Celebrating Natalie Wraga (1901 – 2002)
One of the earliest and oldest AF Founders Club members died last Monday night. Natalie Grant Wraga was 101. She was the daughter of a prominent judge in czarist Russia and fled the country as a teenager shortly after the Bolsheviks took over. An anticommunist to the very end, she worked for the State Department during the 1920s in Riga, Latvia, which was then the window to the Soviet Union. There she collaborated with the “good George Kennan” as she called him (he turned liberal later in his life), and became one of the foremost experts on Soviet disinformation.
At one of the first AF roundtables Natalie spoke to a handful of us about Sun Tsu, the CIA, Gorbachev, and the difference between misinformation and disinformation.
“If I believe that the cold war is over and I tell you so, that is misinformation,” she explained. “If I do not believe it is over, but I tell you that it is just to make you abandon your defenses, that is disinformation.” At the end of the evening she said, “Keep your eyes open and your ears open. Many people are studying the past, but very few are studying the present.”
Two Founders Club members, Anne Smith Caparso and John Berlau, were so struck by her ideas that they continued their association with her for many years, visiting her, writing about her, and introducing her to other young thinkers.
But even more incredible than her contributions to the study of disinformation was the amazing way she lived. She was an inspiration, the highest example of how to live your life to the fullest, a person Aristotle would call “blessed.” For three years before and during the founding of AF, I would drive to her mountain-top house outside of Leesburg, VA every Friday to read to her, take her to lunch, organize her library, and pick berries from her yard. She was legally blind, but you’d never know it by the way she navigated the miles and miles of back country roads on our way to lunch.
Her mind was as sharp as a tack and her health was breathtaking. She ate only what was in season, put away an obscene amount of garlic, and stayed away from most meats. She would always have a glass of red wine with lunch, but had only been drunk once in her life. She bought her chocolate from Belgium (because they don’t measure out the cream – “they just pour and pour”), her homeopathic remedies from France (because they use ingredients that we can’t use here), and her hydrogen peroxide from Mexico (because it’s stronger). She took a tablespoon of Acacia honey every day to ward off rheumatism and used the comfrey grown in her yard as a salve to heal the wounds from her many falls–which would sometimes happen in very public places.
After taking a terrible spill, Natalie would tell horrified onlookers how her whole life was full of falls–how as a little girl she tripped over a chicken and killed it. She tripped while she was with me several times, but never as bad as the time she fell down a flight of alabaster stairs in Vera Cruz with my mother-in-law, Elena Siddall. Natalie refused any and all medical treatment and patiently enjoyed the rest of her trip as the blood clot on her eye traveled down through her face and neck and then disappeared.
Natalie knew herself so well. She knew what she could and couldn’t handle. She’d refuse medical treatment when everyone else thought she should go to the emergency room, but then she’d stay locked indoors when the weather would change (like it did on Monday night). She was incredibly demanding and even impossible at times. Nevertheless, she commanded the attention of several dozen devotees–children, mothers, intelligence officers, AFers, neighbors, and family members–all of whom had a different job, and she instructed us around the clock to carry out what her eyes and hands couldn’t do for her. We are her intellectual and spiritual offspring; the children she never had.
She talked about her death a lot, not in a morbid way, but with the full knowledge that death is a natural part of life. She would often tell me that right before it was her time to go that she would like to eat a pound of good caviar with a silver spoon and then slip quietly into sleep and die.
I woke up on Tuesday morning with an email from Elena in my inbox. It read, “Old soldiers never die…Natalie died in her sleep sometime in the night–in her own bed on her own terms.” Amen.
Also available:
Washington Post obituary of Natalie Wraga
A century of anti-communist wisdom, by John Berlau
Scholar of ‘Dezinformatsia’ Still Expert at Telling it Like It Is, by John Berlau
Lessons from a Cold Warrior, an AF interview with Wraga.