WINCHESTER — As a sophomore at John Handley High School, William Eaton was assigned a research project on a career in public service.
After looking through resources at Winchester’s Handley Library, Eaton chose the Foreign Service as his topic.
Little did he know, that’s exactly where his path would lead him. Today, he still credits his hometown with giving him a foundation for success.
Eaton was featured Thursday evening in a fireside chat series that’s part of Handley’s 100th anniversary celebration. He answered questions prepared by his lifelong friend and Handley classmate Harry Smith, a local banker, board chair of Valley Health System and chair of the Handley 100th steering committee.
The chat centered around Eaton’s life which, after Handley, took him to all different corners of the world, and intersected with a wide array of historical moments.
After graduating from Handley, Eaton participated in a study abroad year in Belgium, an experience he said also stoked his interest in the Foreign Service.
Then he was drafted to serve in the Vietnam War. He actually had to get permission to delay his service so that he could finish out his time in Belgium.
After serving in South Korea, Eaton completed his degree at University of Virginia. He took the Foreign Service Officer Test, and worked at the Shenandoah Valley Herald newspaper in Woodstock while awaiting his results.
He passed the test, and his adventures truly began.
His first assignment with the Foreign Service was in Georgetown, Guyana, South America. It was right after the 1978 People’s Temple mass suicides, where American cult leader Jim Jones ordered his followers to kill a U.S. congressman and several journalists, then convinced them to drink cyanide-laced punch. More than 900 people died, including many children.
“It was quite a time to go to Guyana,” Eaton said.
While there, he visited Jonestown with the U.S. Ambassador to Guyana, and spent time interviewing imprisoned members of Jones’s cult who were involved in the killings.
He wrote a telegram to D.C. about Jonestown about a year later, which he says got a lot of attention.
“So the Ambassador gave me a break from consular work, and I went to the political section,” he said. “And I had the fun job because I was dealing with all the opposition groups. … The government was very corrupt, very anti-American. And I had to talk about that, talk to the opposition groups and things like that, which was sometimes risky. I had one demonstration, somebody was killed right in front of me.”
From there, he said, “I think they felt sorry for me … and they asked me what I wanted to do.”
His answer? Moscow, where Soviet Russia was very much alive.
“I just was fascinated by everything having to do with the Soviet Union at the time, and this was … the height of the Cold War,” Eaton said. “This was when Brezhnev was in power. And we were the enemy, and American diplomats were really the enemy.”
What ensued, Eaton said, “was like living in a James Bond thriller.”
“You had KGB agents that would go into your house several times a week and rifle through all your things. They followed you everywhere. They’d tape your phone calls. They were always trying to do things to set you up for a photograph they could use in the press to say the American diplomats are all spies and stuff like that.”
Eaton speaks Russian. Actually, he speaks six languages. But he said he supervised around 100 Soviet workers in the U.S. Embassy. He struck up a friendship with some of them, and soon, he says, they started telling him “things they weren’t supposed to tell me.”
“I found out about all sorts of KGB operations that were underway, and people in the embassy that they had targeted and things they were going to do to try to get this person in trouble or to try to coerce…
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