Back Channel (16 page)

“You can’t talk to anybody about what happened. Not until your debriefing. You won’t get a chance to say goodbye to Fischer or anybody else. They don’t know you were arrested. Nobody knows but us, and we’d like to keep it that way.”

“I’d prefer it.”

“That includes your grandmother and your boyfriend.”

Margo nodded stiffly, having half expected this command. She leaned against the seat and watched the city hurry by: the towers of fourteenth-century palaces mixed with the blocky practicality of socialist architecture. A tram buzzed past. A lone driver struggled over the cobbles, and Margo wondered automatically whose side he was on. She felt as though she had been in Varna a very long time.

“Where’s Agatha?” she said suddenly.

“Who?”

“From the State Department. My”—she almost said “minder,” then remembered about rooms and cars—“roommate. She’s traveling with me.”

“Oh, right. Right. Miss Milner.” A shrug of the broad shoulders. “I don’t know where she is. My understanding is that she’s already
left the country.” A pause, as if he was weighing how much to tell. “I would suspect she’s lying in a hospital somewhere. Germany, most likely.” He didn’t wait for Margo to ask. “She was mugged last night. The police found her unconscious in the street. I’m afraid they beat her up pretty badly.”

A few hours later, accompanied by Ainsley, Margo flew to Vienna. Actually, he had barely left her side all morning. His principal goal seemed to be keeping her away from the rest of the diplomatic personnel. Ainsley warned her at the start, via a handwritten note, that conversation inside the building was not secure, and signs on seemingly every wall reminded her again. She had expected a debriefing, or at least a question or two about her experiences in custody, but every time she tried to bring it up, Ainsley changed the subject. In Vienna, he saw her onto the late-afternoon flight to Paris. She sat beside an elegant Frenchman who smoked constantly and invited her to spend the weekend at his château, a man so voluble that she suspected that he, too, was there to keep an eye on her—or, more precisely, an ear. That flight was met by another American functionary, a young woman named Paula, who reminded her in manner but not appearance of the vanished Agatha. Paula kept Margo company in the transit lounge, smoking one cigarette after another while chatting garrulously about the coming referendum on whether the French President should be elected directly by the people rather than in an electoral college, and in this way managed not only to keep Margo from mentioning her experiences in Bulgaria but also to bore potential listeners to tears. Paula got her early to the gate and made sure she boarded the connection to Idlewild Airport in Queens.

Margo slept the whole way.

In New York, she stood in the passport line with everybody else until a plainclothes immigration officer flashed a badge and asked her to follow him. Under the curious stares of the crowd, they passed through a door marked
NO ACCESS
, down a dingy hallway, and into a private office.

“You did ever so splendidly, dear,” cooed a familiar voice, as Harrington rose from the other side of the desk. “Goodness, but you’ve
had a time,” she continued, putting her hands on Margo’s shoulders as if to brush her off. “Let’s have a good look at you, dear, shall we?”

But Margo was in her arms, as the tears she had held in check for a day and a half finally poured out of her.

“That’s all right, dear,” Harrington murmured, patting her neck. “Everybody cries the first time.”

PART II
Evens and Odds

October 6, 1962–October 20, 1962

Ithaca, New York | Washington, D.C.

Margo spent the night with yet another female minder at a high-ceilinged apartment on Central Park West in the Sixties, and in the morning, beneath the gleaming dining-room chandelier, she was debriefed by a pair of hard-faced men she had never met before, neither of whom offered a name. They provided her with two days of newspapers to assure her that the American public knew nothing of her arrest. Reading the headlines, Margo learned that Bobby Fischer had ruined his adjournment analysis, and, from a superior position, allowed Botvinnik to slip away with a draw—a fact that seemed scarcely relevant at the time, but would turn out later to matter a great deal. Then the questions, fast and direct, although they wrote her answers into their notebooks with agonizing slowness while the minder lurked in the shadows like a bad conscience.

Margo spent a day and a half with them, all her needs provided for, but none of her many questions answered. Such as: Who told Bobby to invite her? Such as: How was Agatha?
Where
was Agatha? Such as: How did Fomin learn so much about Margo herself so fast? Such as: Didn’t it seem to them that she escaped from the DS a little too easily? Such as: Didn’t Fomin’s questions to her suggest that there really were missiles in Cuba? Such as: Are we going to war? Is everyone going to be blown to bits?

The official debriefers made note of her questions but explained that they were not authorized to answer, only to ask. As for Harrington,
upon arrival on the final morning, she said the same thing, in more flowery language: “It’s not unusual at all, dear, for someone who’s been through what you’ve experienced to think she’s unlocked the secrets of the universe. Best to let it lie. All of this is being handled at higher levels, I assure you. As for you, my dear, it’s time to return to your normal life.”

Margo asked again about Agatha: “She’s fine, dear, that’s all that I can tell you.” Only when Margo blurted that she might like to be like the minder one day did Harrington turn correcting: “No, dear, you wouldn’t, I can assure you.”

And then there was the matter of Margo’s father and his fate. Harrington was dubious: “It’s just exactly the sort of thing the Russians would dummy up, dear. To upset you, dear. To get you to love them more than you love us.” But when Margo asked why on earth they would bother when they could have pulled out her fingernails instead, Harrington only shrugged and said there was no predicting the mind of a man like dear Aleks Fomin.

Until that moment it had not occurred to Margo that Fomin might have a first name, and she asked Harrington to repeat it.

“A-l-e-k-s-a-n-d-r.”

After that there was paperwork for Margo to sign, concerning confidentiality (again), as well as her release of the federal government and its agencies and assigns and employees from any and all liability in return for a payment of ten thousand dollars into an account in her name at the Riggs National Bank across the street from the White House, to be turned over upon her attaining the age of twenty-one or receiving her degree, whichever came first, providing she kept the terms of—

Margo signed, not bothering to read the rest.

Harrington checked the signatures, filed the papers away, then launched into a lecture about how her part in this drama was officially over, and she should return to her normal life as swiftly as possible. And how she must never, under any circumstances, try to contact any of the people she had met during what Harrington insisted on calling “this little adventure.”

Then Harrington gave Margo a hug, wished her well, and urged her to do her best to forget everything that had happened in Bulgaria.

“Suppose I can’t.”

“You’ll do fine, my dear.”

A moment later, Harrington was gone, the debriefers with her, and
GREENHILL
’s minder was leading her down to the street, where a taxi was waiting, the driver paid in advance for the hour-long trip up to the house of Margo’s youth, in the sleepy Hudson River town of Garrison, where Claudia Jensen would be waiting to scold her granddaughter back to health.

Margo spent the first day sleeping, and in the morning, over breakfast, asked her grandmother whether there had ever been a hint of a secret truth behind the official tale of how her father died. Nana was furious. She marched into her study, unlocked the drawer of her enormous claw-footed desk, and pulled out a red satin box Margo had seen a hundred times. Inside, resting on a bed of silk, was the European–African–Middle Eastern Campaign Medal awarded to Donald Jensen, together with two service stars, one for Tunisia, the other for Algeria. Margo stared at the bit of metal and multicolored cloth. As a child, she had been terribly impressed. Only in college had she discovered that the same decoration was awarded to every member of the armed forces who served in the theater.

“Do you want to take this away from him?” Nana snapped.

There was, of course, a larger history, of which Margo remained innocent. The simple facts, some even today not declassified, are these: Margo Jensen, American student, was arrested by the Darzhavna Sigurnost late on the night of Thursday, October 4—the day of the Botvinnik-Fischer contest at the Olympiad. Because of the time difference, the news of her arrest arrived in Washington early on the evening of the same day. By coincidence, on that very day the Air Force was in the midst of a determined effort to wrest control of the U-2 surveillance flights from the Central Intelligence Agency. The collapse of
SANTA GREEN
tipped the balance in the negotiations—the spies, said the airmen, could do nothing right—and a few days later, the President’s national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, finally agreed.
He had the President sign an order formally transferring authority to the Strategic Air Command. SAC immediately scheduled an overflight of Cuba for the next day, but it was postponed due to weather.

G
REENHILL
by this time had been back in the States nearly a week. She escaped from the DS early on the morning of Friday, October 5, and flew to Vienna with Ainsley later that morning. She went onward to Paris, where she boarded the flight for Idlewild Airport in Queens, arriving on October 6. She was debriefed, and the tapes and transcripts were sent off for analysis.

As for Harrington, with
SANTA GREEN
behind her, she flew to Florida to assist in the debriefing of a Cuban asset who had been exfiltrated by boat after another aborted effort to discover what the Russians were building ninety miles off the coast. Harrington was old-school, and believed passionately in human sources, but the United States, as it moved rapidly into the technological era, was raising a new breed of intelligence officer, of whom Gwynn was typical. The new breed disdained human sources—in ordinary language, spies—because spies, as mere mortals, could lie, make mistakes, get drunk, fall in or out of love, take bribes, get tortured, create diplomatic incidents. The new breed believed that the only reliable intelligence was culled from that which could be intercepted, detected, recorded, measured, or photographed. So it was that, six days after Margo arrived at her grandmother’s house in Garrison—to be precise, Sunday, October 14—a U-2 lifted off from Laughlin Air Force Base in Texas. The plane was part of the 4080th Reconnaissance Wing, and the pilot, in accordance with the rules governing the U-2 program, had resigned his commission in the Air Force prior to undertaking surveillance over hostile territory. Flying at seventy thousand feet, he made the first American overflight of Cuba since the crisis began back in the spring with Smyslov’s cryptic message on Curaçao. Onboard cameras snapped hundreds of photos of the target areas. The Soviet troops on the island were aware of the surveillance, but had difficulty tracking the plane; in any case, they had no orders to fire.

This would shortly change.

The pilot completed his mission safely. Although the U-2 flights were now controlled by SAC, the photographic analysis still took place at the Central Intelligence Agency’s new headquarters in McLean, Virginia—often referred to, inaccurately, as Langley, which is an unincorporated
community. By the following day, the Agency’s experts had completed their analysis of the photographs. The supervisor of the photographic section briefed the deputy director of intelligence, who immediately called National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy. They met that evening at Bundy’s office in the basement of the West Wing. There was no longer any question, said the DDI: the Soviets were constructing launching sites for intermediate-range ballistic missiles.

“How do you know?” Bundy asked, because he possessed that rarity among politicians, a mind that was persuaded by evidence rather than by conclusory assertion. He was a short, thin-faced, scholarly man, in narrow tie and spectacles. At Yale he had studied mathematics, dazzling his professors, who urged him to enter the academy. For a while, he even had. He had been dean of arts and sciences at Harvard at the unheard-of age of thirty-four, and had almost single-handedly ended the system under which rich kids got in automatically. He liked things neat. He believed in logic. He believed in compartmentalization. He did not suffer fools. Despite his diminutive stature, he had dressed down more than one Cabinet secretary or senior senator. He had destroyed careers, but never casually. Bundy craved information, and the man sitting across from him was excellent at providing it.