My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973

Two qualities are required of an intelligence officer in the field: placement and access, that is , knowing whether information can be found and how to get it. What activity could supply those qualities? Something involving travel to Iron Curtain countries. If I worked for CIA, I could run a real travel agency; short of that, couldn't I set myself up as a travel advisor? Thus a new and necessary entity was born on the last schuss of my trail: Locus Solus - International Travel Counsel.

The name was the clincher. Locus Solus had been a little magazine I'd started thirteen years before with three poet friends (it was originally the title of a work by one of our idols, Raymond Roussel). The magazine was officially published in Lans-en-Vercor, or rather, unofficially: then as now I wanted to avoid bureaucratic hassle, and I managed to persuade the quiet, friendly man who ran - and was still running - the local post office to let me use my personal address as the magazine's.

I now was beginning to see that what my intellectual friends cared about was not anything I needed or wanted. They may have had the answers. I noticed, however, that their answers frequently came from commentators on the authors they revered rather than from the authors themselves - they were like students taking refuge in essays on Shakespeare instead of tackling Hamlet on their own. They reminded me of 4th-century Manicheans who hoped that if they ate a fig from the right tree they might eventually sigh forth some particles of the Godhead. My friends were looking for the figs of intellectual correctness. For me, what matter was not the rightness of the ideas I'd collected but the process of thinking, something that often led to confusion - in my opinion, a very productive state of mind. So I went on listening to the talk about post-structuralism or Maoist theory, as interested as ever, but keeping my mouth shut, unless there was an urgent reason for me to open it.