Agents of Innocence

5

Beirut; October 1969

Rogers thought of his wife in the moments before sleep. He felt her lustrous black hair brushing gently against his neck and her breasts full against his chest. He liked so much softness. Other embassy wives seemed to Rogers as tough as shoe leather. They adopted the clannish manners of the girls’ schools where most of them had been educated, gave lavish parties, drank too much, talked too much. They prodded their husbands for details of their work and gossiped to each other about embassy life.

Jane was different. She never ventured near Rogers’s work. When someone from the embassy brought up the subject, or asked her what her husband was working on, she would laugh and say honestly: “I don’t know. I never ask him.”

They had met while Rogers was a student at Amherst in the 1950s. Jane was a student at Mt. Holyoke, an intense, hardworking girl who turned down dates so that she could study on weekends. She was an English major and liked, in those days, to talk to Rogers about such things as “the new criticism” and the different types of ambiguity in poetry, and whether Charles Dickens was, in fact, the greatest novelist who ever lived.

Rogers met her at a mixer and asked her out for a month before she finally accepted. She was a dreamgirl of the fifties: a slim waist, curvaceous figure, and the dark hair that seemed to make her skin look whiter than ivory. Rogers became infatuated with her on the first date and told his roommate that he had met the girl he would marry. She was a virgin, and Rogers pursued her lustily, half-disappointed when she removed his hand from beneath her dress and half-pleased.

Jane fell in love with Rogers, slowly and completely, with the passion of a woman who would fall in love only once. Rogers seemed to her older than the college boys she had dated. He was handsome, determined, occasionally taciturn, yearning for things outside the class-bound world of Amherst and New England, driven to succeed by forces that Jane couldn’t understand. She teased him on one of their early dates that he was a new type of ambiguity. But gradually she grew to trust him, and her trust, once given, was total.

They were married the summer after graduation, on a perfect July day at an Episcopal church in Morristown, New Jersey. Though they seemed the perfect Ivy League couple-the dashing young man from Amherst and the chaste English major from Mt. Holyoke-the marriage bridged what in those days was still a wide social gap between Protestants and Catholics. He was an Irish Catholic, the son of a police captain from Springfield, Massachusetts. She was a Yankee Episcopalian, the daughter of a former Army intelligence officer who liked to be called “Colonel” and commuted to a stock brokerage firm on Wall Street. Parents on both sides were suspicious and prickly.

What drove Rogers was, in part, the insecurity of an Irish Catholic-a “harp,” as the Brahmins of Boston liked to call them-who had gained admittance to the court of the Yankee elite. Rogers never lost his sense of being an outsider. The more time he spent in the world of the establishment, the more he felt that he was not of it. That yearning had pushed Rogers from Springfield to Amherst, as long and chilly a trip as swimming the Irish Sea. And it eventually pushed him into the Central Intelligence Agency.

Rogers’s intelligence career began a few months after he was married. Like most of the recruits of the 1950s, he was initially spotted by a college professor and encouraged to contact a certain government official, whose title and agency were never precisely specified. He went to Washington full of enthusiasm, suffered through weeks of mumbo-jumbo about just who he would be working for and what he would be doing, and eventually was offered a job. It was 1958, a time when a new recruit could dream of using the enormous power of the United States, secretly and subtly, to make the world a better place. What’s more, Rogers didn’t know what else to do. He didn’t want to go to law school. He didn’t want to work on Wall Street or Madison Avenue. He liked the idea of travelling. So he became a spy.

Jane’s father, the Colonel, sensed that something was up when Rogers visited Morristown the Christmas after he joined the agency training program. What sort of work are you doing? asked the Colonel.

“Government work,” said Rogers.

“What agency?” asked the Colonel.

“What do you mean?” answered Rogers.

“I mean, where do you work?”

“Oh,” said Rogers. There was a long pause. “Uh, the State Department.”

“Balls!” said the Colonel. They never talked about it again, but the older man seemed delighted and gave Rogers his unqualified approval from that moment on.

Rogers began his CIA career with a mixture of ambition and idealism. The agency was a place, in those days, for doing good and doing well. Rogers had all the basic skills of a good case officer-the drive, the intelligence, the intuitive sense of how to manipulate others. And he had one thing more: the burr under his saddle, which left him never quite comfortable or content.

He fell into the Middle East almost by accident. The agency was offering a two-year training program in Arabic for interested new recruits. The only real qualification seemed to be a lack of prior involvement in the region. Rogers, knowing next to nothing about either Arabs or Israelis, was regarded as an ideal candidate. He leapt at the opportunity. The Middle East was as far from Springfield, Massachusetts, as he could imagine.

From the first, Rogers loved his work and excelled at it. His father, the police captain, had once confided to his son, as if it was a great secret, that every time he put on his uniform, he was an intensely happy man. It was a secret that Rogers shared. He regarded his work-the simple tasks of recruiting agents and gathering intelligence-as a sublime pursuit, combining duty and pleasure in equal measure. What more, Rogers occasionally asked himself, could a man want?

Rogers’s marriage survived some difficult tests in the early years. The worst moment, etched in his memory, was their arrival in Khartoum in midsummer 1963.

Jane was weak and exhausted from a month of sleepless nights. She had given birth to their first child only four weeks before and wanted to wait until fall, when it was cooler, before travelling to Sudan. But Rogers had insisted that they couldn’t wait. He was needed in Khartoum. There were rumors about a pro-Soviet coup. He was missing out on the action.

They had landed in Khartoum in the sweltering heat of July and unpacked their bags in an embassy house that didn’t have an air conditioner. When they opened the door, a lizard was crawling on the living room wall and there were large bugs in the kitchen sink. Rogers remembered that first night in Khartoum-Jane nursing the baby in the intense heat, sweat pouring off her breasts as the infant sucked and cried-like a nightmare. He fell asleep that night to the sound of Jane sobbing in the bathroom and promised himself that he would try to make up for the awfulness of that first assignment. He never quite did.

Khartoum was the first child. Oman was the second. In those first few months in Beirut, Rogers and his wife still didn’t like to talk about what had happened to their daughter in Oman. It was too painful, too much a symbol of what frightened Jane about the Middle East.

Jane coped. She learned to live with the privations of the Arab world. She studied Arabic, read and reread her beloved English novels, immersed herself in the world of her children. Surrounded by the deceit of the intelligence business, she somehow remained tender and vulnerable, as idealistic as she believed her husband to be.

As the years passed, Rogers’s fascination with the Middle East became more intense. He was an Arabist in his heart, as well as his head. He spoke the language fluently, understood the strange rituals and nuances of the culture, grieved at the stupidity and suffering of the Arabs. He felt the Middle East like a physical sensation on his skin: from the moist, dank air of Jiddah on the Red Sea, where clothes hung from the body like wet rags in midsummer, to the dry deserts outside Cairo and the crunchy taste of sand in the mouth and throat during the winter dust storms.

Unlike many of his colleagues, who served their time overseas chiefly to advance their promotion prospects back at headquarters, Rogers wanted to stay abroad forever. He was happiest trekking through the wilds of Dhofar in Oman to call on a tribal leader, or sitting in a parlor in Aden, chewing qat, as he talked Arab politics late into the night with a Marxist revolutionary.

Rogers tried, not always successfully, to keep from romanticizing his work. He reminded himself that, at bottom, it was a struggle for control, over his emotions and those of others. But there was also a restlessness deep down in him-that burr under the saddle-which was part of why he had been drawn to intelligence work in the first place. There were so many layers of self-control in Rogers that people usually didn’t see the yearning and the impulsiveness. But it was there.

Jane Rogers saw it and left it alone. If she worried about her husband, it was only that he worked too hard. She was the sort of woman who could not imagine character defects in someone she loved.