cover image My Spy: Memoir of a CIA Wife

My Spy: Memoir of a CIA Wife

Bina Cady Kiyonaga. William Morrow & Company, $24 (320pp) ISBN 978-0-380-97587-7

Self-styled ""CIA wife"" Bina Cady met Joe Kiyonaga, a Japanese-American law student from Hawaii, at the University of Michigan in 1946. They married a year later. Her unpretentious account of their 30-year marriage elicits the reader's sympathy with its witty portrayal of a ""mixed"" couple facing bigotry (she calls herself Irish-Catholic, ""although my father was Welsh-Cherokee"") and its description of her lonely life as a mother of five, which unfolded on a need-to-know basis, with a tight-lipped husband always on guard. Kiyonaga, who fought bravely against the Nazis in WWII as part of the Hawaiian Nisei, a Japanese-American regiment, emerges as an urbane, mercurial, suspicious figure, a devoted husband and father who nevertheless used the agency's resources to track his wife's old beaus. While some of his activities as a CIA agent may have advanced the cause of freedom, other operations seem highly questionable. In Brazil, Kiyonaga plotted a coup with a cabal of business and military men, overthrowing Brazil's reformist government in 1964 and installing a 21-year military dictatorship. As CIA station chief in El Salvador and Panama, Kiyonaga (who died of cancer in 1977) exploited his contacts with military strongmen, including Manuel Noriega, Panamanian head of secret police, who later achieved notoriety as a dictator as well as a reputed murderer and drug dealer. The author's account of her husband's exploits is at times cavalier and occasionally insensitive (""Hope Somoza was the best looking and best dressed of the president's wives,"" she coos about the Nicaragua dictator's spouse), but she justifies almost everything in the name of the Cold War. (Mar.)