San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Memoirist offered portrait of secret life
When flames from the Oakland hills fire of 1991 approached Lillian McCloy’s home in the Hiller Highlands, she remained calm and analytical. She’d been the wife of a CIA officer who worked under deep cover and was accustomed to thinking one step ahead of disaster.
The firestorm ended up claiming her home and her trunks full of pictures and records from life abroad. But she was able to rescue the concrete Buddha statue from her backyard, and escape with that and her memories. Her recollections eventually became “Six Car Lengths Behind an Elephant: Undercover & Overwhelmed As a CIA Wife and Mother,” a memoir published in 2016, when she was 90 and at Waters Edge Lodge, an assistedliving facility in Alameda.
The book’s allure and McCloy’s natural wit kept her in demand at the lunch or dinner table at Waters Edge, and her stories went beyond the CIA. She had also been executive secretary to celebrity attorney Melvin Belli, known as the “King of Torts,” and before that a jazz singer who played the clubs in Winnipeg, where she was from.
McCloy, who had lost her vision due to macular degeneration, could spin a yarn with several subplots, right up until she went into hospice care after the New Year, when her health suddenly declined. She died Jan. 26, at age 97.
“She was irreverent and people loved her stories about being the wife of a CIA officer and the adventures she had moving from country to country,” said her daughter, Johanna McCloy. “It was dangerous work but she had fortitude.”
McCloy’s memoir described difficult posts in New Delhi, India and Caracas, Venezuela, in the 1970s and 1980s, when these were hazardous places to be fronting for the CIA. The book was favorably noticed by both spy writer John le Carre and travel writer Pico Iyer.
“A charming and unusual portrait of a secret life,” wrote le Carre, in a letter to Johanna McCloy.
“If you are married to a spy, the always fraught arena of a relationship turns into a positive minefield,” wrote Iyer, as a blurb. “Lillian McCloy gives us the story of a life spent around secret intelligence that is funny and charming and in every wonderful sense, deeply spooky.”
Lillian Thorbjorg Sveinson was born Jan. 9, 1926, in Selkirk, Manitoba. Her parents were Icelandic, and Lillian was the youngest of seven kids in a family that lived above the tinsmith shop of her father, Thorkell. She went directly from high school to business college and was trained as a paralegal, a skill she took with her to Winnipeg in her early 20s.
One story she told is that she was in a music store where a customer was testing out pianos. She started singing along and that got her hired as a big band vocalist in the Jack Shapira Orchestra, and later a fourpiece combo. A DJ named Monte Halparin at a local radio station noticed her and they became a couple, briefly engaged to be married. This was before Halparin got his break and became Monty Hall, host of “Let’s Make a Deal.”
By then, Lillian had left Win
nipeg for Vancouver, riding the Canadian Pacific Railway for three days to move in with a friend. Lillian worked for several attorneys and became involved with a surgeon, who couldn’t commit. So she got on another train, this time bound for San Francisco, where her biggest adventures began.
She arrived in the mid-1950s, trading the train for the cable car, which she rode to work from her studio apartment on Russian Hill. Hired by Belli, her first duty in the morning was to feed his parrot a jigger of bourbon, and the day went from there. Often it ended at the Iron Horse on Maiden Lane, where “Canada,” as Belli called her, did not mind sipping a martini.
The actor Sterling Hayden,a Belli client, tried to recruit Lillian to join his yacht crew on a trip from San Francisco to Tahiti. “No thanks, Hayden,” she responded. “I can’t swim.” It was the kind of quip that endeared her to Belli, especially since it was a true statement.
“She liked to say she was the only executive secretary who lasted with Belli,” said her daughter, a Berkeley writer and actor who had a guest star role on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” “She was really good at her job and she was funny. This was the era when women dressed up for work and wore long gloves. Then you smoked at your desk while you worked.”
One night, a friend from work asked Lillian to accompany her as the third wheel on a blind date with a Marine Corps fighter pilot stationed in Alameda. That was how she met Frank McCloy, and also how the friend’s blind date ended. McCloy pursued her and they were married on June 13, 1959, with a reception at the officers club on Treasure Island. McCloy soon left the service to fly commercially for PSA. They had a son, John, born in 1961 and a second on the way when McCloy got bored with the airlines. Without telling his wife, he had applied to the CIA. As her memoir begins, he called her from Washington, D.C., to break the news just a few days before a daughter, Kristin, was born, in 1962.
“I found myself hurtling down the corridor to the delivery room,” she wrote in the book. “I told the orderly, ‘guess what? My husband works for the CIA.’ ”
She would soon learn to be more discrete about announcing her husband’s occupation. In 1962, they moved to “the Farm” in Langley, Va., where officers are trained. A third child, Johanna, was born in Scranton, Pa., where McCloy was training how to convincingly present himself as a buyer for a multinational corporation. In 1964, the family moved to Madrid, for seven years. Lillian, who had never been outside of North America, proved adaptable, picking up Spanish and a canny ability to deflect attention from what her husband was doing.
“She even assisted him a few times,” Johanna said. “One time my dad was concerned that a guy he was working with might be a double agent for the KGB. So he asked my mom to put on a big floppy hat as a disguise and follow the guy down the street to the hotel where he was meeting my dad, to make sure there was no suspicious behavior along the way.”
By the time the family got to India, her own skills in dealing with the skulduggery of CIA life earned her the nickname “Thor,” given by her husband partly because she had the willpower of the god of thunder and partly because her middle name was Thorbjorg.
After subsequent postings, and new languages learned in Tokyo and Caracas, McCloy retired from the agency, and took a straight job with General Dynamics, selling the F-16 fighter jet in Asia. He died in 1986, at 54.
At age 60 and widowed, McCloy moved back to the Bay Area after 24 years away. She bought a townhouse in Hiller Highlands, where she lived alone. Five years later came the fire which destroyed it all. But she rebuilt, and it was here, in 1993, that she got an IBM Selectric and started typing her memoir. It came fast. In six months she had several hundred pages, which she boiled down to 240.
From the outset she was determined to protect the people who had protected her husband, including international firms that hired him in order to provide cover and a backstory. As she put it in the memoir, “Everything written in this narrative is true. However, it was necessary that I exercise extreme discretion in revealing details that might disclose the identity of the American companies who so valiantly agreed to hire my husband.”
On her 80th birthday in 2006, her old flame Monty Hall recorded a video clip remembering their romance in Winnipeg. “That was a big night when we’d go out for hamburgers, or you’d come to the radio station and we’d have coffee,” Hall said. “Those were glorious days.”
After her eyesight started to fail, 12 years ago, McCloy sold the house in Oakland and moved to Waters Edge Lodge, where she still did not mind sipping a martini if one was put in front of her. There was something new to talk about in 2022, when her story about following the suspected double agent in Madrid was excerpted in a collection titled “Dare to Be Fabulous: Follow the journeys of daring women on the path to finding their true north.”
The chapter by McCloy is titled “Mrs. Spook.” She liked that.