Death of my oldest friend
My friend Ken Ahearn died in August and the local newspaper has finally run his obit. Here it is. He was 97.
As my parents’ generation would have said, Ken was a real character. He had the warm and casually funny ways of an adored uncle — which no doubt came in handy as a spy for the Central Intelligence Agency, which Ken had been earlier in life. In that capacity, he was stationed in Vienna, Austria in the 1950s and 60s, when he focused on recruitment: trying to get well-placed Soviet agents to switch sides at the same time as the Soviets tried to get their American equivalents to do the same. He told one story of scanning a sports stadium with binoculars to see who he could recruit until coming across a Russian all the way across him doing the same to our side with binoculars and looking directly at Ken.
Ken had other great stories from his time in the CIA, most of which could have been scenes from movies starring Don Knotts, but here’s the one he retold the most, to charming effect. Over lunch, he and a fellow agent made an offer to a Soviet officer, but made the mistake of putting it into writing. The Soviet grabbed up the printed sheet, which detailed a nice payment, security, U.S. residency and other benefits, and ran off with it, with Ken and his colleague in hot pursuit. They couldn’t catch him, and then were horrified to see their offer put on the front page of Pravda and circulated around Vienna — which then led them to drive around and pick up every copy they could find and trash it, but clearly they couldn’t get them all. But here’s the twist: The offer turned out to be so generous that now all sorts of Russians started showing up on Ken’s doorway looking to switch sides — making his job far easier.
I met Ken in 2006 when a handful of us, fed up with the predations of Bush/Cheney, set about founding a local Democratic Club; it wasn’t much, but it was doing something. Ken was in that first meeting, and became our founding Treasurer (not President, as the obit states). I met him in that first roundup of interested parties and, soon thereafter, his beautiful and charming wife Gloria, who had worked for the state department. (As Ken would note, the two of them worked both ends of undeclared combat: espionage and diplomacy.) Ken was a liberal from a time when probably most of the U.S. government was liberal (and: effective). We got to be very close, and especially after Gloria died unexpectedly, I started picking up Ken and taking him around to movies and restaurants and over to my house to play games with my family and our friends. Ken was always a hit: a funny older guy who told great stories. Everyone loved him, from the adults to the kids to the dogs. New friends would come to my house and meet Ken and inevitably spend hours talking with him.
One year, I threw a Halloween costume party and before the guests started to arrive, I took the dogs for a walk. Anyone with dogs knows that it’s good to take them to stretch their legs before company comes. As I approached the house, through the open curtains I saw a shadowy figure wearing dark glasses, a hat, and a trench coat and looking very shady indeed sitting inside at my kitchen table with my kids. All of the protective hairs on my neck jumped to attention and I ran to the door. It was Ken, of course, who had come to the party as a stereotyped secret agent.
I would say I’ll miss Ken, and I do, but I’ve already been missing him. About two years ago, his children had a farewell party of sorts for him on his birthday because they were concerned that he may have been slipping a bit into forgetfulness. My friends and I who attended didn’t see any of that, and I would occasionally call and leave a phone message and would always send a card on his birthday. Every time I’d have people over, I’d think about Ken and miss him being there.
Five years ago, when Ken was a mere 92 and still driving and seeming very spry indeed, I took him to lunch for his birthday and asked him about death. He told me, “The body dies, but ‘you’ just move over.” (Which is what I believe as well.) And then I asked him what kept him seeming so young. He said, “What keeps me young is that I’m always curious, and I always wonder.”
Ageless wisdom indeed.