SPY KIDS 159home from a TDY to Croatia on Halloween day, arriving just in time to
join my girls as they went trick-or-treating. They never thought to ask why I
wore the same camouflage Croatian Army jacket as my costume each year.
Or why I was a tad jumpy whenever some clown (or witch) set off a Hal-
loween firecracker in my general vicinity.After I resigned from the agency, I remarried and my new wife and I had
(you guessed it) a baby girl. Although I was no longer an agency employee,
I continued to travel overseas and support the national security mission
as needed. Because of this, my third little angel also got a taste of what it
was like to grow up as a spy kid. For example, like her sisters, she too com-
plained about the fact that the tooth fairy left her only foreign currency.
None of them bought my argument that Saddam’s dinars were way cooler
than an ordinary American five-dollar bill.
Although my third daughter did not grow up overseas, she has trav-
eled internationally her entire brief life. She was six weeks old (and undoc-
umented) when she made her first road trip to Mexico, and she speaks
Spanish. For as long as she can remember, I’ve been running a business in
Iraq. Over the years, she’s accumulated a nice collection of souvenirs from
Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, UAE, Oman, and the other Middle Eastern
countries I’ve visited. She’s also heard lots of exciting stories about Iraq.
In one case, she and a few of her fourth-grade classmates heard an Iraqi
terrorism story unfold in real-time when I was driving them to yet another
field trip.
Stuck in traffic while driving to the Natural History Museum, I
received a call on speakerphone from an Iraqi employee in our office in
the al-Mansour neighborhood of Baghdad. He proceeded to breathlessly
tell me about a massive car bomb that had just gone off across the street,
killing dozens. Our guys were all accounted for. He noted that our security
cameras had recorded the entire thing, and I was welcome to watch the
rescue efforts unfold live as soon as I got back online. He warned me that
the horrific scenes were bloody and tough to witness.
At this point I noticed that the children had quieted down. I glanced
in the rearview mirror, and their eyes seemed to be open a little wider than