My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File

Different people can view the same actions in varying ways depending on their personal experience and expectations. In this deeply personal analysis, Dr. Verdery evaluates the motivations of various players, including herself, after reading her secret files from the former Romanian police. It is a thoughtfully engaging read.

I learned from this book that a substantial literature of post-surveillance memoirs exists. I haven't read them, so perhaps my enthusiasm for this book is tainted by not having anything to compare it to. But I really enjoyed the book, and recommend it.My Life as a Spy is an ethnographic memoir by an anthropologist, well known for her research in Romania while it was part of the Soviet bloc, in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 2000s she received her 2000+-page secret police file, which showed how extensively she had been surveilled during that time, and how many of her friends and acquaintances had been compelled to spy on her.The importance of this book lies not in the revelations the dossier contains --- interesting though they are-- but in the author's attempts to make sense of it all. Verdery brings an open and clear-eyed seriousness to the task. Although not a page-turner, the book is highly readable with only a few traces of academic jargon.She devotes one long chapter to each of the two decades (the 70s and 80s) she conducted fieldwork in Romania, reading the secret file against her own fieldnotes, her letters home, and her research at the time. Then, she devotes a long chapter to the people who informed on her. She meets with friends who informed on her and attempts to understand what their experience was. She even tracks down the state security officers who recruited the informants and kept an eye on her. (She procured her FBI file, too.) Finally, she briefly ruminates on surveillance in Romania in general, and in such a way that will help us think about surveillance in general, esp. our own ubiquitous surveillance today via the Internet and mobile telephony.There are no good guys and bad guys here, only a society that was profoundly structured by surveillance. It would be foolish of us to think that "old economy" surveillance is no longer relevant. There is much to learn from this book, even if you have no prior knowledge or, or academic interest in, Romania or the former Soviet Union. This is because the author skillfully and diligently carries you along on her own personal quest to understand herself, the people around her, and the political regime that had so many people spying on each other. It will open your mind.I hope that the author will elsewhere reflect on the knowledge she produced -- i.e., the scholarship she published -- through the lens of the surveillance culture in Romania. Did it make a difference to the questions she asked and the answers she found?

The author goes into considerable detail discussing and analyzing her experiences with Romania’s security services during her periods of academic research there in the 1970s and 1980s. Here assessment is greatly aided by her state security file, which she has access to after the fall of the Communist dictatorship that existed during her field work.Although she was simply doing research projects, the state security system believed her to be a spy and went to great lengths to spy on her – using over 80 informants as well as electronic surveillance (a hidden video camera in her room, tapped phone lines, etc). She was even spied on in the U.S. after she returned home from one of her visits. Her security file included over 2,000 pages.Her book weaves together her present day reflections and excerpts form her state case file, her letters home during her research visits, and her field notes. She includes interviews done in more recent years with some of the government’s informers (some of whom she had had close relationships with when working in their country) as well as with a couple of the members of the security forces that handled her case.With uncommon honesty and insight, and the gift of hindsight, she shares the naivety and insecurities of her younger self. She also shares her various emotions and thoughts related to discovering (1) the great lengths to which the authorities went to investigate her, and (2) the fact that close friends reported her every move to security officers.Her book offers a frightening look at life in a police state during the cold war, when anyone could be informing on anyone else, and when to be suspected of espionage meant all your friends and associates became suspect also and thus were put in danger. It also shows how security officials can find “evidence” of wrong doing by having a bias that leads them to misinterpret what they see.In her concluding sentence in the Epilogue, she writes, “…I hope to have illuminated something not only of how Romanian socialism worked but of the new forms of statecraft, promising greater security through ever-heightened surveillance, that are developing worldwide.” This is, as far as I could tell, the only reference to surveillance outside of Romania and I would have liked her to share a little more about this more global perspective.It is hard to rate this book. It is scholarly but also readable. I give it four stars instead of five because for the general reader, like myself, her thoroughness makes the book a bit tedious. I would have liked more summaries of things and less material to read through.

I am from Romania and this is a very true account of those times. Thank you so much for writing this book!

Rivalling Garton Ash's My File this will become a classic of the genre and of auto-ethnography. Beautifully written too... a mini masterpiece

Excellent book with fascinating and interesting insights into the operation of the Romanian security services in the communist era. As someone who worked there in the 1990s, I found it useful to understand what had gone before..