What was it Harlot had said once on a Low Thursday? “The aim of these gatherings is to acquaint you with the factology of facts. One has to know whether one is dealing with the essential or the circumferential fact. Historical data, after all, tend to be not particularly factual and subject to revision by later researchers. You must look to start, therefore, with the fact that cannot be smashed into sub-particles of fact.”
Yes, I had been delivered from the book of documents into the world, and all of Russia lay before me. But I had one fact that was essential, even if it was no more than the hypothesis that, for fact, Harlot was here in Moscow. A man who could conceive of the universe as a distortion fashioned for purposes of self-protection by God was a man to live in monumental double dealings he had created for himself, larger than any agency he served. No, there could be no reply to why I was in Russia unless I believed that Hugh Montague was here and alive, and I had a fair chance to find him. For if here, he would choose to reside in Moscow as a most honored colleague of the KGB, yes. Given his wheelchair, he might even be dwelling within a stone’s throw of the statue of Dzerzhinsky. I felt one step closer to the concealed life of my mind. The thought that Harlot might be inhabiting a room but a few hundred yards away from this room enabled me to know at last what Bill Harvey had meant nineteen years ago when he spoke of an embodiment. Harlot, living in the shadow of Dzerzhinsky Square, was my embodiment.
I might never finish the book of Harry Hubbard and his years in Saigon, nor the stretch of service in the White House when one lived through Watergate, no, nor the commencement of my love affair with Kittredge, no, that was as removed as childhood. Unlike God, I had not been able to present all of my creation. I was out of the documents and on my own, and my life was more exposed than it had ever been, for I was taking the longest leap of my life. Could I be ready to find my godfather and ask him, along with everything else I would ask: “Whom? In the immortal words of Vladimir Ilich Lenin, ‘Whom? Whom does this all benefit?’”
TO BE CONTINUED
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Over the last seven years, whenever I would mention working on a novel about the CIA, nearly everyone, and I think this is a compliment to the Agency rather than to the author, would say, “I can hardly wait.” The next reaction, particularly among people who were not familiar with how a novel gets written day by day, would appear in the following polite form: “Do you know someone in the CIA very well?” which is, I expect, a substitute for saying, “How do you understand enough to write about them?”
I would generally answer that, yes, I knew a few people in the organization although, of course, I could not say much more than that. While this was not without its truth, the general assumption that to know a couple of intelligence officers will prepare the solid ground for writing about a good many of them, is as innocent, when you get down to it, as asking a professional football coach whether he has stolen the secrets of the team to be played next week. I assume he would answer, “We don’t have to. Professional football is a culture, fellow, and we are steeped in it. Besides, we have enough imagination to write the game plan for the other guys as well.”
So, I could have answered that I wrote this book with the part of my mind that has lived in the CIA for forty years. Harlot’s Ghost, after all, is the product of a veteran imagination that has pondered the ambiguous and fascinating moral presence of the Agency in our national life for the last four decades; I did not have to be in the organization, nor know its officers intimately to feel the confidence that I had come to understand the tone of its inner workings. A Russian Jew of the early nineteenth century who happened to be consumed with interest about the nature of the Orthodox Church would not have had to be on intimate terms with a priest to feel that his comprehension of Russian Orthodoxy was possessed of some accuracy. He would, of course, have required some inner link, some sense that he, as a Jew, if he had been born into Russian Orthodoxy, might have become a monk. In turn, it would not have been all that impossible for me to have spent my life in the CIA provided I had come from a different background and with a different political bent.
I am obviously suggesting that some good novels can stray far from one’s immediate life and derive instead from one’s cultural experience and one’s ongoing imaginative faculty. Over the years, that faculty can build nests of context onto themes that attract it. The imagination may proceed in many a direction at once—the life of the President of the United States and a day in the routine of a homeless man might be covertly occupying separate parts of one’s brain at once. Novelists not only live their own lives but develop other characters within themselves who never reveal their particular intelligence to the novelist’s conscious mind until, perchance, the day they come into one’s working literary preoccupations.
Now, the process, of course, is not always so magical. In the case of a novel like Harlot’s Ghost, one does a great deal of research. If I have not absorbed one hundred books on the CIA, then I must have come near, and I had the great good fortune that, as I wrote, new works on the subject of Intelligence kept coming out, and some of them were very good. If this had been a book of nonfiction, I would have had footnotes and attributions on many a point, plus an index and bibliography, and indeed I will pay my respects to the volumes that surrounded me these last seven years before this disclaimer is done.
Nonetheless, Harlot’s Ghost is a work of fiction, and most of its main characters and the majority of its accompanying cast are imaginary. Since they move among real personages, of whom a few are prominent in our history, it may be important to explain how I used the books I studied.
Some nonfiction awakens the imagination. Its personages take on the luster of good fictional characters, that is, they seem as real and complex as men and women we know intimately. The larger share of nonfiction, however, deadens perceptions. Nonetheless, when one is consumed with a subject, even mediocre treatments can, if read with sufficient concentration, enlarge the working imagination, which, once it becomes passionate, and focused, begins to penetrate the obfuscations, cover-ups, evasions, and misapprehensions of all those middling tomes that are so poorly written that the best clue to what really took place is to be found in the evasions of their style. A man who has been coaching football for forty years need only watch a high school running back for a few plays to decide whether potential is there. Ditto for good prize-fight managers watching an amateur throw one left hook. Say as much for novelists who have spent their lives at it. I have done enough indifferent writing over the years, and spent so much time contemplating why it is bad, that by now I can read another author’s work and penetrate on occasion to what he is or, even more important, is not really saying. It is similar to that exercise in counterintelligence where one attempts to differentiate the lies from the truths your opponent is offering.
To a degree, it could be said that my comprehension of the CIA comes from books I have reinterpreted for myself quite as much as from works that informed me more directly. The result, and this is all I will claim, is that I have given the reader my sense of what the Agency may have been like from 1955 to 1963, at least as seen through the eyes of a privileged young man who grew up in it. It is a fictional CIA and its only real existence is in my mind, but I would point out that the same is true for men and women who have spent forty years working within the Agency. They have only their part of the CIA to know, even as each of us has our own America, and no two Americas will prove identical. If I have an argument to make, then, on grounds of verisimilitude, I will claim that my imaginative CIA is as real or more real than nearly all of the lived-in ones.
In the course of putting together this attempt, there was many a choice to make on one’s approach to formal reality. The earliest and most serious decision was not to provide imaginary names for all the prominent people who entered the work. After all, that rejected approach would have left one with such barbarisms as James Fitzpatrick Fennerly, youngest man ever to be elected President of the United States.
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It was obvious, therefore, that one would have to give Jack Kennedy his honest name. It would not damage the novel. He would be as intense and fictional a presence in the novel’s life as any imaginary human could ever be; one could only strip him of his fictional magic by putting a false name on him; then the reader’s perception becomes no more than, “Oh, yes, President Fennerly is Jack Kennedy—now I will get to learn what made Jack Kennedy tick.”
Something of the same was true in lesser measure of E. Howard Hunt and Allen Dulles. Concerning the latter, the problem was not large since he is not a central character here; with Hunt, who is a figure in these pages, the decision was not as immediately found. I debated for a time whether to call him Charley “Stunt” Stevens, and decided that would be the cruellest invasion of his integument, since many a sophisticated reader would soon enough be saying, “It’s Howard Hunt,” and would next believe—having relaxed into the presence of the false name—that every word I wrote about fictional Hunt was true; whereas, when I name him overtly, readers are free to disagree. They can say, “That is not my idea at all of Howard Hunt.”
Looking, then, for inner sanction, I found it in two of Hunt’s autobiographical works, Give Us This Day and Undercover. They established the parameters of his character, and enabled me to write about Howard Hunt within the comprehension gained from his two books. I have, of course, except on those rare occasions where I quote from his printed remarks for a sentence or two, made up his dialogue. My guide was not to go beyond the characterological limits of his own account—I did not give him sly tasks I did not believe he would carry out merely because I wished to enliven my pages.
The real character with whom perhaps the greatest liberties were taken was William Harvey. There is a well-written and most entertaining book called Wilderness of Mirrors by David C. Martin, and it is only fair to state that its portrait of Harvey captured my imagination and stimulated it to press beyond the nonfictional restraints of Martin’s book. My William Harvey bears relation to the deceased William Harvey and certainly follows his career, oversees him at the Berlin Tunnel, in his marriages, at Mongoose, in his feuds with a real General Lansdale and a real Robert Kennedy, and ends his career in Rome. None of that is made up. Since Martin’s book seems to be the source, however, from which derive other descriptions of Harvey in other books, I decided to make my Harvey more imagined (and less close, I expect, to the real man than Howard Hunt).
With Harlot, we move a step further into the unbounded and fictional. James Jesus Angleton, “Mother” in CIA legend, was obviously the original model for Hugh Montague, but since very little was known publicly about Angleton at the time I began this novel, and he was obviously a most complex and convoluted gentleman, I decided to create my own intricate piece of work, the wholly fictional Hugh Montague, and, of course, his equally fictional wife, Kittredge.
Similar in kind is Cal Hubbard. Strains of Tracy Barnes and Desmond FitzGerald can obviously be found, but since I knew very little about either of those gentlemen, it is fair to say that Hubbard, like Montague, is all-but-entirely fictional.
Harry Hubbard, Dix Butler, Arnold Rosen, Chevi Fuertes, Toto Barbaro, the Masarovs, the Porringers, the personnel at the Farm, and nearly all other minor characters in Berlin, Uruguay, and Miami are fictional. Castro, Artime, Barker, San Román, Tony Oliva, Eugenio Martínez, and a number of other Cubans briefly seen are real, as are the U.S. government officials in Special Group, Augmented, and William Attwood and Lisa Howard. The decision to mix real and fictional minor characters came not from the desire to sink into docudrama but to attempt to rise above it. At the cost of repeating the theme of this disclaimer, it is the author’s contention that good fiction—if the writer can achieve it—is more real, that is, more nourishing to our sense of reality, than nonfiction, and so I mixed the factual with the fictional in order to prove a point: If the reader’s imagination is rewarded with a large and detailed mural of a social organism moving through some real historical events, then the reader’s last concern is to be provided every instant with a scorecard of what actually happened and what was made up. My hope is that the imaginary world of Harlot’s Ghost will bear more relation to the reality of these historical events than the spectrum of facts and often calculated misinformation that still surrounds them. It is a sizable claim, but then I have the advantage of believing that novelists have a unique opportunity—they can create superior histories out of an enhancement of the real, the unverified, and the wholly fictional.
Let me give the most extreme example of this premise as it applied to this work. Judith Campbell Exner wrote a book in company with Ovid Demaris called My Story, which gave a detailed and, under the circumstances, tastefully candid portrait of her affairs with Frank Sinatra, Sam Giancana, and Jack Kennedy. It was a decent book and gave off an agreeable air—one tended to believe its facts.
Since the incidents in that work were complementary to my attempt, I decided to make use of her account, although not directly. I did not feel, for example, that I could write about Judith Campbell Exner with more insight than she had exhibited. I felt bound by the precise edges of her account, yet, novelistically, I needed to go further. So I decided to create an imaginary character, Modene Murphy, whom I could comprehend better because she was a reflection of my understanding. She would be a little bit like Judith Campbell, yet considerably different. Her actions would parallel Campbell’s in many ways, that is, she would have affairs with Sinatra, Kennedy, and Giancana, she would be harassed, as was Campbell, by the FBI, and she would find in the end a comparable misery. Her inner life, however, her dialogue, and most of her specific situations would belong to Modene Murphy. So it would not be Judith Campbell I was writing about; all the same, Campbell’s experiences would offer the inspiration and the historical sanction to conceive of a similar history.
That treatment is, in effect, the model of reality I used for most of this novel. The events described are either real, or able to respect the proportions of the factual events. I have looked to avoid exaggeration. If I have succeeded, Harlot’s Ghost will offer an imaginary CIA that will move in parallel orbit to the real one, and will be neither an over-nor underestimation of its real powers.
Let me express my appreciation for the following books. I will list them in alphabetical order, by author, and put an asterisk next to those works for which I feel a considerable debt.
E.C. Ackerman. Street Man: The CIA Career of Mike Ackerman. Ackerman and Palumbo, 1976.
*Philip Agee. Inside the Company: CIA Diary. Boston: Stonehill, 1975.
———and Louis Wolf, eds. Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe. New York: Lyle Stuart, 1978.
Stewart Alsop. The Center. New York: Harper and Row, 1968.
Christopher Andrew. Her Majesty’s Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community. London: Heinemann, 1985.
Charles Ashman. The CIA-Mafia Link. New York: Manor Books, 1975.
William Attwood. The Reds and the Blacks. New York: Harper and Row, 1976.
Bradley Earl Ayers. The War That Never Was. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976.
James Bamford. The Puzzle Palace. New York: Penguin Books, 1983.
John Barron. KGB. New York: Reader’s Digest Press, 1974.
Louise Bernikow. Abel. Seattle: Trident, 1970.
Frei Betto. Fidel and Religion. Havana: Publications Office of the Council of State, 1988.
Celina Bledowska and Jonathan Block. KGB-CIA, Intelligence and Counterintelligence Operations. New York: Exeter Books, 1987.
William Blum. The CIA: A Forgotten History. London: Zed, 1986.
Robert Borosage and John Marks, eds. The CIA File. New York: Grossman, 1976.
Benjamin C. Bradlee. Conversations with Kennedy. New York: Norton, 1975.
*William Brashler. The Don: The Life and Death of Sam Giancana. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.
Vincent and Nan Buranelli. Spy-Counterspy: An Encyclopedia of Espionage. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982.
David Chavchavadse. Crowns and Trench Coats: A Russian Prince in the CIA, an Autobiography. New York: Atlantic International Publications, 1990.
Ray Cline. Secrets, Spies and Scholars. Reston, Va.: Acropolis, 1976.
———, et al. The Central Intelligence Agency: A Photographic History. New York: Stein and Day, 1986.
William Colby. Honorable Men. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978.
H.H.A. Cooper and Lawrence J. Handlinger. Making Spies: A Talent-Spotter’s Handbook. Boulder, Colo.: Paladin Press, 1986.
Miles Copeland. The Game of Nations. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969.
*———. Without Cloak or Dagger. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974.
*William R. Corson. The Armies of Ignorance. New York: Dial Press, 1977.
———, and Robert Crowley. The New KGB. New York: William Morrow, 1986.
———, Susan B. Trento, and Joseph J. Trento. Widows: Four American Spies, the Wives They Left Behind, and the KGB’s Crippling of American Intelligence. New York: Crown, 1989.
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