I was born in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1960. My father was the CIA station chief there. I grew up in the 1970s, at the twilight of the Cold War in Washington, DC, living in a family of secrets.

My parents were social people — WASPs at ease among the postwar elite. My life was house parties, sojourns to the Middle East, Southern rock, and drugs. It was an exotic atmosphere with proximity to great power and corruption, all laden with guilt.

Prior to his post in Switzerland, my father had been stationed in Germany and would go on to work both in the White House and overseas in the Middle East. He was recruited by the Agency after World War II. He’d been in Naval Intelligence and served on two aircraft carriers, one called “the Wasp” and the other, more prophetically, “the Langley.” He was of a “certain type” — an East Coast-born, privately educated American with roots going back to the Continental Army — and of a generation that made up the core of the Agency just before its rise to its heights of power and influence.