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A Father, a Son, and the CIA
W.W. Norton
May 2013
On Sale: May 14, 2013
320 pages ISBN: 0393239802 EAN: 9780393239805 Kindle: B00AN86K08 Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Memoir
>What happens when a father asks his son to lie for
the greater good? Growing up, Scott C. Johnson
always suspected that his father was different. Only as a
teenager did he discover the truth: his father was a spy,
one of the CIA’s most trusted officers. At first the secret
was thrilling. But over time Scott began to have doubts. How
could a man so rigorously trained to deceive and manipulate
simply turn off those skills at home? His father had been
living a double life for so long that his lies were hard to
separate from the truth. When Scott embarked on a career
as a foreign correspondent, he found himself returning to
many of the troubled countries of his youth. In the dusty
streets of Pakistan and Afghanistan, amid the cold urbanity
of Yugoslavia, and down the mysterious alleys of Mexico
City, he came face to face with his father’s murky past—and
his own complicity in it. Scott learned that his chosen
profession was not so different from his father’s: they both
worked to gain people’s trust and to uncover their secrets.
The only difference was what they did with that
information. In the aftermath of 9/11, father and son
found themselves on assignment in Afghanistan and the Middle
East, one as a CIA contractor, the other as a reporter for
Newsweek. Suddenly, an unsettled Scott was forced to keep
his father’s secret all over again. As their professional
lives collided, Scott and his father inched toward a
personal reckoning, struggling to overcome a lifetime of
suspicion and deception. The Wolf and the
Watchman is a provocative, meditative account of truth
and duplicity, of manipulation and loyalty. It is also a
moving, intensely personal portrait of a bond between father
and son that endured in the shadow of one of the world’s
most secretive and unforgiving institutions.
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