A Good Spy Leaves No Trace: Big Oil, CIA Secrets, And A Spy Daughters Reckoning
2021 Anne E Tazewell. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or digital, without written permission from the publisher.
Disclaimer: The events in this book are based on the authors experience and told from her perspective. To protect the privacy of certain individuals some names have been changed. Unless quotes are attributed with a footnote, they approximate a conversation. The stories shared by the author characterize her truth with no malice or intent to harm anyone in any way.
Published in the United States by WriteLife Publishing
(An imprint of Boutique of Quality Books Publishing Company, Inc.)
www.writelife.com
Printed in the United States of America
978-1-60808-263-6 (p)
978-1-60808-264-3 (e)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021940135
Book cover and design by Robin Krauss, www.bookformatters.com
Cover design by Rebecca Lown, www.rebeccalowndesign.com
First editor: Caleb Guard
Second editor: Andrea Vande Vorde
PRAISE FOR A GOOD SPY LEAVES NO TRACE AND ANNE E TAZEWELL
Anne Tazewell has written an evocative memoir about her quest to unmask the life of her elusive father, a CIA officer who operated in the Middle East in the 1950s and 60s. It is an important spy story, charmingly told, and along the way readers will bump into a colorful cast of spooks, including Miles Copeland, Kim Philby and Kermit and Archie Roosevelt. A captivating story.
Kai Bird is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian, Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography and the author of The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, Crossing Mandelbaum Gateand most recently The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.
A Good Spy tells a fascinating story of the author's journey to confront the facts around her mysterious CIA agent fatherand at the same time shed light on her own shadow. A dedicated environmental, anti-war, anti-fossil fuels activist daughter of a military-industrial-complex, oil company mercenary soldier, she weaves a tale that is a microcosm for the dualities that confront our world today.
John Perkins, New York Time Best Selling Author of The New Confessions Of An Economic Hit Man.
Mission Impossible meets Eat, Pray, Love. This is a riveting, powerfully written espionage thriller with a deeply personal journey into the shadowlands of the human heart. Tazewell masterfully weaves together a search for her fathers spy secrets with her own buried truths. It is a stunning, revelatory read.
Will Harlan, author of the New York Times bestselling biography Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America
In this captivating and moving memoir, a CIA daughter goes in search of the truth about her spy father, a brilliant but troubled man present at the creation of modern U.S.-Middle East relations.
Hugh Wilford, author of Americas Great Game: The CIAs Secret Arabists and The Shaping of the Modern Middle East
A haunting story of a daughter searching for her lost father. An epic of international intrigue and shadowy Cold War geopolitics. The origin story for a champion of a new world of growth and alternative energy. A Good Spy Leaves No Trace is all of these books and more. Anne Tazewell turns this deeply personal story into a door that unlocks for us a little-known but important room in our shared history.
- David Taylor, author of Cork Wars: Intrigue and Industry in World War II
Anne Tazewells memoir is a genuine page-turner. I couldnt put it down. Herein lie the inside stories of how the world worked when her father was a CIA Station Chief in the oil rich Middle East of the 1950s and60s. Surrounded by close friends from World War II such as Miles Copeland, a schemer and a dreamer for the CIA, and CBS News reporter Frank Kearns, Ms. Tazewell exposes relationships both personal and geopolitical. She describes the heartbreaking chicanery within her family and by the U.S. government with its many friends who wanted to influence control of the oilfields. Its also a story of loss, of reconciliation and of love by a daughter for her father. Through her determined research she opens up the inner workings of people in her family, places both near and far, and events that quietly lay dormant in hopes of never being disturbed. As I read A Good Spy Leaves No Trace I kept wishing that I would have had access to what she has learned for my own uses. Shes painfully honest in laying out the facts of her life and that of her unprincipled father. Because of that, she is a great storyteller.
This is a wonderful book for anyone who yearns to reconnect with their own past!
Gerald Davis, author of Algerian Diary: Frank Kearns and the Impossible Assignment for CBS News, and producer, writer and director of the Emmy-winning documentary for PBS, Frank Kearns: American Correspondent.
One of the joys of being a professor is learning the unique lives of your students. My former student, Anne Tazewell exceeds all of them, and her riveting story provides wisdom and inspiration for us all. Underlying her tumultuous world was a passion for nature and finding solutions to clean energy. A must read!
Meg Lowman, Conservation Biologist and Arbornaut. Author of The Arbornaut (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux) 2021
A Good Spy entwines a passionate quest to uncover her father's secret, real life Clancy-esque thriller life with an untold history of events in the Middle East that shaped the world we live in today. Anne Tazewell captures the intimate, the power, the personal pain and the sheer force of world events that make this true life saga one of the most critical foreign policy reads in decades. In other wordsdamn, its great.
Josh Tickell, Author and Film Director, including Kiss The Ground - How the Food You Eat Can Reverse Climate Change, Heal Your Body & Ultimately Save Our World
To the great spirit who connects us all: past, present, and future.
May we be at peace,
May our hearts remain open,
May we awaken into the light of our own true beings,
May we be healed,
May we be a source of healing for all beings.
Buddhist Metta Meditation of Loving Kindness adaptation
T he name catches my attention: Miles Copeland III, the music producer. I am listening to National Public Radio, stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic on Interstate 40the stretch in North Carolina that extends from Research Triangle Park to my exit in Chapel Hill. One consolation is that my Prius engine cuts off when I stop and will automatically turn back on when I push on the gas pedal. Since starting my job promoting alternative fuelseverything
