by Paul Vidich
The next hour was unpleasant. He was made to wait in a windowless cell somewhere in the bowels of a temporary office building erected during the war to meet the needs of a burgeoning bureaucracy and never removed. They had taken everything—envelope, newspaper, briefcase, coins, house keys, wallet. They’d been polite but they didn’t answer any of his questions. What is going on? Why am I here? He’d resisted the impulse to object—yell, actually. It would make him feel better, but it would not change things. They were following orders or procedures. When they took the briefcase, he said, “You’ll have to pay for the lock if you break it.”
Room 8 had two wood chairs and a small, battered table. He tried the doorknob but found it locked. Of course it would be locked, he thought, but sometimes people got sloppy. Vasilenko got sloppy. What else explained the error? The FBI had followed the unsuspecting new guy. It didn’t matter how diligent Mueller was if the man on the other end of the bargain was careless.
The door to Room 8 burst open. Mueller had his head in his hands on the table, staring at nothing, and the door startled him. The muscular agent wore a tailored suit oddly formal for the late hour, and a loose necktie. Young, bright-eyed, slightly apologetic, arms akimbo.
“So you’re the CIA guy. I’m Agent Peters. Good to meet you. Agent Walker thinks you’re a pretty swell fellow.”
Mueller arched an eyebrow. “He does, does he?” Mueller mumbled something meant to convey modesty. Gratuitous compliments bothered Mueller. Flattery held in its offering the possibility of an unwanted seduction.
“So what were you doing in Union Station?”
Mueller gave a story about the spectacle of the train wreck drawing crowds and he’d gone to see what the commotion was all about. Mueller saw skepticism crisp the agent’s face. They both knew this was a game. Agent Peters placed things taken from Mueller on the table like an offering: his wallet, keys, loose change, a handwritten note from Beth, even the ticket stub from her performance at the National Theater that had stayed in his pocket all week.
Mueller looked up. “My briefcase?”
“There’s another agent on his way. He’ll have questions for you.”
Mueller knew the danger he was in. A trio of missteps had put him in jeopardy. An unauthorized meeting with the other side. His briefcase had held classified cables, now in the hands of people not authorized to read them. It would get him a reprimand—another. Failure to lock his safe at night. Removing documents from the office. He was less concerned about that oversight. The danger lay in Vasilenko’s documents. Information that suggested Mueller was doing the FBI’s job would sound alarms, excite calls, raise concerns. Mueller didn’t know how to evaluate that risk.
• • •
Midnight. The sound of his name. His leg had gone to sleep. He wished the rest of him would join it. It was excruciating to be awake on a hard chair, wanting the sedation of sleep but being too keyed up to succumb. Mueller opened his eyes. A man in the door. Mueller looked at his watch. An hour. It felt like an eternity.
“George Mueller?”
Who did they think was in the room? Insufferable underlings tested his urge to say something he might regret. “Yes.”
“I’m Agent Colson.”
The bright light revealed the man’s ugliness. He was the one from Union Station. He had a fat neck, wire-rim eyeglasses that pressed into the flesh on his temples, thick lenses that made his eyes small and intense, like a bird of prey, and a single black hair sprouted from a discolored mole on his chin.
“Do you have anything to say?”
Mueller focused on the man’s eyes to avoid staring at the mole hair. “About?”
“What you were doing in Union Station?”
“When did it become a crime to be in a train station?”
“You’re not going to answer?”
“I just did.”
“You can make this easy or you can make this difficult.”
“Let’s go with the easy. How’s that?”
Agent Colson leaned forward and put his face close enough to Mueller to taste the foul breath of his growled words. “Don’t fuck with me.”
Mueller sat back in his chair and took a moment to consider the flash of anger on the agent’s face. He knew the drill, the intimidation, the pressure to make a mistake that would be used against him. So Mueller relented to the interrogation. The agent’s questions came at a staccato clip, one after the other, questions repeated as if his answer had been forgotten, and when he repeated his answer he got back hostile silence. No, he didn’t know what was in the envelope. He had not opened it. No, he didn’t read Russian. After an hour of this, Agent Colson walked out.
• • •
Early in the morning, Mueller was awakened from a fitful sleep that wasn’t sleep at all but a recess from consciousness. His watch told him it was dawn outside, but inside there was only the incessant fluorescent light, the blank walls, his table, the empty chair opposite, the same ten square feet of cell. His neck ached from the long awkward position of his head on the miserable table, his mouth was dry, and his right leg had gone painfully numb. His clothes were clammy with body odor and his cheeks darkened with day-old stubble.
William Walker stood in the door. He came with a hint of cologne that perfumed the cell’s stale air. Walker had the alert composure of a man who’d had a good night’s sleep and was ready to greet the day.
Finally, Walker. They were getting themselves organized, Mueller thought. Each agent was a step up the chain of command, and a step toward a responsible conversation to straighten things out.
“I didn’t expect to see you here,” Walker said in his friendly drawl. “You in trouble?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so?”
It was the tone of Walker’s voice that alerted Mueller. “I am available to be convinced, but, no, I don’t think so.”
“We’re friends, aren’t we? How long have we worked this together?” Walker turned the chair around and sat facing Mueller, elbows resting on the back. He leaned forward, exciting a crack in the wood joinery. “I’m going to ask you some questions. That okay with you? Then we’ll take it from there. Try not to be too fresh. That’s not helpful.”
“Fine.”
“What were you doing in Union Station?”
Mueller’s surprise swelled in sudden laughter.
“What’s so funny?”
They didn’t know. He could count on Vasilenko for the usual caution. “Picking up an envelope. You opened my briefcase. You have the envelope. You’ve read what’s inside, or gotten someone to read it. How’s your Russian?”
“Picking up from whom?”
“You know who. You followed him. Yuri Vasilenko. NKVD. We recruited him in Vienna. His cover is trade. He was transferred here from New York and he continues to be useful.” Mueller added. “Intelligence not counterintelligence.”
Walker had no expression on his face, but he gripped the chair, and then released it and smiled. It was a smile that wasn’t quite a smile. “You know the rules.”
Mueller frowned.
“No one informed us.”
Mueller waited to be lectured. “I have to be in the office.”
“This isn’t over, George. You’re now a person of interest.” Walker stood. “There’s a shower down the hall if you want to get rid of your stink. I’ve alerted Coffin. He’s on his way.”
• • •
Mueller met with his CIA colleague and the head of FBI counterintelligence in a second-floor conference room with a view of the Potomac. A brace of flags surrounded a large portrait of newly inaugurated President Eisenhower. Someone had mercifully found coffee and it sat on the table beside a tray with three cups. Faint light from the dawning sun’s corona fretted the tree line and revealed fog on the river.
Mueller was alone for the first thirty minu
tes. He was restless, with the edgy, exhausted restlessness of a night without sleep, head slumped on a table. He sat, stood, sat again, and fidgeted with a pencil he took from a container of sharpened pencils. He twice glanced toward the closed door expecting the person passing in the hallway to enter, but neither did. He was anxious in a way that made him uncomfortable. His mind was drawn to outcomes that he didn’t want to consider. Bad outcomes.
Mueller stood abruptly when Walker came through the door. James Coffin followed close behind. Coffin wore a dark mackintosh and his homburg, which he hung on a stand by the window. His thick black hair was flecked with gray and combed straight back and he was fully alert at this early hour of the day. His expression was flat, opaque, and his eyes followed Mueller as he walked around the table. He wore thin-soled leather shoes and a bespoke English suit. He nodded at Mueller, his only concession to the fact that they knew each other. Coffin lit a cigarette.
“Good morning,” Mueller said.
“Yes, George. Here we are.”
Walker poured himself a cup of coffee and sipped it standing up—his conference room, his territory, his command. Walker opened the meeting. He offered a mild rebuke for the lack of cooperation between the FBI and the CIA. He gave a short lecture on the law and reminded the two CIA officers that they could work together, as their charters required, or they could work apart, and in that case it was likely that things would come apart. The CIA, he reminded them, gathered intelligence. The FBI arrested spies and protected secrets. “Things don’t end up well when we try to do each other’s jobs. Do you understand? I’m reasonable, but I work for a man who has less tolerance for your swagger. Do you understand?”
Silence lingered in the room after Walker ended his little speech. Mueller squeezed the pencil to contain his impatience. Coffin held a filtered cigarette in long delicate fingers. “Understood,” he said.
Walker paced the length of the table and turned to Mueller. “You met Vasilenko four times in the past two months.” He threw a typed document at Mueller. “Our agents saw you together. Whiskey Bar on the fifth, then once in a parked car near the Carlton Hotel, and last night at Union Station. We’re supposed to be informed whenever one of you guys meets a Russian. We weren’t. We got one report. We never got another. Did you write them? Or did we just not get copied? What’s going on here, gentlemen?”
Walker looked directly at Mueller. “Tell me, George, are you the one we’re looking for? Is that why he never showed up that night at Lafayette Park? Because the fucking Judas was right next to me? Am I the biggest fool in this town?”
Coffin tapped the fragile ash of his cigarette on the saucer. He didn’t look up and he spoke in a perfunctory voice. “Calm down. We need proof we’ve been penetrated. Otherwise we are just speculating.” He looked at Mueller and delivered an order disguised as a request. “George, would you step outside for a moment?”
Mueller waited in the corridor. His fidgeted with the pencil, fingers rolling it over his knuckles, and marked time. He paced the corridor traveling to a secretary’s desk and then back, repeating this pattern until bored. He was tempted to put his ear to the closed conference room door, but secretaries who’d arrived in the office early had their eye on him. He didn’t like the attention. It was a place of suspicions. A stranger in their midst. A secretary removed a file from her desk to hide it from view. Then other employees arrived, greeting each other in resonant voices until they saw Mueller, and then their demeanor became guarded and they spoke to each other in a conspiratorial hush. Harsh fluorescent light gave their faces a pasty hue. It was a cramped place, hardly ventilated, and Mueller caught the faint hint of a cigarette. Dawn and already smoking.
How long would they be? Mueller looked at the closed door, at his watch, and then he glanced again at the diligent secretaries who typed, making an incessant clacking, while others stood at the water cooler gossiping. Fifteen minutes had passed. He had an urge to punch the wall.
Suddenly the door opened. Coffin nodded at Mueller to rejoin the group. Mueller sat where he’d left his coffee, and he looked from one man to the other, seeking a clue to what they’d discussed, searching for anything that would hint at his fate. Part of him wanted to be done with the whole charade.
“Well,” he said.
“What happened in Vienna?” Walker asked.
“Vienna?” Think. “I don’t understand the question,” Mueller said.
“You were in Vienna in ’forty-eight. Correct?”
“Yes.”
“You were in contact with the Soviets there, correct?”
“Yes.” What was in the papers? What had Vasilenko turned over? Mueller looked at the two men. “Berlin had been blockaded. We knew they were running a network out of Vienna and I went there to find out what we could about their intentions in Berlin. It was unstable. Food riots on May fifth paralyzed the city. Berlin, Vienna, Bern. We were looking for agents disillusioned with communism, or wanting a paycheck. I was sent to build a network. I’m not sure I’m answering your question.” Mueller looked at his interrogators. It incensed him to be questioned about the quality of his work. It was his worst trait, the self-righteous indignation he felt for the sacrifices he’d made, nights lost, marriage broken, health squandered—for what? They were all adults here doing their jobs.
“What’s the point?” he snapped. “What are you looking for?” His fist hit the table harder than he intended. “Are you questioning my commitment here?”
“Calm down, George,” Walker said. “We have questions and we need some answers. For the moment you can go. We’ll be in touch. But don’t leave the city.”
The meeting ended. Mueller followed Coffin out of the building into chilly morning air. They drove to Quarter’s Eye in Coffin’s car in the light traffic of early commuters making good time on Pennsylvania Avenue. It was his English sports car with cracked leather seats and a quaint speedometer limited to the speed the car could actually reach. Cigarette butts overflowed the ashtray. This eccentric car was one of Mueller’s only windows into Coffin’s personal life.
Mueller turned to Coffin. “What did Vasilenko turn over?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen the material. Walker’s got it and he says that he will keep it until he knows what’s going on. I don’t think we can risk a confrontation over this. We need to pick our fights, and this isn’t a fight we are in a position to win, or perhaps it’s better said that our chances are uncertain. He has something he won’t share so he’s got a trump card. There may be nothing. If so, he’s playing us. It’s regrettable that you were picked up.”
“Very regrettable.”
“Who picked the men’s room?”
“He did.”
“Why?”
“He doesn’t give me his reasons.” Mueller sounded more sarcastic than he intended. “The plan always had that risk.”
There was a beat of silence.
“You left your safe unlocked.”
That again. Mueller gazed out the window at a squad of marines jogging along the Mall. He resented the new order of things that substituted bureaucracy for the good judgment of men hired for their intelligence and initiative. Quit. Resign. He knew that it would no longer be that simple.
“I straightened one thing out,” Coffin said. He leaned forward into the windshield, looking through the fog. “I said you were authorized to take classified documents home. I settled that with him.” Coffin turned sideways to Mueller, dark eyes casting a judgment. “It doesn’t look good at best. You had sensitive cables in your possession when you met with a high-ranking member of the NKVD. . . . Would you take a polygraph?”
The implications of the request settled in one syllable at a time. He was under suspicion. The oxygen of trust was sucked out of the air.
“What’s your concern?”
“We just need to put this behind us.”
• • •<
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Mueller’s polygraph was conducted the next morning. He’d been polygraphed once, but not when he left the disbanded OSS to join the CIA as one of the Agency’s first recruits. Those first officers who came over were all known to each other, soldiers who’d fought together against the Nazis, men of intelligence, class, integrity, men known for their willingness to set aside rules, particularly arbitrary rules, to accomplish their mission, but those heady days of lax supervision were gone. Calcifying bureaucracy had set in, and with it, the polygraph.
Mueller knew that the polygraph was designed, in part, to intimidate the subject. If the device was successful in detecting lies, it was because the subject thought it worked. The lie detector didn’t actually measure lies, the choices a man made to conceal or prevaricate. It didn’t measure free will. It recorded excitement. It recorded changes in breathing, blood pressure, heart beat, and sweat. Mueller understood the theory. All case officers did. When a person lied, the stress produced physiological changes that could be measured. And case officers knew the techniques of how to lie without detection. This was a popular topic of conversation at Friday vespers after the second bottle of Scotch whiskey had been opened. Officers shared tips on how to rehearse answers to condition a response. Squeezing toes in shoes before answering. Biting the tongue. Four hundred milligrams of over-the-counter meprobamate taken an hour before the test. All strategies for lying successfully. Everyone had advice, an opinion, a complaint about the process. Everyone also had a lie. Mueller knew there was no special magic. Confidence was the most important thing. Confidence and a friendly relationship with the examiner—rapport, where you smiled and made him like you. Simply not caring about the consequences was a strategy too.
Mueller met the operator at 10:00 a.m. Mueller didn’t like the test, he didn’t like the idea that he was being tested, and he took a dislike to the young man who was his test operator. He had a dull, military appearance—crew cut, narrow tie, dark suit, a big athletic build and an impassive face that Mueller couldn’t approach, even if he had wanted to. Mueller tried to look happy to be there.
