During the fall semester of 1970, I was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. It had been just two years since the assassinations of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and since the violent confrontation between antiwar protesters and Chicago police at the Democratic National Convention. Appealing to his “silent majority,” Richard Nixon had won the election against Hubert Humphrey.

In Philadelphia that September black radicals had organized the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention. Convinced that the document drawn up in 1787 had been designed to oppress African-Americans and other minorities, they planned to draft a new social contract proclaiming the rights of people of all races and classes. The highlight of the conference was an all-day meeting on Saturday, September 5, at Temple University’s gymnasium. Like many other twenty-somethings at the gathering, I doubted the event would lead to anything meaningful, but I was reluctant to miss any excitement.

I arrived early at the gym but stood in line for hours waiting to be admitted. Thousands had turned out for the affair, and the crowd outside began to grow impatient. As we drew closer to the door, we discovered that Black Panthers wearing combat fatigues and berets were frisking everybody for weapons. No one really liked this idea, but most of us accepted the nearparanoia of the times among radical whites and African-Americans alike. Not only were organizers fearful of right-wingers, such as the American Nazi party and the Ku Klux Klan, but they were just as wary of assassination attempts by the CIA or the FBI. Doubtless the Panthers would have preferred to restrict the conference to a blacks-only crowd, but Temple’s administration had granted permission to use its facility with the proviso that the conference be open to the public.

After searching us, the Black Panthers led us in groups to bleacher seats in the upper tiers of the gymnasium. Over the sound system came a steady stream of acid rock and Motown interspersed with recorded diatribes on political repression, the police state, Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo, fascism, and the like. As we waited for the first speaker to arrive, I noticed a lone figure leaning against one of the building’s massive concrete columns. His arms were folded, his expression was detached, and his head was covered in a mane of electrostatic curls. To me and many other white students, he was instantly recognizable as Abbie Hoffman. But most of the African-Americans who filed past ignored him. He was, after all, not a particularly imposing figure, being of slender build and average height. Seeing him in person for the first time, I found it hard to believe that this was the same man who had stood trial in Judge Julius Hoffman’s courtroom only a year earlier, one of the celebrated Chicago Seven.

At a similar gathering of antiwar firebrands, Hoffman would have been treated as a founding father. However, to most blacks in the audience that day, he was just another white boy. Although he had spoken out many times in support of groups such as the Panthers, his concerns and methods were foreign to most urban blacks.

Still, if he was not well known, he was not unknown either. After several minutes a young man sitting next to me got up from his seat and approached Hoffman, exclaiming, “Hey, my man, how ya doin’?”

Hoffman turned and squinted. He obviously didn’t know this fellow. The young man held out his hands, palms upward, and Hoffman, quickly recovering, slapped them. The gesture, the universal greeting of African-American youths at the time, was reciprocated.

“Jerry, baby, you talkin’ today too?” the young man asked. He had mistaken Hoffman for Jerry Rubin, Hoffman’s kindred spirit in the antiwar movement.

The Yippie icon started to correct his inquisitor, but by then the young man had signaled to a friend nearby. Soon three or four blacks were crowded around Hoffman, and I saw him smile awkwardly as a pen was pressed into his hands. Hoffman, who was easily a dozen years older than his admirers, graciously autographed their conference programs. The young man returned triumphantly to his seat next to me.

Intrigued, I asked him if I could see his program. On it Hoffman had written: “Everything I ever needed to know I learned from Abbie Hoffman. Peace, Jerry Rubin.”

—Dennis E. Gale is the Henry D. Epstein Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at Florida Atlantic University.

The first thing you must understand in the story of how I was recruited to spy for Albania is that when I was eight years old, I never foresaw a time when I might be embarrassed to admit that I used to read Dennis the Menace comic books. But the truth is that before I discovered Superman or Batman, let alone Hemingway or Shakespeare, I loved reading about a kid my age who got away with things I never could.

The second thing you must understand about the story is where I lived at that time in the early sixties. Our house was near Peru, Indiana, on Capehart Street on Bunker Hill Air Force Base, now renamed Grissom Air Reserve Base after Indiana’s native astronaut, Gus Grissom. Bunker Hill was an important base for the Strategic Air Command, the nuclear weapons branch of the U.S. Air Force.

Life on a SAC base was, for our fathers, a constant state of readiness to bomb the Soviet Union, for all of us made the assumption that the Russians would drop a hydrogen bomb or a missile on us at any time. For most people Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece Dr. Strangelove is a dark comedy; for me it is a home movie of my childhood. My classmates and I knew no other life, and it seemed perfectly normal at the time.

Bunker Hill was special in many ways. Peru was the unlikely but historic winter quarters for a number of circuses. Unlike military families, circus families put down roots in the area. Sometimes on the edge of a cornfield a family would set up a trapeze and teach their children the act while passersby watched the free show. Just outside the base, past the security fence and guarded gate, was a barn with a painted sign by the highway: FREE ELEPHANT MANURE.

Idyllic as it was, I had visions of the wider world. The inside cover of the Dennis the Menace comic book ran a list of readers looking for pen pals. For some reason I thought I would like a pen pal in Hawaii and sent a request to the magazine. After a time I received a letter from Dennis, promptly pasted in a scrapbook, telling me that he would run my listing. When the issue finally arrived in the mail, I was thrilled to see my name in print even though Bailey was misspelled as Badey.

Soon the letters started arriving, some from Hawaii but the majority from other parts of the country, including one from a woman in her twenties who assumed I must be a young airman on the base. I wish I could say that I made lifelong friends through the mail, but before long I lost interest in the project.

One day while I was at school another letter arrived for Greg Badey of Bunker Hill Air Force Base. This letter, I was told years later, was strangelooking, with foreign stamps and an Albanian postmark. Albania was at that point in the Cold War the most radical Communist state in Europe, having broken away from the U.S.S.R. to follow the Maoist line of Red China. The envelope alarmed my mother so much she opened it. Inside was a letter asking me if I would be the writer’s pen pal. He asked me to send him photographs of my home, my pets, my school, and, if I wouldn’t mind, photos of the airplanes on the flight line and the buildings around the base. My parents immediately took the letter to the Air Police, who confiscated it. My parents never heard any more about it, but I’m sure that somewhere in the bowels of the Pentagon or the FBI there is a classified file on the Dennis the Menace spy connection recorded for history.

In time we were transferred to another base. My father retired after twenty-three years of active service and lived to see the end of the Cold War. Our former enemies are now friends or at least friendlier rivals, and Albania threw off its shackles and is building a democratic state. Historians are now gaining access to the once-secret files of the Cold War and finding the answers to many mysteries. One mystery, however, may never be answered: What kind of spy reads Dennis the Menace comic books?

—Greg Bailey, an attorney in St. Louis, is a correspondent for The Economist and a freelance writer.