Introduction: Getting to Kwangju

Langley, Virginia; October 2015

It was time to go home but a notice on the agency’s internal website caught my attention as I was preparing to log off the Top-Secret network.  It was an announcement from the history office and included a picture of an old Civil Air Transport DC-8 or 9 aircraft.  The museum was celebrating the 70th anniversary of the once secret “proprietary” as it likes to call the government’s not-for-profit business activities.  Something about the picture made me open the voluntary comments section and I spun out my little, almost forgotten, story about CAT. 

As a young adult, I had asked my dad how I ever got to Kwangju, the first time.  I knew we had arrived there in March 1954 on an airline flight from Japan, but that made no sense.  Why would there be commercial service to this poverty-stricken provincial capital only months after the Korean armistice?   Dad replied, “Oh we flew CAT” and left it at that, as if there was more to say but he didn’t want to.  Years later, soon after I started work for the CIA in 1976, just around the corner from where I was now sitting in the Langley headquarters building, I noticed a plaque near the main entrance memorializing, among other things, the CAT proprietary.  I asked my older brother George, and he added that he remembered the flight and how my mother first refused to board since she had seen the pilots drinking at a bar a little while earlier.  And they were carrying side arms. I don’t know if he made that up, knowing my distrust of alcohol, but it sounds reasonable.  Anyway, if anyone asks me how I got to Kwangju as a three-year old, I can say, “a drunken CIA took me there”.

Not that my dad, or any of us, had anything to do with CIA at the time, other than taking advantage of their air service in a little plane that flew from Iwakuni airbase in southern Japan and landed, after a brief stop in Pusan, not on a real runway but on strips of metal laid out in the mud, near Kwangju. Dad had been in the forerunner department of the National Security Agency (NSA) during World War II, working in the Army Signal Corps, given his knowledge of Chinese and maybe a little Japanese. And maybe he was good with codes, as I am not, but all my children are.  I have some of his practice WWII codebooks in my study.

I don’t think he liked the CIA so much. After getting married, and as I was slogging my way through an impossible combination of Chinese language and econometrics in graduate school, I announced to the family that I had passed my “full scope” polygraph and that my wife ‘Len (Helen) and I were moving to Washington where I was going to work for CIA as an economic analyst. I thought he would be really pleased, given I would work on his beloved country of China, and, mostly, that he would not have to worry about my finances.  I know I would feel that way, given my four children.  But no, he wasn’t so excited and even seemed a bit disappointed.  Perhaps it was an Army-CIA rivalry or, more likely, he knew then I would never be able to work, as had he and my mother, all four grandparents, two of my three uncles, and two great aunts, as a Presbyterian missionary in Asia. (My third uncle, George Hopper, no doubt had the toughest missionary job of all, as a career chaplain at Tulane University in New Orleans.)

My siblings tell me I misunderstood and that Dad liked the fact I was working in our government, and we certainly traded stories over the years as you can read in this book.  Two graduate school friends, one American, one Korean, were not sure when I showed them the GS-9 offer letter; they expressed a warning and some confidence. “Bill that spy agency has lots of trouble, (it was in the middle of the Church Investigations) but you are the kind of smart, honest person they need.” They went on to get their PhDs. I moved to Washington with my new wife without passing my comprehensives. Fifty years later, I still wonder if that was the right decision. Certainly, an agency that depends on trust still needs a lot of work. But that is another story, perhaps a part two of this one.