In the era before Internet snooping and mass electronic surveillance, governments gathered intelligence by sending trained agents into the field. In the world of international espionage, two kinds of spies collect state secrets: OCs and NOCs. Those with 'official cover' (the OCs) work in embassies. and consulates (and) enjoy the protection of diplomatic immunity if their true purpose in a country is revealed. At worst, the host nation declares the individual a persona non grata and she leaves with no repercussions. Those operating under non-official cover (NOCs) lacked the necessary affiliation with a diplomatic mission to qualify for immunity. NOCs operate at great risk. When caught they face severe penalties, often death, for their transgressions.Bulgarians assumed that I was an NOC. In the immediate post-Cold War era, only this possibility explained my presence in and knowledge of their country. I spent over a decade denying this double identity until one day a jumpy druggie forced me to embrace the part.
Describing the humdrum life of a foreign researcher in the Bulgarian capital, one day Ghodsee comes across a collection of government files in a trash can, but is confronted with a young passer-by who challenges her right to take them. In the grip of the ethnographer's passion for evidence, and thinking the files might serve a future research project, she pretends to be an NOC, speaking a few words of English and staring down her young challenger.
The files tell the life story of an agricultural specialist under Communism, a Mr. Andreev. Ghodsee wonders what happened to him after communism collapsed. "Had he lost his life savings, like so many other Bulgarians of his generation when the whole banking system imploded in 1996? How had he survived the hyperinflation that destroyed the value of his pension? After working and paying into the system for forty years, did he have to accept money from (his son) to afford the basic necessities? The new Bulgarian government privatized the old state greenhouses to foreign investors who shut them down and then sold the valuable land beneath them. What did Mr. Andreev think when the new democrats broke up the collective farms, their tractors sold for scrap metal? After years of being self-sufficient in food production, Bulgaria now imported shrink wrapped cucumbers from Turkey and Israel.
Noting that for thirty years Mr. Andreev had kept Bulgarians in cucumbers while not a single vegetable ever bore his signature, Ghodsee fingers the refusal of intellectuals to accept limits on their freedom to think, versus the reliable provision of basic necessities and even comforts to the far larger cohort of ordinary citizens.
Those who write about communism by definition see it through an intellectual lens, yet when people who do not read intellectual publications discover life under really existing socialism, they are envious.
Among Mr. Andreev's files were railway time tables for holidays on the Black Sear, and even weekly TV schedules. Ghodsee notes that the evening news came on at 17:30, and the national 'Good Night, Children" song was broadcast as usual at 19:50. "Andreev's son would have been three in 1977, and like most Bulgarian children, he probably listened to that song each evening before bedtime: 'I am Sandman, I've come from the woods to wish you kids 'Good Night'. It is dark outside. It is time to sleep." (A similar program sent my own children to bed in 1960s' Hungary, where summer vacations would find us in a government funded guesthouse on Lake Balaton"..)
Noticing permission for foreign travel and participation in international conferences, Godsee wonders whEther Mr. Andreev was ever accused of being a spy, then realizes that the papers that document her own career could enable some future Ph.D candidate to make the case that she too was a spy.
Someday, a graduate student might use my old field notes and journals as raw data for her dissertation. This aspiring Ph'd student will work her way through my files. Between some old teaching evaluations and notes for unwritten fellowship proposals, she will discover the folders from Mr. Andreev, a collection of communist era documents from an official Bulgarian Ministry. Maybe this will be the evidence she needs to prove that I really was a CIA NOC. Why else would I have these personal files from 1970s Bulgaria? These weren't just crop reports; they were encrypted military secrets, perhaps coordinates for a clandestine underground nuclear weapons"..
The dissertating Ph.D. student will suggest that Mr. Andreev was not an agronomist. He was an undercover agent involved in agricultural espionage. When she convinces the Bulgarian government to release Mr. Andreev's secret service dossier and they confirm his true employment, a web of mystery and suspicion will descend over my entire academic career. My books will be reread for information about my secret missions. The dissertation might become a bestselling e-book.
Because Mr. Andreev and I were Cold War spooks, readers will take an interest in our biographies. Expert cryptographers might scrutinize our half-finished crossword puzzles. My grocery lists will be scanned and digitally stored in the British Museum. Perhaps a novelist will be inspired to write a cloak and dagger thriller about a young American woman who is initiated into an international society by a retired Bulgarian intelligence agent posing as a cucumber expert. The phallic symbolism is irresistible. Neo-Freudians will celebrate. They'll make a movie. There'll be a plastic actionbot of the actress who plays me. My grandchildren will brag in school"
In the final ironic lines of this small e-book, Kristen Ghodsee distills the essence of America's war syndrome: the temptation to see the worst in others, and especially, the conviction that our own way of life is superior to theirs.
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