The Press in Montana | I married a spy

(Bozeman, Montana) In Bozeman’s resurrected old theater, they play the Tennessee Williams classic, The Glass Menagerie, and I don’t want to miss it. As I sit down, I look at the details of this vibrant, half-faded art deco building, saved by an NPO, like there are so many on this continent, anonymous cultural oxygen canisters.

At the beginning of the 20th^e century, the breeders had succeeded the prospectors, and it was time to show that there were friends of the arts among the ranchers. Members of the richest family had this little palace built and named it after their mother: Ellen.

There is still suspended in the air dust from itinerant actors, operetta singers, ventriloquists, magicians, circus animals and all the artists, illusionists and fantasists that the train could bring to this stage ago. 100 years.

My neighbor is busy reading the program. I ask her if she has ever seen the play. She answers me in French, explains to me that she lived in Belgium, was a broker and has just had her memoirs published.

– When my husband died, I discovered that he had been a spy, the octogenarian told me bluntly.

I don’t have time to ask another question; the play begins.

Suspense…

Tennessee Williams tells the story of a Southern family abandoned by the father. “He was a telephone worker and fell in love with long distance,” Tom, his son, and his mother later said.

Once the piece is finished, my neighbor gives me her business card. On one side: Joyce Van Horne, artist, writer. On the other: a lemon tree branch that she painted in Provence. We arrange to meet.

Joyce lives with her daughter, in the suburbs of this town of 56,000 inhabitants which is one of the gateways to Yellowstone.

Bozeman’s restored downtown has retained its rustic Western charm, while welcoming a new cohort of hipsters, lovers of the outdoors, mountain biking and kombucha. They came to meet the bear and the bald eagle on the mountain trails and never left. (Unlike Lewis and Clark, who returned to St. Louis after finding the majestic springs of the Missouri here. The guys arrive in paradise on earth, take lots of notes, pack up their things and go home! Go figure explorers .)

Mixed here are girls from the Montana State University (MSU) rodeo team, nomads and longtime locals who fly fish as intensely as others enter a meditative trance. Alongside the dozen microbreweries and eco-responsible cafés, there is also the Western Café, which stands the test of time by offering home cooking and one and a quarter pound pies…

Joyce and her daughter live in a new subdivision, enclosed by brown houses that have come to graze on the meadow.

She met her husband at college in Baltimore. He was her chemistry teacher. Suddenly, this man who had studied philosophy was offered all kinds of management positions that he never seemed to have applied for. At Westinghouse. Then to ITT, the famous International Telephone and Telegraph, which sent it to Brussels.

They had three children. He was gone every week, but came back on weekends. “When we went on vacation, I drove the car with the children and he came to join us by plane. He never traveled with us. I didn’t ask myself any questions, maybe I was stupid…”

On the contrary, this cultured woman, who worked for an advertising firm and for Merrill Lynch, stays quite far from stupidity.

– When we love, Joyce…

– Yes, I loved him.

Later, he got a job with NATO, he who had no more military training than you and me (I still learned a lot playing with GI Joe). But even then, Joyce didn’t ask any questions.

The years have passed. They retired. He died in 2019, at age 86.

“He had left in plain sight on his desk a file entitled “people”. I opened it. It was a list of 626 names. I knew some of them. Mine was there. Each name was accompanied by a letter, like a code. »

She shows me the mysterious file, a series of sheets with printer holes from the 1980s. Nobody knows what it means.

But Susan, their daughter, had her doubts since adolescence. “He had titles like ‘marketing director.’ He didn’t know anything about it! And all these trips… He was never there. »

On her deathbed, she confronted him.

– Dad, did you work for the CIA?

“He admitted to me that he had worked for the NSA. »

The National Security Agency is a division of Defense responsible for telecommunications. It goes very well with a job at ITT, which installed telecommunications systems around the world after World War II. And to NATO.

Joyce put together some mysterious details. This “boss”, who came from time to time from the United States, and who apparently committed suicide – that’s what her husband said. “I’m sure it was his controller.” »

And these missions all over Europe and Nigeria. This visa canceled, then found after a meeting with the future president…

“He wasn’t a spy like James Bond, but he worked in intelligence, and I guess he protected us by not telling us anything, by not traveling with us,” she says.

Susan looked through old passports. The stamps told a different story – several trips to Spain, which he had never spoken about. We know that ITT was present under Franco via the telephone company, in addition to taking care of military communications.

– How did it feel to discover that… and even then, only fragments?

– It’s as if he had died a second time. As if I hadn’t been as much a part of his life as I thought… I only knew half of him.

Sometimes telephone workers fall in love with long distance.