- “He trained most of the listening post operators on how to make minor repairs.”
- “The intercept center has been a mystery for all these years since the assassination. Despite much effort, I have been unable to determine where the intercept center was located, other than that it was in a residential neighborhood and not attached to the CIA station or the American embassy.”
- “Three of the LIFEAT listening posts that year were in the homes of … people, with small children running around.”
—Bill Simpich; State Secret
Affairs of State
Anna Wolfe 2025
Every time I walk into an elevator, I still think of my brother Hermes, smartest guy in every town, everywhere we lived. Those early memories imprint themselves in our highly plastic child’s brain and never disappear, no matter what we tell ourselves about their ontological status.
In every elevator for the last sixty years, I remember Mexico City, August 1963.
I stare at the buttons. I stare at the walls. I stare up at the corners and I try to spot the hidden camera. I stare at the button panels and I wonder how they hid the secret keys.
I close my eyes and I remember my six year old brother -small, agile, fearless – crawling up the elevator shaft and fiddling with the telephone cables that had popped out of their clamps on the wooden beams of the old building that was sweating in the summer heat.
I glance surreptitiously at the slits between the elevator panels and I wonder how he managed to jiggle them loose and find the disassembled sniper rifles. But I didn’t see that, and I don’t remember it. I have no idea why that image is stuck in my head.
If similar, parallel fact patterns from Chicago and Miami are still classified sixty years later, it’s just a coincidence. Pseudonyms from ancient Greece will grant me the illusion of escaping the Debating Society. I ride the elevator to the top mulling over characters from the Iliad and the pantheon of Titans. (Am I supposed to meet Achilles today? Oh, that’s right, he “died” in 2004.)
If I have to stop the video towards the end of Oliver Stone’s “Through the Looking Glass” and pace around my apartment for several days, trying to catch my breath, it’s just another in a long line of baffling episodes of Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Hermes died right before he retired from his position as the last human proofreader in a law firm located in New York City and Paris, France. He was thinking about moving home to Anytown, America, to live in the attic of our funky old house, where Dad used to sit at his roll top desk and sort and re-sort all his files. He died too young, just like Mom and Dad.
I can’t talk to him.
But then, I never could.
My father had a photographic memory also.
Eidetic, my son corrects his deceased grandfather’s word choice. My son spent only one week with my father, but the resemblance is astonishing.
What’s the difference?
Whatever you want to call it, it runs in the family. And Dad was already testing mine when I was eight. In those days we didn’t diagnose people like that with Autism, or dismiss them with allegations of False Memory Syndrome. In the aftermath of World War II, everyone had a job to do, so we just got on with it.
Not that I had any idea, even a few months ago, that, once upon a time, at the age of five, I was holding hands with a human computer while we walked around Mexico City.
All I knew was that the guy holding my hand was my Daddy.
I loved and adored him, and he filled up the whole sky.
From
The Director, A Pacifist Rant
Upcoming Sequel to
The Actor, A Cold War Memoir
By Anna Wolfe
Now available on Amazon
Published by Last Laugh Productions.
Preview
1974 This isn’t Watergate
On December 16, 1974, my mother handed me a mysterious and painful letter. Underlined and repeated 5 times, once or twice on each page, were the words “Do not tell your father about this letter.” After allegedly “disappearing” at a Modern Language Association conference that didn’t start until two weeks later, Dad was in the hospital, having his vagus nerve clipped to stop the internal bleeding. She wanted me to move out. I had 2 years left in high school.
A year or so later I sat on the brown plaid sofa with Dad in what was now the TV room, balancing a plate of spaghetti in my lap. He was intensely focused on some kind of congressional investigations, that were spawned by an article in the New York Times that Seymour Hersch warned CIA Director Bill Colby about on December 9, 1974. Five days before Mom’s mysterious letter.
“Is this still about Watergate?” I asked him.
Dad used to be an Actor.
His voice dropped to the lower, gravelly register, as though he’d been to Hell and back.
“No”. He said.
“This isn’t Watergate.”
annawolfepoet 