110 AMERICAN SPY
handcrafted (to use today’s trendy vernacular) by a CIA bartender with
generous pours of smooth Palmera rum.
As the band delivered another hypnotic tune by Toots and the Maytals,
I welcomed a Chinese official and his wife to the celebration. I’d met the
Chinese cultural attaché, whom I’ll call Mr. Kang, a few weeks earlier at one
of Palmera’s many official functions. Around thirty years old and wearing
black-rimmed glasses, he was one year into his four-year tour of duty in
Palmera. Like all Chinese officials posted abroad, he and his dependent
wife were forced to leave their only child in China, as human “collateral” to
ensure they did not defect. Worse, they would not see their young daughter
at all during their four-year overseas assignment. I felt truly sorry for them,
but this inhumane policy was routinely applied for the same crude but
effective reasons to most diplomats and spies from Communist countries.
Mr. Kang handed me a bottle of Chinese wine. He then asked (in
broken Spanish) how much we’d paid for a piece of Haitian naïve art that
was hanging on the wall next to us. He also wanted to know how much we
paid our household staff and whether we paid in dollars or Palmera pesos.
I fudged the answer, saying my wife would know but she was occupied at
the moment. (I wasn’t lying; Stacy was chatting up my priority KGB target
and his wife in the garden, next to the mango tree. More on him later—the
KGB man, not the mango tree.)
Mr. Kang then invited my wife and me to join him and his wife for
dinner the following week at a large Chinese restaurant in an upscale com-
mercial neighborhood of Palmera. I readily accepted, then pawned him
off on my good friend (and Soviet access agent), an official from a country
friendly to the Soviet Union.
As a CIA officer, why was I so eager to meet with the bumbling Mr.
Kang, whose official title suggested his role in Palmera was limited to
attending concerts and organizing cultural exchanges? It’s simple: when
a Chinese “cultural attaché” extends an invitation to an American offi-
cial, there’s no doubt about what’s actually happening. We’re not going to
discuss Ming Dynasty vases. This is the first step in the “assessment and
development” dance carried out by spies the world over. In fact, I made
the first move when I invited him to our party. (I’d also made a mental
“note to self ” to offer him the standard college education for his child, if
and when I pitched him.) Since Chinese intelligence officials were priority