Read The Company: A Novel of the CIA Online

Authors: Robert Littell

Tags: #Literary, #International Relations, #Intelligence officers, #Fiction, #United States, #Spy stories, #Espionage

The Company: A Novel of the CIA (9 page)

BOOK: The Company: A Novel of the CIA
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"I don't suppose you are," Ebby remarked in a voice hollow with melancholy for what might have been.

With a deft gesture that, as far as Ebby could see, only the female of the species had mastered, Eleonora reached behind her shoulders blades with both hands and did up the zipper. "You'd better throw something on if you don't want us to be late for the Wilsons," she snapped. She spotted her stiletto-heeled pumps under a chair. Slipping her feet into them, she stomped from the bedroom.

The Otis elevator lifting Ebby with motionless speed to the sixty-sixth floor of the Chrysler Building was thick with cigar smoke and the latest news bulletins. "It's not a rumor," a middle-aged woman reported excitedly. "I caught it on the hackies radio—the North Koreans have invaded South Korea. Its our nightmare come true—masses of them poured across the thirty-eighth parallel this morning."

"Moscow obviously put them up to it," said one man. "Stalin is testing our mettle."

"Do you think Mr. Truman will fight?" asked a young woman whose black veil masked the upper half of her face.

"He was solid as bedrock on Berlin," observed another man.

"Berlin happens to be in the heart of Europe," noted an elderly gentleman. "South Korea is a suburb of Japan. Any idiot can see this is the wrong war in the wrong place."

"I heard the Presidents ordered the Seventh Fleet to sea," the first man said.

"My fiancé is a reserve naval aviator," the young woman put in. "I just spoke with him on the telephone. He's worried sick he's going to be called back to service."

The operator, an elderly Negro wearing a crisp brown uniform with gold piping, braked the elevator to a smooth stop and slid back the heavy gold grill with a gloved hand. "Eighty-second Airbornes been put on alert," he announced. "Reason I know, got a nephew happens to be a radio operator with the Eighty-second." Without missing a beat he added, "Final stop, Chrysler Cloud Club."

Ebby, half an hour early, shouldered through the crowd milling excitedly around the bar and ordered a scotch on the rocks. He was listening to the ice crackle in the glass, rehashing the waspish conversation he'd had with Eleonora over breakfast, when he felt a tug on his elbow. He glanced over his shoulder. "Berkshire!" he cried, calling Bill Colby by his wartime OSS code name. "I thought you were in Washington with the Labor Relations people. Don't tell me the Wiz snared you, too."

Colby nodded. "I was with the NLRB until the old warlock worked his magic on me. You've heard the news?"

"Difficult not to hear it. People who generally clam up in elevators were holding a seminar on whether Truman's going to take the country to war."

Carrying their drinks, the two men made their way to one of the tall windows that offered a breathtaking view of Manhattan's grid-like streets and the two rivers bracketing the island. Ebby waved at the smog swirling across their line of sight as if he expected to dispel it. "Hudson's out there somewhere. On a clear day you can see across those parklands trailing off to the horizon behind the Palisades. Eleonora and I used to picnic there before we could afford restaurants."

"How is Eleonora? How's Immanuel?"

"They're both fine." Ebby touched his glass against Colby's. "Good to see you again, Bill. What's the word from the District of Columbia?"

Colby glanced around to make sure they couldn't be overheard. "We're going to war, Eb, that's what the Wiz told me and he ought to know." The pale eyes behind Colby's military-issue spectacles were, as always, imperturbable. The half smile that appeared on his face was the expression of a poker player who didn't want to give away his cards, or his lack of them. "Let the Communists get away with this," he added, "they're only going to test us somewhere else. And that somewhere else could be the Iranian oil fields or the English Channel."

Ebby knew the imperturbable eyes and the poker players smile well. He and Colby and another young American named Stewart Alsop had studied Morse from the same instructor at an English manor house before being parachuted into France as part of three-man Jedburgh teams (the name came from the Scottish town near the secret OSS training camp). Long after he'd returned to the states and married, Ebby would come awake in the early hours of the morning convinced he could hear the throttled-back drone of the Liberator banking toward England and the snap of the parachute spilling and catching the air as he drifted down toward the triangle of fires the maquis had ignited in a field. Ebby and Colby, assigned to different Jedburgh teams, had crossed paths as they scurried around the French countryside, blowing up bridges to protect Patton's exposed right flank as his tanks raced north of the Yonne for the Rhine. Ebby's Jedburgh mission had ended with him inching his way through the jammed, jubilant streets of the newly liberated Paris in a shiny black Cadillac that had once belonged to Vichy Premier Pierre Laval. After the German surrender Ebby had tried to talk the OSS into transferring him to the Pacific theater but had wound up at a debriefing center the Americans had set up in a German Champagne factory outside Wiesbaden, trying to piece together the Soviet order of battle from Russian defectors. He might have stayed on in the postwar OSS if there had been a postwar OSS. When the Japanese capitulated, Truman decided America didn't need a central intelligence organization and disbanded it. The Presidential ax sent the OSS's analysts to the State Department (where they were as welcome as fleas in a rug), the cowboys to the War Department and Ebby, by then married to his pre-war sweetheart, back to Columbia Law School. And who did he come across there but his old sidekick from the Jedburgh days, Berkshire, one year ahead of him but already talking vaguely of abandoning law when the Cold War intensified and Truman reckoned, in 1947, that America could use a central intelligence agency after all.

"I heard on the grapevine that Truman's flipped his lid at the CIA," Colby said. "He blames them for not providing early warning of the North Korean attack. He's right, of course. But with the nickel-and-dime budget Congress provides, they're lucky if they can predict anything beside Truman's moods. Heads are going to roll, you can believe it. The buzz on Capitol Hill is that the Admiral"—he was referring to the current DCI, Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter—"will be job hunting before the year's out. The Wiz thinks Elsenhower's Chief of Staff at Normandy, Bedell Smith, may get the nod." Colby glanced at a wall clock, clicked glasses with Ebby again and they both tossed off their drinks. "We'd better be getting in," he said. "When the Wiz says sixteen thirty he doesn't mean sixteen thirty-one."

Near the bank of elevators a small sign directed visitors attending the S.M. Craw Management Symposium to a suite of private rooms at the far end of the corridor. Inside a vestibule two unsmiling young men in threepiece suits checked Colby's identification, then scrutinized Ebbys driver's license and his old laminated OSS ID card (which he'd retrieved from a shoebox filled with his wartime citations, medals and discharge papers). Ticking off names on a clipboard, they motioned Ebby and Colby though the door with a sign on it reading, "S.M. Craw Symposium."

Several dozen men and a single woman were crowded around a makeshift bar. The only other woman in sight, wearing slacks and a man's vest over a ruffled shirt, was busy ladling punch into glasses and setting them out on the table. Ebby helped himself to a glass of punch, then turned to chat with a young man sporting a Cossack mustache. "My names Elliott Ebbitt," he told him. "Friends call me Ebby."

"I'm John McAuliffe," said the young man, a flamboyant six-footer wearing an expensive three-piece linen suit custom-tailored by Bernard Witherill of New York. "Friends call me a lot of things behind my back and Jack to my face." He nodded toward the thin-faced, lean young man in a rumpled off-the-rack suit from the R.H. Macy Company. "This is my former friend Leo Kritzky."

Ebby took the bait. "Why former?"

"His former girlfriend crept into my bed late one night," Jack said with disarming frankness. "He figures I should have sent her packing. I keep reminding him that she's a terrific piece of ass and I'm a perfectly normal Homo erectus."

"I was angry, but I'm not any more," Leo commented dryly. "I decided to leave the pretty girls to the men without imagination." He offered a hand to Ebby. "Pleased to meet you."

For a second Ebby thought Jack was putting him on but the brooding darkness in Leo's eyes and the frown-creases on his high forehead convinced him otherwise. Never comfortable with discussions of other people's private lives, he quickly changed the subject. "Where are you fellows coming from? And how did you wind up here?"

Leo said, "We're both graduating from Yale at the end of the month."

Jack said with a laugh, "We wound up here because we said yes when our rowing coach offered us Green Cups down at Mory's. Turns out he was head hunting for—" Jack was unsure whether you were supposed to pronounce the words "Central Intelligence Agency" out loud, so he simply waved his hand at the crowd.

Leo asked, "How about you, Elliott?"

"I went from Yale to OSS the last year of the war. I suppose you could say I'm reenlisting."

"Did you see action?" Jack wanted to know.

"Some."

"Where?"

"France, mostly. By the time I crossed the Rhine, Hitler had shot a bullet into his brain and the Germans had thrown in the sponge."

The young woman who had been serving drinks tapped a spoon against a glass and the two dozen young men—what Jack called the "Arrow-shirt-cum-starched-collar-crowd"—gravitated toward the folding chairs that had been set up in rows facing the floor-to-ceiling picture window with a view of the Empire State Building and downtown Manhattan. She stepped up to the glass lectern and tapped a long fingernail against the microphone to make sure it was working. "My name is Mildred Owen-Brack," she began. Clearly used to dealing with men who weren't used to dealing with women, she plowed on, "I'm going to walk you through the standard secrecy form which those of you who are alert will have discovered on your seats; those of you who are a bit slower will find you're sitting on them." There was a ripple of nervous laughter at Owen-Brack's attempt to break the ice. "When you came into this room you entered what the sociologists call a closed culture. The form commits you to submit to the CIA for prior review everything and anything you may write for publication about the CIA while you're serving and after you leave it. That includes articles, books of fact or fiction, screenplays, epic poems, opera librettos, Hallmark card verses, et cetera. It goes without saying but I will say it all the same: Only those who sign the agreement will remain in the room. Questions?"

Owen-Brack surveyed the faces in front of her. The lone female amid all the male recruits, a particularly good-looking dark-haired young woman wearing a knee-length skirt and a torso-hugging jacket lifted a very manicured hand. "I'm Millicent Pearlstein from Cincinnati." She cleared her throat in embarrassment when she realized there had been no reason to say where she came from. "Okay. You're probably aware that your agreement imposes prior restraint on the First Amendment right of free speech, and as such it would stand a good chance of being thrown out by the courts."

Owen-Brack smiled sweetly. "You're obviously a lawyer, but you're missing the point," she explained with exaggerated politeness. "We're asking you to sign this form for your own safety. We're a secret organization protecting our secrets from the occasional employee who might be tempted to describe his employment in print. If someone tried to do that, he—or she—would certainly rub us the wrong way and we'd have to seriously consider terminating the offender along with the contract. So we're trying to make it legally uninviting for someone to rub us the wrong way. Hopefully the intriguing question of whether the Company's absolute need to protect its secrets outweighs the First Amendment right of free speech will never be put to the test."

Ebby leaned over to Colby, who was sitting on the aisle next to him. "Who's the man-eater?"

"She's the Company consigliere," he whispered back. "The Wiz says she's not someone whose feathers you want to ruffle."

Owen-Brack proceeded to read the two-paragraph contract aloud.

Afterward she went around collecting the signed forms, stuffed them in a folder and took a seat in the back of the room.

Frank Wisner strode up the lectern. "Welcome to the Pickle Factory," he drawled, using the in-house jargon for the Company. "My name is Frank Wisner. I'm the deputy to Allen Dulles, who is the Deputy Director/ Operations—that's DD-slash-o in Companyese. DD/0 refers both to the man who runs the Clandestine Service as well as the service itself." The Wiz wet his lips from a glass of punch. "The Truman Doctrine of 1947 promised that America would aid free peoples everywhere in the struggle against totalitarianism. The principal instrument of American foreign policy in this struggle is the Central Intelligence Agency. And the cutting edge of the CIA is the DD/0. So far we have a mixed record. We lost Czechoslovakia to the Communists but we saved France from economic collapse after the war, we saved Italy from an almost certain Communist victory in the elections and the Czech-style putsch that would have surely followed, we saved Greece from a Soviet-backed insurgency. Make no mistake about it—Western civilization is being attacked and a very thin line of patriots is manning the ramparts. We badly need to reinforce this line of patriots, which is why you've been invited here today. We're looking for driven, imaginative men and women"—the Wiz acknowledged Millicent Pearlstein with a gallant nod—"who are aggressive in pursuit of their goals and not afraid of taking risks—who, like Alice in Wonderland, can plunge into the unknown without worrying about how they are going to get out again. The bottom line is:

There aren't any textbooks on spying, you have to invent it as you go along. I'll give you a case in point. Ten days ago, one of our officers who'd been trying to recruit a woman for five months discovered that she religiously read the astrology column in her local newspaper. So the morning he made his pitch, he arranged for the section on Capricorns to say that a financial offer that day would change their lives and solve their money problems—don't refuse it. The woman in question listened to the pitch and signed on the dotted line and is now reporting to us from a very sensitive embassy in a Communist country."

BOOK: The Company: A Novel of the CIA
13.07Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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