Resurfaced: Peter Perl’s ‘The Spy Who’s Been Left in the Cold’ (1998)
We’re excited to introduce a recurring series in which we work with publishers to dig up notable stories from their archives that were previously unpublished on the web. And we’re especially excited to kick this off with The Washington Post.
Today’s piece is “The Spy Who’s Been Left in the Cold,” a 1998 Washington Post Magazine story by Peter Perl, who just announced he’s retiring from the paper after 32 years. Here’s more from the Post’s Marc Fisher:
“In the Washington Post newsroom in recent years, Peter Perl has been the official mensch, the go-to guy both for reporters trying to figure out their career paths and for editors struggling with how to keep aggressive and smart journalism at the fore even in an ever-tougher economic environment. But beyond his avuncular manner and wise counsel, what made Perl one of the newsroom’s most respected figures was what he’d done for the first quarter century of his time at the paper: Perl, who is retiring from The Post shortly, was a master storyteller, a specialist in the art of profiling people who didn’t want to be profiled and public figures who were assumed by journalists and readers alike to be overexposed. Perl drilled down to the psychological roots of former Washington Mayor Marion Barry’s struggle between the morality of fighting for the poor and the amorality of doing whatever it took to get his way. He discovered and sensitively revealed the hurt child beneath D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams’ oddly distant public persona. And in this finely-etched, subtly-shaded profile of a man he didn’t even get to meet, Perl shows us the many facets of Jonathan Pollard, the American intelligence analyst who was convicted of spying for Israel and is serving a life sentence in a federal prison. It is a story of deceit and betrayal, but also of devotion and righteousness. It is a typical Peter Perl tale, ignoring the easy conclusions and trusting that readers will come with him on a journey into the grey zone where all the most fascinating stories live.”
A pool salesman struggles to cope with a weak economy, which has forced him to rethink the meaning of the American Dream:
‘You can’t be too safe or too smart about money with the economy now,’ Tyler said. ‘I want to save up and make the smart investments.’
‘You’ll make them,’ Frank said, nodding.
‘I want to have that absolute stability,’ Tyler said.
‘You’ll have it.’
They stayed out on the deck until the sun disappeared behind the townhouses. Frank went to bed just before midnight and awoke at 4. He always had been a sound sleeper, but lately he had been putting himself to bed with Tylenol PM and stirring awake to questions in the middle of the night. When had stability become the goal in America? What kind of dream was that? And in the economy of 2012, was it even attainable?
The candidate’s former prep school classmates recall a bullying incident that still troubles them to this day:
A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.
‘It happened very quickly, and to this day it troubles me,’ said Buford, the school’s wrestling champion, who said he joined Romney in restraining Lauber. Buford subsequently apologized to Lauber, who was ‘terrified,’ he said. ‘What a senseless, stupid, idiotic thing to do.’
The story of a 21-year-old who was the first American woman to die in the Vietnam War. For years the CIA refused to acknowledge that she worked for the agency:
It is Warren who inherited from his dead parents the one thing that most illuminates his sister’s time in Vietnam: a trove of 30 letters she wrote home, dating from her arrival in Saigon to the week before her death.
The letters offer a glimpse into the life of a young woman supposedly working for the State Department as she launched her career and looked for love amid Vietnam’s escalating violence.
‘Reading these letters,’ said Warren, 65, a retired airline mechanic, who hadn’t looked at them since he was a kid, ‘it’s like I got to know her all over again.’
August 6 1964: Dear Mother, Dad & Warren , I think I’m going to really enjoy working for the State Dept. Security-wise we do have to be careful — but you’d never feel that way right here in Saigon if it weren’t for the Vietnamese Police all over the city.
“Barbara Robbins: A Slain CIA Secretary’s Life and Death.” — Ian Shapira, Washington Post
![A former research assistant for Bob Woodward is hired to help Ben Bradlee work on another book, and discovers that the former Washington Post managing editor still has unresolved questions from the Watergate era:
Later in the interview, Ben talked about Bob’s famous secret source, whom he claimed to have met in an underground garage in rendezvous arranged via signals involving flowerpots and newspapers. ‘You know I have a little problem with Deep Throat,’ Ben told Barbara.
‘Did that potted [plant] incident ever happen? … and meeting in some garage. One meeting in the garage? Fifty meetings in the garage? I don’t know how many meetings in the garage … There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight.’
I read it over a few times to make sure. Did Ben really have doubts about the Deep Throat story, as it had been passed down from newsroom to book to film to history?
“The Red Flag in the Flowerpot.” — Jeff Himmelman, New York magazine
More #longreads from New York magazine](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m39zjec1kb1qf4hl5o1_400.jpg)
A former research assistant for Bob Woodward is hired to help Ben Bradlee work on another book, and discovers that the former Washington Post managing editor still has unresolved questions from the Watergate era:
Later in the interview, Ben talked about Bob’s famous secret source, whom he claimed to have met in an underground garage in rendezvous arranged via signals involving flowerpots and newspapers. ‘You know I have a little problem with Deep Throat,’ Ben told Barbara.
‘Did that potted [plant] incident ever happen? … and meeting in some garage. One meeting in the garage? Fifty meetings in the garage? I don’t know how many meetings in the garage … There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight.’
I read it over a few times to make sure. Did Ben really have doubts about the Deep Throat story, as it had been passed down from newsroom to book to film to history?
“The Red Flag in the Flowerpot.” — Jeff Himmelman, New York magazine
Most attention has been on the Supreme Court fight over The Affordable Care Act’s mandate to expand health insurance to 30 million more Americans. But what’s overshadowed is what the rest of the law is doing to change the business model for health care:
The program launched in June 2009 with a checklist of quality metrics. To earn a bonus, surgeons would, among other things, need to ensure that antibiotics were administered an hour before surgery and halted 24 hours after, reducing the chances of costly complications.
Only three doctors hit the metrics that first month, but their bonuses caught the attention of others. “There was a lot of, ‘Why are those doctors getting more, and I’m not?’” Zucker says. Eight doctors got bonus payments in July; two dozen got them in August. Compliance with certain quality metrics steadily climbed from 89 percent to 98 percent in three months.
“Health Reform at 2: Why American Health Care Will Never Be the Same.” — Sarah Kliff, Washington Post
![When your wedding doubles as a covert operation. A look at the complications of CIA marriages, and how secrets often lead to separation:
The Fredericksburg woman divorcing her husband laid out all the messy details, including the most secret of them all. Her husband, she wrote in now-sealed court documents, is a covert operations officer for the Central Intelligence Agency. His CIA job, she said, poisoned their five-year-old marriage.
“[He] used me and our daughter . . . to run cover for his undercover operations . . . I never felt safe, never knew who people were or why they were interested in us or why they were photographing us,” wrote the woman, who is in her 30s, in December. “As a result of [his] different assignments I never had a good support network of people I could trust or rely on to help out.” And, she claimed, her spy-husband had little interest in household chores. “[He] never so much as washed or folded a load of laundry, swept or mopped one floor, or changed one dirty diaper.”
“CIA Divorces: The Secrecy When Spies Split.” — Ian Shapira, The Washington Post
More from Shapira: “How a Letter on Hitler’s Stationery, Written to a Boy in Jersey, Reached the CIA.” — Oct. 31, 2011](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m117jcWt161qf4hl5o1_400.jpg)
When your wedding doubles as a covert operation. A look at the complications of CIA marriages, and how secrets often lead to separation:
The Fredericksburg woman divorcing her husband laid out all the messy details, including the most secret of them all. Her husband, she wrote in now-sealed court documents, is a covert operations officer for the Central Intelligence Agency. His CIA job, she said, poisoned their five-year-old marriage.
“[He] used me and our daughter . . . to run cover for his undercover operations . . . I never felt safe, never knew who people were or why they were interested in us or why they were photographing us,” wrote the woman, who is in her 30s, in December. “As a result of [his] different assignments I never had a good support network of people I could trust or rely on to help out.” And, she claimed, her spy-husband had little interest in household chores. “[He] never so much as washed or folded a load of laundry, swept or mopped one floor, or changed one dirty diaper.”
“CIA Divorces: The Secrecy When Spies Split.” — Ian Shapira, The Washington Post
More from Shapira: “How a Letter on Hitler’s Stationery, Written to a Boy in Jersey, Reached the CIA.” — Oct. 31, 2011
A family discovers new details about their son’s death in Iraq, and wonders why the U.S. lieutenant responsible was not punished:
A year after Dave Sharrett II died, his parents, Vicki and Dave Sr., were nearly at peace. They had come to accept the Army’s explanation of how it all happened in the “fog of war.” They were confident in the Army’s promises of transparency and accountability for the lieutenant who fired the fatal shot.
Then came the third knock on the door.
After a memorial service for their son at Fort Campbell, Ky., in February 2009, soldiers who fought alongside him paid a surprise visit to the Sharretts. In a cramped room at the Holiday Inn Express, the soldiers used words such as “cover-up” and “lies.” They brought video recordings shot from aircraft high above the chaos that showed how Dave Sharrett II and two other American soldiers were killed.
See also: “The Life and Death of Pvt. Danny Chen.” — Jennifer Gonnerman, New York magazine, Jan. 7, 2012
