’m also curious about how you feel about so much of this research that you’ve been doing being subject to public scrutiny for the first time. There was recently this big scandal with Jill Abramson’s book, where it felt like the general public discovered that most books aren’t fact-checked. How did you think about making sure that what you were putting out there was as accurate and airtight as possible?

Little, Brown outsourced the fact checking to professional fact checkers. I’ve been fact checked at magazines before, and I thought it was going to be much more rigorous. I talked to Dan about that; Dan actually worked at a couple of publishing houses, and he said, ‘No, no, these guys vetted it really well — we have nothing to worry about.’ He said, ‘What you’re not doing is you’re not giving yourself credit. You do have everything substantiated, and you’ve got the proper number of sources.’

We sold it in the UK, and their fact checking is much more rigorous, because their libel laws are so draconian. And they’re worried about Roman Polanski; he sued Vanity Fair. Some of the stuff he did to Sharon — I didn’t want to put a lot of it in, but I kept hearing it, from more than one or two or three people.

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There’s this moment, late in the book, when you’re getting really deep into that kind of uncomfortable territory — like, “who shot JFK”-type stuff — when you kind of give in to the idea that this research is going to take you places you don’t consciously want to go. You write, “I had to let the story consume me.” Can you talk about that feeling of giving in to the story like that, just being like, ‘okay, I have to stop worrying about what this looks like. Let’s go’?

The reason the JFK stuff came in was because I was looking at Jolly West’s files for documentation of him having some kind of an intersection with Manson or the family. [West is a psychiatrist famous for, among other things, his work with the CIA’s MKUltra project, serving as a brainwashing expert in the Patty Heart trial, and the death of an elephant he’d injected with LSD.]

I could show that he was working out of the [Haight-Ashbury Free] clinic recruiting subjects for his research at the same time Manson was bringing the women in to see his parole officer there, but I was trying to get them in the same room. I felt like everything that Manson did with his women was exactly what the CIA was trying to do with people without their knowledge, in the exact same time, at the exact same place.

West had a history of doing research in inducing insanity without a person’s awareness. He reported that he had learned how to replace true memories with false ones. And he saw Jack Ruby [who shot JFK’s killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, in 1963] within the 24 hours that Ruby became insane.

One I had those documents I thought, okay, at the very least that should have been disclosed to the Warren Commission. When you have that paperwork, and then you go through everything that was ever written about MKultra and West, and see that it’s never been reported, it’s only been speculated, no one could ever prove it …

Then I just knew: I don’t care anymore what people think of me. I have the paperwork. I’m not relying on someone’s hazy memory of something 30 years ago.

The documentation was the most important thing to me. That’s what kept me going, saying, ‘I want to do justice to these papers.’ If I hadn’t found them, maybe somebody else would have. But if no one ever found them, then people got away with it.

As far out as it ends up going, one of the things I really like about the book is the way it works to contextualize and kind of ground Manson — talking about how he was coming up in an era when the government was working on mind control experiments, so it’s not that crazy to think about what he was doing as a kind of mind control experiment. For so long there’s been this sense that he was magic in some way, and a lot of what the book does is say, ‘no, he’s a piece of a lot of pieces of the culture that were happening at the time. This is not so inexplicable as people like to think.’

He represents different things to different people, as did Jolly West. I think the three protagonists of the book, hopefully excluding me, are Manson, Vince Bugliosi, and Jolly West. Those three men, West, Bugliosi and Manson, are of a certain time and place that might never happen again. Those guys had secrets; they were sinister. Each of those three guys I became pretty intrigued by. I sometimes wondered which was the most evil of the three of them. I’m not sure Manson was.

When you say, they were of a time that might never happen again — you have this line in the book where you’re talking about trying to interview people, and it’s not that they don’t want to answer questions, it seems like they physically can’t. You write, “It was irreparable. Wherever the ’60s had come from, they were gone, even in memory.”

I feel like we as a country fetishize the ’60s in a different way than we fetishize other eras — like we really believe that the ’60s meant something, and if they didn’t mean something, then we’re in trouble.

So another thing I really appreciated about the book is that it’s like, look, it might not have meant anything! Or, really, it might have meant a lot of things. But the ’60s weren’t some special case of history where everything made sense and followed a narrative. When it was happening, it was as messy as anything that’s happening now.

I really romanticize the ’60s — I was born in ‘59, so the murders happened when I was 10 years old.

I loved the whole idea of peace and love and Woodstock and all of that. So all of this reporting, especially the first few months, was really eye opening to me. I knew there was sleazy stuff going on, but when I started interviewing people in that world and finding out just how sleazy, and how horribly the women were treated, and how people treated each other so terribly — ripping each other off for drugs — it was a lot uglier than I ever suspected.

One of my favorite small parts of the book is at the beginning there’s a drug dealer who’s maybe gotten raped, and he’s really high, so his friends chain him up so he can’t take revenge on the person who supposedly did it. The guy who does the chaining, he mentions, “It was easy, because I already had the chain there for someone else.” 

I’m glad you caught that!

Are you kidding me? That’s when I bought in. I was like, okay, I’m on board with this book.

But it was also really striking to me because that sounds more like the ’60s that I’m familiar with. My dad lived on a commune around then, The Hog Farm — there was actually a Manson girl who lived there for a while, too, though he didn’t know her — and I grew up hearing his stories, and they weren’t really much about peace and love. They were a lot more about drugs and craziness.

Also discovering that personal connection, and there are some others — a high school classmate of mine is the son or nephew of a different Manson girl, that kind of thing — made the murders feel different to me. They became more real, more tangible, not just this big national myth about the end of the sixties.

You write in the book about how the murders touched everyone at the time in this small community. For me, discovering these things, it was like, ‘this stuff is still alive.’ I felt like, if you’re a part of this community, it actually still touches you. It’s not totally over yet, somehow.

A couple of people I interviewed got so upset. One guy, his name is Jules Pachieri, he was a multi-millionaire, and then he became a yogi. He’s all about peace and love and transformation stuff, and he agreed to let me interview him. When I started asking him questions he got really angry at me, and literally threatened to kill me. It was still a magazine piece at the time, and my editor made me go to the West Hollywood police and report it in case something happened.

I had like, ten of these experiences with different Hollywood people. Michelle Phillips, from the Mamas and the Papas, she went out to lunch with me, and she got so upset talking about Sharon that she left to go to the bathroom and came back and said, ‘I threw up. I vomited. I can’t do this anymore.’ That was thirty years later. It impacted a lot of people’s lives.

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I’d love to hear more about the part where you’re doing the reporting, and trying to figure out the line between wanting to get the story and the truth, and people being like, I’m so viscerally upset by you asking these questions that it’s making my physically sick. Where did you draw the line? Or did you?

That’s the thing about it. You can’t even imagine anybody you know getting killed like that. That’s going to traumatize you for life.

But there was some other visceral reaction so many people had. And then I end up speculating, but I do think that Manson had much deeper ties in the community. An important thing I left out of the book is that there’s really good evidence that the killers tried to kill the same four people the night before they actually killed them. The night before, Sharon [Tate], Wojciech [Frykowski], and Abigail [Folger] were at dinner at Jay Sebring’s house. The lines were cut to the house that night. The police found that out three days after the murders, and hid that information. It’s never been reported before. So I do think that there are still secrets, all of these years later, that people have kept. And I think a lot of them feel guilty about it.

One of the things you push back on really hard in the book is the calcification of the Manson story — the way, as you put it, “a narrative becomes the narrative.”

When I finally had to accept that I might not find the smoking gun and be able to answer all the questions — around the time that I reconciled myself to that, Serial had already happened, and Making a Murderer was happening, and those two both end up without any conclusion. It makes it interesting, because it’s giving it back to the reader to let them decide what they want to think.

But then on the other hand, do you worry at all about being in this post-fact, fake news moment — that people might look at this book and take it as evidence that you can’t trust anything, that basically everything is bullshit?

I don’t want to be the person that feeds into that deep state paranoia. My brother was the first one to say, ‘The Trump base is going to love this book.’

I said, ‘No, please! I’m not going to publish it if that’s going to happen!’

I am a little worried that it’s going to confirm — I mean, it’s not the first book about this, but there’s a reason to distrust the government, the CIA and the cops and all that. I’m a thousand times more cynical than I was 20 years ago, and skeptical and questioning. That’s what the book ruined for me, is having faith in the system.

Which is interesting, because more traditional true crime relies on and then also reinforces our faith in the judicial system, and the idea of narrative: a story that begins will have a throughline, and an end, and justice.

Beyond that, though, it was kind of wonderful for me to get to read a book that’s constantly grappling with the artificiality of narrative, and the choices you have to make as an author to make something that has a story. Because you know that when you write it as a story, people will read it and think, ‘oh, well, that’s how it happened.’ Not seeing all the things you’re choosing to leave out because they don’t go anywhere, or don’t feel relevant, but they still happened.

That’s scary. I have a responsibility as a storyteller. I thought, am I being fair to Terry Melcher? Am I being fair to Vince? I’m haunted by, if I made mistakes, what I might do to these people.

You’ve got an obligation to be as honest and truthful as possible. No matter what you’re going to manipulate what you use. I constantly had to ask myself, am I cherry picking? I gotta show both sides. That’s a scary responsibility, unless you think no one’s going to read it.

Which I feel like — twenty years in on a project, you can’t think that way. You have to believe that someone’s going to read it and care, right?

You know, I finally decided that, even if no one reads it, as long as it’s available if someone wants to find it, I won’t feel as horrible as if I left this earth not having put it on paper. That was the most important thing. I had too much invested. I had to finish.

A lot of people asked, ‘What kept you going? Why didn’t you give up?’ I said, ‘Once you accumulate all of that information, you can’t discredit what you found by letting it go unseen.’ You gotta get it out there.

That’s the biggest relief of all — even if the book gets lousy reviews and I get made fun of, I don’t care, as long as my reporting is out there for other people to read. I’m raising questions about stuff that hopefully will create the endings I couldn’t put in the book. Maybe they’ll come out after the fact.

I mean, we’re definitely in a Manson moment, with the 50th anniversary of the murders coming up this summer, and so many movies and things coming out about them …

This is one battle I didn’t win with Little Brown: I didn’t want my book to be released this summer. They wanted to publish this on the 50th anniversary, and I said, ‘I’d much rather have it in the fall, or winter after.’ I just don’t want to look like we’re trying to capitalize on it, trying to make money off of it. They agreed to do it much earlier in the summer.

But then, I owe so much money to so many people, and if the interest raised by things like Tarantino’s film [Once Upon a Time in Hollywood] is going to help sell my books … I’m hoping people will get curious about who these people were, and why these things happened, because of this movie. I’m hoping it does generate interest.

It’s difficult for me, because I’m pretty good friends with a couple of the victims’ relatives. Deborah Tate is tough as nails, I’m not worried about her, but some of the others aren’t, and it’s going to be a difficult time for them. I don’t want to feed into that, but at the same time, I gotta do my job.

I mean, I didn’t want it to come out the 20th year. I wanted it to come out 19 years ago, and then 17, and then 15. I’m just glad it’s finally coming out.

* * *

Zan Romanoff is a full-time freelance writer and the author of the novels A SONG TO TAKE THE WORLD APART and GRACE AND THE FEVER, out now, as well as LOOK, which is forthcoming from Dial Books for Young Readers in spring 2020. She lives and writes in LA.

Editor: Dana Snitzky

After Jean Guerrero’s father tore up his condominium’s walls to find the devices that he believed were monitoring him, her mother diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic. The crack cocaine he’d been smoking certainly exacerbated his condition. For Wired, Guerrero honors her father’s claim that he is a TI, or “Targeted Individual,” by treating his story the way a trained journalist should: she goes searching for answers. She casts a wide essayistic net, examining philosophy and psychology, the biblical prophets who modern people would call bananas. She investigates the CIA’s MKUltra mind-control program and wonders if certain psychological ailments can show us things about the world we might not otherwise see. She’s reaching, but only because she’s searching for unconventional, uncomfortable truths in a country where the CIA did actually dose 10,000 American citizens with LSD without their consent. In an era of data-harvesting, she says, aren’t we all under surveillance?

We can dismiss the targeted individual whose persecutors allegedly tormented her about a breakup. Or we can ask ourselves if her story reveals something we’ve ignored about ourselves: a social media dynamic in which we are actually being watched, in which our most intimate lives are exposed, in which we are sometimes mocked and taunted by remorseless strangers.

There’s no mystery that Facebook knows our gender, ages, hometowns, birthdays, friends, likes, political leanings, and internet browsing habits. Facebook can tell, by analyzing our likes and comments, whether we are going through a breakup or a divorce. It can make predictions about our health. It can algorithmically intuit our fantasies and fears and use that information to target us with messaging so personalized it feels like persecution.

Consider this example from my own life: After the Los Angeles Times published allegations of sexual misconduct by a gynecologist at the university I attended, Facebook started bombarding me with pictures of his face in the form of ads, from plaintiff lawyers offering free consultations and injury checks. I’d had an uncomfortable experience with this gynecologist and had been considering sharing my story with journalists after reading the first article. But seeing his face on my news feed every time I opened Facebook felt invasive, almost nightmarish.

My USC classmates and I were being stalked by lawyers who knew we’d attended the university while the gynecologist worked there. It didn’t feel like the platform was presenting an option to speak up; it felt like harassment. The specificity of the ads, their omnipresence and relation to a very personal incident in my life felt like an assault on my process of deliberation—on the integrity of my free will.

Like my father, I was experiencing a form of gang stalking. And it was real.

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Nations have long done battle with one another in different ways. These days, they spy from satellites, send viruses to corrupt government software, poach scientists and infiltrate academia. At The Guardian, Daniel Golden describes how international intelligence agencies send operatives to scientific conferences to gather intel, and how the U.S. has worked to convince foreign nuclear scientists to defect.

Scientific conferences attract people from all corners of the world and facilitate the exchange of information. Conferences are also one of the few opportunities for nuclear scientists from Iran to leave the country, so they function as what Golden calls “a modern-day underground railroad” for potential defectors. U.S. intelligence agencies routinely create their own sham conferences through an intermediary in order to isolate their targets and engage them one-on-one. The system has worked on many scientists. It’s fraught with many dangers: how to blend into a relatively small academic community and impersonate a scientist with actual scientific knowledge? How to get the target away from his guards without attracting attention? The larger question is whether this billion-dollar industry keeps the world safer.

“From the Iranian point of view, they would clearly have an interest in sending scientists to conferences about peaceful uses of nuclear power,” Ronen Bergman told me. A prominent Israeli journalist, Bergman is the author of The Secret War With Iran: The 30-Year Clandestine Struggle Against the World’s Most Dangerous Terrorist Power, and is working on a history of Israel’s central intelligence service, the Mossad. “They say, ‘Yes, we send our scientists to conferences to use civilian technology for a civilian purpose.’”

The CIA officer assigned to the case might pose as a student, a technical consultant, or an exhibitor with a booth. His first job would be to peel the guards away from the scientist. In one instance, kitchen staff recruited by the CIA poisoned the guards’ meal, leaving them incapacitated by diarrhoea and vomiting. The hope was that they would attribute their illness to aeroplane food or an unfamiliar cuisine.

With luck, the officer would catch the scientist alone for a few minutes, and pitch to him. He would have boned up on the Iranian by reading files and courting “access agents” close to him. That way, if the scientist expressed doubt that he was really dealing with the CIA, the officer could respond that he knew everything about him, even the most intimate details – and prove it. One officer told a potential defector: “I know you had testicular cancer and you lost your left nut.”

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In 1953 the United States was still new to Iran. Many Iranians thought of Americans as friends, supporters of the fragile democracy they had spent half a century trying to build. It was Britain, not the United States, that they demonized as the colonialist oppressor that exploited them.

Since the early years of the twentieth century a British company, owned mainly by the British government, had enjoyed a fantastically lucrative monopoly on the production and sale of Iranian oil. The wealth that flowed from beneath Iran’s soil played a decisive role in maintaining Britain at the pinnacle of world power while most Iranians lived in poverty. Iranians chafed bitterly under this injustice. Finally, in 1951, they turned to Mossadegh, who more than any other political leader personified their anger at the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC). He pledged to throw the company out of Iran, reclaim the country’s vast petroleum reserves, and free Iran from subjection to foreign power.

Prime Minister Mossadegh carried out his pledges with single-minded zeal. To the ecstatic cheers of his people, he nationalized Anglo-Iranian, the most profitable British business in the world. Soon afterward, Iranians took control of the company’s giant refinery at Abadan on the Persian Gulf.

***

British agents began conspiring to overthrow Mossadegh soon after he nationalized the oil company. They were too eager and aggressive for their own good. Mossadegh learned of their plotting, and in October 1952 he ordered the British embassy shut. All British diplomats in Iran, including clandestine agents working under diplomatic cover, had to leave the country. No one was left to stage the coup.

Immediately, the British asked President Truman for help. Truman, however, sympathized viscerally with nationalist movements like the one Mossadegh led. He had nothing but contempt for old-style imperialists like those who ran Anglo-Iranian. Besides, the CIA had never overthrown a government, and Truman did not wish to set the precedent.

—From journalist and author Stephen Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men, the history of the CIA’s 1953 coup in Iran, which deposed the only democratic government the country ever had. Earlier this month, negotiators announced an accord to restrict Iran’s nuclear program in return for sanctions relief. The deadline for a final deal is June 30.

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Earlier this week Mother Jones published a fascinating sampling from the CIA’s psychological profiles of various international figures. In 1943, the Office of Strategic Services (the WWII-era CIA predecessor) tasked a Harvard psychologist with drafting a profile of Hitler’s personality. Below is an excerpt, as compiled by Dave Gilson of Mother Jones:

There is little disagreement among professional, or even among amateur, psychologists that Hitler’s personality is an example of the counteractive type, a type that is marked by intense and stubborn efforts (i) to overcome early disabilities, weaknesses and humiliations (wounds to self-esteem), and sometimes also by efforts (ii) to revenge injuries and insults to pride…

Sexually he is a full-fledged masochist…Hitler’s long-concealed secret heterosexual fantasy has been exposed by the systemic analysis and correlation of the three thousand odd metaphors he uses in Mein Kampf…and yet—Hitler himself is Impotent. [original emphasis] He is unmarried and his old acquaintances say that he is incapable of consumating the sexual act in a normal fashion.

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It is Warren who inherited from his dead parents the one thing that most illuminates his sister’s time in Vietnam: a trove of 30 letters she wrote home, dating from her arrival in Saigon to the week before her death.

The letters offer a glimpse into the life of a young woman supposedly working for the State Department as she launched her career and looked for love amid Vietnam’s escalating violence.

‘Reading these letters,’ said Warren, 65, a retired airline mechanic, who hadn’t looked at them since he was a kid, ‘it’s like I got to know her all over again.’

August 6 1964: Dear Mother, Dad & Warren , I think I’m going to really enjoy working for the State Dept. Security-wise we do have to be careful — but you’d never feel that way right here in Saigon if it weren’t for the Vietnamese Police all over the city.

“Barbara Robbins: A Slain CIA Secretary’s Life and Death.” — Ian Shapira, Washington Post

More #longreads from Ian Shapira

The Fredericksburg woman divorcing her husband laid out all the messy details, including the most secret of them all. Her husband, she wrote in now-sealed court documents, is a covert operations officer for the Central Intelligence Agency. His CIA job, she said, poisoned their five-year-old marriage.

“[He] used me and our daughter . . . to run cover for his undercover operations . . . I never felt safe, never knew who people were or why they were interested in us or why they were photographing us,” wrote the woman, who is in her 30s, in December. “As a result of [his] different assignments I never had a good support network of people I could trust or rely on to help out.” And, she claimed, her spy-husband had little interest in household chores. “[He] never so much as washed or folded a load of laundry, swept or mopped one floor, or changed one dirty diaper.”

“CIA Divorces: The Secrecy When Spies Split.” — Ian Shapira, The Washington Post

More from Shapira: “How a Letter on Hitler’s Stationery, Written to a Boy in Jersey, Reached the CIA.” — Oct. 31, 2011