Company Town | A Community of Spies in Camden, Maine

By Jon Marcus

The gale of laughter startled jays and sparrows from the woods along a steep road at the hilly inland edge of Camden, Maine.

I had inadvertently provoked this outburst. Riding with a group of local cyclists, I had casually mentioned I was struggling to flush out how this small, idyllic coastal town became—of all things—a retirement destination for the nation’s top spies. My fellow cyclists laughed so hard, I almost managed to catch up to them. 

It was not that I was wrong, one explained, not unkindly, when we reached the top of the climb. It was just that “nobody around here is going to talk to you about that.”

I should have heeded his advice.

Over the course of years, on countless stops in town while visiting relatives who live nearby, I inquired about these enigmatic residents and how they ended up here. I got knowing smiles, and that burst of laughter in the woods, but little else. It was true: Nobody would talk about it.

Here is what I would eventually learn about the spies of Camden: Drawn to the area for various reasons that proved impossible to corroborate, after lives about which there is little in the public record, some indeterminate number of former military and civilian intelligence operatives and occasional diplomats found this Midcoast community a friendly place to spend their sunset years.

Beginning with the man I heard described as Agent Zero, but whose identity I couldn’t conclusively establish, they bought summer homes, then settled year-round, after colorful and itinerant careers. More colleagues followed from the closed and tight-knit fraternity of secret agents, and wove themselves into the fabric of the place. They joined the garden club, the Rotary club, and the Episcopal church. Even the former library director once worked at the CIA, I discovered from a mention buried deep in her biography; she at one point agreed to speak with me, before apparently deciding better of it.

Invisible in life, these spies were often revealed only in death. Their obituaries divulged a pattern: A disproportionate number of them died in Camden. That had been the clue that set me on my seemingly futile quest.

Then came my epiphany. I had it all wrong, I finally realized, after years of fruitless prying.

The real story wasn’t who lived behind the tidy brick and wood colonial facades of Camden, what they’d done before, or how they came to be here.

The real story was about how small towns in New England keep their secrets.

What the former spies had found in Camden was a sense of privacy embedded deep in New England culture. It goes back to the tradition of live and let live, says a former head of the chamber of commerce. “This is a place that people come who want to be left alone.” In a New England town like this, adds the local newspaper editor, “you’re not going to intrude on someone else’s life.” 

Of this, Camden is a prime and indisputable example.

* * * * *

The stiff breeze across the harbor is not enough to ruffle the water at low tide, or the fleet of boats that lie at anchor in the shadow of the soaring Camden Hills. The scene looks like a landscape painting. Tourists stroll the picture-postcard main street, the Colonial Revival–style red-brick public library at its crest.

Camden is consistently ranked among the nation’s most beautiful small towns. What began as a hardscrabble assortment of shipyards, factories, and water-powered mills became a summer destination at the end of the 19th century for people who found Newport and Bar Harbor too ostentatious, but who still had money enough to put up grand vacation “cottages.” They also built the Camden Yacht Club and Megunticook Golf Club, the iconic harbor park and amphitheater, the four-story opera house with carved wood trim and chandeliers, and a toll road to the top of Mount Battie, from which spreads a hypnotic panorama of thick woods pierced by white church steeples against the backdrop of Penobscot Bay.

Neighbors here look out for each other, says Nancy Harmon Jenkins, 87, a noted food and cookbook writer, who grew up in Camden and now lives in an 18th-century yellow wooden house with white brick chimneys near downtown. “People are very private, but on the other hand they are watching all the time,” she says in a conversation on her front porch. When she drove her parents’ car into a ditch at 16, she recounts, a stranger took her in and offered to call her father. “But I haven’t given you my name,” said Jenkins. “I know who you are,” the stranger responded.

The 5,000 or so residents spread across 18 square miles of land continue to protect each other’s privacy. Only the most egregious behavior seeps into the open, such as when the head of a local charity was found to have embezzled several million dollars over more than a decade, or when a wealthy summer resident in 2021 poisoned a thicket of oak trees on an adjacent property owned by the widow of the president of L.L. Bean because they blocked her view. “Every now and then somebody breaks the rules,” says Jenkins.

Among the more dubious chapters in its long history, Camden was the backdrop for the 1957 movie Peyton Place, based on a best-selling book of the same name, which exposed the darkest gossip of a fictional New England town—adultery, illegitimacy, domestic abuse, murder, suicide, even incest. In Peyton Place, “two people talking is a conspiracy, a meeting is an assignation, and getting to know one another is a scandal,” one of the principal characters observes.

The movie starred Hope Lange and Lana Turner, looking unhappy to be playing a teenager’s mother. It reveals how astonishingly little Camden has changed in its appearance in the nearly 70 years since. Neither has the murky sense of mystery just below the surface. Its seamy subplots, the Camden Herald review said when the book came out, were “recognizable because they are universal.”

They still are, says Lynda Clancy, editor of the Penobscot Bay Pilot, which covers the town today. Camden “is more like Peyton Place than it thinks it is,” she says.

Soon it would have a new secret to keep.

* * * * *

The biggest unknown about the spies of Camden is what brought them here, beginning in the 1950s. In answer to that question, I uncovered only speculation.

The most intriguing centers on a shadowy research center set up by a former Army scientist to study extrasensory perception. One of the heirs to the Borden milk fortune, who heard him speak at Harvard, invited the scientist to visit her and her husband in Camden, where they owned a farm. With their even wealthier fellow residents, they set up a lab for him in a 45-room mansion in the neighboring village of Glen Cove. It was called the Round Table Laboratory of Experimental Electrobiology.

Before the operation shut down in 1957, military officers interested in potential Cold War applications of ESP visited Glen Cove to learn more about its work, according to Annie Jacobsen, a national security expert who has written about it. Among them was the Army liaison to the CIA. That exposed them to the charms of the Maine coast, this theory goes, where they returned to vacation in the summers and eventually settled.

There are other suppositions. That intelligence agents knew Maine because they kept safe houses there. That it was comfortably distant from nuclear missile targets.

But the most likely reason that spies retired to Camden is probably the simplest. Unlike its wartime predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS—whose disparate agents included Julia Child, Black future civil rights activist Ralph Bunche, and Jewish Major League Baseball player Moe Berg—the CIA was made up largely of white male Ivy League graduates, often from families with money; even today, more than 60 percent of agency employees are men, and nearly three quarters are white. They knew New England from vacationing or attending summer camps there.

High-level military intelligence men were already summering nearby even when Glen Cove was operating, Jacobsen reports—so many of them, in fact, they crept quietly into popular culture. In the film adaptation of Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October, for example, fictional CIA analyst Jack Ryan chooses to hide a stolen Soviet submarine in the Penobscot River, a beach pebble’s throw from Camden, because he’d grown up and fished there.

“The CIA and the State Department were the domain of WASPs. They went to Yale. They liked to sail. They had an affinity for Maine,” says Matt Storin, a former foreign correspondent and newspaper editor who also retired to Camden, explaining with a shrug the less complicated truth that likely led so many spies here.

The CIA man who covertly recruited those Ivy League graduates also may have had a hand in this. While no one will admit to remembering his name, insiders describe him as an avid sailor from an old Gloucester, Massachusetts, family and credit him with luring some of his confederates to Camden.

Then there was Robert “Bob” Tierney, a West Point grad and Strategic Air Command pilot who joined the CIA and was posted to Laos, Japan, and Singapore before he also ended up in Camden, where he made an unusual decision for a retired spy: to start a bed-and-breakfast inn that welcomed former colleagues.

More fatefully, Tierney helped create an annual foreign affairs conference that filled guest rooms in the dark and gloomy month of February even as it cemented the town as a destination for still more international intelligence experts. He and others “had not only seen the world but had helped to run it,” an official history of what became the Camden Conference notes. “In retirement, they wanted to bring that world to Camden for one weekend a year.”

The conference, which debuted in 1988 in venues ranging from the town library to a local church, has managed to attract a number of marquee guests. Former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft showed up at the first one; so did future Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger and future Defense Secretary William Cohen, then Maine’s senior U.S. senator. In subsequent years came Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Thomas Pickering, and Nicholas Burns, who currently serves as U.S. ambassador to China.

Even the conference’s executive director, Kim Scott, doesn’t know for certain which members of her board are former civilian and military intelligence operatives. But, she says, “you can’t just call these people up and get them to come here unless you have connections.”

Speaking at the Camden Conference one year, former CIA Director John Deutch made waves not by disclosing some national secret, but by quipping, as he looked out at the audience (the event is open to the public): “I see there’s a lot of CIA.” Everyone “started looking around furtively,” remembers Daniel Bookham, the former chamber of commerce director.

So big did the conference grow that it eventually made its home at the Camden Opera House (though many of its founders “would just as soon go back to the library and keep it kind of quiet,” Scott says, smiling). It began to draw more visitors from the ranks of the clandestine services, too.

“Word of mouth was circulating around Langley and around Foggy Bottom that you ought to check out this Penobscot Bay,” one told me, in the wood-paneled study of his Camden home, on the condition that I not disclose his name. “We came up to these conferences two years in a row and we would sit in the audience and my wife would go to the ladies’ room during breaks and meet the other attendees at the conference, who said, ‘You ought to come [and move here].’” Already familiar with Camden from summer visits in his youth, he did.

In part because of its high-level policy focus, the Camden Conference attracted mostly senior intelligence officials. Nancy Jenkins has a journalist friend who mentioned this small town in Maine to a high-ranking CIA official he was interviewing for a documentary about the Vietnam War. “‘Ah,’ said the very high-up gentleman, ‘you know you can tell the status of a CIA man by where he retires to,’” Jenkins says. “‘The low-level guys go to Bethesda, the mid-level to somewhere in Florida, but the really top men retire to Camden.’”

This influx wasn’t in itself a secret. “We used to say there must be a sign down there at the CIA telling them all to come here,” Barbara Dyer, a former member of the select board and official town historian, told me before she died in 2022, at 97. The locals didn’t care where they’d worked. If there was friction, it was over “people from away” trying to change things.

“They would join a committee and they would say, ‘We should change this and change that because that’s the way it was where I came from.’ And that didn’t go over big with the natives,” Dyer said.

Otherwise the natives kept their feelings to themselves, in the New England tradition.

* * * * *

New Englanders were not always so restrained. Puritans informed on newly arrived Baptists and Quakers for working on the Sabbath. Neighbors turned against each other in the hysteria of the witchcraft trials. “If you weren’t the accuser, you could become the accused,” says David Allen Lambert, chief genealogist of the New England Historic Genealogical Society.

All that changed dramatically in the 18th century. Lambert traces the shift to the abolition era, when communities conspired with their silence to protect escapees from slavery. So circumspect are small New England towns today, he says, “I think of them as the perfect places for people in the witness protection program. You can keep a really low profile.”

David Watters cites the “craggy individualism” preached by Protestantism, which he calls “inseparable from the notion of privacy.” Around the Civil War, New Englanders began to answer questions with questions, says Watters, former director of the Center for New England Culture at the University of New Hampshire and coeditor of The Encyclopedia of New England. “How are you?” one might inquire. “Why do you ask?” the other would reply.

“There is a recognition of boundaries,” Watters says. After all, he says, quoting Robert Frost: “Good fences make good neighbors.”

And Camden “is New England writ large,” says Philip Conkling, author of the town history Where the Mountains Meet the Sea. “People go to incredible lengths not to ask directly what you do. They’re no less curious than anybody else. But it’s considered really poor form to say, ‘So, what did you do?’”

Peter Ralston chronicles life in Midcoast Maine as a professional photographer whose gallery is in an 1835 wood-and-granite building overlooking Rockport Harbor. When he was a boy, Ralston’s family lived next to the artist Andrew Wyeth in Pennsylvania; years later, Ralston would stay in a guest house at the Wyeth summer home in Maine. “[Tourists] would stop and ask, ‘Where do the Wyeths live?’ And we, of course, would send them miles in the opposite direction. We have each other’s backs here,” Ralston says. “That’s not to say there isn’t plenty of gossip—very little goes unnoticed, much less unremarked upon. But there are certain quiet community ways that still prevail.”

This can confound newcomers. When Tess Gerritsen moved to Camden more than 30 years ago, after living in California and Hawaii, she thought the reason locals seldom asked her anything about her life was because she was one of only two Asian residents at the time. Then she realized, “No, they’re like that to everybody. It’s Yankee reserve. They know things, but nobody talks about it.”

Gerritsen, the best-selling author behind the Rizzoli & Isles mysteries, learned about the spies around her in a typically roundabout way. In a town where a third of the population is 65 or older, her physician husband asked his many retired patients what they’d done in their careers. “Worked for the government,” they would answer, cryptically. “Doing what?” he’d ask. “I can’t tell you,” they would say.

One night Gerritsen was talking to a neighbor at whose house her son was attending a sleepover. “Oh, you must be one of those retired spies,” she joked. There was a long pause. “Who have you been talking to?” the neighbor asked. Gerritsen still isn’t sure if that was meant to be a joke, too.

Gerritsen’s experience would eventually lead to a novel, The Spy Coast, about a group of retired CIA agents living in a thinly disguised stand-in for Camden called Purity, Maine; a sequel is due out in spring, and a TV adaptation is planned. In the book, “old friends from Virginia” is code for former CIA, a reference to the headquarters of “the company” in Langley. “This village is our DMZ,” one character says. “It’s the reason we live here, to be left alone.”

Since the book came out, people have started to confide in Gerritsen about the spies, she says, sitting at the heavy wooden table in her dining room overlooking Penobscot Bay. “‘My dad was one,’ or, ‘My grandpa was one,’” they’ll whisper, in line at the Bagel Café.

It’s that younger generation asking questions now. Some have realized they don’t know much about their parents’ work lives, either.

Chrisso Rheault’s father, Andre, was a CIA agent—recruited by that Gloucester sailor—and his uncle, Robert “Bob” Rheault, was a Green Beret officer in charge of Special Forces in Southeast Asia in the late 1960s (and who screenwriter John Milius said partly inspired the character of Colonel Kurtz in the Francis Ford Coppola film Apocalypse Now). Both retired here.

“They just didn’t talk about it. Whatever had happened, happened,” Chrisso Rheault says. That was the sentiment among their neighbors, too, says Rheault, who still lives in Camden and helps run the Atlantic Challenge youth rowing and sailing program. “No one talks.”

“You don’t really talk about these things,” echoes Les Fossel, whose late father was in the OSS and then the CIA. His mother probably wasn’t, but wouldn’t have told him either way, he says.

Fossel, who owns a Midcoast-based company that restores old houses, took the extraordinary step of hosting townspeople at the Camden Public Library to see if they could fill in the blanks about his father. Someone joked that the windowless room was a good place to have the conversation, and Fossel had to promise that the video camera recording the session wouldn’t swivel and show any faces.

The session didn’t unearth much more than Fossel already knew—which wasn’t a lot, considering that the file on his father that the government had relinquished to a Freedom of Information Act request was, not surprisingly, extensively redacted.

Piercing those defenses would test the most accomplished spy. And the results might be like something out of Peyton Place, says cultural historian Watters.

“If all the skeletons in the closet rattled at the same time,” he says, “you could probably hear it on the moon.”