4

“LAST WEEK,” SAID HARLOT, “WE TOOK A TOUR THROUGH ESPIONAGE. IN that field, the basic building block is fact. Today, I look to enter the more complex world of counterespionage which is built on lies. Or, should we say, on inspirations? The actors in this kind of venture tend to be adventurers, aristocrats, and psychopaths. Yet, these personnel compose but half of the team. Their less visible counterpart is made up of a support system ready to devote ceaseless attention to detail. Scoundrels and scholars, we see, are in collaboration. The difficulties cannot be underestimated. Just as an honest man feels safe until he lies (since his habits for consorting with untruth are few), so is a liar secure until he is so unwise as to be honest. One cannot trap a total liar. He can say, for example, that he and a young lady were at the opera Tuesday night sitting in box 14, and when you tell him that is impossible since box 14 happens to belong to a good friend of yours who was definitely present on Tuesday night sitting alone there, as he always does, why, then, your liar will look you straight in the eye, and tell you he never said he was in box 14 on Tuesday night, it was box 40, and say it with such authority that you believe him. The liar has as simple a life as the honest man.”

I was struck with the resonance of the mirth that came forth from the nabobs. They laughed as if good humor on this subject was part of some private preserve.

“Counterespionage, of course, does not permit the luxury of unbridled prevarication. On the contrary, we tell the truth almost all of the time, but tell it under the umbrella of a great lie: We pretend that the agent bringing our Company secrets over to our opponent is in their employ when, in fact, he is one of ours. That is unobstructed counterespionage. It is encountered, however, more frequently in theory than in practice. We and the KGB have both gotten so good that it has become difficult to lie successfully to each other. Should a Polish defector approach us with the desire to be spirited over to America—well, as a good many of us know, we tell him to earn his transatlantic wings by remaining at his ministry in Warsaw as our agent for a couple of years. Let us say he accepts our bargain. The moment he does, we are obliged to distrust him. Has he been dangled before us? We test him. We ask him to get information that should be out of his reach. If he is bona fide, he should have to come back and confess failure. Lo and behold, he produces the information. We know the stuff is accurate because we have gathered such intelligence already from other sources. So we test him further. Again he passes our tests, which is to say, he is too successful, and flunks. Do we drop him? No. So long as we can believe that the KGB assumes they have gulled us, we have an instrument. We can send the Russians off in the wrong direction by requesting precisely those documents that will confirm their erroneous conclusions about our needs. Of course, it is a delicate misrepresentation. We cannot violate too much of what they know about us already, or they will become witting to our use of their agent.

“Do I hear a sigh? The complexity of this is nothing compared to the mires of a real situation. There are so many games available that the only limit upon counterespionage is the extent of our human resources. It requires a host of intelligence people to examine the value to us of each real secret we send over to the other side as a sacrifice to the greater good of moving the enemy’s determinations into the wrong direction. So many trained people become engaged in examining the seaworthiness of these calculated lies that counterespionage operations, unless they involve the highest stakes, tend to grind down. The wicked odor that comes up from such activities is neither sulphur nor brimstone—merely our overworked circuits smoking away.”

To my consternation, the Chief of Station Designate for Uruguay chose to speak up at this point. “If I may say a word,” he said.

“Please do,” replied Harlot.

“I’m Howard Hunt, just recently back from a stint as covert ops officer in North Asia, working out of Tokyo, next assignment, COS, Montevideo, and if you’ll bear with this interruption, sir, .  .  .”

“Feel free,” said Harlot, “even the children speak out here.”

“Good,” said Hunt. “I believe I’m expressing the point of view of some of us when I say—with all due respect—that it’s never been that way out where I’ve been, not in my fraction of the total endeavor, anyway.”

“Mr. Hunt,” said Harlot, “I’m certain it has not been that way out where you are, but believe me, it is very much that way where I am.”

Hunt, to my surprise, was not put away by the remark. “Sir,” he said, “this is terrific stuff. I’m sure you fellows use it with finesse every day. And who knows, some of the younger people here may get up to your level eventually. I respect it. But, speaking frankly, it’s no great help to me.” I was surprised at the hum of assent that came up behind him. The guests, many invited by Mr. Dulles, made up a much more divided audience than I would have expected; Hunt, encouraged by these covert sounds of support, now added, “I work with a lot of foreign individuals. Some I can trust, some I don’t, things go right, they go wrong. We learn to seize the going situation. There’s no time for fine adjustments.” The murmur of assent came up again.

“You are speaking of dirty tricks,” said Harlot.

“That’s one expression for it.”

“No harm,” said Harlot. “Sometimes capers are essential. Much of what I teach here, after all, is going to get turned on its head out there because—boom!—the explosion does or does not take place. You are in the lap of the gods.” At the look on Hunt’s face, Harlot nodded. “Would you like a projection of what I am saying?”

“Please,” said Hunt.

“Yes,” agreed a few of the guests.

“In that case,” said Harlot, “it may be worth our time to take a look at operations on the ground level. Allow me to postulate some poor Arab conspirator who is in his home that morning cleaning his handgun in the hope he will terminate an Arab leader a little later that day. This assassin is teamed up with a co-conspirator, equally poor, who happens to be out at the moment looking to steal a car for the job. The second fellow, like most thieves, is impulsive. Scouting for a suitable jalopy, he happens to pass an Arab-American hamburger stand. There, behind the counter, stands a dusky but beautiful young girl. She has been blessed with a pair of divine melons under her blouse. He thinks he will come to less in the scheme of things if he does not spend some time studying those melons at first hand. So he natters away with the hamburger girl. When he finally gets around to pilfering the car and returns to base, he is late. Our assassins, therefore, are not at the proper street corner at the precise hour when the Arab leader is supposed to drive by. They do not know their good fortune. This Arab leader has his own intelligence people, and they have infiltrated the little outfit to which these terrorists belong. If the gunmen had arrived at the right time, they would have been shot down in ambush and never have had a look at the leader. Another route had been chosen for him. Yet, now, the same Arab chieftain’s car, quite by chance, happens to stop for a red light where our two conspirators, still driving about in full panic and acrimony over their failure, have just come to a stop in their stolen jalopy. The gunman, seeing his target, hops out of the car, shoots, voilà!—a successful assassination. Who but the Lord can unravel the threads of logic in such coincidence? I suspect, however, that there is a moral. Dirty operations, when too precisely planned, tend to go wrong. That is because we are all imperfect and, at worst, serve as the secret agents of chaos.”

“Mr. Montague, at the risk of tooting my own horn,” said Hunt, “I’d like to say that I played a considerable part in our highly successful operation against Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. I would remind you that with no more than a handful of people we succeeded in toppling a left-wing dictatorship. I would not describe our accomplishment as chaos. It was beautifully planned.”

“While I am not up,” said Harlot, “on Guatemala, I have heard enough to believe we pulled it off by dint of a little luck and a good deal of moxie. I’m sure you put in your fair share of that. Gentlemen, I repeat: Give me a successful coup and I will point you to its father, a misconceived scheme.”

There was a stir.

“That’s Bolshy, Hugh,” said Dulles. “It’s wholly cynical.”

“You go too far,” said one of the notables whom I did not know.

“Get off it, Montague,” uttered another.

“Hugh, give us, dammit, give us something less fanciful than these woeful Arabs,” said Dulles. He was ensconced in a large leather armchair, his foot in a carpet slipper upon a padded stool. His walking stick stood in a ceramic umbrella stand by his side. He looked testy. I could see another facet of our Director’s personality. On occasions like this, he looked not unready to thrash the air with his cane. “No, you fool,” he might shout, “not the port! Can’t you see I’ve got the gout!”

“A concrete example,” said Harlot, “may cause more unhappiness.”

“It’s not unhappiness that’s bothering some of the good people here,” said Dulles, “but an absence of the particular.”

“Very well,” said Harlot, “let’s look at the Berlin tunnel. There’s a major operation.”

“Yes, give your views on that,” said Richard Helms. “Agree or disagree, it has to be of considerable value for the rest of us.”

There was a formal round of applause as if Helms, by his choice of words, had lifted the carriage of discourse out of the ditch and up on the road again.

“In that case, let us return for a brief spell to fundamentals,” said Harlot. He had managed not to appear too uncomfortable during the altercation, but now that the situation was his to control once more, the full timbre of his voice returned. “Taken from an historical perspective, the gathering of information used to precede operations: The intelligence obtained would direct the venture. These days, however, large operations are initiated in order to acquire intelligence. This is a reversal of the original order, and can prove highly disruptive. Last winter, when the Berlin tunnel was still in operation, hundreds of translators labored over the prodigious output of telephone and cable traffic between East Berlin and Moscow. The effort was analogous to extracting a gram of radium from a mountain of uranium.” There were sounds of acknowledgment from his audience.

“Now, suddenly, our gigantic operation collapses. We don’t know how. One fine day this past April, Soviet military vehicles converge on the working tip of the tunnel in East Berlin, and in short order are shoveling their way down to the precise place where we have tapped into their cable. The Russians are going out of their way to make the point that they have been tipped off. They know our next two questions have to be: ‘By whom?’ and ‘When?’ Frightful questions when one does not know the answers. The careful disciplines of espionage, counterespionage, and counterintelligence have all been buried under the sheer earth-moving vigor of CATHETER. Still, we must pick a route through the wreckage. For whom, we do have choices. Given the size of the operation, security had to be stretched thin; someone in the KGB, or the SSD, could have obtained information from one of our technicians. Counterintelligence explores this possibility in the hope that more damaging suppositions will not have to be faced. For the next stage down in our choices is abominable. Is it a mole in MI6? In the BND? Or, someone among us? If these paths have to be pursued, the analysts will be on it for years and are likely to collect half-founded suspicions concerning hitherto reliable officers. Whom, therefore, is a nightmare.

“When is even worse. When poses this dire question: For how long have the Russians known about the existence of the tunnel before they decided to discover it? If they only knew for a week, or a month, no great harm has been done—any attempt to feed us tainted information via their tapped phone lines had to be put together hastily. If we knew this was so, then we could afford to ignore the input of the last week, or the last month. The tunnel, however, took more than a year to build. After which, it was in operation for eleven months and eleven days. If the Russians had this considerable period of lead time, they would certainly have had the opportunity to create an immense work of disinformation. That is precisely the Soviet genius. We are posed, therefore, with an outright dilemma. While our Russian emigrés labor away in translation mills at a job that will take at least another two years merely to process the back material on hand, we still do not know whether such intelligence is to be trusted. If we could at least calculate the likely date on which disinformation was introduced, we might be able to interpret what the Russians wish us to believe. Instead, we are obliged to stare at open entrails and make divinations.”

“Come now, Hugh,” said Dulles, “once again, it is not so bad as that.”

“Well, sir, it is from my point of view.”

“Oh, dear,” said Dulles. “Do you know, I prefer to look on the bright side. We have been given a bonanza in the newspapers and in the magazines. Time magazine termed it ‘The Wonderful Tunnel.’ Some headline writer over at the Washington Post classified it as ‘The Tunnel of Love.’”

Some of the invited began to laugh. Dulles joined in with a hearty “Ho, ho, ho.” In the pause, he dug into his vest pocket for a clipping. “Let me offer an item,” he said, “out of the New York Herald Tribune. I quoted from it to the President just this morning. ‘A venture of extraordinary audacity. If it was dug by American intelligence forces—and that is the general assumption’ ”—our Director waited to pick up his full complement of hearty, happy roars of laughter—“‘this tunnel is a striking example of a capacity for daring undertakings. Seldom has an intelligence operation executed a more skillful and difficult operation.’” He put the clipping away to the sounds of “Hear, hear.”

“What,” asked Dulles, “is the balance sheet of the tunnel? Tremendous information, formidable headaches. Our business, the business of suspicion, goes on as usual. Nonetheless, we have won an overwhelming victory with the German people, West and East. We’re fighting for the hearts of Europe, Hugh, and the fact of the matter is that everybody over there in East Germany is tickled with our tunnel, even the Russian bear, malgré lui. Why, my God, half of East Berlin is going over to Altglienicke for a visit. The Soviets have had to put up a snack bar right on the site.”

An ambiguous response now rose from the nabobs, curious in the unevenness of its volume. Not all of them found Dulles’ riposte equally amusing, but others couldn’t stop laughing. Those of us who came to seminar every Thursday hardly dared to smile. Indeed, some of us, myself most certainly included, were bewildered by the intensity of the disrespect. I could feel a passion in the room to run the flag up the pole. We had scored in East Germany!

Montague waited for the laughter to cease. “Allen,” he said, “in the face of such victories as you describe, those of us who work in counterespionage feel properly subservient to good propaganda.”

“Now, Hugh; now, Hugh; you know me better than that,” said Dulles, and gave an avuncular wave of his hand.

Harlot resumed his lecture, but I, for one, was more ready to study the division of feeling in the room. The most hostile of the officers had jobs in the Agency that you could deduce from their faces. More intelligent than the instructors we had had at the Farm, they, like Hunt, still shared that no-nonsense paramilitary glint of the eye which was so often a substitute, even an effective substitute, for intelligence itself. I began to wonder at their presence on this High Thursday. Why had Dulles invited them to Harlot’s dinner later tonight? Would they come as friends, or to study Hugh Montague, their future foe?

A few days later, I had the small but firm pleasure of discovering that I was not off by much. “It got a bit political,” Harlot said. “Your new Chief of Station is, I fear, one of them. You must not become infected by him with cheap patriotism. It’s as bad as cheap Christianity, and it is running like a virus through the Company.”

“Yessir,” I said, “you are going to have, I fear, one hard time.”

“Bet on me.”

“Was,” I asked, “Mr. Dulles the least bit on your side about the tunnel? I didn’t receive that impression.”

“Well, Allen does like good public relations. He’ll even decorate Harvey before he’s done. But, in fact, he is awfully worried about the tunnel. What if one of us did hand CATHETER over to the Russians?”

“A mole?”

“Hell, no. Somebody responsible. Done for good high patriotic reasons.”

“Are you serious?”

“Can you come near to what I’m thinking?” he replied.

“Oh,” I said, “I think I remember that conversation. The tunnel was letting us know that the Russians were weaker than we expected.”

“Yes, exactly. Go on.”

“But once the tunnel is blown, all such intelligence is tainted. It can’t be relied on for military policy. Certainly doesn’t allow us to slow things down. We have to keep arming just as we have been doing.”

“You are learning how to think,” he said.

Thoughts like this, however, kept one on a wicked edge. “Doesn’t such a premise implicate you?” I asked. “At least from Mr. Dulles’ point of view?”

It was the closest he ever came to looking at me with love. “Oh, I like you, boy, I’m really getting to like you. Allen, yes, Allen is worried stiff. He is indebted to me up to his armpit, but now he has to fear that I’m the one who made what is, from his point of view, a dreadful end run.”

“And did you?”

The gleam came back. I had the feeling that no man would ever see such exaltation in his eye unless he had climbed with him to the top of Annapurna. “Dear Harry, I didn’t,” he said, “but, I confess, it was tempting. We had gone so far down the wrong path with that tunnel.”

“Well, what was holding you back?”

“As I once told you: In faith, the simple subtends the complex. Patriotism—pure, noble patriotism—means dedication to one’s vows. Patriotism has to remain superior to one’s will.” He nodded. “I am a loyal soldier. So I resist temptation. All the same, Allen can never trust me completely. Which is proper. Of course, he was worried. That was why I chose to talk about Berlin in front of so inauspicious an audience. If I was the author of the end run, why would I advertise the drear results?” He made a face, as if reflecting on the cost of the mockery visited on him. “I must say,” he added, “I was startled at how self-important these operations people are becoming. One has to tip one’s hat to your future Chief of Station. He knows enough to parade himself as a bang-and-boomer. However, I looked up his record. He’s more a propagandist than a paramilitary. Getting to be Chief of Station is a plum for him. Although, give him credit, he does mix his bullshit with pluck.”

We sipped our drinks, we smoked our Churchills. Kittredge, sitting directly in back of him, had been looking intently at me all through this talk, and now began to make faces behind Hugh’s back. I did not know how she could bear to do it to her fine features, but she succeeded in flaring her nose and twisting her mouth until she looked like one of those demons who hover behind our closed eyes as we part the curtains of sleep. Pregnancy was no small force of disruption in her.

“Yes,” I said to Harlot, “you were good in what you said on counterespionage.”

“Well,” he smiled, “wait till we get to Dzerzhinsky.”