Publications

Sam was ten years-old when her father revealed the first of many important secrets to her: that he was an undercover intelligence officer for the United States government. That was in 1972, when Soviet and Chinese communist aggression was at its peak, the nuclear threat was hanging over the planet, and the Vietnam war was still raging. Ten years before, John Le Carré had captured the imaginations of readers the world over with The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, and Mission: Impossible was one of the most popular television shows in America. Sam had a pretty good sense of what a spy was already. The most obvious tell was that they wore a raincoat. The reel-to-reel tape recorder hidden away in a secret compartment in her family’s living room cupboard confirmed her understanding of her dad’s covert profession. Little did she know what a weird, wonderful, and intense coming-of-age awaited her.

That night, Sam unknowingly signed on for the job of maintaining her dad’s cover, and she would someday be held accountable for it. Over the years, she would lie some, conceal a lot, serve as a safe-house keeper, and work as an in-house file translator. She would even do a little spy work herself (earning her the code name Yidlika II), all for the sake of her family’s unwavering dedication to her country’s fight against communism. She would come to believe the CIA was one, big, secret family, loyal to its own, for better or for worse. And then she would discover how wrong she was. She hadn’t even gotten the raincoat thing right. Spies wear trench coats, of course.

In reality, being raised under the umbrella of the CIA was a mixture of stability and chaos, excitement and tedium, inclusion and isolation, privilege and hardship, access and denial. Sam would call many places home in the coming years. She would make friends, fall in and out of love and in and out of favor with her parents, and, eventually, the Agency itself. But for a very long time, the single, most ever-present influence over her life was the CIA. Until, eventually, she grew out of it. In 1985, at the age of 23, she left her unofficial post at the Paris station and never looked back.

Do You Have a Raincoat captures a unique moment in modern American history, as well as the evolution of the CIA, from its OSS incarnation to its role as a subversive barrier against communism, and finally to a more visible and controversial player in the fight against terrorism. At its heart, Do You Have a Raincoat is a funny, warm, engaging, and intelligent story about growing up undercover.