Читать книгу Exceptional Circumstances - James Bartleman - Страница 4

In quiet moments — and I have many of those now at my retirement home in sleepy Penetang — I often think back to my tumultuous beginnings as a junior diplomat more than three decades ago. I ask myself whatever possessed me to go from being an idealistic twenty-three-year-old hoping to make the world a better place to becoming an amateurish secret agent in war against international terror — and later on, an even more hapless spy subcontracted out by my superiors in the Department of Foreign Affairs to work for the CIA. I suppose I went wrong in part because I was young, naïve, and impressionable, and had little experience of the world outside small-town Ontario. But I also thought I had something to prove — wanting to demonstrate that a Métis in the 1960s, when my people were looked down upon as outsiders, could be just as good as anyone else in Canadian society in anything we set out to do. I did nothing illegal, and my accomplishments — if that is what they could be called — led to praise and early promotion. This book, more a confession than a memoir, is my attempt to come to terms with my reckless behaviour in those early years.

Luc Cadotte,

Penetang, June 2002