BOOK REVIEW: STORY OF A CIA WIFE: MARRIED TO THE CRAFT
By Rosie Mowatt-Larssen /BookBaby
Reviewed by: Elaine Shannon
The Reviewer — Elaine Shannon covered national security and transnational organized crime for Time and Newsweek for 30 years and now writes about those topics as contributing editor for The Cipher Brief. She’s the author of four non-fiction books. Her latest: Hunting LeRoux (HarperCollins, 2019) about the global search for Paul LeRoux, a brilliant cybersecurity expert who went rogue and created the first cloud-based drugs, arms and murder cartel. The LeRoux story is now in development for a feature film by acclaimed filmmaker Michael Mann.
REVIEW — Rita Hayworth famously said, “Men fell in love with Gilda, but they wake up with me." Hayworth was talking about the fictional Latin bombshell she played on the big screen and her shy, life-scarred real self.
Spy stories are a lot like that. Who doesn’t fall in love with James Bond?
But what happens the next morning, and the year after? Pipes break. Roofs leak. A kid has an asthma attack, gets kicked out of school or wrecks a car – usually all three, plus more crises.
The only woman who ever let James Bond put a ring on it — Tracy Draco Bond, played by the glorious Diana Rigg – got shot in the face on their wedding day in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969). Neither Tracy nor Bond’s babymama Madeline Swann/Léa Seydoux, who got dumped in Spectre (2015) and reappeared just in time to introduce their child to a doomed Bond in No Time to Die (2021), found out whether a spy could handle everyday family life, when he had no 24/7 room service, no unlimited expense account, no Q or Moneypenny.
Rosie Mowatt-Larssen found out. Her new book, Story of a CIA Wife: Married to the Craft, is the story of her marriage to and working partnership with Rolf Mowatt-Larsen, who spent 23 years as a CIA intelligence officer. Rosie, who met Rolf when he was stationed in Germany, where she was born, was no stay-at-home traditional wife. She was a bit of a badass who also wanted more, and she got it.
“The African division was courting him heavily,” she writes of his early years in the Agency. “That sounded exotic to me. Exciting. But from the very beginning of the assignment process, the area that excited him the most was Soviet East European Division (SE). The city: Moscow. ‘A spy in Moscow,’ he sighed, wistfully. ‘Broadway. Right? The biggest stage.’” In time, he got to the CIA’s version of the Great White Way, and so did she.
Only, it was dark and very very cold.
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Rosie starts her story in early 1983, when Rolf, then a U.S. Army officer at Fort Bliss in El Paso, informed her, “We are going to Washington.” His impulsive application to become a CIA officer had been approved. Neither one of them knew what the job was, but Rolf, born in the U.S. to Norwegian immigrants, was determined to see a lot more of the world than would be possible if he took his next Army assignment, teaching at West Point, his alma mater.
They moved with their young son to a noisy, boxy little apartment in a down-market section of Fairfax. Her husband was gone to mysterious training sessions at the Farm most of the time. Social gatherings among CIA trainees were rare and even fewer included spouses, because budding intelligence officers, mostly men, weren’t interested in making small talk with wives.
Their loss: they would surely have enjoyed Rosie’s razor wit, and they might have escaped her cold-eyed appraisal. She writes of her husband’s stuck-up training mates: “They generally had an inclination to think they were really ‘hot stuff,’ which was annoying, but understandable. Why join the CIA if you couldn’t feel special? Especially early on. And yet, as we learned over the course of our career, misplaced arrogance was a cultural problem in CIA, especially for those who couldn’t get over themselves, and for those who forgot that our work is not about us, but our mission.”
As Rosie tells it, Rolf’s first assignment, in an unnamed Scandinavian capital, bordered on comedy. She writes of their first attempt at recruiting, by inviting an African diplomatic couple to come over for a “very casual” evening watching a movie on their VCR. Rosie made popcorn. The Africans, eager to look their best for the American diplomats, showed up in tuxedo and ball gown. The Mowatt-Larssens tried recruiting again, inviting a Chinese diplomatic couple for dinner. Five couples showed up. Lesson learned: Chinese diplomats “come in numbers.”
About a year in, the CIA informed them that their landlord and next-door-neighbor was a KGB spy, and he had probably bugged their townhouse. They panicked, briefly, as they reviewed what they had said. Nothing of national security import, they decided. This episode is dark comedy: why didn’t the Agency, in the depths of the Cold War, realize that a newly-minted operations officer had been assigned to living quarters cheek-by-jowl with a man from Soviet intelligence? Was the CIA station in a country close to the Soviet Union that clueless? Guess so – the Mowatt-Larssens swiftly moved to another rental.
Rosie clearly enjoys savaging Dewey Clarridge, one of the CIA’s legendary figures, who, as chief of the CIA’s Europe Division at the time, visited her husband’s station, clouded the air with cigar smoke, knocked back countless straight Scotches, spouted “racial slurs about every nationality and every ethnic group I could think of” andboasted that his tie “cost me over $100.”Clarridge would be indicted in 1991 for perjury and making false statements to congressional committees and a presidential review board investigating the Iran-Contra scandal. President George H.W. Bush pardoned him the next year.
Rosie found that as crass and thuggish as Clarridge seemed, he was not unique. “I was later to find out that there were many Dewey Clarridges in the CIA in those days,” she writes. “They had their qualities. Some of them were colorful, aggressive, dynamic characters, charismatic risk takers who got things done that normal officers dared not try to do. But others were egocentric manipulators of people who didn’t obey the boundaries between our ‘targets’ and our colleagues and families. Operating with total power in total secrecy was a recipe for abuse, and I saw plenty of it.”
As her husband came to specialize in arms control issues, she went to work for the Agency as a “contract spouse,” specializing in translating from her native German and as half of a “tandem couple,” she was trained alongside her husband in such technical tasks as “developing film from a miniature camera, developing secret writing to and from spies, working with “water soluble” documents, preparing material and concealing things (money, medicine, film, written requirements and instructions, cameras and electronic gear) in hidden cavities of modified objects carried by spies.” She learned tradecraft such as how to service dead drops, how to shake an adversary tailing her and how to put on disguises. As the couple prepared to move to Moscow, she was promoted up to “full-fledged member of the team.”
Mowatt-Larssen relished life in Moscow, despite the claustrophobic living conditions and unrelenting KGB surveillance. “I wondered if I was strange, because I thought life was all wonderful in our new city,” she writes. “…Surprisingly to me, many did not like the lifestyle. Working and living with the same people in close quarters was too much for some folks. They felt they never got a break from the observers or the small group of us who were being observed….It is true that many marriages broke up and there were many incidents related to people’s failure to cope with accumulated stress.” The Mowatt-Larssen marriage, and partnership, evidently flourished. Rosie said she, her husband and other station personnel survived by learning “to see ourselves as being parts of a Spartan phalanx, with no light separating our weakest link from our strongest link, as a team.”
She describes dragging their reluctant 11-year-old son to go sledding in below-zero weather, as cover for servicing a dead drop. (“I felt like saying, ‘Shut up, kid. You sit there because we are going sledding’.”) Slipping into a graveyard to smoke out Russian surveillance, Rolf thought he had spotted multiple counterspies. He aborted the mission. The family’s drive home was harrowing, fearing arrest at any moment. They weren’t stopped, but later, some CIA higher-ups doubted their story of intensive, skillful KGB shadowing, derided Rolf’s report as “ghost surveillance” and complained that “the Station had lost its nerve and was seeing ghosts.” A new chief of station arrived in Moscow and dismissed Rolf’s account as “speculation.” Inside the office, Rolf was nicknamed “prince of darkness,” not in a good way.
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Rosie writes that she and her husband privately believed that “the only logical explanation for the intelligence service’s advantage over us was that the CIA had a traitor in the ranks…a ‘mole’.” Turns out, they were right. In 1994, CIA and FBI counterintelligence specialists discovered that CIA officer Aldrich Ames had been recruited by the KGB in 1985. During the 1990’s, the CIA and FBI unmasked former CIA employee Harold Nicholson and FBI agent Earl Pitts as Russian agents. In 2000, FBI agent Robert Hanssen was exposed as a Russian mole, having volunteered to work for the KGB in 1985, the same year as Ames. Of course, none of those turncoats would have known what the Mowatt-Larsens were going to do, loitering around a cemetery on a weekend in Moscow.
Many more stories from the inside follow, tightly focused and sharply observed. Rosie Mowatt-Larssen worked for the CIA for years, at the same time caring for their son and two daughters, one of whom required eye surgery as an infant or risk blindness. When her husband was sent to an unnamed southern European city, just three weeks after Rosie had given birth to their youngest daughter, the family landed in the middle of a garbage strike, with rats rampant, a filthy apartment, blood-stained bedsheets and loud all-night parties outside. A diplomat from another country who lived near them was nearly killed by a car bomb detonated by terrorists.
Then, in late 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. In February 1992, Rolf told Rosie he was being sent on the road to set up a CIA station in a Eurasian nation created from one of the old Soviet republics. He would be gone for three, maybe six months.
“That does it,” she shouted, holding back tears. “If you go, I will leave. It’s work or me! I have had enough of this!”
“Can you guess the outcome?” she writes. “We all know what he did. He went anyway and I’m still his wife.”
Her reward was Rolf’s next posting to Moscow. She found it bittersweet – supremely important, to the CIA, but profoundly sad, watching the new super-rich gobble up luxuries, while poor teenagers turned to prostitution and hustling and desperate old ladies sold their meager possessions. She became a protocol officer in the U.S. Embassy, working under Ambassador Robert Strauss and his wife Helen. In 1994, Aldrich Ames was arrested as a Russian spy. The U.S. expelled the senior KGB officer in Washington, and the CIA’s chief of station was expelled from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Rolf was promoted from deputy chief to chief of Moscow station. He was very important, but it was a desk job, no more dead drops and car chases.
When time came to leave Moscow, Rosie and Rolf decided “we wanted to be where the action was.” She wanted “a tough, edgy place” that was warm. He requested any of five hardship posts in the Middle East. Instead, they were sent to another comfortable, boring northern European capital she doesn’t name but from her hint – its industries were “global leaders in producing precision watches” – I’m guessing Switzerland. The place was so orderly that she had to pack her trash in “color-coded bags [that] had to be purchased from the municipality and they were not cheap.” Cat litter could not be discarded in the regular trash but had to be delivered to a “designated litter location.” She broke that rule, and others. They enrolled their three children in the British international school, only to learn that the girls were stressing out because they were required to change into their physical education outfits in the same room with the boys, and one teacher was so strict and scornful, her students regularly vomited in class.
They were back in language school in Washington, preparing for her idea of a dream job in Asia, on September 11, 2001. CIA director George Tenet changed Rolf’s assignment. His new portfolio was Weapons of Mass Destruction, inside the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center.
Rosie decided to stay home. Their son was in college; their daughters, adolescents.“My husband, like so many others, was constantly working and traveling,” she writes. “9/11 reminded me how much family mattered.”
But for a woman of action, a little domesticity goes a long way. “The working spouse has the status and recognition,” she writes, “whereas a stay-at-home spouse has no ‘official’ paid duty.” No status and not much of a voice. She applied to become a CIA staff officer, was accepted and asked for what she’d always wanted – a warm, edgy place. She got it.
“I could not be happier when I got my first assignment,” she writes, “in the Middle East.”
Editors note: For more on this book – check out our Cover Stories podcast interview with Rosie Mowatt-Larssen
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