Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  “All right, then. Their new roles established, the principal can complete his withdrawal from the agent. They still meet, but less often. After a few years, agent and principal may not even see each other. The agent, furnished with a dead drop, leaves his papers and picks up his instructions. On those rare occasions when it is crucial for the agent to talk to the principal, a meeting is arranged in a safe house, but since this is time-consuming in a hostile land, they usually stay apart. The principal is out breaking ground with new clients.

  “This, gentlemen,” said Harlot, “is espionage—a middle-class activity that depends on stability, money, large doses of hypocrisy on both sides, insurance plans, grievances, underlying loyalty, constant inclinations toward treachery, and an immersion in white-collar work. See you next week. Before too long, we will come to more damnable stuff—counterespionage. That is where we say farewell to white-collar mentality.” He waved at us and walked from the room.

  3

  THAT NIGHT, ROSEN AND I WENT TO HARVEY’S RESTAURANT. IF GOING OUT to dinner together after the Thursdays was now a habit, it came from no growing affection. I had arrived, however, at the glum conclusion that Rosen was at least as smart as myself, and knew a lot more of what was going on in the Company. He had not only managed to strike up an acquaintance with a variety of experts and many a desk, but had kept up a correspondence with everyone he knew in the field. One of Rosen’s heroes, paradoxically, was Ernest Hemingway (paradoxically, I say, since what kind of welcome would Arnie have gotten if Hemingway did not even cotton to Robert Cohn?). No matter, Rosen knew Papa’s sayings, and believed that an intelligence officer, like a novelist, should have a friend in every occupation: research scientist, bartender, football coach, accountant, farmer, waiter, doctor, so forth. Ergo, Rosen worked his tables in the Company cafeteria, and never seemed to worry about the size of the greeting. Half of what I knew about Agency secrets, hushed-up fiascoes, or internal power struggles among our leaders came from him, and I noticed that Hugh Montague was not above inviting Arnie to dinner once a month. “It’s like examining the contents of a vacuum cleaner,” Harlot once complained. “There’s an abundance of lint, but you can’t ignore the chance that you’ll find a cuff link.”

  A cruel estimate, but for me, Rosen’s tidbits were undeniably interesting. He could, for example, fill me in on Berlin. Dix Butler had been writing back to him, and I heard a lot about Bill Harvey, who apparently did not even get three hours of sleep these days. That was the word from Dix. Contemplating the red flock wallpaper in Harvey’s Restaurant, I was taken with the serendipity of the occasion. One was dining in an establishment founded a century ago by a man with the same last name; now, at the other end of the restaurant I saw that J. Edgar Hoover was in the act of being seated with Clyde Tolson. I had even been able to observe that the Director of the Bureau proceeded to his table with the heavy grace of an ocean liner. Having heard from C.G.’s lips of the simple inhumanity of Mr. Hoover, I could contrast his massive sense of self-importance with the kindly, limping, gout-ridden gait of Allen Dulles.

  Rosen whispered to me, “Did you know that Hoover and Tolson are lovers?”

  I misunderstood him. “You mean they have a roving eye for women?”

  “No! They are lovers. With each other.”

  I was shocked. After Berlin, this was upsetting stuff. “That’s a little too horrendous to contemplate,” I told him.

  Whereupon Rosen went back to Harvey. Did I want to hear more? I did.

  “One joke making the rounds,” said Rosen, “is that Wild Bill keeps getting teased about his adopted daughter. His friends tell him she ought to be given a medical examination. The KGB could have planted a subcutaneous sneaky before they deposited the baby on the doorstep. Harvey becomes tight as a tick. The possibility eats at him. It’s implausible, but Harvey’s under a lot of strain these days.”

  “You heard this from Dix?”

  “How not?”

  “Is he faring well?”

  “Says to tell you Berlin is glum now that the tunnel is gone.”

  At the next High Thursday, Harlot would also speak of CATHETER. His guests that day were the most impressive single gathering we were to have at any of the seminars. In addition to Mr. Dulles, Frank Wisner was there, and Desmond FitzGerald, Tracy Barnes, Lawrence Houston, Richard Bissell, Dick Helms, Miles Copeland, and there were four or five unfamiliar faces who I could see were Agency moguls. The set of their shoulders, so quietly supporting one or another unholy weight, spoke of elevated rank. Rosen whispered that this lofty gang would all be moving off afterward to a dinner Allen Dulles was giving at his home for Harlot.

  This was one time when I knew as much as he did. In the morning, there had been an unexpected visitor at the Argentina-Uruguay Desk. The future Chief of Station for Montevideo stopped by for a chat. Transferred from Tokyo in July, he had come into the office one morning when I was out on an errand, had introduced himself around, and promptly disappeared.

  “You won’t see him again till Christmas,” said Crosby, my section chief. As with other long-emplaced deskmen, nine-tenths of his knowledge was on the dark side. So I heard a good deal about my new COS before I met him. His name was Hunt, E. Howard Hunt, and he was putting in his Washington time paying calls on Director Dulles, General Cabell, Frank Wisner, Tracy Barnes.

  “Maybe he has to,” I said, “as new Chief of Station.”

  “That’s right,” said Crosby. “Chief of Station, and he hasn’t even hit forty. Probably wants to be DCI some day.”

  I liked Hunt when I met him. Of medium height, with a good trim build and well-groomed presence, he looked semimilitary. His long pointed nose had an indentation just above the tip that suggested a good deal of purpose in his trigger finger. He certainly came right to the point.

  “I’m glad to meet you, Hubbard,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of house to keep in the upcoming tour. In fact, I’m on the wicket right now trying to talk a few of our Company tycoons into letting us beef up the Station. They all cry, ‘Hide the wampum. Howard Hunt is raiding us again!’ But it’s the truth, Hubbard. In Intelligence, the secret way to spell effective is M-O-N-E-Y.”

  “Yessir.”

  He looked at his watch with a gesture that had as many fine moves as a well-timed salute. “Now, fellow,” he said, “we’re going to get to know each other well, but for the nonce, I’m asking for a boon.”

  “Yours.”

  “Good. Get me an invitation to Hugh Montague’s thing this afternoon.”

  “Yessir.” I wasn’t sure I could fulfill his request. When he saw the hesitation in my response, he added, “If you come up short, I can always go over the top. It’s no stretch to say that Director Dulles and Dickie Helms are friends of mine, and I know they’ll be there.”

  “Well, that is the sure way to do it,” I confessed.

  “Yes,” he said, “but I’d rather owe this favor to you than to Mr. Dulles.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “Get me into the dinner as well,” he added.

  When he was gone, I called Harlot’s secretary, Margaret Pugh.

  “I don’t know if we want to invite Mr. Hunt,” she said. “He’s trying to breed up.”

  “Could you see it as a favor to me?”

  “I know.” She sighed. The sound told me much. She was sixty years old and professionally stingy. I had, however, whenever we spoke to one another, done my best to improve her day, and she did keep accounts.

  “I’m in the mood to hear a good joke,” she said. “Tell me one.”

  Crosby had furnished a two-liner that morning, but I wasn’t certain it could qualify as good. “Why won’t Baptists,” I asked her, “make love standing up?”

  “Why won’t they?”

  “Because people might think they were dancing.”

  “Oh, you are wicked,” she said. “Oh, dear, oh, dear.” But she sounded merry. “I’m going to do it,” she decided. “I am going to enable Howard Hunt to mi
ngle with his betters. When Hugh looks at the guest list—which he pretends not to—I will tell him that it was all my fault, and that I did it to start you nicely in South America. Harry, don’t confess that it originated with you. Not under any circumstances. Hugh does not believe I can be suborned. I’m serious,” she said, as if she could perceive me smiling—which I was—“you have to hold the line.”

  “I swear.”

  “He has no humor about his friends getting through to me.”

  “I swear.”

  “Oh, you don’t know,” she said, “how much I’d like to charge you for this.”

  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.”