ImScottJohnson

I found out when I was 14. My dad took me to his office, in a suburban minimall outside Detroit, Michigan, and as we were sitting in the car, he came out with it, and told me he was a spy. The whole story is in the book. It was a pretty thrilling moment, and definitely marked a before and after in my life with him.

Re Snowden, I think it's hard to pass judgment right now on the long-term questions his actions raise. I do think that there are serious risks of government overreach when it comes to eavesdropping and data mining, and that the info Snowden leaked could, over time, develop into a much bigger problem. Re my father, he's alive, yes. And he's been very supportive. I think parts of my book were difficult for him to read, but writing it brought us closer and allowed us to have discussions we might not otherwise have had.

My mother knew, yes. She had to be trained up as well (both she and my step mother, later) and so she was definitely in on the whole secret. There came a time when it was hard for her to keep up the lie and the deception. Before he told me, I thought he was just a "diplomat" or, later, a "teacher," when we lived on a secret CIA training facility in southern Virginia.

Well, let's see. When he was based in India, he did a lot of running agents and things like that, which involved doing "dead drops" and meeting his agents in the middle of the night. Once, the KGB tried to recruit him, too, and that was a pretty dramatic moment, one I recount in the book. Re the second question, being a spy has its dramatic moments, of course, but they are also ordinary people, with ordinary challenges, and I think that goes against the stereotypical idea that all of them are, literally, like James Bond. Re reporting, there were so many crazy things it's hard to think of them all. Once I interviewed a 15-year old boy who had been a child soldier and had cannibalized people while running around in the jungle with Joseph Kony. That was pretty crazy.

My dad and I had always been close. However his work meant that there was this big secret he couldn't share with me. So he told me because he didn't want there to be such a big area of his life that was off-limits to me. He wanted to share as much of himself as possible with me. Also, I think it was partly practical. I was old enough to be figuring out the truth on my own. So keeping the secret would have been more of a headache than anything at a certain point. There are no hard and fast rules about how CIA officers tell their families. Each case is different. Some never reveal anything to their children. Others, like my dad, do so when it seems right.