Terminological Clarifications

:: from my visit to China with a USIA family ::

Our family was always getting queried, in the Philippines for example, as to whether we were embedded in the CIA in some way. I empathize. Like I understand why there'd be confusion. We definitely had US Embassy status, in terms of commissary, swimming pool, canteen and military base access. Mom even got an award from the ambassador at one point, and dad could be espied sitting not far from Imelda Marcos at this or that gala gathering. 

"The king and queen fled the land" was the text of that cryptic middle-of-the-night phone call, from a family friend it turned out later, who was feeling paranoid about our status and suggesting we skedaddle. Filipinos always treated us kindly, across the political spectrum.

However, as Quakers (Friends) we had our own "intelligence community" if you wanna call it that: the AFSC, FCNL, RSWR and other four-letter agencies. 

AFSC (American Friends Service Committee) in particular has had CIA ties going back to the Rufus Jones - Cord Meier relationship. FCNL (Friends Committee on National Legislation) is a District lobby, plugged in to the congressional matrix if not so much the executive branch, and is supposedly where oversight happens. RSWR (Right Sharing of World Resources) was like Grameen Bank, into right sharing, which meant pioneering the practice of making micro-loans, but without the exploitative interest rates and subsequent sharking.

The AFSC is oft jokingly referred to by veterans (like me) as "the Quaker KGB" with headquarters in Friends Center ("the Quaker Vatican") not far from Smedley Butler's grave (39°58'47.8" N, 75°37'12.5" W) as the crow flies. I worked for AFSC independently of my parents, taking up nuclear cleanup and risk around the Pacific Rim as a topic, as well as local ethnic strife (LAAP program). Later, I'd supervise the AFSC from on high, as an NPYMer (North Pacific Yearly Meeting, another four-letter entity I've served).

The better mental picture therefore is of a rivalrous yet, on occasion, friendly-enough relationship, as when I'd have gin and tonic (with extra gin) with that Mockingbird guy in Georgetown (you know the one), or here in Portland, or as when dad and I ventured over to Institute for Policy Research (WDC) that time, to hear Ralph McGehee tell his story, live in person.

Ralph (exCIA) was impressed with how inertial was the CIA's ballast of football player (team player) dummies, as when they couldn't get it through their thick heads that Vietnam was not just some backdrop for some global great game of dominoes. Why did it take so long to shift weight around? As Quakers might put it: why are "weighty Friends" (a real term) sometimes likewise the most stubborn stuck-in-the-muds? Put that way, it sounds like a question in basic physics.

I'd read Ed Lansdale later (thanks to Prouty, another Bucky fan), who was from an earlier cohort than my dad was.  For some of those years in Manila, we were a USAID family i.e. that's when we had those embassy privileges (which we didn't always have). But dad was with the UN before that, at least twice, and not with the USG at all in many chapters, and even in places with no US embassy.

Yes, I went to Vietnam with my family, on a trip to other places. Was that the same trip that took us to Kashmir and through the Khyber Pass by bus (Peshawar to Kabul), and to Tashkent and Moscow? No, probably not. Our Vietnam visit, where we met with Buddhist monks, was likely enroute to Thailand (again) and Malaysia, Indonesia and Borneo. 

We Urners got around.