A Good Spy Leaves No Trace
is a part ghost story, part secret political history, part call to action, and part family memoir. It is an
investigation of loss, love, oil, and the alternatives, a story both personal and political. At its heart, Anne Tazewell’s work is a multigenerational account of her family. A Good Spy Leaves No Trace tackles deep political issues, including sustainable living, greed, and the temptation to gain power.
Anne Tazewell’s memoir combines history with present-day events to accentuate the influence of the past in the present and highlight the guilt that comes with unresolved communication and childhood trauma. The book beautifully narrates the incidents of Anne’s life, revealing raw emotions, honest truths, and complex dilemmas. The intriguing style of storytelling takes the reader along an emotional journey, enabling them to reminisce about their own childhood and relationships.
A Good Spy Leaves No Trace pays homage to James M Eichelberger, a father, writer,
philosopher, and CIA agent. The story highlights the conflicting emotions that Anne had about her father while showcasing her journey of finding forgiveness. In its essence, A Good Spy Leaves No Trace is a compelling account of the use of a family’s alchemical power to find forgiveness and heal.
Author
Anne E Tazewell is award-winning advocate for the environment. For over three decades she has championed alternative fuels, energy efficiency and waste reduction initiatives. For the past seventeen years she has served as a clean energy expert at NC State University where she has received grants totaling over fifteen million dollars for her work. Previous to this she has been a vegetarian restaurant owner in Norfolk, VA and chef and textile artist in Key West, FL. Anne holds an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction from Goucher College and lives in Carrboro, North Carolina.
Praise
Anne Tazewell has written an evocative memoir about her quest to unmask the life of her elusive father, a CIA officer who operated in the Middle East in the 1950s and 60s. It is an important spy story, charmingly told, and along the way readers will bump into a colorful cast of spooks, including Miles Copeland, Kim Philby and Kermit and Archie Roosevelt. A captivating story.
~Kai Bird is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian, Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography and the author of The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate—and most recently The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter
A Good Spy entwines a passionate quest to uncover her father’s secret, real life Clancy-esque thriller life with an untold history of events in the Middle East that shaped the world we live in today. Anne Tazewell captures the intimate, the power, the personal pain and the sheer force of world events that make this true life saga one of the most critical foreign policy reads in decades.
In other words – damn, it’s great.
~Josh Tickell, Author and Film Director, including Kiss The Ground – How the Food You Eat Can Reverse Climate Change, Heal Your Body & Ultimately Save Our World
One of the joys of being a professor is learning the unique lives of your students. My former student, Anne Tazewell exceeds all of them, and her riveting story provides wisdom and inspiration for us all. Underlying her tumultuous world was a passion for nature and finding solutions to clean energy. A must read!
~Meg Lowman, Conservation Biologist and author of The Arbornaut (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux) 2021
Accolades
“Mission Impossible meets Eat, Pray, Love. This is a riveting, powerfully written espionage thriller with a deeply personal journey into the shadowlands of the human heart. Tazewell masterfully weaves together a search for her father’s spy secrets with her own buried truths. It is a stunning, revelatory read.”
~Will Harlan, author of the New York Times bestselling biography Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America
A Good Spy tells a fascinating story of the author’s journey to confront the facts around her mysterious CIA agent father — and at the same time shed light on her own shadow. A dedicated environmental, anti-war, anti-fossil fuels activist daughter of a military-industrial-complex, oil company mercenary soldier, she weaves a tale that is a microcosm for the dualities that confront our world today.”
~John Perkins, New York Time Best Selling Author of The New Confessions Of An Economic Hit Man.
In this captivating and moving memoir, a CIA daughter goes in search of the truth about her spy father, a brilliant but troubled man present at the creation of modern U.S.-Middle East relations.
~ Hugh Wilford, author of America’s Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East
A haunting story of a daughter searching for her lost father. An epic of international intrigue and shadowy Cold War geopolitics. The origin story for a champion of a new world of growth and alternative energy. A Good Spy Leaves No Trace is all of these books and more. Anne Tazewell turns this deeply personal story into a door that unlocks for us a little-known but important room in our shared history.
~David Taylor, author of Cork Wars: Intrigue and Industry in World War II
“This is a wonderful book for anyone who yearns to reconnect with their own past!”
~ Gerald Davis, author of Algerian Diary: Frank Kearns and the ‘Impossible’ Assignment for CBS News and producer, writer and director of the Emmy-winning documentary for PBS, “Frank Kearns: American Correspondent.”
My father was a man cloaked in mystery, a man of contradiction. James M Eichelberger was a writer, philosopher, decorated World War II intelligence officer, CIA agent, and oil industry consultant who died a penniless alcoholic. After he left our family in Beirut, Lebanon when I was six years old, I only saw my father seven times before his death in 1989.
I am a back-packing, nature loving world traveler who discovered my professional passion after parenting three children and going to college in my mid-forties. My calling to reduce the use of oil to mitigate the worst of what is to come with climate change is what brought my father back into my life decades after his death. A chance radio interview began a quest to understand his life and in turn better understand my own.
Oil became a river of connection, though my father and I stood on opposite banks of it.