Mother Country

When I was nine, I helped my father build a life-size replica of the intelligence officer Jim Thompson’s Bangkok living room in our home. We listened to “Mother Country” and “Chantilly Lace” while cutting teak down to size and staining it to make Jim’s 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—the Thai Silk King. Some thought he had been eaten by a tiger, but my dad was pretty sure he’d been kidnapped by the Chinese.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—phone 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.I sifted through the agent’s 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....