(continued)

UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS Young took this photo at Site R, the Pennsylvania mountain bunker that reportedly served as Dick Cheney's "undisclosed location" after September 11

For 90 minutes, through one and a half salted margaritas, John Young has been eyeballing me, speaking softly, fidgeting with the digital recorder I've placed in front of him. He's heard all the questions I am asking before, and he answers them carefully and pleasantly. Then he tells me why he's here.

A few years ago, Anthony Haden-Guest called Young and asked to meet him for a drink. Haden-Guest, who wrote a book about Studio 54's glory days and is a two-time winner of Spy magazine's Ironman Nightlife Decathlon, is known in media circles as something of a hapless rogue, full of astonishing, barely believable yarns. His brother is Christopher Guest, one of the creators of This Is Spinal Tap and the director of A Mighty Wind. Haden-Guest has a habit of calling magazine editors out of the blue from Chad or Syria with a great story. He is a contributor to Radar and a personal friend of Radar's editor in chief.

Haden-Guest wasn't on an assignment when he called Young, he was just interested in Cryptome. Over drinks, Young says, a loquacious Haden-Guest offered a confession: He has been accused of being an agent for MI6, he told Young. In fact, Young says, Haden-Guest revealed that he actually had on one occasion done some unpaid work, as a favor, for British intelligence by writing a report while traveling in the Middle East. This was all in the strictest of confidence, Young says: "He said, 'You must never repeat this.'" Afterward, Haden-Guest wrote a brief, laudatory article about Young for a British newspaper. Roughly one year prior to my interview with Young, Haden-Guest called Young again and proposed doing a more involved story on him for Radar. They met at Haden-Guest's New York apartment for three hours, Young says, and Haden-Guest tape-recorded the conversation. Young never heard from him again.

Young dribbles out this information in bits and pieces, changing the subject abruptly before returning to Haden-Guest and suggestively dropping another nugget—did I know that he had been incarcerated by the Germans as a child during World War II?—and studying my reaction. Eventually, it dawns on me what Young is getting at: He thinks Anthony Haden-Guest is a British agent. He thinks MI6 sent Haden-Guest to "ping" him—"like a radar ping; try a ping and see what comes back"—using a fake Radar interview as a pretext. And he thinks I have something to do with it.

As it happens, Haden-Guest had indeed written a 565-word story about Cryptome for Radar. The piece was Radar's idea. When he became too busy to work on the story, it was killed and reassigned to me.

For months and months, Young had sat on this data he'd collected, waiting to hear back from Haden-Guest about the story. Nothing. Then, out of the blue, I'd sent him an e-mail saying that, once again, Radar would like to interview him. So he showed up to ping me. "That's why I'm meeting you," he says matter-of-factly, locking eyes with mine. "Don't forget, you're all supposedly suspect. The thing is, I told [Haden-Guest] the full story, and he got it on tape. And it was sent off somewhere else. Being a reporter is a standard cover story. So, if you don't know that's out there—that is what I think about you. It's what I think about him, too." Young believes that Haden-Guest and I are both working on stories about him. But for MI6, not Radar.

MASTER SPY? Anthony Haden-Guest

I glance around at the tables next to us, concerned that someone might overhear our conversation. I don't know if it's because I don't want them to hear the paranoid rantings of a lunatic, or because I don't want them to hear the "truth" about Anthony Haden-Guest. It is a simple and harmless set of facts: Radar killed Haden-Guest's story and handed it to me. That's not evidence of espionage. And so what if he bragged that people think he's a spy? Haden-Guest has been regaling acquaintances with fantastical-seeming tales for decades. Why, if he really were an agent, would he volunteer—to John Young, of all people—that he's suspected of being an agent? "It's standard tradecraft," Young explains. What seems like a reporter's effort to butter up a subject by appealing to his interest is also a tactic used by agents to inoculate themselves against being uncovered. It muddies the waters. And why wouldn't MI6 send someone to ping the man who'd outed 276 of their agents, to see what clues he may inadvertently give up about his sources? And who better than a reporter?

In John Young's world, Spy magazine's Nightlife Decathlete may well be an actual spy. The more Young talks about it, the less absurd it sounds. There are the random phone calls from third world hotspots. There was the episode in the 1980s when Haden-Guest was kidnapped in Beirut while traveling with a DEA informant who claimed he was working undercover on a heroin sting. There was the strange story in the British edition of Esquire about the Middle East intelligence-gathering exploits of his friend "CK," who is "a mercenary, if you like, one of the rare agents on the ground in this high-tech epoch." But in the end, this was still the man who once appeared on a panel discussion with Randy Jones of the Village People.

I slowly come to see the point of Young's constant references to "common tradecraft," and "standard fare": He lives in this world every day. We see headlines now and again. We know—and quickly forget—that the CIA tailed Fox News Channel's Brit Hume, then a reporter for the late muckraking columnist Jack Anderson, in the 1970s. That it kidnapped German citizen Khaled el-Masri in Macedonia, shoved a tranquilizer suppository up his ass, chained him to the floor of a plane, and flew him to an Afghan secret prison in 2004. That the NSA is capable of listening in on any communication, anywhere. This is what they do. It's not so crazy to imagine they'd check in on someone like Young. It's standard. You just have to know what to look for.

As Young lays out his case, he oscillates abruptly, and at a disorienting pace, between charm and hostility. He is furious at Haden-Guest. He feels like he's been had. A relatively well-known media figure has all but told him that he's an agent, using a magazine as cover, and for some reason—Affection? Vanity?—Young hasn't posted a word of it to Cryptome. "Now Cryptome is on the hook," he says. "It was a terrible mistake not to out this guy. I out everybody else. I agreed to keep a secret. I'm opposed to secrecy." He rants about the betrayal, then drops it, and tells me that he's willing to put me in touch with good sources for national security stories. Then he insults me. A half-hour ago he said he found Radar "delightful"; now he finds it insipid. I point out to him that he's alternating between affability and belligerence, and he bangs on the table with glee, delighted that I noticed. "That is a practiced technique," he says. "It's called whipsawing."

Young points out how easy it was for me to set up the interview, how accessible he made himself to me. "See, it's standard tradecraft in the spy world to be extremely cooperative to people who are expecting resistance. You just offer all possible help, and they just walk right into it. Did you really think I'd let you interview me, rather than me interview you? I'm plumbing your data. I've learned a lot about how Radar operates. I'm just doing the usual shit that agents do to recruit other agents."

Am I being recruited?

"Yes."

My mission, should I choose to accept it: Find out what happened to Haden-Guest's 
story, and write about Haden-Guest's alleged MI6 connection in Radar. If I don't, Young will write about it on Cryptome. "I don't believe you for a minute that you're any different from Haden-Guest," Young rants. "I'm about to get fucked over again. Radar's behind this. Turns out, you're on my shit list. I'm only talking to you to figure out what happened, and what I'm going to make of it. It doesn't look good. Until you find out what this story was and why it was killed, I only have vengeance in my mind against Radar and anyone associated with it."

"Or you know," he says, flashing his teeth, "maybe it's a fucking con job I'm giving you, and you're about to get eaten alive by Anthony Haden-Guest. He's more famous than me. And so it's kind of interesting what you'll do with this. I'll give you a month."