Beyond that internship, the University of Montana’s School of Journalism gave me no-nonsense training in the fundamentals of clear writing. My exacting reporting and editing teacher, Robert McGiffert, was so good that his summer job was editing for the Washington Post.
I shed more of my self-deluded and small-town naïveté at the university in Missoula. Let my hair grow long with the Beatles’ rock ’n’ roll times. Experimented with illegal controlled substances, inhaling with a result best described as I got stoned. But only a few thousand times, and I never danced with the Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds crowd. As friends came home from Vietnam in coffins and obvious untruths came out of Washington, I joined anti-war protests and argued to keep them respectful, constitutional. I spent one spring break studying with a group of black community organizers in Chicago’s ghetto and ran a Montana Ralph Nader project on corporate responsibility that hustled some victories even though its secret was that the only other member was… Shirley, the young co-ed I’d convinced to be my girlfriend.
But when I came back from my D.C. internship to graduate from the university, I had no idea how to make my dreams work. All I wanted to do — well, not all—was write fiction. I’d ditched my parents’ and high school teachers’ plans for me to become a lawyer, even though I’d once imagined litigating bad guys into prison, innocent people to freedom, and constitutional challenges to democratic safety during the day so I could afford to eat and rise before dawn or stay up at night to write fiction. In the autumn of 1971, I began an “independent undergraduate studies” fifth year to give me what I thought was a necessary legitimizing academic umbrella to write fiction…
… only to be saved—dazzled, actually — by another dose of great luck.
Montana was rewriting its outdated, robber baron-bred state constitution — Dashiell Hammett set his great first novel of crime and political corruption, Red Harvest, in the old constitution’s Montana. The meager staff of the new constitutional effort needed an emergency replacement who could write fast and had a résumé involving government and politics (say, working for a U.S. Senator). A friend plucked me out of my campus wanderings for that job, where I got to see how wonderfully democracy works when ordinary citizens rise to their best and refuse to work behind closed doors.
After the convention, spring of 1972, I disappeared on the road for a few months of driving around the country, survived the trip, came back to Helena, Montana, and after a brief foray as a laborer/fire hydrant inspector, took a job targeting juvenile delinquency in an octopus of a state agency backed by federal funds. I needed a day job that required me mostly to use my mind and hands, because my heart and soul belonged to my dreams.
I’d decided that the only way to learn how to write a novel… was to write a novel.
And that the only way to be a writer… was to write.
Seldom has a novice been so unprepared for the consequences he catalyzed.
But the rage to write burned in me like a heroin addiction welded to sex.
I lived in a small, second-story apartment above a sweet cottage not far from the state capital building in Helena. For a while, my roommate was one of America’s smartest Baby Boomers, a longtime friend named Rick Applegate. Often, I stole my fictional characters’ names from the spines of Rick’s nonfiction books. My neighbors were a beautiful, nice, so cool couple: he was an affable, whip-smart lawyer, she was that tawny-haired, artsy woman so many of us sixties soldiers wanted to be or wed. I lived in that apartment long enough to meet their first born, a baby girl named Maile Meloy who went on to become one of the major American novelists/short story authors/essayists of her generation, but I moved out of town before they brought home their second child, a son, Colin Meloy, leader and chief writer for the famous twenty-first-century indie folk rock band The Decemberists. I labored within a classic American bureaucracy by day, jogged and studied judo at the YMCA, saw my girlfriend when I could, was a bumbling godfather to my cousin’s newborn son, soared in AM radio and record player rock ’n’ roll, went to movies, saved my pennies, and spent the rest of my time drifting in surreal worlds or at the kitchen table hunkered over a forty-pound, high school surplus, green Royal manual typewriter.
And felt two what-if questions from my Washington, D.C., days come to life.
In those days, James Bond, super spy, dominated espionage fiction. Despite fine movies having been made from their excellent books, masters John le Carré (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold) and Len Deighton (The Ipcress File) were overshadowed by 007. Eric Ambler, Joseph Conrad, and Graham Greene could be found on library shelves, but at bookstores they were blanked out by the glitz of Dr. No, Goldfinger, and From Russia With Love (the best Bonds) — Sean Connery and Ursula Andress, sex and a Walther PPK.
As much as I love “Bond, James Bond,” I didn’t want to write about a superhero. A superhero always triumphs — is immune to paranoia, is never in ultimate jeopardy.
And was someone I’d never met. Trained — or perhaps tainted—as a journalist, I wanted to keep one hand on facts while my other shaped fiction. So I knew that whoever my hero was in that novel of what-ifs that ambushed me on a Washington street, he was no superman.
But he did work for the CIA.
The Central Intelligence Agency, America’s best-known spy shop. In that fearful post-Joe McCarthy era, when assassinated JFK had publicly loved James Bond and secretly been entangled in covert intrigues like assassination plots against Cuba’s Fidel Castro outsourced to the Mafia by our spies, the CIA was a myth-shrouded invisible army. In those pre-Internet days before electronic books, Web sites with varied credibility, and search engines — before Vietnam war protests and Watergate helped expose espionage scandals — the average bookstore and library carried… zero books about the Agency.
When I researched Condor, I found only three credible books on the CIA, two by David Wise and Thomas B. Ross (The Invisible Government and The Espionage Establishment) and one by Andrew Tully (CIA: The Inside Story). I stumbled across a book by historian Alfred W. McCoy, who braved the wrath of the U.S. government, French intelligence agencies, the Mafia, the Union Corse (the major French criminal syndicate), the Chinese Triads, and our exiled Kuomitang Chinese allies to write The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, an analytic history of the twentieth century whose depth, accuracy, and brilliance deserved (but did not receive) a Pulitzer Prize. McCoy tramped the mountains of Laos, air-conditioned government corridors of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), and along the klongs of Bangkok to show how, in our crusade against communism, America’s government had at the least embraced ignorance about the gangsterism of those who called themselves our friends and allies.