Secret Agent My Father and Me

Abstract

This manuscript is an investigative memoir about my father James M Eichelberger, a CIA agent in Cairo and Beirut in the 1950’s and 60s, a Middle East oil consultant, a WWII spy for the French Resistance and a man who died penniless, a man I barely knew. I am a married mother of three, concerned about our environment, who has a career promoting alternative transportation fuels. In 2003 I first search the internet for my father. The undercover political landscape of WWII and the early days of Middle East oil emerges through personal correspondence, books my father is mentioned in, archives, newspapers and meetings, as does the deceit he engaged in through his personal life. Understanding the social political history of these times helps me reconcile the pain of his abandonment.