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Patrick, stolen by Dad. I had not known that Dad hadn’t made
up the “John” part of his name. He was the kind of boy who might’ve
easily done such a thing.
    My grandmother and grandfather settled in
Indianapolis shortly after arriving in this country in 1907. Mary
Ann came from County Sligho to join her sister, Agnes and her
husband Mike in Indianapolis. My grandmother spoke only Gaelic when
she arrived at the age of twenty-five. But by the time she died,
sixty years later, she could not remember a single word of her
native tongue.
    My grandfather Tom Kiernan was, technically,
an Englishman, his parents having emigrated to Whitechapel,
England, twenty-five years earlier from County Mayo. Seventy years
later, I had an argument with my Aunt Kate where I tried to
convince her that Grandad Kiernan wasn’t really Irish but an
Englishman. (I was on an anti-Irish kick at the time.) I’ll never
forget her response: “Well, his mother was Irish and his father was
Irish, so I’d say that was a neat trick him turning out
English!”
    Because he had no real prospects in New York
and because he believed he had just met the woman he wanted to
marry, Tom followed Mary Ann within a few months to Indianapolis,
where he became a fireman—an occupation that effectively buffered
his soon-to-be-large Irish family—from the poverty and want of the
coming Depression. They lived in a large house on the west side of
Indianapolis, where their four boys and three girls attended
parochial school.
    Intellectually gifted, my
father had a vision of who he was and where his place was in the
world. From the beginning, he knew that wasn’t Indiana. At
fourteen, he ran away to New York City where he found work as a
photographer’s apprentice and modeled for Boys’ Life .
    A year later, he returned to Indianapolis to
finish school. My grandfather told him he wouldn’t waste any more
private school tuition money on him. My father enrolled at
Washington High School, a public school, skipped his junior year,
and became class president, head of the school newspaper, and
debating society president. He graduated at the top of his
class.
    After he graduated, he
enlisted in order to join his two older brothers in World War II.
Both of them were pilots; Tom was with the 55th Fighter Group,
338th Squadron, and Jim with the 398th Bomb Group,
603 rd Squadron. Except for the fact that my Dad was, briefly, a
part of the 8th Air Force, there is no file, and no record of his
unit.
    On the basis of a standard IQ test, my
father was sent to Officer’s Training in Florida, given the rank of
Lieutenant 2nd Class. He was sent to London to work with British
Intelligence. From this point until he was honorably discharged
from the Army in 1945 there is no detailed information as to what
my father did in the war. When my older brother Tom used the
Freedom of Information Act in 1996 to get what were supposed to be
the military records of my father’s work with British Intelligence
during the war, almost all of the pages were blacked out. We
believe, from piecing together certain known events of his history,
that my father migrated to the OSS, or the CIA after the war. But
he never admitted to it, himself.
    Often, when he’d had a few
drinks too many, my father, who was a brilliant raconteur, would
tell stories about experiences behind enemy lines, always out of
uniform or, worse, wearing an enemy
uniform . He was fluent in French but used
to joke that his German wasn’t good enough to prevent him from
being executed. He was certainly a spy during the war. He hinted at
many escapades, but none fully explained.
    He was a brilliant puzzle-solver, and when
he wasn’t dodging bombs, dating English actresses, or doing
intelligent reconnaissance on every pub in London, he worked at
Bletchley Park. The work done at Bletchley Park (with British
cryptanalyst, Alan Turing,) was primarily code cracking. The
decryption done at Bletchley is generally accepted as being the
reason