The Company: A Novel of the CIA (68 page)

Roberto only smiled. "When my kids get a whiff of victory in their nostrils they'll move mountains."

"Forget about moving mountains," Jack said. "I'll settle for drums of gasoline."

One of the mess boys made his way forward carrying a wooden tray , filled with tumblers of Anejo, a distilled rum that was taken with coffee in Cuba but sipped neat on the Rio Escondido because the electric coffee machine in the galley had broken down. Roberto clanked glasses with Jack and tossed back some of the rum. "Did you get to speak with your wife before we left?" he asked.

"Yeah. The loading master at Puerto Cabaezas let me use his phone. I got through to her right before we put to sea."

Jack turned away and grinned at the memory: "Oh, Jack, is that really you? I can't believe my goddamn ears," Millie had cried into the telephone. "Where are you calling from?"

"This isn't a secure line, Millie," Jack had warned.

"Oh, Christ, forget I asked. Anyhow, I know where you are. Everyone in the shop knows where you are. Everyone knows what you're doing, too."

"I'm sorry to hear that," Jack had said, and he had meant it. He had heard scuttlebutt about the New York Times story on the CIA's operation in Guatemala. "Hows my boy? How's Anthony?"

"He's only incredible, honey. He celebrated his eight-month birthday yesterday by standing up all by himself for the first time. Then he fell down all by himself, too. But he didn't cry, Jack. He picked himself up all over again. Oh, honey, I just know the first words out of his mouth's going to be your family motto—once down is no battle!"

"What about you, sweetheart? You hanging in there?"

The phone had gone silent for a moment. Jack could hear Millie breathing on the other end of the line. "I'm surviving," she had finally said. "I miss you, Jack. I miss your warm body next to mine in bed. I miss the tickle of your mustache. I get horny remembering the time you touched the hem of my skirt back in Vienna..."

Jack had laughed. "Jesus H. Christ, if this were a secure line I'd tell you what I miss."

"Screw the line, tell me anyhow," Millie had pleaded.

The loading master had pointed to the Rio Escondido tied to the pier. Through the grimy office window Jack could see the sailors singling up the heavy mooring lines. "I've got to go, sweetheart," Jack had said. "Give Anthony a big kiss from his old dad. With luck, I ought to be home soon."

Millie had sounded subdued. "Come home when you can, Jack. Just as long as you come home safe and sound. I couldn't bear it if—"

"Nothing's going to happen to me."

"I love you, Jack."

"Me, too. I love you, too, Millie." He had listened to her breathing a moment longer, then had gently placed the receiver back on its cradle.

"There's something I've been wanting to ask you, hombre," Roberto was saying now.

"What's stopping you?"

"I know why I'm here. I know why they're here," he said, waving toward the Cubans sprawled around the deck. "I don't know what you're doing here, Jack."

"I'm here because I was ordered to come out and hold your hand, Roberto.

"That's horseshit and you know it. I heard you volunteered."

"This is a hot assignment for a young officer looking for a promotion."

"More horseshit, hombre."

The shooting on the fo'cs'le had stopped. Darkness had fallen abruptly, as it does in the Caribbean. Stars were still dancing over the tips of the swaying masts. The bow wave, filled with phosphorescent seaweed, washed down the sides of the ancient hull. Jack polished off his rum. "In the beginning," he told Roberto, "it was inertia. I was in motion—been in motion since they sent me off to Berlin ten years ago. And a body in motion tends to continue in motion. Then it was curiosity, I suppose. Where I come from you're brought up to test yourself." He thought of Anthony. "You climb to your feet, you fall down, you climb to your feet again. It's only by testing yourself that you discover yourself."

"So what have you discovered?"

"A center, a bedrock, a cornerstone, the heart of the heart of the matter. On one level I'm the son of an Irish immigrant buying into America. But that's only part of the story. I came down here hoping to find the beginning of an answer to the eternal question of what life is all about. To give it a name, Roberto, I guess what I discovered was something worth rowing for besides speed."

Dick Bissell's Cuba war room on the ground floor of Quarters Eye had been transformed for what one Company clown had billed as a premortem autopsy on the cadaver known as JMARC, the last global review scheduled before the Cuban freedom fighters hit the beaches. Fifty or so folding chairs had been set up in semicircular rows facing a lectern. Folding metal tables off to one side were filled with sandwiches, soft drinks and electric coffee urns. There was a handwritten sign posted on the inside of the door advising participants that they could make notes for the purposes of discussion, but they were obliged to deposit them in the burn bin when they left the room. Dick Bissell, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his tie hanging loose around his neck, had been talking nonstop for one and a quarter hours. Now, turning to the wall behind him, he rapped the grease pencil marks on the plastic overlay to bring everyone up to date on the progress of the five freighters ferrying Brigade 2506 toward the beaches designated Blue and Red at the Bay of Pigs. "We're at D-minus-three and counting," he said. "Planes from the Essex, patrolling the airspace between Cuba and the invasion fleet, have seen no indication of increased air or sea activity on the part of Castro's forces. We haven't stepped up the U-2 overflights for the obvious reason that we don't want to alert Castro. The single overflight on D-minus-four showed no unusual activity either."

A Marine colonel sheepdipped to JMARC said from the front row, "Dick, the communications people on Swan Island did pick up a sharp increase in coded traffic between Point One and several militia units on the island. And the Pentagon is reporting more radio traffic than usual between the Soviet embassy in Havana and Moscow."

Leo raised a finger. "There's also that report from the Cuban government in exile in Miami about the two Cuban militiamen who fled in a fishing boat to Florida last night—the militiamen, from the 312th Militia Battalion stationed on the Isle of Pines, reported that all leaves have been cancelled until further notice."

Bissell took a sip of water, then said, "So far we've been unable to confirm the report from the militiamen, nor is there evidence of leaves being cancelled anywhere else in Cuba. As for the increase in Cuban military traffic, I want to remind you all that we've known since late February that the Cuban General Staff was planning to call a surprise alert sometime in late March or early April to test the readiness of the militia to respond to an emergency situation. The alert even had a code name—"

Leo said, "The Cubans were calling it Operation Culebras."

"That's it," Bissell said. "Culebras. Snakes."

"Which leaves the Russian traffic," Ebby noted from the second row.

Bissell worked a cap on and off of a fountain pen. "If you take the traffic between any given Soviet embassy in the world and Moscow, you'll see that it fluctuates from week to week and month to month. So I don't see what conclusions we can draw from an increase in Russian diplomatic traffic. For all we know, a Russian code clerk in the Havana embassy could be having a hot love affair with a code clerk in Moscow."

"That's not very convincing," Ebby muttered.

Bissell stared hard at him. "How would you read these particular tea leaves, Eb?"

Ebby looked up from some notes he had jotted on a scrap of paper. "It's the nature of the beast that every morsel of intelligence can have several interpretations. Still, every time we see a detail that would appear to warn us off JMARC, we somehow manage to explain it away."

And there it was, out in the open for everyone to see: the visceral misgivings of one of the Company's most respected middle-level officers, a veteran of the CIA's unsuccessful efforts to infiltrate agents behind the Iron Curtain in the early fifties, a holder of the Distinguished Intelligence Medal for his exploits in Budapest in 1956. The room turned still—so still that it was possible to hear a woman in the back scratching away on a cuticle with a nail file. Bissell said, very quietly, "Your 'every time we see a detail' covers an awful lot of territory, Eb. Are you suggesting that we re institutionally incapable of criticizing an operation?"

"I guess I am, Dick. I guess I'm saying it is an institutional problem— the Company has the action in Cuba, so it has become the advocate, as opposed to the critic, of the action it has. What criticism I've seen always seems to be confined to this or that detail, never to whether the operation itself is flawed."

"D-minus-three seems to me to be pretty late in the game for second thoughts."

"I've had second thoughts all along. I did raise the problem of our losing the so-called guerrilla option when we switched the landing site from Trinidad to the Bay of Pigs. When I was brought in on the logistics end of the operation, I wrote a paper suggesting that the obsession with being able to plausibly deny an American role in the invasion had adversely influenced the choice of materiel—we are using old, slow cargo ships with limited storage space below decks, we are using antiquated B-26 bombers flying from air bases in Central America instead of southern Florida, giving them less time over target." Ebby, tormented by the possibility that the Company was treating the Cubans freedom fighters the way it had treated the Hungarians five years before, shut his eyes and massaged the lids with the thumb and third finger of his right hand. "Maybe I should have raised these points more forcefully—"

Bissell swatted at the air with a palm as if he were being strafed by an insect. "If those are your only objections—"

Ebby bristled. "They're not my only objections, not by a long shot—"

"Mr. Ebbitt seems to forget that we pulled off this kind of operation in Guatemala," a young woman working on the propaganda team commented from the back row.

Ebby was growing angrier by the second. "There's been nothing but regression in Guatemala since we got rid of Arbenz," he said, twisting around in his seat. "Ask the Mayan campesinos if we succeeded. Ask them if—"

Bissell tried to calm things down. "Okay, Eb. That's what we're here for. Let's hear your objections."

"For starters," Ebby began, "it's an open question whether the so-called Guatemala model will work in Cuba. Castro won't scare off the way Arbenz did in Guatemala simply because we land a brigade of emigres on one of his beaches. He's made of sterner stuff. Look at his track record. He and a handful of guerrilla fighters sailed to Cuba on a small yacht, took to the mountains and survived everything Batista could throw at them, and finally walked into Havana when Batista lost his nerve and ran for it. Today Castro is thirty-two years old, a confident and vigorous man on the top of his game, with zealous supporters in the military and civilian infrastructure."

Ebby pushed himself to his feet and walked around to one of the tables and drew himself a cup of coffee. Behind him, nobody uttered a word. He dropped two lumps of sugar into the cup and stirred it with a plastic spoon as he turned back to face Bissell. "Look at the whole thing from another angle, Dick. Even if the invasion does succeed, the whole world will see this for what it is: a CIA operation from start to finish. The fact of the matter is that JMARC is likely to cripple the Company for years to come. We're supposed to steal secrets and then analyze the bejesus out of them. Period. Using the Company to do covertly what the government doesn't have the balls to do overtly is going to make it harder for us to collect intelligence. What business do we have mounting an amphibious invasion of a country because the Kennedys are pissed at the guy who runs it? We have an Army and a Navy and the Marines and an Air Force— they're supposed to handle things like invasions." Ebby opened his mouth to say something else, then, shrugging, gave up.

At the lectern, Bissell had been toying with his wedding ring, slipping it up and back on his finger until the skin was raw. "Whoever called this a premortem certainly knew what he was talking about," he said uneasily. Nervous laughter rippled through the war room. "Anyone who assumes that we haven't agonized over the points Ebbitt raised would be selling us short. what you're saying, Eb—what we've said to ourselves so many times the words ring in my brain like a broken record—is that there are risks no matter what we do. There are risks in not taking risks. Risks in moving the invasion site to the more remote Bay of Pigs. Risks in using obsolete B-26s instead of Skyhawks. Risks in calculating how the Cuban people and the Cuban Army will respond to the landings. Our job up on the top floor is to calculate these risks and then weigh them against the downside. Which, believe me, is what we've done." Bissell's voice was hoarse and fading fast. He took another gulp of water. Then he straightened his stooped shoulders as if he were a soldier on a parade ground. "Let me be clear—I believe in the use of power, when it's available, for purposes that I regard as legitimate. Ridding the hemisphere of Castro, freeing the Cuban people from the oppression of Communism, is clearly legitimate. So we'll go forward, gentlemen and ladies, and win this little war of ours ninety miles from the coast of Florida."

The Marine colonel hammered a fist into the air. A dozen or so people in the room actually applauded. Bissell, embarrassed, shuffled through his notes. "Now, I want to say a word about the bogus coded messages we're going to broadcast from Swan Island..."

Later in the day, after the premortem, a number of old hands went out of their way to stop Ebby in the hallway and tell him that they shared some of his reservations on JMARC; they had gone along, they admitted, out of a kind of group-think that tended to confuse criticism with disloyalty. At one point Ebby ran across Tony Spink, his old boss from Frankfurt, in the men's room. Spink, who had been put in charge of air drops to anti-Castro guerrillas holed up in the mountains of Cuba, remarked that Bissell and the topsiders seemed so fucking sure of themselves, he'd begun to suspect there had to be an aspect of JMARC he didn't know about, something that would tilt the scales in favor of going ahead.