My Spy : Memoir of a CIA Wife Book

Our story spans fifty years, four continents, three wars, a revolution, five children, two races and one faith. It is the story of an often stormy, sometimes blissful, but never dull marriage. It lasted thirty years---and then death did the parting.

So begins the love story of Joe Kiyonaga, the striking Japanese-American war hero from Hawaii, and Bina Cady, the irreverent Irish-Catholic redhead from Baltimore. Similar in their convictions, different in most every other respect, the two leaped into a marriage in 1947 that defied the anti-Japanese sentiments of the day. Their unlikely union would come to include a powerful, top-secret cohort: the CIA.

During the darkest days of the Cold War, Bina, as a CIA wife, was initiated into a world of silence. She would learn not to ask who had called a 2:00 A.M., where Joe had disappeared to for days at a time, or why a notorious dictator had shown up at their door unannounced. Joe's "cover" had to be maintained, and no one could be trusted with the truth. Bina would learn to live a lie and lie bravely.

From the surreal intrigue of post-war Japan to the raucous mariachi-band parties of 1960s El Salvador and the "Yankee Go Home" Panama of the 1970s to the planning of a coup d'etat in Brazil, Bina would become Joe's unwitting partner, playing the traditional role of wife and mother for the most untraditional of ends: helping Joe recruit agents. Everything from cocktail parties to the children's swim meets would become possible venues for agent recruitment; every casual acquaintance---even the parish priest---a potential intelligence source. Through Joe's work, Bina was introduced to foreign leaders, militarystrongmen and influential journalists secretly working with Washington---a cast of like-minded souls who believed, as did Joe and Bina, that the CIA's cause was noble and that its methods served a greater good.

In the end, Bina's story is the story of the spy she loved.

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