152 AMERICAN SPY
impact our family fun. I recall our family spending one Christmas Eve
with several other families at the home of some close US embassy friends.
Everyone was having a wonderful time, including the children. It almost
felt like home, until I had to leave the gathering early and without comment
to run a three-hour SDR and conduct an important prewar agent meeting.
My embassy friends were good about not saying anything at a time like
this, since they’d been briefed in DC prior to their Belgrade assignments to
not play “spot the spook” or otherwise comment on suspected CIA activity
they may observe while in Belgrade. The walls had ears, and a single over-
heard or monitored comment could compromise a CIA officer’s identity or
even a valuable operation.
By now you probably won’t be surprised to learn that the divorce rate for
CIA officers is significantly higher than the national average. Having to
endure multiple, long-term Yugoslavia TDYs was the final straw for Stacy,
and we divorced upon our return to the United States. When things got
too tough to handle, I made long-term TDYs back to the war zones of
Croatia and Bosnia, since they provided me with welcome escapes from the
stressful situation at home.
Although we divorced long ago, Stacy and I get along just fine today,
but she is still paying the price for my overseas wanderlust. When our oldest
daughter was in college, after I left the CIA, she asked to accompany me
on a private business trip to Iraq that I had planned over her winter break.
I readily agreed, since I was headed to Erbil in the generally safe Kurd-
istan region of northern Iraq. How many college kids get to go to Iraq
for Christmas vacation? A few years earlier I took my daughters and their
cousin to another country in the Middle East for spring break.
Stacy was not amused by my plan to take our first-born daughter to
Iraq. While I agreed that, generally speaking, there were probably better
places than Iraq for our daughter to spend her winter vacation, I assured
her that Erbil was a pocket of tranquility in the otherwise insanely dan-
gerous war zone. To further emphasize the righteousness of my position,
I promised Stacy that she’d never read about this place called Erbil on the
front page of the New York Times. (You just know where this is headed.)