The Company

by Robert Littell

  “You’d have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to,” Leo said.

  “You think they’ll actually impeach Nixon?”

  “It’s beginning to look like a possibility. Especially if the Supreme Court rules against the President on the tapes.”

  “Explain me something, Leo.” Anthony shook a shock of flaming-red hair out of his eyes. “Why would Nixon be dumb enough to record all his conversations in the Oval Office, including the ones that show he was involved in the Watergate business?”

  Leo shrugged a shoulder. “Has to do with his personality, I suppose. Nixon feels the Eastern establishment hates him. He tends to pull up the drawbridges and hunker down in the White House, agonizing about his enemies, real or imagined. The tapes may have been his way of agonizing for posterity.”

  “Have you actually met Nixon, Leo?”

  “Several times. I was called in to brief him on specific Soviet Division areas of interest.”

  “Like what?”

  Leo had to smile; he was extremely fond of his godson and had a sneaking admiration for his lively curiosity even when the questions were off-base. “You ought to know better than to ask me something like that, Anthony.”

  “I’m not a Russian spy, Chrissakes. You can trust me?”

  “I don’t think you’re a Russian spy. But I’m still not going to tell you things that you don’t need to know. That’s how we operate in the Company.”

  “I’ve pretty much decided to join the Company when I finish college,” the boy said. “With both my parents working there, I ought to breeze in.”

  “First finish high school, buddy. Then get your warm body into a good college. Then graduate. After which we’ll see about your breezing into the Company.”

  Jack McAuliffe pushed through the kitchen door looking for more booze. He waved to Anthony in the pantry, grabbed two bottles of Beaujolais by their throats and headed back toward the rumpus room. Jack, who was Ebby’s Chief of Operations, still sported his flamboyant Cossack mustache, but his dark hair had begun to thin out on the crown of his head and his once-lanky body had thickened noticeably around the middle. To the younger generation of Company officers he was something of a legend: the man who had defied orders and gone ashore at the Bay of Pigs—and escaped only when the Brigade commander threatened to shoot him if he remained.

  “Where were we?” Jack asked as he spilled wine into outstretched tumblers.

  “We were on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs,” a newcomer to the Soviet Division reminded him.

  “That’s not anyplace you’d want to go for R and R,” Jack quipped. The young officers scraping up chairs around him in the rumpus room laughed appreciatively.

  “Would the invasion have succeeded if Kennedy hadn’t cut back on the first air strike and called off the second?” an intense young woman inquired.

  “Probably not,” Jack said thoughtfully. “But Khrushchev might have thought twice about installing missiles in Cuba if he hadn’t been convinced Kennedy was chicken-shit.”

  “Are you saying the Cuban missile crisis was Kennedy’s fault?” another officer wanted to know.

  Jack swivelled on his stool. “It was Khrushchev’s fault for trying to upset the balance of power in the hemisphere by installing missiles in Cuba. It was Kennedy’s fault for letting Khrushchev think he might be able to get away with it.”

  Ebby wandered down to join the impromptu bull session. One of the mid-level officers, a crateologist who specialized in analyzing packages from their shape, size, weight and markings, asked the DD/O about the CIA’s role in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Ebby, sitting on the edge of the ping-pong table, explained how he had been sent into Budapest to talk the anti-Communist Hungarians out of an uprising, at least until the groundwork for the revolution could be laid. Jack described the day when he and Millie had spotted Ebby coming across the Austrian border with a group of refugees. “Frank Wisner was the DD/O at the time,” he said. “He had tears in his eyes when he realized Ebby had made it out alive.”

  “What ever happened to Wisner?” someone asked.

  Jack and Ebby avoided each other’s eye. “Hungary broke him,” Ebby finally said. “He became moody. The moodiness turned into dark depressions. Eventually things got serious enough for him to check into a private psychiatric hospital near Baltimore, where he was diagnosed for psychotic mania—which is roughly a manic-depressive with dreams of grandeur. The doctors even thought his grand schemes—the idea of rolling back Communism in Eastern Europe—might have been early symptoms of the mania. The Wiz was given shock therapy, which brought an end to a given depression but couldn’t prevent a new one. By the time he retired—“

  “That was back in 1962,” Jack said.

  “—he wouldn’t eat in the same restaurant twice for fear it had been staked out by the KGB. Then, nine years ago—“

  Jack finished the story for Ebby. “In 1965 the Wiz was living on his farm in Maryland. The family had hidden his firearms…one day he found a shotgun”—Jack inhaled through his nostrils—“and he went and killed himself.”

  “It was the Wiz who recruited me,” Ebby told the young officers. “It was the Wiz who gave me a boot in the backside when I lost sight of the goal posts. He was a passionate man with a great intellect and boundless energy. I’m proud to have known him—proud to have fought the Cold War alongside him.”

  “He’s one of America’s unsung heroes,” Jack agreed.

  In the early evening the rain let up and the Soviet Division officers and their ladies wandered off to movie theaters. Manny headed back to Langley for the night watch in the Operations Center. Leo and Jack and Ebby broke out some whiskey for a last drink in Leo’s den on the second floor of the house. Downstairs, their wives could be heard tidying up. Leo glanced at his two friends. “Who’s going to be the first to raise the subject?” he asked.

  Ebby said, “You mean Giancana, I suppose.”

  “Harvey Torriti phoned me up from Santa Fe when he saw the story in the paper,” Jack said.

  “What did he think?” Ebby asked.

  “It sure looks like a mob hit—prying up the manhole to cut the alarm system, the clockwork precision of the break-in, subduing everyone in the house with an unidentified nerve gas, Giancana tied to the bed with a pillow covering his face and seven bullet holes in the pillow.”

  “I can hear the but coming,” Leo said.

  “There was a but,” Jack said. “It’s Rosselli’s disappearance. The Sorcerer said it was too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence—the two Cosa Nostra dons who were trying to knock off Castro for us getting whacked at the same time.”

  “He’s assuming Rosselli’s dead,” Ebby noted.

  Jack snickered. “Jesus H. Christ, guys like Rosselli don’t drop from sight like that. He left a woman’s apartment at midnight. Miami police found his car abandoned in a parking lot near the docks in North Miami Beach. The doors were wide open, the key was in the ignition, a Saturday Night Special was in the glove compartment. The Sorcerer said the word on the street was Rosselli’d bought it, too.”

  “Could be Castro,” Ebby remarked.

  “Fidel knew the Company was trying to nail his hide to the wall,” Leo said. “He knew who our middlemen were.”

  Ebby said, “If Castro is behind Giancana’s murder and Rosselli’s disappearance, it raises ominous possibilities—“

  One of the two telephones on Leo’s desk purred. Leo picked up the receiver. “Kritzky.” He reached over and hit the button marked “Scramble,” then listened for a moment. “Add it to the President’s Book but flag it to say that HUMINT sources are involved so he won’t think it came from a cipher breakout.” He listened again. “We’re flying out of Dulles tonight. Unless World War III starts I’ll be out of the loop for two weeks…Thanks, I plan to.” Leo rang off. “Vienna Station’s got a Russian journalist claiming that India’s going to test a ten kiloton atomic device before the month is out.”

  “That’ll put nuclear prolif
eration on the front burner,” Ebby guessed. “We’ll get the usual flurry of ‘drop whatever you’re doing’ queries from Kissinger’s shop in the White House basement.”

  “Let’s get back to your ominous possibilities,” Jack said quietly.

  “Remember what Castro is supposed to have said after the Bay of Pigs?” Ebby asked. “Something along the lines of United States leaders should bear in mind that if they were sending terrorists to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves would not be safe.”

  “I can feel the sand shift under my feet every time we get onto this subject,” Leo admitted.

  “It’s a mystery we’ll never get to the bottom of,” Jack said.

  “Maybe it’s better that way,” Ebby said. “There’s something to be said for letting sleeping dogs lie.”

  “Adelle once repeated something Lyndon Johnson told her days after Kennedy was shot in Dallas,” Leo said. He stirred the ice cubes in his drink with the blade of a letter opener. “‘Kennedy was trying to kill Castro but Castro got him first.’”

  “If Johnson had a shred of hard evidence it would have come out when the Warren Commission investigated the assassination,” Ebby said. “I think he was going on gut feelings.”

  “Warren Commission was a joke,” Jack said. “Remember when Harvey Torriti testified at a closed session? He never breathed a word about the Company’s Cosa Nostra connections and the various attempts to knock off Castro. He never told them that Oswald had been spotted visiting the Soviet embassy in Mexico City before he killed Kennedy; or that Oswald saw a KGB 13th Department wetwork specialist named Valery Kostikov, who had connections to people close to Castro.” Jack had to laugh. “I once asked Harvey how come he never told Warren’s people about that stuff. You know what he said? He said he didn’t tell them because they didn’t ask.”

  Ebby shook his head uncomfortably. “Assuming Castro got to Giancana and Rosselli, the question is: Did he get to John Kennedy, too?”

  “Maybe Fidel’ll write his memoirs some day,” Leo said. “Maybe he’ll tell us the answer then.”

  Ebby looked at Leo. “Where are you and Adelle going?”

  “Changing the subject,” Jack accused Ebby.

  “We’re off to the Loire Valley,” Leo said. “We’re biking from one chateau to another. You get to eat these fantastic French meals, then you pedal all day to work them off.”

  “When’s the last time you took a holiday?” Ebby asked.

  “We spent ten days biking through Nova Scotia the September before last,” Leo said. “What’s that? Twenty months ago.”

  “You’ve earned a break,” Ebby said.

  “Tessa and Vanessa going with you?” Jack asked.

  “The twins’ idea of a vacation is holding the fort while the parents are away,” Leo said.

  Ebby climbed to his feet and stretched. “I guess we’d better assign a team to the Giancana-Rosselli thing,” he told Jack. “Just in case Castro left some fingerprints lying around.”

  “The absence of fingerprints is a fingerprint,” Leo noted.

  “You’re supposed to be on vacation,” Jack said.

  Manny settled into the catbird seat in the pit of the spacious Operations Center, kicked off his loafers and hiked his stockinged feet up on a desk crammed with sterile telephones. The night watch, which came his way once every twenty-one days, was not his idea of a sexy way to spend an evening; he would have preferred to take in Young Frankenstein with Nellie. Catching up on operational reports made the first hour or two pass quickly enough but then tedium inevitably set in; to get through the night the dozen or so hands on deck would resort to reading very tattered copies of Cold War spy novels that were stacked in a bookcase near the water cooler.

  Tonight looked as if it would be no exception to the rule. First, Manny leafed through the blue-bordered National Intelligence Daily hot off the basement press and due to be circulated (to a very restricted audience) the following morning. Behind him, technicians from the Office of Security, dressed in pristine white overalls, were inspecting the devices that vibrated the glass panes in the windows to prevent the KGB from eavesdropping on conversations with laser beams. Television sets lined up on a shelf were tuned to the major networks to monitor breaking news stories. Junior officers from various directorates sat around an enormous oval table keeping track of overnight cables pouring in from stations around the world, sorting them according to security classification and dropping the more urgent ones into the duty officer’s in-box. Manny glanced at the wall clock—he still had ten and a half hours to go on the twelve-hour shift—and, swallowing a yawn, attacked the pile in the in-box to see if anybody on the seventh floor of Langley needed to be rousted out of bed.

  The first batch of cables all looked as if they could wait until people showed up for work the following morning. There was a report from Cairo Station about a shake-up in the Muhabarat, the Egyptian intelligence service, with President Anwar el-Sadat bringing in people known for their personal loyalty to him. Beirut Station had weighed in with still another warning that Lebanon was moving toward the brink of civil war between Islamic fundamentalists and Christian Arabs; Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, firmly implanted in the country’s sprawling Palestinian refugee camps, was stockpiling arms and boasting of turning northern Lebanon into a launching pad for raids into Israel. Saigon Station was ringing the gong (as Company argot had it): the situation in Vietnam was unraveling faster than anyone had expected; CIA was working with the Navy to develop plans to evacuate 1,500 American civilians by helicopter if regular Army units from the North broke through South Vietnamese lines and made a dash for the capitol. Paris Station was predicting that the Gaullist Valéry Giscard d’Estaing would defeat the Socialist François Mitterand in the run-off round of the election in a week’s time. Lisbon Station was concerned that Communists in the leftist military junta that seized power in a coup d’état the previous month might leak NATO secrets to Moscow.

  At ten P.M. the green light over the door to the Operations Center flickered. The armed guard on duty looked through the one-way window, then called out, “Coffee’s on.” The dozen duty officers and secretaries, delighted to be diverted for even a few minutes, filed through the partly open door to the corridor and returned carrying doughnuts and cups of steaming coffee. Manny slipped into his shoes and lined up behind the cart. He drew a mugful of coffee and helped himself to a jelly doughnut, then made his way back to the pit. Across the room the young woman at the telephone switchboard pulled off her earphones and announced, “Mr. Ebbitt, sir, I have a call on an open line from a lady asking to speak to the person in charge. She says it’s a matter of life or death.”

  “Put it through on my outside line,” Manny said. He picked up the green phone. “Yes?”

  The caller’s edgy voice came through the earpiece. “There has to be someone in charge at night. I need to talk to him, and fast.”

  “Could you kindly state your name and your business—” Manny began but the woman cut him off. “For crying out loud, don’t pussyfoot around with me. A man’s life is hanging on this call. We don’t have much time—he has to be back at his embassy by eleven. Pass me over to someone who can make things happen.”

  Manny sat up in his chair and hit the “record” button on the tape recorder plugged into the phone. “You’re speaking to the night duty officer, ma’am.”

  On the other end of the line the woman took a deep breath. “Okay, here’s the deal. My name’s Agatha Ept. That’s E-P-T, as in inept but without the in. I work for the government Patent Office. A week ago Friday I met this Russian diplomat at a reception at the Smithsonian—they were giving a sneak preview of a show honoring a hundred years of American inventions. The Russian said he was a political attaché. He obviously knew a lot about inventions and we got to talking. He asked me if we could meet again and I thought, where’s the harm? So we met for lunch last Sunday at one of the restaurants in the Kennedy Center.” The woman covered the mouth
piece with her hand and spoke to someone in the room. Manny heard her say, “I’m coming to that part.” She came back on the line. “Where was I?”

  Manny liked the sound of her voice—she was in some sort of bind but she was cool enough. He even caught a hint of humor in her tone, almost as if she were enjoying the situation; enjoying the adventure of phoning up the CIA. “You were having lunch in the Kennedy Center,” he said.

  “Right. So my Russian acquaintance—“

  “You want to give me his name?”

  “He specifically asked me not to do that over the phone. So we talked about this and that and then we each went our merry ways. Then tonight, out of the blue, it was around eight-thirty, I got a buzz on the intercom. Lo and behold, there he was! He’d found my address, you see, though I don’t really know how since my phone is unlisted. He was in the lobby downstairs. He begged me to let him come up. He said it was a matter of life or death which, given his situation, I suppose isn’t an exaggeration. I let him in and up he came. Well, the long and the short of it is he wants political asylum. He said Russians didn’t get to meet many Americans. He said I was the only person he could turn to. He asked me to get in touch with the CIA on his behalf—he wants to stay in America, in return for which he’s ready to give you information.”

  “What sort of information?”

  Ept could be heard repeating the question to the Russian. “He wants to know what sort of information you can give him.”

  Manny could hear a man with a thick accent whispering urgently behind her. The woman said, “He says he has a lot of secrets to offer. Okay, what do I do now?”

  Manny said, “What you do now is you give me your phone number and your address. Then you sit tight. You brew up a pot of coffee, you make small talk until I get there. Okay?”

  “It has to be okay. I mean, it’s not as if I have a wide range of options to choose from, is it?”

  Manny scratched her name and address on a pad, then read it back to her to confirm them. Agatha wanted to know his name. He told her she could call him Manny. She laughed and said she would have preferred his real name but would settle for Manny. She asked him what his birth sign was and when he told her he was a Capricorn, she breathed an audible sigh of relief. The Russian in her apartment was a Virgo, she said. She herself was a Taurus with Capricorn rising, which meant the three of them were earth signs and would get along real fine. Manny was in luck, she added: Jupiter just happened to be in Taurus and was about to form a sextile with Venus in Virgo, which meant that any project they undertook together in the next ten days was bound to work out. Manny told her, “I like your style, Agatha. Hang in there.”