When I was nine, I helped my father build a life-size replica of the intelligence officer Jim Thompson\u2019s Bangkok living room in our home. We listened to \u201cMother Country\u201d and \u201cChantilly Lace\u201d while cutting teak down to size and staining it to make Jim\u2019s gridded wall panels and the raised thresholds he used to block bad spirits. Jim disappeared while my dad was working for the US government in Thailand. He was well known as a successful businessman\u2014the Thai Silk King. Some thought he had been eaten by a tiger, but my dad was pretty sure he\u2019d been kidnapped by the Chinese.<\/p>\n
On November 14, 2017, I met a retired federal agent for lunch at Los Portales, a Mexican restaurant off an airport service road in Maryland. He told me story after story. We kept talking for nearly a decade\u2014phone calls, text messages, visits. It was hard to believe that one man could have his hands in so much of the century. He said his oath was to the American people and the Constitution.<\/p>\n
I sifted through the agent\u2019s files, then followed his tracks, to Kenya, Saudi Arabia, Greece, New Hampshire, and Russia. At the start of his career, in 1990, he was assigned to watch employees at the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., when Gorbachev came to town. He rode last in a line of cars. Gorbachev was in the front with his translator, Pavel Palazchenko, who had taken the baton from Viktor Sukhodrev, a sort of godfather of translation. Sukhodrev was often the third person in the room\u2014with Khrushchev and Kennedy, Brezhnev and Nixon, Gorbachev and Reagan. His translations were informed by his knowledge of American politics and culture. I photographed the collection Sukhodrev kept in his home office in Nikolina Gora. It included audio recordings, Bibles, board games, Camp David souvenirs, Playboy magazines, restaurant guides, and spy novels. I photographed Gorbachev and Palazchenko. I photographed Gorbachev\u2019s fish tank.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When I was nine, I helped my father build a life-size replica of the intelligence officer Jim Thompson\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":349225,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[9,11,10],"class_list":["post-349224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349224\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/349225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}