From My Narrative Inheritance to Their Own Narratives

An Introduction to the Special Section on Harold Lloyd Goodall, Jr.’s A Need to Know: The Clandestine History of a CIA Family by Harold Lloyd Goodall, Jr. [Arizona State University, Tempe]

These comments provide a brief introduction to and framework for this special issue honoring and commenting on the author’s memoir: A Need to Know: The Clandestine History of a CIA Family. By locating his narrative within scholarship dedicated to family secrecy and to cultural histories of the cold war and war on terror, the author connects the long term consequences of growing up in a family marked by secrecy and fear to the long term consequences of a people living under conditions of an enduring war marked by a culture of secrecy and fear.

Keywords: family; secrecy; culture; fear; war

My mother had a secret. Well, more than one secret. But the one secret that organized the rest was that her husband—my father—was a spy. He worked, as she always put it, “for the government.”

My father also had a secret. Not only that he worked for the government. He was a spy who harbored a dark suspicion about his boss in the CIA: The boss was preventing a dangerous Soviet spy from being outed because it would have ruined the boss’s career.