The Company: A Novel of the CIA (7 page)

"Gehlen was supposed to have planted one of his Fremde Heere Ost agents in Stalin's inner circle during the war," remarked the Berlin Base archivist, a former Yale librarian named Rosemarie Kitchen.

"Lot of good it did him," quipped Ebby, which got a titter around the room.

"I don't fucking see what there is to laugh about," Torriti exploded. His eyes, suddenly blazing, were fixed on Ebby. "The frigging Russians were tipped off—the KGB pricks know when and where and who. Vishnevsky's got a rendezvous with a bullet fired at point blank range into the nape of his neck, and that bothers me, okay? It bothers me that he counted on me to get him out and I didn't do it. It bothers me that I almost didn't get myself and Jack and the two Silwans out neither. All of which means we're being jerked off by a fucking mole. How come almost all the agents we drop into Czechoslovakia or Rumania wind up in front of firing squads? How come the emigrés we slip into Poland don't radio back to say they're having a nice vacation, PS regards to Uncle Harvey? How come the fucking KGB seems to know what we're doing before we know what we're doing?"

Torriti breathed deeply through his nostrils; to the people crowded into the room it came across like a bugle call to action. "Okay, here's what we do. For starters I want the names of everyone, from fucking Bedell Smith on down, in Washington and in Berlin Base, who knew we were going to pull out a defector who claimed he could identify a Soviet mole in MI6. I want the names of the secretaries who typed the fucking messages, I want the names of the code clerks who enciphered or deciphered them, I want the names of the housekeepers who burned the fucking typewriter ribbons."

Miss Sipp, scrawling shorthand across the lined pages of the night order book, looked up, her eyes watery with fatigue. "What kind of priority should I put on this, Mr. Torriti? It's seven hours earlier in DC. They're fast asleep there."

"Ticket it Flash," snapped the Sorcerer. "Wake the fuckers up."

Holding fort at table number 41, seated facing a large mirror on the back wall so that he could keep track of the other customers in La Nicoise, his watering hole on Wisconsin Avenue in upper Georgetown, Mother polished off the Harper bourbon and, catching the waiter's eye, signaled that he was ready to switch to double martinis. Adrian, no slouch when it came to lunchtime lubricants, clinked glasses with him when the first ones were set on the table. "Those were the d-d-days," he told the visiting fireman from London, a junior minister who had just gotten the Company to foot the bill for turning Malta into an Albania ops staging base. "We all used to climb up to the roof of the Rose Garden, whiskeys in our p-p-paws, to watch the German doodlebugs coming in. Christ, if one of them had come down in Ryder Street it would have wiped out half our spooks."

"From a distance the V-1's sounded like sewing machines," Angleton recalled. "There was a moment of utter silence before they started down. Then came the explosion. If it landed close enough you'd feel the building quake."

"It was the silence I detested most," Adrian said emotionally. "To this day I can't stand utter silence. Which I suppose is why I talk so damn much."

"All that before my time, I'm afraid," the visiting fireman muttered. "Rough war, was it?" He pushed back a very starched cuff and glanced quickly at a very expensive watch that kept track of the phase of the moon. Leaning toward Adrian, he inquired, "Oughtn't we to order?"

Adrian ignored the question. "Nights were b-b-best," he prattled on. "Remember how our searchlights would stab at the sky stalking the Hun bombers? When they locked onto one it looked like a giant bloody moth pinned in the beam."

"I say, isn't that your Mr. Hoover who's just come in? Who's the chap with him?"

Adrian peered over the top of his National Health spectacles. "Search me."

Angleton studied the newcomer in the mirror. "It's Senator Kefauver," he said. He raised three fingers for another round of drinks. "I had a bachelor flat at Craven Hill near Paddington," he reminded Adrian. "Hardly ever went there. Spent most nights on a cot in my cubbyhole."

"He was nose to the grindstone even then," Adrian told the visiting fireman. "Couldn't pry him away. Poke your head in any hour day or night, he'd be puzzling over those bloody file cards of his, trying to solve the riddle."

"Know what they say about all work and no play," the visiting fireman observed brightly.

Adrian cocked his head. "Quite frankly, I don't," he said. "What do they say?"

"Well, I'm actually not quite sure myself—something about Jack turning into a dull chap. Some such thing."

"Jack who?" Mother asked with a bewildered frown.

"Did I say Jack?" the fireman inquired with a flustered half-smile. "Oh dear, I suppose any Jack will do."

"Christ, Jimbo, I thought I'd split my trousers when you asked him who Jack was," Adrian said after the visiting fireman, his cuff worn from glancing at his wristwatch, was put out of his misery and allowed to head to Foggy Bottom for an important four o'clock meeting.

They were sampling a Calvados that the sommelier had laid in especially for Angleton. After a moment Mother excused himself and darted from the restaurant to call his secretary from the tailor's shop next door; he didn't want to risk talking on one of the restaurant's phones for fear it might have been tapped by the Russians. On his way back to the table he was waylaid by Monsieur Andrieux, the Washington station chief for the French SDECE, who sprang to his feet and pumped Mother's hand as he funneled secrets into his ear. It was several minutes before Angleton could pry his fingers free and make his way to table 41. Sliding onto the chair, holding up the Calvados glass for a refill, he murmured to Adrian, "French've been treating me like a big wheel ever since they pinned a Legion d'Honneur on my chest."

"Frogs are a race apart," Adrian crabbed as he jammed the back of his hand against his mouth to stifle a belch. "Heard one of their senior spooks vet an op we were proposing to run against the French Communists—he allowed as how it would probably work in practice but he doubted it would work in theory. Sorry about my junior minister, Jimbo. They say he's very good at what he does. Not sure what he does, actually. Someone had to give him grub. Now that he's gone we can talk shop. Any news from Berlin?"

Mother studied his friend across the table. "You're not going to like it."

"Try me."

"Amicitia nostra dissoluta est. 'Our friendship is dissolved.' I am on to you and your KGB friends!"

The Brit, who knew a joke when he heard one, chortled with pleasure as he identified the quotation. "Nero's telegram to Seneca when he decided time had come for his tutor to commit hari-kari. Christ, Jimbo, only surprised I was able to p-p-pull the wool over your eyes this long. Seriously, what happened to your Russian coming across in Berlin?"

"The Sorcerer woke me up late last night with a cable marked Flash— been going back and forth with him since. Vishnevsky never showed up. The KGB did. Things turned nasty. Torriti hung around longer than he should have—had to shoot one of the Germans and hit a Russian over the head to get himself out of a tight corner. Vishnevsky and his wife, drugged probably, were hauled back to Moscow to face the music. Kid, too."

"Christ, what went wrong?"

"You tell me."

"What about Vishnevskys serial's? What about the mole in MI6?"

For answer, one of Mother's nicotine-stained fingers went round and round the rim of the snifter until a melancholy moan emerged from the glass.

After a moment Adrian said thoughtfully, "Hard cheese, this. I'd better p-p-pass Vishnevsky's serials on to C—there's not enough to dine out on but he can work up an appetite. Do I have it right, Jimbo? The Russian chaps debriefed someone from MI6 in Stockholm last summer, in Zurich the winter before. There were two blown operations that could finger him—one involved an agent, the other a microphone in The Hague—"

"I haven't unsealed your lips," Angleton reminded his friend.

"He'll take my guts for garters if he gets wind I knew and didn't tell him."

"He won't hear it from me."

"What's to be gained waiting?"

"If Vishnevsky wasn't feeding us drivel, if there is a mole in MI6, it could be anybody, up to and including C himself."

"I would have thought C was above and beyond." The Brit shrugged. "I hope to Christ you know what you're doing."

A waiter brought over a silver salver with their bill folded on it. Adrian reached for the check but Angleton was quicker. "Queen got the last one," he said. "Let me get this."

Angleton's luncheon partner, Harold Adrian Russell Philby—Kim to his colleagues in MI6, Adrian to a handful of old Ryder Street pals like Angleton—managed a faint smiled. "First Malta. Now lunch. Seems as if we're fated to live off Yankee largess."

Jack McAuliffe had taken Ebby slumming to a posh cabaret called Die Pfeffermühie—The Peppermill—off the Kurfiirstendamm, West Berlin's main drag sizzling with neon. The joint was crawling with diplomats and spies and businessmen from the four powers that occupied Berlin. On the small stage a transvestite, wearing what the Germans called a Fahne, a cheap gaudy dress, rattled off one-liners and then laughed at them so hard his stomach rippled. "For God's sake, don't laugh at anti-Soviet jokes," the comic warned, wagging a finger at an imaginary companion. "You'll get three years in jail." Raising his voice half an octave, he mimicked the friend's reply. "That's better than three years in one of those new high-rise apartments in Friedrichsmain." Some upper-class Brits drinking at a corner table roared at a joke one of them had told. The comedian, thinking the laughter was for him, curtsied in their direction.

At a small table near the toilets Jack scraped the foam off a mug with his forefinger, angled back his head and, his Adam's apple bobbing, drained off the beer in one long swig. Wiping his lips with the back of his hand, he carefully set the empty mug down next to the two others he'd already knocked back. "Jesus H. Christ, Ebby, you're coming down too hard on him," he told his friend. "The Sorcerer's like a wild dog you come across in the field. You need to stand dead still and let him sniff your trousers, your shoes, before he'll start to accept you."

"It's the drinking that rubs me the wrong way," Ebby said. "I don't see how a drunk can run Berlin Base."

"The booze is his pain killer. He hurts, Ebby. He was in Bucharest at the end of the war—he served under the Wiz when Wisner ran the OSS station there. He saw the Soviet boxcars hauling off Rumanians who had sided with Germany to Siberian prison camps. He heard the cries of the prisoners, he helped bury the ones who killed themselves rather than board the trains. It marked him for life. For him the battle against Communism is a personal crusade—it's the forces of good versus the forces of evil. Right now evil's got the upper hand and it's killing him."

"So he drinks."

"Yeah. He drinks. But that doesn't stop him from performing on a very high level. The alcohol feeds his genius. If the KGB ever cornered me on an East Berlin rooftop, Harvey's the man I'd want next to me."

The two exchanged knowing looks; Ebby had heard scuttlebutt about the close call on the roof after the aborted defection.

On the other side of the room a middle-aged Russian attaché wearing a double-breasted suit jacket with enormous lapels staggered drunkenly to his feet and began belting out, in Russian, a popular song called "Moscow Nights." At the bar two American foreign service officers, both recent graduates of Yale, pushed themselves off their stools and started singing Kipling's original words to what later became the Yale Whiffenpoof song.

We have done with Hope and Honor, we are lost to Love and Truth...

Jack leaped to his feet and sang along with them.

We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung...

Ebby, who had done his undergraduate work at Yale before going on to Columbia Law, stood up and joined them.

And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth, God help us, for we knew the worst too young.

Half a dozen American civilians sitting around a large table in a corner turned to listen. Several added their voices to the chorus.

Our shame is clean repentance for the crime that brought the sentence,

Our pride it is to know no spur of ride.

As they neared the end of the song others around the cabaret joined in. The transvestite comic, furious, stalked off the stage.

And the Curse of Reuben holds us till an Allen turf enfolds us

And we die, and none can tell Them where we died.

By now Americans all over the cabaret were on their feet, waving mugs over their heads as they bellowed out the refrain. The Russian and East European diplomats looked on in amused bewilderment.

GENTLEMEN-RANKERS OUT ON THE SPREE,

DAMNED FROM HERE TO ETERNITY,

GOD HA'MERCI ON SUCH AS WE,

BAA! YAH! BAH!

"We're all mad here, Ebby." Jack had to holler to be heard over the riotous applause. "I'm mad. You're mad. Question is: How the hell did I end up in this madhouse?"

"From what you told me back at the Cloud Club," Ebby shouted, "your big mistake was saying yes when the coach offered you and your rowing pal that Green Cup down at Mory's."

Part 4

PART ONE

PRIMING THE GUN

In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.

Snapshot: a three-by-five-inch black-and-white photograph turned sepia with age. Hand-printed across the scalloped white border is a faded caption: "Jack and Leo de Stella after The Race but before The Fall. " There is a date but it has been smudged and is illegible. In the photograph two men in their early twenties, brandishing long oars draped with the shirts they won off the backs of the Harvard crew, are posing in front of a slender racing shell. Standing slightly apart, a thin woman wearing a knee-length skirt and a man's varsity sweater has been caught brushing the hair out of her wide, anxious eyes with the splayed fingers of her left hand. The two young men are dressed identically in boating sneakers, shorts, and sleeveless undershirts, each with a large Y on the chest. The taller of the young men, sporting a Cossack mustache, clutches an open bottle of Champagne by its throat. His head is angled toward the shirt flying like a captured pennant from the blade of his oar but his eyes are devouring the girl.

NEW LONDON, CONNECTICUT, SUNDAY, JUNE 4, 1950

RACING NECK AND NECK BETWEEN THE BUOYS, THE TWO SLEEK-SCULLED coxed eights skidded down the mirror-still surface of the Thames. Languid gusts impregnated with the salty aroma of the sea and the hoarse shrieks from the students on the bank of the river drifted across their bows. Rowing stroke for Yale, Jack McAuliffe feathered an instant too soon and caught a grab and heard the cox, Leo Kritzky, swear under his breath. At the four-fifths mark Leo pushed the pace to a sprint. Several of the oarsman crewing behind Jack started punctuating each stroke with rasping grunts. Sliding on the seat until his knees grazed his armpits, Jack made a clean catch and felt the blade lock onto a swell of river water. A splinter of pain stabbed at the rib that had mended and broken and mended again. Blinking away the ache in his rib cage, he hauled back on the haft of the oar slick with blood from a burst blister. Slivers of sunlight glancing off the river blinded him for an instant. When he was able to see he caught a glimpse of the Harvard eight riding on its inverted reflection, its oars catching and feathering and squaring in flawless synchronization. The cox must have decided the Harvard boat was slipping ahead because he notched up the strokes to forty-eight per minute. Balanced on the knife edge of the keel, coiling and uncoiling his limbs in long fluid motions, Jack abandoned himself to the cadence of pain. When the Yale scull soared across the finish line just ahead of the Crimson's hull, he slumped over his oar and tried to recollect what whim of craziness had pushed him to go out for Crew.

"Rowing," Skip Waltz shouted over the din of the New Haven railroad station, "is a great training ground for real life in the sense that you're taking something that is essentially very simple and perfecting it."

"In your view, Coach Waltz, what's the most difficult moment of a race?" called the reporter from the Yale student newspaper.

Waltz screwed up his lips. "I'd say it's when you reach for the next stroke, because you're actually going in one direction and the hull's going in the opposite direction. I always tell my men that rowing is a metaphor for life. If you're not perfectly balanced over the keel the boat will wobble and the race will slip through your fingers." The coach glanced at the station clock and said, "What do you say we wrap this up, boys," and made his way across the platform to his crew, who were pulling their duffle bags off a low baggage cart. Waltz rummaged in his trouser pocket for a dime and gave it to the Negro porter, who touched the brim of his red cap in thanks. "Anyone for a Green Cup down at Mory's?" Waltz said.

"Mind if I take a rain check, coach?" one of the oarsman asked. "I have a philosophy oral at the crack of eleven tomorrow and I still haven't read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason."

One after another the rowers begged off and headed back to college with their duffel bags slung from their shoulders. Only Jack and Leo and Leo's girl, Stella, took the coach up on his invitation. Waltz collected his Frazer Vagabond from the parking lot down the street and brought it around to the station entrance. Leo and Jack tossed their duffle bags into the trunk and the three of them piled in.

Mory's was nearly deserted when they got there. Two waiters and a handful of students, all wearing ties and jackets, applauded the victory over the arch enemy, Harvard. "Green Cups for my people," the coach called as the four of them pulled up high-backed wooden chairs around a small table. For a while they talked about scull weights and blade shapes and the ideal length of the slide along which the oarsman travels with each stroke.

"Is it true that Yale rowers invented the slide?" Jack inquired.

"You bet," Coach Waltz said. "It was back in the 1880s. Before then oarsmen used to grease their trousers and slide their butts up and back along a wooden plank set in the hull."

When the Green Cups arrived Coach Waltz raised his glass and saluted the two crewmen. Cocking his head, he casually asked them if they spoke any foreign languages. It turned out that Jack was fluent in German and could get by in Spanish; Leo, an ardent, angry young man who had been raised in a family of anti-Communist Russian-Jewish immigrants and was majoring in Slavic languages and history, on a full scholarship, spoke Russian and Yiddish like a native and Italian like a tourist. The coach took this in with a nod, then asked whether they found time to keep up with the international situation, and when they both said yes he steered the conversation to the 1948 Communist coup d'etat in Czechoslovakia and Cardinal Mindszentys recent death sentence in Red Hungary. Both young men agreed that if the Americans and the British didn't draw a line across Europe and defend it, Russian tanks would sweep through Germany and France to the English Channel. Waltz asked what they thought about the Russian attempt to squeeze the allies out of Berlin.

Jack offered an impassioned defense of Truman's airlift that had forced Stalin to back down on the blockade. "If Berlin proves anything," he said, "it's that Joe Stalin understands only one thing, and that's force."

Leo believed that America ought to go to war rather than abandon Berlin to the Reds. "The Cold War is bound to turn into a shooting war eventually," he said, leaning over the table. "America disarmed too soon after the Germans and Japs surrendered and that was a big mistake. We should be rearming and fast, for Gods sake. We need to stop watching the Cold War and start fighting it. We need to stop pussyfooting around while they're turning the satellite countries into slave states and sabotaging free elections in France and Italy."

The coach said, "I'm curious to know how you men see this McCarthy business?"

Jack said, "All right, maybe Joe McCarthy's overstating his case when he says the government is crawling with card-carrying Commies. But like the man says, where there's smoke, there's fire."

"The way I see it," Leo said, "we need to put some pizzazz into this new Central Intelligence Agency that Truman concocted. We need to spy on them the way they're spying on us."

"That's the ticket," Jack heartily agreed.

Stella, a New Haven social worker seven years older than Leo, shook her head in disgust. "Well, I don't agree with a word you boys are saying. There's a song on the hit parade... it's called, 'Enjoy Yourself (It's Later Than You Think).' The title says it all: we ought to be enjoying ourselves because it is later than we think." When everyone looked at her she blushed. "Hey, I'm entitled to my opinion."

"Coach Waltz is talking seriously, Stella," Leo said.

"Well, so am I. Talking seriously, I mean. We'd better enjoy ourselves before the war breaks out because after it breaks out we won't be able to— the ones who re still alive will be living like worms in underground fallout shelters."

On the way back to the off-campus apartment that Leo and Jack shared (when they weren't bunking at the Yale boathouse on the Housatonic) with a Russian exchange student named Yevgeny Alexandrovich Tsipin, Leo tried to argue with Stella but she stuck to her guns. "I don't see the sense of starting the shooting all over again just to stay in some godforsaken city like Berlin."

This exasperated Leo. "This pacifism of yours plays right into Stalin's hands."

Stella slipped her arm through Jack's, lightly brushing a breast against his elbow. "Leo's angry with me, Jacky," she said with a mock pout, "but you see my point."

"To tell the truth, I see two of them," Jack said with a leer.

"I hope you're not trying to beat my time," Leo warned.

"I thought crew shared everything," Jack said.

Leo stopped in his tracks. "So what are you asking, Jack? Are you asking me to lend you Stella for the night?"

"You're doing it again," Jack warned good-naturedly, "exposing the chip on your shoulder."

"When is it going to sink in?" Stella told Jack. "The chip on his shoulder is what he's all about." She turned on Leo. "Let's get something straight," she said, her face a mask of seriousness. "You don't own me, Leo, you only have the franchise. Which means that nobody borrows Stella unless Stella decides to be borrowed."

The three started walking again. Jack was shaking his head. "Damnation! Leo, old pal, old buddy, are we numskulls—I think we've been on the receiving end of a pitch!"

"Stella's not making a pitch—"

"I don't mean Stella. I mean Coach Waltz. When's the last time coach talked politics with any of his rowers? Remember what he asked us just before we headed for the Roach Ranch? Do we think patriotism is out of fashion? Do we think one man can make a difference in a world threatened by atomic wars? And remember his parting words—about how, what with Yevgeny being the son of a Russian diplomat and all, it'd be better if we kept the conversation under our hats."

"For cryin out loud, Yevgeny's not a Communist," Stella declared.

"Jesus H. Christ, I'm not saying he's a Communist," Jack said. "Though, come to think of it, his father would probably have to be, to be where he is." He turned back to Leo. "How could we miss it? The coach's got to be a talent scout. And we're the talent."

Leo flashed one of his famous sour smiles. "So who do you think he's scouting for? The New Haven Shore Line?"

"It's got to be something connected with government. And I'll lay you odds it's not the National Forest Service." Jack's Cossack mustache twitched in satisfaction. "Well, damnation," he said again. "Skull and Bones didn't tap us, Leo, but I have a hunch a society a lot more mysterious than one of Yale's secret societies may be about to."

"How can any society be more secret than Skull and Bones?" Stella wanted to know but by now both other companions were absorbed in their own thoughts.

Making their way single file up the narrow, dimly lit staircase in a seedy building on Dwight Street, pushing open the door of a fifth-floor walkup, tossing their duffels into a corner, they found their Russian apartment-mate slumped over the kitchen table, his head on Trevelyan's
American Revolution
. When Jack shook his shoulder Yevgeny yawned and stretched and said, "I dreamed you guys became the first boat in the Harvard-Yale classic to come in third."

"Leo went to a sprint at the four-fifths mark," Jack said. "Yale won by a nose. The two oarsmen who died of exhaustion were buried in the river with full honors."

Stella set the kettle to boiling. Jack threw on a 78-rpm Cole Porter record. The "troika," as the three roommates styled themselves, pushed the rowing machine into a corner and settled onto the floor of the tiny living room for one of their regular late-night bull sessions. Yevgeny, a sturdy, sandy-haired young man whose pale eyes seemed to change color with his moods, was majoring in American history and had become something of a Revolutionary War buff; he had pored over Pennypacker's
General Washington's Spies
and Trevelyans
The American Revolution
and had actually followed in Washington's footsteps, walking during winter recess the route the Continental Army had taken from Valley Forge across the frozen Delaware to Trenton. "I've figured out the big difference between the American Revolution and the Bolshevik revolution," he was saying now. "The American version lacked a central unifying vision."

"The Americans were against tyranny and taxation without representation," Jack reminded his Russian friend. "They were for individual rights, especially the right to express minority views without being oppressed by the majority. Those are unifying visions."

Yevgeny flashed a wrinkled smile. "Jefferson's 'All men are created equal' didn't include the Negroes who worked in his nail factory at Monticello. Even Washington's supposedly idealistic Continental Army was run along elitist principles—if you were called up you could pay someone to take your place or send your Negro slave."

Stella spooned instant coffee into mugs, filled them with boiling water from the kettle and handed them around. "America's central vision was to spread the American way of life from coast to shining coast," she commented. "It's called Manifest Destiny."

Jack said, "The American way of life hasn't been all that bad for a hundred fifty million Americans—especially when you see how the rest of the world scrapes by."

Stella said, "Hey, I work with Negro families in downtown New Haven that don't have enough money for one square meal a day. Are you counting them in your hundred fifty million?"

Yevgeny spiked his coffee from a small flask of cheap cooking cognac and passed the bottle around. "What motivated Washington and Jefferson, what motivates Americans today, is a kind of sentimental imperialism," he said, stirring his coffee with the eraser end of a pencil. "The original eastern seaboard revolution spread from coast to shining coast over the bodies of two million Indians. You Americans carry on about making the world safe for democracy but the subtext is you want to make the world safe for the United Fruit Company."

Leo turned moody. "So what image would you reshape the world in, Yevgeny?"