Orchids for Mother
Aaron Latham's 1977 Novel
“People in our business don’t grow up. Especially my generation. We were college boys when we joined the OSS, and it seemed like a fraternity. We weren’t so much fighting the enemy as hazing him. Playing pranks on him. Like collecting all that pornography to drop on Hitler. Then that collegiate tone carried over from the OSS into the CIA. You must’ve seen it: Langley’s New Haven all over again right down to Nathan Hale.”
“I noticed him. So I haven’t graduated yet. I’m still stuck in fraternity land.”
“Secret society’d be a closer, like Skull and Bones.”
“There are a lot of Bones men around, aren’t there?”
“Oh, Langley’s a regular haunted house. It’s as though we began as boyish pranksters and we’re still boyish pranksters. How else do you explain my trying to win an Italian election with a movie?”
Mother chuckled softly; then Paul did, too.
“Our operation to make Castro’s beard fall out?” Mother continued. “Or our plan to plug all the toilets at the International Communist Youth Festival, to show that communism doesn’t work?”
“No kidding?”
“No kidding.”
“You once told me,” Paul said, “that the best book ever written about the agency is Huckleberry Finn. Is that what you meant? That we’re all Tom and Huck?”
“Sure,” Mother said, smiling broadly for the first time in weeks. “Especially those last chapters—the ones most English teachers like least and I like best. Remember, they try to rescue Jim from the plantation. Dig a tunnel. Bake a pie with a rope in it. Write all those ‘nonamous’ letters. And they make poor Jim keep a diary, in code, in his own blood.” He stopped smiling as he added, “They went to all that trouble and almost all of it was totally useless. Just like so many of our own operations…”
—Aaron Latham, Orchids for Mother (Chapter 28: The Purge)
I’d never read Aaron Latham’s Orchids for Mother before, but I found myself drawn to the novel for a few reasons. There was the presence of a subplot involving the daughter of a character based on Frank Wisner; Frances Fisher, daughter of the departed director of clandestine operations, Robert Fisher. She falls in love with Paul, the protégée of the James Angleton Character, Francis Xavier Kimball. The twist is: at some point she begins to believe that Kimball orchestrated the assassination of Fisher, one designed to look like a suicide. This is a point left open in the novel, never fully resolved, although Frances believes it enough to write a damning “Family Jewels” style report that finally sweeps Mother out of his perch at CIA counterintelligence.