Carol F. Cini of Southport has written about his father's work in the CIA.

Like a number of American children during the Cold War, Carol F. Cini spent a lot of time abroad as his father served his country. Born in Paris (the F. stands for "Francois"), the younger Cini spent time as a boy in Paris, the Netherlands, Saigon and Honduras.

But he wasn't an Army brat. Cini's father, Walter T. Cini, was a veteran officer with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

"Dad was very secretive about his work," said Cini from his home near Southport. It took the son two years of combing records and family letters to reproduce his father's story -- a story he tells in "The Spy and His CIA Brat" (CreateSpace, $14.95 paperback). The self-published volume is available through Amazon.com.

The son of an Italian immigrant grocer, Cini avoided the family business to study abroad, in Italy, Spain and at the Sorbonne in Paris. With his gift for languages, he was quickly picked up by the Army's Military Intelligence Service, at first in a special unit interrogating German prisoners of war. He then moved into the OSS, the CIA's wartime predecessor, and in 1947 to the CIA itself.

A cultured man, the elder Cini naturally gravitated to intellectual and artistic circles. (After his retirement from the agency, he spent 10 years as deputy director of the American Academy in Rome, a non-profit that supports American artists, architects and scholars studying and working in Italy.)

His wife, Stephane, was French, which earned Carol Cini dual French-American citizenship. (This caused problems as a teenager, when he was suddenly called up for the French army draft.)

One of Walter Cini's most remarkable achievements came in 1958. While stationed in The Hague, he worked with a Dutch publisher to arrange the publishing of the first Russian language edition of Boris Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago."

Originally published in Italian in 1957, "Zhivago" was officially banned in the Soviet Union. (Soviet officials later pressured Pasternak to decline the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature.)

CIA officials determined that Pasternak's message of individual conscience would strike a blow against Soviet propaganda, provided for a quick press run. Cini and other officers then quietly arranged for the books to be passed out at the Vatican pavilion at the Brussels world's fair.

Before long, the National Review Bulletin reported, "In Moscow, these books were passed from hand to hand as avidly as a copy of 'Fanny Hill' in a college dormitory.”

Carol Cini said he never knew of the incident until he was contacted by Washington Post reporter Peter Finn.

Being a CIA brat wasn't easy, Cini said. "We didn't get a lot of the amenities the military kids did -- no bowling allies." Instead of living on base, they lived among the locals. If trouble happened, "we were on our own," Cini said. (Once, in an evacuation, he had to ride the train to Florence by himself.)

There were other shocks. Carol Cini happened to be on the scene in Saigon on June 11, 1963, when a Buddhist monk, Thích Quảng Đức, burned himself alive to protest the South Vietnamese regime. "I could smell the flesh burning, and I was out of there," he said. "It was awful."

After 32 years with the U.S. Government Printing Office, Carol Cini and his wife retired to the St. James community. He now volunteers part-time with the Brunswick County sheriff's department.

Reporter Ben Steelman can be reached at 910-343-2208 or Ben.Steelman@StarNewsOnline.com.

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