The Reluctant Spy Read Online Free

the MN
Saturnia;
he and my grandmother arrived at Ellis Island in February 1931 and almost immediately made their way to Canonsburg, where they remained for two years before moving to Farrell, another Pennsylvania milltown. It was there in 1934, on the kitchen table of a rented house, that my father came into the world—the first Kiriakou boy born in the United States.
    My grandmother Katina was an educated woman, fluent in three languages, who taught Greek and Italian for a while during the Great Depression. But for most of her life, she was a homemaker while my grandfather labored in the mill; he retired in 1965, taking over his sister-in-law’s butcher shop for the rest of his working years. By that time, in the late 1960s, my own father had married, my kid brother and I had been born, and our family had moved to 307 East Fairfield Avenue in New Castle, a town about twenty miles from Farrell. That’s where my two younger siblings, Emanuel and Tina, and I grew up.
    New Castle, like many towns in western Pennsylvania, fell on hard times when the American steel industry got whacked by foreign competition, but in those days it was a thriving community of fifty thousand or so. In our household, education was everything. My dad, Chris Kiriakou, was a teacher and a musician with multiple degrees who eventually became an elementary school principal. He encouraged my mother, Stella, to further her education as soon as their youngest, Tina, was in kindergarten. She did, starting college when I was in fifth grade and graduating when I was a high school freshman; afterward, she got a second degree and taught school for two decades.
    Both my grandfathers had been members of the United Steel-workers, and their children were union people, too—my dad in the American Federation of Musicians, my mom in the American Federation of Teachers. Kiriakou households were solidly Democratic: More than two decades after Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s death, my paternal grandfather still kept a picture of FDR on top of his TV.
    Because of their union backgrounds, the running conversation in the homes of my grandparents had less to do with things Greek than it did with the Depression-era politics that so profoundly influenced them. My paternal grandfather would recall attending a rally for Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants who had been tried andexecuted for murder—wrongly in the view of many—in the 1920s. I was curious about these and other larger-than-life characters of his youth, and I spent time in the local library as a young teenager doing my “independent” research on their exploits.
    What I discovered in the process became a lifelong passion. These men and their stories had been immortalized in song, part of a canon of folk and protest music that preceded my grandfather’s arrival in America and now reaches into the twenty-first century. Greek music was omnipresent in my life, but it was the songs and ballads of people such as Woody Guthrie, honoring Sacco and Vanzetti in recordings from the mid-1940s, that captivated me with messages of revealed injustice. The television era was coming of age when I was a kid, but I was hooked on the sounds of social justice—music created by people who, in many cases, were my grandfather’s chronological contemporaries. Later, when I was in college, the great Pete Seeger and a host of other folk-music icons came into my life, singing about the Big Muddy, the Swedish immigrant labor organizer Joe Hill, and more.
    My grandfather also got me hooked on something else when he gave me a transistor radio. I was only eight years old, but my addiction to a technology that predated the television age by three decades began one night when I heard WGN in Chicago and thought, “Wow, if I can get a station that far away with this little radio, what can I get with a good radio?”
    My father answered that question when he bought me a shortwave radio and helped