Crossing into the U.S. is like being in one of those old Graham Greene novels where anxiety is in the air and saying the right thing to customs officials is the prudent thing to do. I made sure that my reading material, packed in my luggage, was innocuous. Maybe, I should take something by Virginia Woolf I told a friend. “Yeah, but avoid To the Lighthouse, if I were you,” she warned, thinking perhaps that it might be mistaken for a primer for would-be snipers.

Upon landing at Ronald Reagan Airport in D.C. late in the afternoon, March 25, the air was fresh and balmy, a good change from the persistent Toronto cold. The first face I spotted in the crowd happened to be Brian Stewart’s (from CBC’s The National) running to catch his flight. We also heard David Frum paged as we left the American capital the following Tuesday. Makes a Canadian feel at home.

War-time Washington is a beautiful, surreal city, with people going about their business and the odd out-of-towner wandering around with maps trying to figure out where a museum is located. The cherry blossoms were not yet in bloom and the walking-tour season had not yet begun when my wife and I arrived. Entering the comfy coffee house haven of Dupont Circle, I found a wonderful store (Kramerbooks) and discovered the kind of critical tomes about U.S. policy in Iraq and elsewhere that I was afraid to take with me past U.S. border security.

The sense of a country on edge returned, however, with police cars careening down downtown streets, helicopters hovering just blocks from the White House and the name of G. Gordon Liddy, former Watergate burglar turned radio-talk-show host, plastered on bus shelters everywhere. Liddy, a right-wing tough guy, rules the U.S. pro-war airwaves. (Recently, on his Website, Liddy instructed his listeners on how to deal with peace activists: “In the middle of their remarks, without any warning, punch them in the nose.” Punches are to be repeated until “the idiot realizes how stupid of an argument [he or she is] making.”

Gliding past the FBI headquarters, the trolley driver shouted that it was designed in “neo-Brutalist style.” Further along in the citywide tour, we ventured uphill into historical and somewhat kitschy Georgetown, where the power elite resides. We whisked past an attractive red brick house on a busy street where Henry Kissinger had lived. (Is this where the plot to overthrow the democratically elected Allende in Chile was hatched? I wondered.) After that, we saw from a distance a white house perched near the slope of land in a leafier neighbourhood Vice-President Dick Cheney calls home. (According to a friend of mine in Washington, a nicer looking place than where President Bush lives).

Later, we embarked on an exploration of the main tourist sites including the International Spy Museum. Motto: “All is not what it seems.” An enthusiastic bunch had already lined up outside, ready to be recruited for romance and adventure overseas, although a security guard told us afterward that attendance had actually dropped recently. We managed to get in and view fascinating aspects of the cloak and dagger trade — including the revelation during the Second World War that the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, had not taken seriously a warning that the Japanese were planning to bomb Pearl Harbour because he had distrusted the source. But Old Paranoid’s direction of a surveillance operation against Martin Luther King and other sixties dissidents did not merit inclusion among the exhibits. Nor was the failure of U.S. intelligence agencies to uncover the plans for the 9/11 attacks before they happened.

I shared my thoughts with that friend of mine, who provided the unsettling revelation that visitors are regularly filmed by a secret camera throughout their tour of the Spy Museum.

One evening our companion took us in a car for his own tour of the city. We eventually found ourselves skulking at night amidst a collection of grey, unimpressive buildings that make up the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Formerly a reporter who had covered their activities in developing countries, he noted that these institutions, represent Washington’s second largest employer after the U.S. federal government. He also noted that the World Bank, which makes life and death decisions about impoverished economies, has invested considerable sums to make the interior luxurious, including the use of gold leaf in the executive boardroom and the top brass’s private dining room. (At least, that was the case when my friend toured the premises a few years ago for an article. A World Bank spokesperson this week denied that there is gold leaf in the boardroom.)

On the last day of my trip, I saw another friend, a Washington writer for an alternative news wire. The BBC had been in to hear his views on the Bush administration. He is currently co-authoring a book on the neo-conservatives who helped ramp up Cold-War tensions and are now leading the war in Iraq. Distressed at the mounting deaths at home and abroad, he is nonetheless hopeful that this powerful group might finally be challenged. He is the most optimistic person I have met during my stay in the U.S. capital. “The war is going badly them,” he says.

Paul Weinberg

Paul Weinberg

Paul Weinberg is a freelance writer as well as author and editor, based in Hamilton, ON.