On her book My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File
Cover Interview of January 23, 2019
In a nutshell
This book is about how surveillance functioned in communist
Romania from 1973 to 1988, the period during which I was one of its subjects.
The text contains many verbatim quotations from documents in my secret police file,
enabling the reader to encounter the world view of those officers. These form
one of the three voices the book employs, the other two being my own research
notes and correspondence from that period, and my authorial commentary in the
present. In this sense, it is a polyphonic work.
“There’s nothing like reading your secret police file to
make you wonder who you really are.” This first line of the Preface sets one
agenda of the book: to describe the effects that reading your own surveillance
file has on your identity, and along the way, to indicate how we can make use
of such a file to understand something about the secret police who wrote it.
They were, after all, masters of deception and approached any new “target” with
the assumption that she was too. Moreover, their optic was shaped by assumptions
and values that differed markedly from those of an American scholar like me,
coming to do research for a dissertation in Eastern Europe during the Cold War.
Convinced I was a spy, they give us a rather unexpected idea of what spying
looked like from their viewpoint.
It is also a kind of primer on what it’s like to do research
in a place and time defined by the “Cold War.” It describes my growing
awareness of the surveillance around me, as well as presenting my interviews
with friends who informed on me to the police. In this light, the best way to
read the book is to treat it as a kind of adventure story, which tells how I rode
my motorbike into a military base and what repercussions that had, how I
struggled to become more tolerant of people who informed on me, how I managed
to track down three secret police officers to interview, and finally, how I
came to understand my place in the world of these officers.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
This book is about how surveillance functioned in communist Romania from 1973 to 1988, the period during which I was one of its subjects. The text contains many verbatim quotations from documents in my secret police file, enabling the reader to encounter the world view of those officers. These form one of the three voices the book employs, the other two being my own research notes and correspondence from that period, and my authorial commentary in the present. In this sense, it is a polyphonic work.
“There’s nothing like reading your secret police file to make you wonder who you really are.” This first line of the Preface sets one agenda of the book: to describe the effects that reading your own surveillance file has on your identity, and along the way, to indicate how we can make use of such a file to understand something about the secret police who wrote it. They were, after all, masters of deception and approached any new “target” with the assumption that she was too. Moreover, their optic was shaped by assumptions and values that differed markedly from those of an American scholar like me, coming to do research for a dissertation in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. Convinced I was a spy, they give us a rather unexpected idea of what spying looked like from their viewpoint.
It is also a kind of primer on what it’s like to do research in a place and time defined by the “Cold War.” It describes my growing awareness of the surveillance around me, as well as presenting my interviews with friends who informed on me to the police. In this light, the best way to read the book is to treat it as a kind of adventure story, which tells how I rode my motorbike into a military base and what repercussions that had, how I struggled to become more tolerant of people who informed on me, how I managed to track down three secret police officers to interview, and finally, how I came to understand my place in the world of these officers.