# When the file starts telling your story ## A reading guide to Katherine Verdery's *My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File* Verdery went to socialist Romania to study village life. In 2008 she received 2,781 pages of Securitate reports that recast her as a spy. *My Life as a Spy* follows what happens when a researcher reads that invented self against her own field notes, friendships, and memory. The book's central answer is simple to state and difficult to live with: surveillance collected facts, then turned them into a person. That person was a changing "spy" assembled from movements, notes, contacts, jokes, letters, and rumours. Verdery uses the dossier to examine the regime, then applies the same attention to the people who made it and to the relationships it entered. ## Before the file In 1973, Katherine Verdery arrived in Romania as a twenty-five-year-old doctoral student of anthropology. She wanted to study village life in Transylvania. A wrong turn on a motorbike near a restricted military area set an early surveillance trail in motion. The book then moves through three investigations: her fieldwork, the Securitate's research on that fieldwork, and her return to the file decades later. Keep those time scales together and the book comes into focus: each record says something about its subject, its maker, and the institution that preserves it. ## The double The Securitate gave Verdery different names for different suspicions. "Folclorista" was the folklorist treated as a military spy in 1973-74. "Vera" was the woman watched in Cluj for an alleged connection to the Hungarian diaspora in the United States. "Vanessa" was the target tracked from Baltimore for contact with Romanian dissidents. A dossier's confidence is not the same as its accuracy. A report can become operationally powerful while remaining wrong about the person it describes. Once an institution gives that description a name, a file number, and a chain of signatures, the description gains a life of its own. The publisher's summary names the file's catalogue of selves: a spy, a CIA agent, a Hungarian agitator, a friend of dissidents — finally, an enemy of Romania. Those labels show how suspicion gathered force by moving her among familiar political types. ## Three readings Verdery makes the book's method visible through typography. The past fieldworker, the Securitate file, and the present author share the page as three voices, then disagree about what the same event means. The book's note on fonts marks present narrative, field notes and letters, and Securitate reports as distinct materials. That small design decision asks the reader to compare their authority instead of flattening them into one seamless account. - Field notes show an anthropologist improvising, learning how to move through a new social world, and building friendships that make research possible. - The file extracts movements, hotel absences, correspondence, conversations, and friendships from their setting, treating ethnographic practices as signs of concealed purpose. - The return to the archive reorganizes a chaotic file, compares it with Verdery's records, and interviews people who appear inside it. ## The file's time The prologue describes 40 months of research in four places between July 1973 and November 1988. The wider story includes repeated visits, later conversations, and the return to the archive. The Securitate file was assembled in fragments and stored out of order. The chronology below is Verdery's reconstruction. - July 1973: Verdery arrives in Romania to begin doctoral fieldwork. - September 1973: a motorbike trip enters an area marked "Entry prohibited to foreigners." A military report carries the incident into the Securitate system. - March 1974: the official surveillance file opens. - 1984-1986: "Vera" in Cluj is associated in the file with the Hungarian diaspora. - 1987-1988: "Vanessa" is watched from Baltimore for contact with Romanian dissidents. - 2007-2010: Verdery petitions for the file, receives it, and reads it closely. - After 2008: she talks with informers, friends, CNSAS colleagues, and former officers. The book's chronology extends through conversations recorded up to 2016. Eleven volumes and documents that sometimes run backward in time do not add up to a complete biography. The archive is a surviving selection shaped by officers, supervisors, and later archival decisions. ## The human network From 1973 to 1988, Verdery identifies at least seventy people who supplied information in the places covered by the book. Only twelve were women. The group included casual contacts, hotel receptionists, colleagues, friends, and intimates. Some wrote once. Some reported repeatedly. Some were recruited under pressure. That range creates the book's hardest moral problem. "Informer" is an archival category, yet the people inside it occupied very different situations. Verdery uses those differences to ask how a system can turn ordinary sociality into an instrument. The portraits of informers are where the dossier's machinery becomes social. A report is never only a report: it records a relationship, a hope, a fear, or a bargain between people who may have believed they were managing an ordinary situation. ## The ethical turn Verdery is both the target in the file and the person deciding what the public gets to know from it. She keeps some identities masked, creates new pseudonyms for people who agree to talk, and usually leaves distortions in the file in place so that the reader can see the record and her response separately. Her anger, embarrassment, guilt, attachment, and confusion are part of the evidence, then objects of analysis. The book asks what ethnography can learn from that tension without pretending the researcher has escaped it. ## What carries forward The useful contemporary lesson is a mechanism. When an institution treats ordinary contact as data, it can change the meaning of a friendship before the people inside that friendship know they are being watched. A record can outlast the moment that produced it, then reorganize how a person understands the past. Digital platforms, intelligence services, and the Securitate do not form one interchangeable system. The comparison is an invitation to ask who can collect your traces, who can interpret them, and what happens when their interpretation becomes the official version of you. ## Sources - [Duke University Press book page](https://www.dukeupress.edu/my-life-as-a-spy) - [Duke University Press author Q&A](https://dukeupress.wordpress.com/2018/05/04/qa-with-katherine-verdery-author-of-my-life-as-a-spy/) - [EuropeNow interview with Katherine Verdery](https://www.europenowjournal.org/2018/10/01/becoming-the-object-of-inquiry-in-ceausescus-romania-an-interview-with-katherine-verdery/) - [PoLAR interview on the anthropology of surveillance](https://polarjournal.org/2024/01/13/the-anthropology-of-surveillance-an-interview-with-katherine-verdery/) - [Stephen Norris, *Anthropology of East Europe Review*](https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/aeer/article/download/27307/32660) - [Romanian legal portal, CNSAS regulation](https://legislatie.just.ro/Public/DetaliiDocument/91490) - [German Federal Archives reader on CNSAS](https://www.bundesarchiv.de/assets/bundesarchiv/en/Downloads/Network-Reader-engl.pdf) The book's documents, memories, and later conversations are read together here, with the file's categories kept distinct from the life they claim to describe.