The Company

by Robert Littell

  One of the four phones on Bissell’s desk rang. He snatched it off the hook, listened for a moment, then said “Put him through on the secure line.” Wagging a finger in Torriti’s direction to indicate he wouldn’t be long, he grabbed the red phone off of its hook. “Listen, Dave, the problem is your act’s too slick. It smells American, which means it can be traced back to the Company. The trick is to make everything look less professional and more Cuban. I’m talking about lousy grammar when your Cubans deliver the news, I’m talking about needles getting stuck in grooves when they play their theme songs, I’m talking about starting the programs several minutes early or late. Rough edges, Dave, are the secret for this kind of operation…That’s the ticket, Dave…I know you will.”

  Bissell flung the phone back onto its cradle. “Ever hear of Swan Island, Harvey? It’s a mound of guano off Honduras with a fifty-kilowatt medium-wave transmitter broadcasting propaganda to Cuba.”

  Torriti said, “Am I reading you right, Dick? You’re complaining that the propaganda show is too professional and the executive action show is too amateur.”

  Bissell had to laugh. “You’re reading me right, Harvey. The only rule is that there are no rules.” He plunked himself down behind his desk again and began screwing a chrome-plated nut onto and off of a chrome-plated bolt. “You still speak the Sicilian dialect?”

  “It’s not something you forget. I’m half-Sicilian on my mother’s side.”

  “You were the OSS’s point man with the Mafia in Sicily during the war.”

  The Sorcerer hiked his shoulders in a disgruntled shrug. “You can’t judge a man by the company he keeps if he works for an intelligence organization.”

  “I want you to keep company with the Mafia again, Harvey.”

  Torriti leaned forward; his sports jacket sagged open and the pearl handle of his revolver came into view. “You want the Cosa Nostra to hit Fidel!”

  Bissell smiled. “They’ve been known to engage in this sort of activity. And they have a reputation for being good at it. Also for keeping their mouths shut after the fact.”

  “What’s in it for them?”

  “Cold cash, to begin with. The man I want you to start with—Johnny Rosselli—entered the United States illegally when he was a teenager. He faces deportation. We can fix that if he cooperates with us. Before Castro came down from the mountains Rosselli ran the Cosa Nostra’s casinos in Havana. Now he has a finger in the Las Vegas gambling pie and represents the Chicago mob on the West Coast.”

  “You got a time frame in mind for JMARC?”

  “We don’t want to start anything before the November election. We don’t like Nixon all that much—the last thing we want is for him to get credit for overthrowing Castro and win the election on the strength of it. I’ll tell you a state secret, Harvey—the Vice President’s not our sort of fellow. Allen Dulles is close to Jack Kennedy. He wants him to be the next President. He wants him to owe the Company a favor.”

  “The favor being we waited for his watch to start before we went after Castro.”

  “Precisely. On the other hand we have to get something going before, say, next summer. Castro’s got fifty Cuban pilots training to fly Russian MiGs in Czechoslovakia. The planes will be delivered, the pilots will be operational, the summer of ’61.”

  “Does Kennedy know about JMARC?”

  “Only in the vaguest terms.”

  “So what guarantee you got he’ll sign off on the op if he’s elected President?”

  “You’re asking the right questions, Harvey. We consider it unlikely that the next President will back off from a paramilitary operation initiated by that great American war hero, Dwight Eisenhower. It would leave him open to all sorts of political flak. The Republicans would say he had no balls.”

  “The people around Kennedy might talk him out of it.”

  Bissell screwed up his lips. “Kennedy comes across as smart and tough. The people around him take their cue from his toughness more than his smartness.”

  “Does that great American war hero Eisenhower know about executive action?”

  The DD/O shook his head vehemently. “That’s simply not a subject we would raise in the White House.”

  Torriti tugged a rumpled handkerchief from a jacket pocket and mopped his brow. Now that they had exchanged confidences he felt he knew the DD/O better. “Could I—” He tossed his head in the direction of the sideboard.

  “For God’s sake, please. That’s what it’s there for, Harvey. You’ll find ice in the bucket.”

  The Sorcerer grasped a bottle with an unpronounceable Gaelic word on the label and helped himself to four fingers of alcohol. He dropped in an ice cube, stirred it with a swizzle stick, tinkling the cube against the sides of the glass. Then he drained off two fingers’ worth in one long swig.

  “Smooth stuff, isn’t it?”

  “Too smooth. Good whiskey, like good propaganda, needs to have rough edges.” Torriti ambled over to the window, parted the blinds with his trigger fingers and stared out at what he could see of Washington. It wasn’t a city he felt comfortable in—there were too many speed-readers who knew it all, too many fast talkers who never said what they meant, who expected you to read between the lines, then left you holding the bag if anything went wrong. Bissell had earned his grudging respect. There was a downside to the DD/O—Bissell’d never run a goddamn agent in his life, never run a Company station for that matter. On the other hand he had a reputation for getting the job done. He had gotten the U-2 reconnaissance plane—a glider with a jet engine and cameras that could read Kremlin license plates from 70,000 feet—off the drawing boards and into the stratosphere over Russia in eighteen months, something that would have taken the Air Force eight years. Now this DD/O out of Groton-Yale with a taste for swanky whiskey wanted someone whacked and he fucking came right out and said it in so many words. He didn’t beat around the goddamn mulberry bush. Torriti turned back to Bissell. “So I accept,” he said.

  The DD/O was on his feet. “I’m delighted—“

  “But on my terms.”

  “Name them, Harvey.”

  Torriti, dancing back across the office, set his glass down on the top-secret papers in Bissell’s in-box and ticked the points off on his fingers.

  “First off, I want good cover.”

  “As far as the Company is concerned you’re the new head of Staff D, a small Agency component dealing with communications intercepts.”

  “I don’t want James Jesus fucking Angleton breathing down my goddamn neck.”

  “You have a problem with him, you bring it to me. If I can’t fix it I’ll bring it to the Director. Between us we’ll keep him off your back.”

  “You want me to push the magic button on Fidel, fine. But I don’t want any other government agencies in on this. And inside the Company every fucking thing needs to be done by word of mouth.”

  “No paper trail,” Bissell agreed.

  “Executors of ZR/RIFLE need to be foreign nationals who never resided in America or held US visas. The 201 files in Central Registry need to be forged and backdated so it looks like anyone I recruit is a long-time agent for the Soviets or Czechs.”

  Bissell nodded; he could see bringing Torriti back from Berlin had been a stroke of genius.

  The Sorcerer ticked off his fifth finger but he couldn’t remember the fifth item on his list.

  “What else, Harvey?” Bissell asked encouragingly.

  “What else?” He racked his brain. “A lot else. For starters, I want an office in the basement. I’m like a mole—I’m more comfortable working underground. It needs to be big—something like what the President of Yale would get if he worked here. I want the housekeepers to sweep it for bugs once in the morning and once in the afternoon. I want an endless supply of cheap whiskey and a secure phone line and a phonograph so I can play operas while I’m talking on it in case the housekeepers fuck up. I want my secretary from Berlin, Miss Sipp. I want a car that’s painted any color of the spectrum
except motor-pool khaki. I want my Rumanian gypsies, Sweet Jesus and the Fallen Angel, to ride shotgun for me. What else I want? Yeah. I need to get ahold of a goddamn laminated identity card with my photo on it so I can waltz past the clowns at the door.”

  “You’ve got it, Harvey. All of it.”

  The Sorcerer, breathing as if he’d run the hundred-meter low hurdles, nodded carefully. “I think you and me, we’re going to get along real fine, Dick.”

  “Push the magic button for me, Harvey, and you can write your own ticket.”

  “Don’t know many folks who hang ordinary garden variety shovels over their fireplaces,” observed Philip Swett. “You’d think it was a family heirloom.”

  “It sort of is, Daddy,” Adelle explained. “It happens to be the shovel Leo bought the day we met—the day we buried his dog and my cat on a hill in Maryland. Leo came across it when he was cleaning out the basement last month. We decided it’d be fun to put it up.”

  The twins, Tessa and Vanessa, aged six years and five months, had just planted wet kisses on the scratchy cheek of their grandfather and raced out the kitchen door, their pigtails flying, to catch the school bus in front of the small Georgetown house that Swett had bought for his daughter when his granddaughters were born. Adelle, one eye on the kitchen clock, the other on the toaster, set her father’s favorite marmalade on the table.

  “So where’s that first husband of yours,” growled Swett.

  “First and only, Daddy,” Adelle groaned, tired of his old gag; her father would be the last person on earth to admit it but he had grown fond of Leo over the years. “Leo’s on the phone, as usual.” There was a note of pride in her voice. “He’s been promoted, you know. For God’s sake, don’t tell him I told you—he’d flay me alive. He’s been filling in as Dick Bissell’s troubleshooter for several months now. At one point he had to fly out to LA and actually met Frank Sinatra. Last Friday they told him he’d been named Bissell’s deputy on a permanent basis. It means a raise. It means a full-time secretary.” She sighed. “It also means more phone calls in the middle of the night. That Dick Bissell never sleeps…”

  Sour Pickles, the cat with the gnarled snout that LBJ had given Adelle as a wedding present, appeared at the door of the mud room. She’d been sleeping on the laundry that had been piling up for the Negro lady who came three afternoons a week. Adelle spilled some milk into a small dish and set it on the floor, and the cat began lapping it up. Leo Kritzky pushed through the kitchen door, a tie flapping loose around his collar. Adelle brushed away with a forefinger a speck of shaving cream on his earlobe. Leo shook hands with his father-in-law and sat down across from him in the breakfast nook.

  “Girls get off on time?” he asked.

  “They’d still be here if they didn’t,” Swett growled.

  “How are you, Phil?” Leo asked.

  “Dog-tired. Bushed. You think raising money for a Catholic candidate is easy as falling off a log, guess again.”

  “I thought his father was bankrolling him,” Leo said.

  “Joe Kennedy saw him through the primaries, especially the early ones. Now it’s up to the big ticket Democrats to cough up. Either that or watch Tricky Dick take an option on the White House.”

  Adelle filled two giant coffee cups from a percolator and pushed them across the table to the men. “Where’s Kennedy today?” she asked her father.

  Swett buttered a slice of toast and helped himself generously to marmalade. “Jack’s starting another swing through the Midwest. He’ll be sleeping at my place in Chicago tonight, which is why I invited myself over for breakfast—got to get up there by early afternoon and organize an impromptu fund raiser for him. What’s Lyndon up to?”

  Adelle, who was coordinating the pollsters working for Lyndon Johnson’s vice presidential campaign, removed a tea bag from the small china pot and filled her cup. “He’s off campaigning in Texas and California,” she said. “He figures they can’t win without both those states. Did you see the story in the Washington Post where Lyndon blasted the Eisenhower administration over that toy submarine—“

  Swett laughed out loud. “I did. I did.”

  “What toy submarine?” Leo asked.

  “And you’re supposed to be in the intelligence racket,” Swett said. “Some toy company or other put a damn-near-perfect scale model of our new Polaris submarine on the market. Russians don’t need spies any more. All those geezers got to do is shell out two ninety-eight for the model sub. I read where it shows the atomic reactor, the two Polaris missiles, down to the last detail.”

  “Getting Lyndon to raise the subject—to use it as another example of the Eisenhower administration’s bungling—was my idea, Daddy. I found the story in the back pages of the Baltimore Sun and showed it to one of our speech writers.”

  “Want to know what I think, I think it’s a crying shame handing them the Polaris on a silver platter.” Swett blew noisily on his coffee and swallowed a mouthful. “If I worked for that Company of yours, Leo, I’d send out signals to get the KGB thinking we manufactured the model to mislead them?”

  Leo smiled. “Life isn’t that simple, Phil. If we try to convince the KGB we planted it, they’ll figure out we’re trying to convince them it’s false and assume it’s true.”

  “Then what we have to do,” Adelle said brightly, “is drop hints it’s true. That way they’ll think we’re trying to convince them it’s true and come to the conclusion it’s false.”

  Leo shook his head. “That might work, unless of course the KGB has some bright USA analyst who says, ‘Look, boys, the CIA’s dropping hints the toy sub’s true, which means they think we’ll think they’re trying to convince us it’s true and we’ll assume it’s false. Which means it must be true.’”

  “Oh, dear, that’s much too convoluted for me,” Adelle said.

  Swett said, “I remember back when you wouldn’t even admit you worked for the Pickle Factory, Leo.” He regarded his son-in-law across the breakfast table. “What’s cooking with Cuba?” he asked suddenly.

  Leo glanced quickly at Adelle, then said, “Only thing I know about Cuba is what I read in the newspapers.”

  “Leo, Leo, remember me? Phil Swett? I’m the guy who used to eat breakfast with Harry Truman. I’m the guy who’s on a first name basis with Dwight Eisenhower. I’m the guy who came up with the idea that Lyndon Johnson was fed up with being Senate majority leader and would say ‘Hell, why not?’ if Jack Kennedy offered him the vice presidency. If Lyndon brings in Texas and Jack squeaks into the Oval Office, folks’ll be lining up to shake my hand. Least you could do is stop treating me like a Russian spy, or a dimwit. Everybody and his uncle knows something’s going on in the Caribbean. It’s an open secret in Jack’s campaign that he’s been briefed on some kind of anti-Castro operation that’s supposed to be in the works.”

  Leo looked his father-in-law in the eye. “Phil, all I can tell you is that you know more than I do.”

  Adelle’s eyes sparkled with merriment. “The idea that Leo might know things you don’t drives you up the wall, doesn’t it, Daddy?”

  Swett was on the verge of losing his temper. “By golly, Harry Truman and Ike and Jack Kennedy treat me like a patriotic American. But my own son-in-law treats me like I’m working for the Kremlin.”

  “Phil, believe me, if I knew something about a Cuban operation, I’d tell you. Far as I’m concerned, if Jack Kennedy can be briefed so can you. You’ve got to understand that the Company is very compartmented. I’m just not involved in that area of the world. Okay?”

  Swett growled, “I guess you don’t know spit about Cuba. I pride myself on being able to read folks real well—I could see the surprise in your eyes when I told you about the open secret in Jack’s campaign.”

  “Leo wouldn’t lie, Daddy. Not to you.”

  “Fact is, I was surprised,” Leo admitted.

  Leo waited while the security guard verified his ID in the lobby of Quarters Eye, a former WAVE barrack off Ohio Drive in dow
ntown Washington that Bissell had commandeered for JMARC, his scare-Castro-out-of-Cuba operation. Pinning on his red badge, he made his way down the narrow, dimly lit ground floor corridor to a green door marked “Access Strictly Limited to Authorized Personnel.” Under it someone had chalked: “No Exceptions Whatsoever.” Leo dialed the code number into the box on the wall and heard the soft buzz of electric current as the lock sprang open. Inside Bissell’s Cuba war room the windows had been blacked out. Two walls were covered with enormous maps, one of the island of Cuba, the other of the Caribbean; each of the maps was fitted with a plastic overlay on which tactical details could be noted using various colored grease pencils. A third wall was filled with blown-up photographs of prime targets: Castro’s three principal military air strips with his T-33 jet trainers and Sea Furies parked in rows on the runways; Point One, the Cuban military nerve center located in a luxurious two-story villa in the Nuevo Vedado suburb of Havana; various Army and militia bases, as well as motor pools crammed with Russian tanks and American army-surplus trucks and Jeeps. Leo’s secretary, a matronly gray-haired woman named Rosemary Hanks, was sorting the overnight traffic at her desk immediately outside Leo’s cubicle off the war room. She plucked a Kleenex from an open box on the desk to blow her nose.

  “Are you allergic, Mrs. Hanks?” Leo asked.

  “I am. To bad news,” she announced in a dry Montana drawl. She waved a cable in the air. “Which is what we just received from Helvetia,” she said, referring to the coffee plantation in Guatemala’s Sierra Madre Mountains where the CIA had set up a training camp for the Cuban exile brigade that would eventually be infiltrated into Cuba. “We’ve had our first casualty. One of the Cubans fell to his death from a cliff during a training exercise yesterday. His name was Carlos Rodríguez Santana. His comrades decided to adopt the dead man’s number—2506—as the brigade’s formal designation.”