Meeting with Tom Twetten (’57 psychology), you get the distinct feeling that there’s much more to his story than he’s telling you.
Tom spent his career working for the Central Intelligence Agency as an operations officer and head of clandestine operations. He will verify that he worked in six countries, but he won’t say which ones. (An Internet search suggests that he worked under cover in Libya, Ghana, India, and Jordan.)
Living in some of those countries in the 1970s, he developed an interest in the preservation of rare books. Twenty years later, he took a night class on bookbinding and found that he had a talent for creating artistic leather bindings.
When he left the CIA in 1995 after 34 years of service, he said, “I could have been a senior adviser in intelligence, but I wanted to get as far away from Washington as I could.”
He and his wife, Kathryn, already liked New England, and they decided to locate “far away” – in terms of both geography and culture – in the tiny village of Craftsbury Common, Vt.
“The second part [of retirement] was to do something entirely different,” he said. Tom launched Craftsbury Antiquarian Books in the basement of his 19th century home. It’s a business in which he both buys and sells rare books – focusing on travel, art, archeology, military, and culture – and also binds books with his own artistic designs.
He says the book business is perfect for retirement. He can work as much or as little as he wants – for a day or an hour. “I can go visit grandkids and take a book to work on,” he says.
It’s a quiet life that seems so counter to his top-secret government career that one can hardly NOT ask the question: Can’t you tell us any stories about your career?
“Well,” he says with a sly smile, “I could tell you stories about book binding.”
On the road 
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