by Edward Klein
“It’s good to meet you, my boy,” he said.
“Good to meet you, too, Ralph,” I replied.
“Of course, that’s not my actual Christian name,” he said. “‘Ralph’ is what they call my handle in the CIA.”
He had an old man’s voice, too. Very cultured. Definitely upper class. The kind that rules the mob.
As I sat down in the front passenger seat, I landed on a hard, round object. I reached back and pulled it out. On it were printed phosphorescent letters that glowed in the dark: Agent 15—Diphosgene (DP)—6 Oz.
Ralph leaned over and snatched it away from me.
“I wish we had these tear gas grenades when those radical bastards seized control of the university president’s office,” he muttered. “A few of these nifty grenades, lobbed into that long-haired crowd, would have changed everything! We could have stopped them in their filthy tracks….”
He seemed agitated as he fiddled with the grenade. But then he let out a deep, mournful sigh and sunk into a long silence.
“Higgy,” he said after he had recovered his composure, “what I’m going to ask you to do is very simple, but it’s very important, and it’s got to be done with the utmost discretion. Things have gotten out of hand here at Harvard. We have become the capital of radicalism and anti-Americanism. Every leftist comes here to recruit impressionable Harvard students. Russell Means, the radical Indian leader from South Dakota, wants students to pledge to give all their possessions—including their families’ homes—to the Indians! The Black Panthers want automatic admission to Harvard for all ex-convicts. And the Weathermen are holding ‘How to Make a Bomb in Your Dorm’ seminars. Higgy, what I need you to do is show up like any other student at these meetings. Grab their literature, make some mental notes of who said what. Give me a flavor of what these leaders are saying and planning.…”
He stopped to let this sink in.
“Okay?” he said, continuing to fiddle absent-mindedly with the tear-gas grenade.
“Sure,” I said brightly. “Sounds constructive”
His voice took on a dolorous tone. “Higgy, do you have any idea how hard it’s been?”
“How hard what’s been?”
“Teaching here at Harvard,” he said. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to stand up in front of a lecture hall filled with women? Nubile young women wearing no bras or panties, their nipples at high beam? Women who are trying to distract you. Women who are… giggling! Can you imagine…giggling at Harvard? They intentionally try to make you lose your place in your lecture notes.”
I didn’t know what to say.
He continued: “Or when you’re a dorm master and at three o’clock in the morning the smell of pot is so strong that it wakes you up and you look out and see students having an orgy in the courtyard and when you call the Harvard cops to break it up, the cops join in!”
He was growing more agitated by the second, and his voice was reaching higher and higher registers.
“Higgy, as much as I deplore these libertine ways…. I have to admit that sometimes I wished it was me—I mean, I wished it were me—or I—or whatever—I wished I was screwing all those girls and me getting higher than a kite. Ah, there I’ve said it! I’ve confessed! Yes, I wanted to get into those lamb pots!”
“Lamb pots?“ I said.
Abruptly, “Ralph” put out his hand to shake mine and, in the darkness, dropped the tear gas grenade. I heard it hit the carpeted floor and roll around.
“Damn!” he exclaimed as he reached down in the darkness
I could hear his agitated breathing as he searched around the car floor.
“It’s stuck behind the emergency brake. Here…I think I’ve got it.”
I heard a small “click,” which I knew was trouble. Ralph had inadvertently pulled the pin. In five seconds the car would be filled with an explosion of tear gas. I yanked open my door.
“Ralph,” I shouted, “get out now!”
I flew out the door and dashed away from the car. Ralph was older—and slower. He barely had the car door open when a distinctive thwump! erupted and then a billowing cloud of white tear gas filled the car.
In his panicked escape he inadvertently pressed the car’s horn. In an instant, lights came on in a wing of the nursing home, bathing the parking lot in a glow.
I finally got a good look at “Ralph.”
He was Nathan Pusey, the former president of Harvard.
CHAPTER FIVE
After college, I read law at the University of Oxford for a couple of years, which provided me with a convenient cover to infiltrate anti-American protest groups. At the end of my time there I fell madly in love. I met Elizabeth Millard, the fabulous, breathtaking, amazing “Taitsie.”
I’ve always thought our meeting was kismet. It was July 4, 1979, and I had just graduated from Oxford. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, I was probably on the lookout for a wife to complete the picture in my mind of American manhood: job, home, wife, kids, and erectile dysfunction.
I can recall the exact moment I laid eyes on Taitsie. We were standing at the opposite ends of a large, crowded room full of tipsy American ex-pats, who had been invited to celebrate Independence Day at the United States Embassy in London. You could never miss Taitsie in a crowd. She was taller than all the other women, far more beautiful, and she always attracted a cluster of hyperventilating suitors.
Her charms were on full display that afternoon. She had the glossiest black hair I had ever seen; natural, unplucked eyebrows that went straight across her forehead; and a smile that promised…well, to be honest, I didn’t know quite what her smile promised. If I had known, I might not have married her.
While Taitsie was flirting with her male admirers, she looked over in my direction, and our eyes met—not once, but two or three times. I was drinking like a fish in those days, but the booze never helped much when it came to having courage with beautiful women. And so when this raven-haired beauty marched over to me and looked me straight in the eye, I took another slug of my double Dewar’s on the rocks and gazed back at her in a state of mute catatonia.
“Hello,” she finally said when she realized that, unlike all the other men at the cocktail reception, I wasn’t going to make a pass at her.
“H-h-hi,” I managed to stammer. “I’m Theodore J. Higginbothem III.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” she said.
“No, I’m serious.”
“That can’t possibly be your real name.”
“I’m afraid it is,” I said. “But my friends call me Higgy.”
“Well, I hardly qualify as your friend.”
“You will,” I said, and was immediately shocked at my unaccustomed boldness.
“Are you sure?”
“I think so,” I said, worried now that I had gone too far.
“When did you decide that we were going to be friends?”
“As soon as I caught your eye,” I said. “I knew we were going to be more than friends.”
Holy shit! I thought. This doesn’t sound like me. I’d never spoken to a woman like this in my entire life. There was something about this woman that knocked me off the rails. I was bowled over by my audacity. So, apparently, was she.
“Well, Higgy….” she said.
She hesitated for a moment, as though she was searching for words. Then she did something extraordinary. She put her arm through my arm, waved good-bye to her admirers, and led me to a far corner of the room. Up close, I noticed that there was a little too much white in her eyes, which might have explained the hint of recklessness that I had detected in her smile.
“I’ve always thought that self-confidence was a man’s most attractive quality,” she said. “So, allow me to introduce myself. I’m Elizabeth Dubois Millard. My friends call me Taitsie. And, in case you’re interested, my father is your host. He’s standing over there under that American flag. That’s him—Robert Millard, the ambassador to the Court of St. James’s.”
Now I was truly speechless.
The Deuce had told me all about “Ducky” Millard and his ongoing turf war with the CIA station chief in the London embassy. Ducky was a classic case of the egotistical businessman who was rewarded for his generous campaign contributions with a plum ambassadorship. But he had made the fatal mistake of attacking the Agency in his dispatches to Washington. Ergo, Ducky became the target of a concerted CIA campaign designed to discredit and disgrace him. Among other things, CIA investigators found out that Ducky had condoned a sexual affair between his 25-year-old daughter Taitsie and his old Princeton roommate, Richard Hack, who was more than twenty years Taitsie’s senior.
The next day, I put in a call to The Deuce over the secure CIA trans-Atlantic phone line. He was alarmed to hear that I had fallen head over heels for Ducky Millard’s daughter Taitsie.
“Higgy, listen to me—you must never see this girl again,” he said. “Her whole blasted family is persona non grata in the CIA.”
“Sure, Dad,” I said. “Thanks for the constructive advice.”
However, for the first time in my life, I had absolutely no intention of listening to my father. Something had happened to me—something that liberated me from his paternal thrall. As soon as I hung up with The Deuce, I phoned Taitsie.
“I can’t wait to see you again,” I told her.
CHAPTER SIX
From then on, I was living a double lie. I kept my romance with Taitsie a secret from The Deuce, and I kept my undercover work for the CIA a secret from Taitsie.
In the summer of 1980, The Deuce called from D.C.
“Higgy,” he said, “I need you here. Now. Can’t talk about it on the phone.”
I was on the next plane from Heathrow to Dulles, where The Deuce met me in a limo and took me to an office building in Rosslyn, just across the Potomac from D.C. Inside, there were signs all over the place that proclaimed: National Campaign HQ for our Next President—Ronald Reagan! 1980.
In a corner office on the top floor, The Deuce introduced me to Reagan’s campaign manager, who turned out to be my father’s old friend, William J. Casey. During World War II, The Deuce and Casey had roomed together in London, where they worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor of the CIA.
I had heard from The Deuce that Casey was a nice fellow, but I found him hard to size up. He mumbled so badly that I couldn’t be sure what he was saying. Clearly, he was born to be a spy, because he had a built-in scrambler in his mouth.
“Genelmun, pease be sheeted,” Casey began. “Me and The Douche go back a long way,” he said, mangling my father’s nickname. “You’re here cuz we’re nine moss into the Rain hostage crisis, and fifty-three Mericun embiss pussonnel are still held by the Ranians. According to our poring”—and here, he pounded a four-inch thick stack of polling data—“the presidential lexsun hinges on one thin. If Prezdun Jimminy Carter gets the hostages out before Noveber, he wins. If not, we win. Pe-iud.”
Casey hesitated, then added: “I’m sure that The Douche grees with me.”
The Deuce nodded his assent, and then spoke up.
“Higgy, what Bill is trying to say is, would you be willing to make a secret little visit to Iran with me? You speak fluent Farsi, thanks to your old tutor, Spit-on-Me. I don’t speak the lingo. I need someone I can completely trust to help me talk to Ayatollah Khomeini.”
I was flabbergasted. First my father had crowned a king in Iran, and now he wanted to crown a king right here at home.
Fifty-three American hostages were being held at the mansion of Iran’s notorious former secret police chief, Teymour Bakhtiari, where they were kept in solitary confinement, forbidden to speak to one another, and repeatedly threatened with execution. Bill Casey wanted us to go to Iran to stop the Iranian government from releasing these poor, tormented hostages.
After we left Casey’s office, and were driving back to D.C., I expressed my misgivings to The Deuce.
“Higgy,” he said, “just remember how Jimmy Carter screwed up the Desert One helicopter mission to rescue our hostages. The man’s a total twit. He’s not competent to be president. Four more years of that hick peanut farmer, and the country may never recover. If you and I pull this one off for Bill Casey and Ronald Reagan, we’ll be doing the country a favor. It’s our patriotic duty to stop the Iranians from releasing the American hostages.”
Was that what was meant by constructive thinking?
CHAPTER SEVEN
I was happy to join The Deuce for the secret meeting with Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Mousavi Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran. This was my first trip back to Iran since 1966, when I was thirteen years old and The Deuce had forced me to dump Old Spit-on-Me’s bodacious young wife Maidhyoimangha and go off to school at Groton. It was a strange homecoming, full of conflicting emotions. This assignment—to keep the American hostages locked up in Iran—was making it hard for me to swallow the constructive philosophy of Iran’s ancient prophet and philosopher, Sara Truth. I seemed to be communing more with the evil in the world.
We flew from Washington, D.C., to London, and then on to Istanbul, Damascus, and Tehran. There, we transferred to the Ayatollah’s private jet, which whisked us off to Qum, known for its holiness, not its hot sex. We arrived in Qum on September 29 1980, just one week after Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, had launched a full-scale invasion of Iran. The Iranians were on a war footing and were naturally suspicious of all foreigners, fearing that we might be agents working for Saddam. We were forced to submit to a body-cavity search by a fat, sweaty Iranian security guard who resembled Marlon Brando and had obviously seen Brando’s notorious butter scene in Last Tango in Paris.
The Deuce and I were taken to a windowless room, where we encountered one of the Ayatollah’s aides, a short, menacing-looking university student named Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He was the ringleader of the so-called “students” who had seized our embassy and were holding the hostages.
“In order to prepare properly for your audience with the Grand Ayatollah,” Ahmadinejad proclaimed, “you will first be required to make a spiritual pilgrimage to the sanctuary of Fatima al-Masumeh, the Infallible One.”
“Will we have to take our shoes off?” The Deuce asked in alarm.
“Of course,” Ahmadinejad snarled.
“I’ve got a hole in my sock,” explained The Deuce, ever the fastidious fashion plate.
“Not to worry,” Ahmadinejad said. “Performing such a pilgrimage guarantees that you will go to Paradise and make love with a dozen virgins, even if you have two holes in your socks.”
He flashed a malicious smile, then added: “Of course, if you were a Jew, those holes might take on a completely different meaning.”
“Paradise is fine,” said The Deuce. “And a dozen virgins is even better. But we just don’t want to end up as hostages numbers fifty-four and fifty-five.”
Ahmadinejad shot The Deuce an indignant look.
“The Imam has given you his word,” he said. “We only kidnap civilians, not CIA agents who once told us how to run our country.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
We were taken to the private estate of Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Mousavi Khomeini, the Supreme Leader. I was in for quite a shock. To the outside world, the Ayatollah was an ascetic living in a humble tent. In reality, he lived in indescribable luxury in a sprawling marble palace, waited on hand and foot by a legion of servants. In our honor, he laid out a sumptuous banquet that featured three cuisines—Iranian, French, and American—and an endless supply of Cristal Brut “Methuselah” champagne.
“Drink up!” Ayatollah Khomeini commanded. “I bought this champagne at a Sotheby’s auction for $17,625 a bottle.”
The place setting in front of the Ayatollah consisted of a spoon—the only utensil he ever used. The banquet was served by a dozen young waitresses dressed in loose black burkas, which covered their entire bodies but were slit up the sides to their waist. The waitresses were completely nude underneath, and m
ost of them ended up with red rear ends from the frequent slaps they received on their buttocks when they bent over the low table to serve the guests. I was about to try it myself when I was stopped by a murderous glower from one of the holy men.
After the feast, we adjourned to a small prayer room, which was carpeted with priceless Persian rugs. The Great Man carried his champagne glass with him, and was accompanied by his handpicked president, Bani Sadr, and our menacing-looking student guide, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Khomeini didn’t waste any time getting down to business.
“I am quite receptive to hearing what incentives you have in mind to induce us to keep the American hostages in Iran until after your presidential election,” he said in Farsi, which I translated for The Deuce. “I want Jimmy Carter defeated as much as you do. I despise any man who commits adultery only in his heart.”
As Ayatollah Khomeini continued with his monologue, I began to detect a strange smell, which soon became overpowering. I turned to Ahmadinejad and whispered to him in English:
“What’s that awful smell?”
“It’s the Ayatollah,” he whispered in English. “Whenever he eats spicy foods, he gets chronic flatulence.”
“Let me tell you,” I said back, keeping my voice low. “I would do anything for my country, but sitting in a small, unventilated prayer room with a seventy-year old fart machine who’s just eaten some under-cooked Persian lamb is almost too much to bear.”
“Tell me about it,” Ahmadinejad said. We were brothers in spirit at last. “The next time we need to put down an uprising by political dissidents, we won’t have to use poison gas. We’ll just send in the Imam.”
