Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (56 page)

In the elevator, the three of us stand there silently.

“I probably shouldn’t tell you this,” I blurt out and then pause, realizing that any sentence beginning with those words is best left uncompleted, especially in the presence of FBI agents. Too late now, I figure, and continue: “But I was slightly paranoid about your visit. I thought you might have done a little digging on me in preparation for this, and I’ve been researching some controversial topics lately as part of a cross-country trip I took to find unmarked historic sites. Sooooo, if by chance you noticed that I bought a handful of books online about domestic terrorism, al-Qaeda, secret government medical tests on Americans, CIA cover-ups, that sort of thing, those were all work-related.”

Neither agent responds.

We step into my apartment, and I quickly change the subject. “Can I offer you all something to drink? Coffee, water, anything?”

“We’re fine,” says the lead agent.

They sit on the sofa and pull out legal-sized notebooks.

“I’m not sure what you need to know about Jay,” I begin, “but I can honestly say that he’s one of the most hardworking and trustworthy people I’ve ever met.”

The lead agent gives me a quizzical look. “You mentioned him before. Who’s Jay?”

“I’m sorry?” I say, laughing, amused by the idea that they’ve possibly mixed up their application files.

“Who is Jay?” the agent asks again, not laughing.

Who is Jay?
That doesn’t make sense.

“Aren’t you doing a background check on him?”

They glance at each other.

“No,” the lead agent says. “We have nothing to do with that.”

Trying not to sound impolite, I ask, “Then … why are you here?”

“We’re investigating what you were doing at the Deseret Chemical Depot in Utah, where military police caught you taking pictures of the base.”

Those words,
investigating
and
caught
, hang in the air. My heart starts racing and multiple images flash through my mind. I recall the sign, the valley, the white cars pulling up out of nowhere, and the circle of MPs around me.

I want to answer right away so I don’t come across as evasive, but I feel self-conscious about not seeming nervous, which only makes me more nervous.

“The reason, well, actually, I wasn’t photographing the base, only the sign at the entrance, as part of a photo journal of my trip, to remind me where I’d been,” I say. “And you really can’t see the facility from the road anyway because it’s miles away. Have you all been there?”

“No,” the lead agent says.

“It’s far down in this valley, and you can barely make out anything. Also, I honestly thought it was closed. I can show you …”

I spin around to the mammoth filing cabinet behind me and pull out the folder marked
UTAH/HUMAN EXPERIMENTS
. I shuffle through the papers and hand the lead agent the article that, erroneously, reported that the base had been shuttered years ago. He reads it and jots down notes.

“I actually came across Deseret by chance. My main story was about the Dugway Proving Ground farther east.”

“That’s also a restricted area,” the agent says, giving the paper back to me.

“Right, I know, and I ended up pursuing an entirely different story in Utah related to Richard McCoy.”

They look at me blankly.

“The guy who might have been D. B. Cooper,” I say.

Agent #2 perks up. “The hijacker?”

“The hijacker.”

I relate McCoy’s story, and they seem genuinely interested. To prove I’m not obsessed with domestic terrorism or classified government
projects, I briefly tell them about David “Carbine” Williams and then Ralph Teetor, who created cruise control.

“He was
blind
?” Agent #2 asks.

“Since childhood.”

One story leads into another, and after I ramble on for twenty minutes straight the agents have closed their notebooks and are cracking smiles. My initial heart-pounding fear has subsided, and they begin discussing some of their own favorite sites. Agent #2 tells me his father is “a history nut” and frequently loaded up the car and drove the family to battlefields and other landmarks all over the country.

“I dreaded those trips as a kid,” he remarks, “but I miss them now.”

“I hear that from a lot of people,” I say.

They get up, we shake hands, and the mood is certainly more jovial. I’m tempted to ask what they’re going to write in their report, but I don’t want to push my luck. I doubt they consider me a national-security threat, although I suspect the phrase “prone to chattiness” is now part of my permanent FBI file.

Joe Rogers, my eighty-eight-year-old neighbor, notices the agents leaving and approaches me in the hallway. “What sort of trouble have you gotten yourself into now, Andrew?” he asks with a grin.

I sheepishly describe what I did in Utah and how the FBI felt my actions warranted further inquiry. This prompts Joe to mention that he’s friends with a number of retired agents who’ve told him about various stakeouts that have taken place right in this building and on our block. I’ve heard inklings of these stories before, but not the full details.

As we’re standing there, it hits me that I’ve lived across the hall from Joe for more than a decade and never really talked with him about his own military background. Like most veterans, he’s humble about his service, and I pry gently. Joe tells me that he volunteered for the U.S. Army Air Corps as soon as he turned eighteen and ended up piloting B-17 bombers over Europe. After the war, he was stationed in China and became an aviation advisor to Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the country’s anti-Communist party.

“In 1946, I had the pleasure of dancing with Chiang Kai-shek’s
wife, Soong Mei-ling,” Joe says, recalling what was clearly a high point of his time in China. He was introduced to her at a dinner banquet, and she commented on his Georgia accent—something they shared. Although born in Shanghai, she was educated in the United States, primarily Georgia (Joe’s home state), and spoke English with a southern inflection.

Joe seems prouder of having danced with Soong Mei-ling, one of the world’s most powerful women, than of his historic flight into Beijing at the height of China’s revolution. I ask if he’d experienced any harrowing moments during the upheaval, and he describes flying from Shanghai to pick up two U.S. State Department workers before Mao’s Communist forces invaded Beijing. Joe had to land on the old polo grounds in front of the Imperial City, becoming the first—and, presumably, last—American to use the spot as an improvised runway. The grounds, today, are better known as Tiananmen Square.

After our one-hour conversation, the longest we’ve had in ten years, I tell him I hope we can do this more frequently.

“Anytime,” he says.

Desk cleared, bills paid, phone calls answered, and FBI agents placated, I contact Megan and we schedule our D.C. get-together.

“Is it all right if my sister Stacy joins us?” Megan asks.

“Of course. Is she also a genealogist?”

“No, she’s a defense contractor and mother of four, but she’s helped me with my research and wants to tag along.”

“Great. The more the merrier.”

On the morning of our rendezvous, I walk up from my apartment to meet Megan and her sister in front of the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, on the corner of Connecticut Avenue and Woodley Road.

We exchange hugs and hellos and get into Megan’s car.

“I know you’re both familiar with Washington, and I’m not going to lead us on a wild-goose chase through the city,” I say, “but I thought I’d show you some lesser-known sites on our way to the Capitol.”

Starting with the Wardman. “One of America’s greatest writers was
discovered here by happenstance,” I say as we pull out of the hotel’s driveway. “In December 1925 the poet Vachel Lindsay was eating in the hotel’s dining room, and a young busboy timidly placed three poems he’d written on Lindsay’s table. Lindsay was initially annoyed by the interruption, but when he looked over the poems, he thought they were quite good. Later that night he was giving a speech and declared that he’d encountered a brilliant new poet and then read the works aloud. Newspapers profiled the ‘busboy poet,’ and that’s how Langston Hughes launched his career.”

We head south on Connecticut Avenue and approach my building. I tell Megan and Stacy about my conversation with Joe Rogers after the FBI paid me a visit.

“That’s my apartment, above the entrance,” I say, “and Joe told me that during the Cold War one of the previous tenants was this ‘big redheaded gal’—his words—who used to spend her days in front of the window knitting or quietly reading to herself. Turns out, she was actually an FBI agent taking down license plate numbers and physical descriptions of everyone who went in and out of the building across the street, which back then was the Soviet consulate.”

From the car, our view of the apartment is partly blocked by a twenty-foot oak.

“See this row of trees here,” I say, “and how this one is shorter than the others?”

Megan and Stacy peer out the window and nod.

“Joe said that the FBI kept pruning the tree that used to be here so the agent had a clearer view, and they ended up ‘killing the damn thing.’ The FBI eventually replaced it, and the new one’s not as tall as the others.”

We hit a red light on the corner of Connecticut and California, and I point out one last espionage site.

“I don’t know if you all remember Felix Bloch, the State Department official accused of being a spy in the late eighties—”

“Oh, sure,” Megan and Stacy say in unison.

“Well, halfway down this street is a blue mailbox that, according
to Joe’s FBI sources, Bloch and his Soviet counterparts would mark in chalk to signal when they were going to meet. Bloch was never convicted, but the State Department fired him, and he ended up moving to North Carolina, where he got a job bagging groceries and driving a city bus in Chapel Hill. He was later arrested for shoplifting.”

The light turns green, and we continue down Connecticut.

Family lore is obviously Megan’s area of expertise, and I confess to her that until I went on my trip, I had never asked my parents about their own brushes with history.

“After visiting Peoria,” I say, “I was talking on the phone with my mom and telling her how penicillin was mass-produced there, and she made this offhand comment that when she was about twelve, Howard Florey had briefly stayed at their home on Long Island during World War II. I’d never heard this before. I knew my grandfather was a doctor, but I had no idea he was friends with both Florey and Alexander Fleming. She vividly remembered how giddy Florey became, almost like a child, when they served him fresh strawberries, which were a rarity back in England because of rationing. Ten years later, when my mom was sightseeing in Europe, she visited Fleming at his home in London. I asked what she thought of him, and her recollection was that he was a very sweet, soft-spoken man. She also said he had a stunning wife, also very nice. Greek. And ‘
much
younger than he was.’ ”

“As a genealogist, I’m always telling people to talk to their parents and elders before it’s too late, and my biggest regret in life was not recording my mom’s stories,” Megan says. “My husband has been good about getting my dad to open up about his Vietnam experiences, and the women in our family usually live into their nineties, so I figured I had plenty of time with my mom. And then she was abruptly diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer at the age of sixty-five. We had a few months before she passed away, but it seemed inappropriate to interview her because she was very resistant to the possibility of dying. Now I encourage others to do as I say, not as I did. I was, however, able to interview my grandmother just three months before she died at ninety,
and when I listened to the tape a few years later, I couldn’t believe how many details I had either forgotten or misremembered.”

“This was your grandmother on the Smolenyak side?”

“No, my mom’s mother.”

Megan’s maiden name is Smolenyak, and in 2001 she married a man named Brian Smolenyak—thus her “double” name.

“How many times removed are you from Brian?” I ask.

“He’s my tenth cousin. There are only four Smolenyak families in the world, all tracing back to this rural village in Slovakia, but the funny thing is, none of them share the same direct bloodline. When Brian and I went there in 2006 on vacation, I asked some of the villagers if I could test their DNA and discovered that they have different genetic identifiers. Smolenyak must have been an occupational name.”

Farther down Connecticut Avenue, we make a left on I Street and pass behind Blair House, where foreign leaders often stay during official state visits. “Did you all read what happened when Boris Yeltsin got drunk here in September 1994 while visiting with President Bill Clinton?”

Megan and Stacy shake their heads.

“Clinton is on the record talking about it in Taylor Branch’s book
The Clinton Tapes
, and if I could put up a historical marker anywhere in D.C., it would focus on this incident,” I say somewhat facetiously.

“In the dead of night,” I continue, “Yeltsin, who was president of Russia at the time and theoretically in control of all their nuclear weapons, got hammered, slipped past his security detail, and wandered out of Blair House
in his underwear
. He was found by our Secret Service agents stumbling around Pennsylvania Avenue half naked trying to hail a cab. When the agents started escorting him back inside to, among other things, avert an international scandal, Yeltsin apparently threw a small tantrum, claiming he just wanted to find some pizza. Taylor Branch asked Clinton how the situation resolved itself, and the president shrugged and said, ‘We got him a pizza.’ ”

We reach the Capitol, and I tell Megan and Stacy I’ve been quizzing
friends who are longtime Washingtonians about their knowledge of the Statue of Freedom, the highest, most visible statue in our nation’s capital and an iconic image of American independence. “Overall the consensus is that it’s either some Roman goddess or a Native American princess—possibly Sacagawea. I didn’t know myself until I read the Architect of the Capitol’s website, which said the model was just an anonymous ‘classical female figure.’ ”