by John Barth
At this point Peter Sagamore had said Look here, Doug: It’s time we got to my Obvious Second Question. Also to your One Other Cause of a while back.
Agreed Douglas Townshend with a gentle pink sigh It is. The One Other Cause for which I am a mole—rather, against which I am a mole—is
THE DOOMSDAY FACTOR.
He meant the word factor (Doug explained as the pair lapped the Washington Beltway this time) in the older English sense: a trading agent. Just as Moose Factory, Ontario, is not an establishment for the making or processing of moose, but a place where Indians in the James Bay moose country formerly traded furs for goods of British manufacture; and just as the sot-weed factor in colonial Maryland was not an element in a situation, but a wholesale buyer of cured tobacco in similar exchange; so the rogue or double agent whom prudent citizens must most fear is your dealer in potential apocalypses: your Doomsday Factor.
Rogue agent, Peter more or less inquired. I hate spy talk.
No more than I. A rogue agent is not quite the same as a double or a triple. A double agent is either a spy for some other agency who has penetrated your own, or a spy of your own who has penetrated another agency, or a spy of your own who has been penetrated by another agency. A triple is an agent of your own who pretends to be doubling for someone else while pretending to work for you, while actually working for you. Either of these becomes a Doomsday Factor if and when he traffics in thermonuclear-weapons information or material in such a way as to make the use of such weapons more rather than less likely, in whatever circumstances or cause. Do you follow me.
Far from eagerly.
Not all Doomsday Factors are intelligence people. Not all doubles, triples, and rogues are Doomsday Factors. The Venn diagram, however, shows a small but awfully dangerous overlap.
Rogue agents, Doug.
Rogue agents are agents or ex-agents out of Agency control in a way different from doubles. There are at least three kinds of rogue agents, I’m sorry to report. By far the most numerous is your ex-officer who uses his Agency skills and connections to go into nefarious business for himself. This sort runs from the lowest level, like Nixon’s hired burglars, up through mercenary terrorists and trainers of terrorists, to multimillionaire dealers in illegal narcotics and weapons, to Doomsday Factors, who for a sum of money will put whole populations at risk. All but the last of these have reached near-epidemic numbers.
Let Doug explain as he and Peter circle the nation’s capital, counterclockwise: When, out of concern for its security, a household buys a pistol, it may in fact increase its security to some degree. It also increases, to a much larger degree, the likelihood that someone in the household will be pistol-shot, whether because an armed intruder meets fire with fire, or because an out-of-hand family quarrel now has an escalated last resort, or merely because an accident happens that couldn’t have happened before the pistol joined the household. This was George Washington’s objection to large standing armies, Dwight Eisenhower’s to the military-industrial complex, and, so Katherine tells me, the Sherritt-Sagamores’ to firearms in your house. Of those objections, only yours has so far been heeded.
Go on.
In the same way, when you conscript a great many ghetto black men and train them to be able killers of Vietnamese and then return them from the dope-soaked natural jungle to the dope-soaked asphalt one, you have provided the means, the motive, and the opportunity for a good deal more urban violence than you had before. And when you hire lots and lots and lots of clandestine-service and counterintelligence people in the manifold divisions of your national intelligence community—particularly when you do so in a low-ideology, high-profit-minded republic like the USA—and you give them skills and information and accesses worth a great many dollars to someone who knows how to take advantage of greed, grudges, boredom, jealousy, rivalry, lust, fear, and other human failings, you have got a loaded pistol in your nightstand drawer indeed.
Said Peter Sagamore No question. But Doug.
Patient friend, said Douglas Townshend, we are getting there, counterclockwise. A second and much smaller category of rogue agent is represented by the likes of Frederick Mansfield Talbott: knowledgeable and competent, respected and influential—and at once so independent-minded in word and deed and so utterly devoted to the Agency that almost nobody in the Agency completely trusts him these days. Rick’s chief responsibility at one time was the sniffing out of moles, even of the Deep Mole we perennially suspect to have penetrated nearly to the top of our outfit. Because this particular sniffing-out proved inconclusive despite Rick’s expertise, some people inevitably came to suspect that the Deep Mole was either Rick himself or the deputy director to whom he submitted his report, and who shortly thereafter transferred him back out into the field. There he became your true Prince of Darkness: first in the Middle East, lately in Latin America.
Now then, Peter: In Joseph Conrad’s day, your rogue agent was more of a nuisance and embarrassment to his original patron than an outright menace to civilization. Even today, he may be no more than a megalomaniacal private-empire builder or a high-tech crook: an updated Lord Jim or Mister Kurtz. His rogueries may be as petty, however reprehensible, as G. Gordon Liddy’s and E. Howard Hunt’s, or as multifarious and profitable as Edwin Wilson’s and Frank Terpil’s.
In that last season of his innocence, Peter Sagamore was able to ask Who are those people? I hate all this. Said twinkling Douglas Townshend You shall come to know who they are, if you want to know, and to hate all this as much as I do. Your present-day rogue agent, on the other hand. may be a Doomsday Factor.
Is that Frederick Talbott fellow a Doomsday Factor?
Rick could be a Doomsday Factor. But if so, he's not out to make dollars; he's out to make policy. If a Frederick Mansfield Talbott decides that Israel must have weapons-grade plutonium to go nuclear, as they say, for the sake of its national survival, then weapons-grade plutonium will manage to disappear unaccountably from a nuclear installation in Pennsylvania and appear in the keeping of Mossad, the Israeli CIA. This is only by way of a hypothetical example. If I then say Look here, Rick: Now that the Israelis have the bomb, the Syrians are going to buy into the club from the French, he'll reply That's a bridge we'll blow up when we come to it. There is your second category of rogue agent.
What is the third. Douglas. Peter asked, inflecting his question Townshend-style. What is the third.
Said Douglas Townshend I’m the third, and the neutralization of Doomsday Factors is my One Other Cause. I double for the Constitution against the CIA, and I rogue for the human race against Doomsday Factors. There we are, and here we are.
A losing race, that one, it seemed to Peter Sagamore. Seemed to him that the class of Doomsday Factors includes all who advance their careers, line their pockets, or gratify their ideologies by commissioning, designing, manufacturing, testing, selling, deploying, or manning the likes of thermonuclear weapons, as well as those who traffic in their legal or illegal proliferation. No? Also those who domesticate Doomsday by scaling such weapons down or seriously considering their deployment for any purpose except deterrence of their use; who speak of limiting or winning a nuclear war, et cetera. Yes? Seemed to Peter Sagamore that the Doomsday Factors have the antifactors outnumbered by about a hundred thousand to one.
Quite so, acknowledged Douglas Townshend. But one can effectively weed only one's own backyard. I can't stop the Pentagon from making and deploying the neutron bomb or the cruise missile. But I may be able to stop a rogue agent from peddling plutonium in Libya or Argentina. And I do my best to stop a rogue agency from subverting the law of the land and its own charter in the name of national security.
Even if to do so, Peter prompted . . .
Quite so, unruffled Douglas Townshend said. That is the Tragic View, which, despite Rick Talbott's taunt, I am a long-term subscriber.
He was telling this, Peter Sagamore once again reminded our friend, to the least political of fictioneers. In priva
te life, a halfhearted liberal with the usual contradictions: his mind a socialist, his heart an anarchist, his belly a shameless capitalist. And his girlfriend a rich, halfhearted radical. At the worktable it was another story. Doug Townshend's allegiance was to the U.S. Constitution, long may it wave; Peter Sagamore's was to the muse. He had no notion what her politics were; job enough to find out her aesthetics.
Nevertheless, Doug pointed out, the Agency appeared in “Part of a Shorter Work.”
If he were writing that story today, P replied, it would be shorter yet. He would take the Agency right out of it; the wrong-looking watermen who came over ostensibly to aid the grounded narrator would remain an unresolved mystery, as would the true identity of the buyer of Sagamore Flats. At the time, he had allowed the Agency to appear in the story because it seemed to have appeared in his life: an apprentice error.
It has appeared again, Doug Townshend observed, pointing to himself.
But not to the same writer.
What exactly changed him.
What exactly changed the world? America moved from the sixties into the seventies; Peter Sagamore moved from his twenties into his thirties. His bones, he forgot to mention before, are nihilist. No wife, Doug, no children; just habits of decency and concentration. In four point five billion years, by Peter’s reckoning, the sun will exhaust its hydrogen fuel and expand to apocalypse us anyhow, if a rogue comet doesn’t knock us off earlier. In the long-winded novel of the universe, the history of life on Earth from beginning to end is one tiny episode, and the evolution of human civilization and art is one single moment in that episode, shorter than the shortest Peter Sagamore story. The rest of God’s novel is about something else. That single moment, like a certain magnificent B-flat, happened to be the only moment that much interested P.S.—but his interest was not especially in prolonging it.
Surely, on the other hand, it is not in seeing it shortened even further.
Not especially. But you should know with whom you’re dealing, Doug. Pete tapped his sternum. Bit of a Black Hole under there.
Douglas Townshend nodded. Melville would have said the same: No! in thunder.
Said Peter It’s time we heard why you’re dealing with me: my Obvious Other Question.
YES.
He too, our friend reminded Peter Sagamore somewhere back then, was single and childless; no more of a philosopher than P; certainly no ideologue, either moral or political. Nevertheless, he subscribed with calm passion to certain values whose ultimate justification he had long since lost interest in questioning. One’s thirties, he observed by the way, in the case of scrupulous and concentrated spirits like Peter’s, are a decade in which one may discover within one’s nihilist bones a moral marrow—but never mind that. On the plane of personal aesthetic practice, at least, his young friend had exchanged freewheeling exuberance for parsimonious rigor, and had accomplished admirable work in both spiritual modes, so to speak. Though he, Douglas, preferred the products of the former, he found the exchange more than sympathetic, perhaps exemplary. In any case it was almost certainly a stage, which, if the writer and the world endured, might well lead to something more disciplined than Stage One, yet richer than Stage Two: in short, to work at once masterful and human.
Or to silence, terse Pete reminded him.
Or to silence. With the merest side-glance at the analogy between these twin prospects and the civilized world’s, Doug next remarked that one serviceable bridge from those first and second stages to that noblest third was the Tragic View: the view he personally held of the U.S. intelligence community, of his own covert efforts to keep it honest, and of many another thing as well, not excluding the alliance he was about to propose to Peter Sagamore.
Mused P It’s not easy to be original this late in the day, Doug, but you may have a first there. What in God’s name is the Tragic View of the Central Intelligence Agency, and why am I being let in on it?
Replied in effect smooth Doug The Tragic View of the Central Intelligence Agency is this: Covert government security operations, like organized criminal operations, are cancers in the body democratic. They have in common that they corrupt and falsify individuals and institutions. They widen the gap between what things represent themselves to be and what they are. They debase the very language. The famous links between the Mafia and the CIA—involving Cuba, for example, during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations—they’re quite natural. The stock-in-trade of both are hit men, cut-outs, dummy companies, fronts, plants, puppets, and extortions. Also coercions, briberies, lies, cover-ups, entrapments, conspiracies, and collusions. A crooked cop and a double agent are cells of the same cancer.
This is the Tragic View?
Not yet. The Tragic View follows upon the recognition that covert operations are sometimes justifiable, perhaps even necessary, for the protection of a good society, but like other aspects of security they are inevitably abused. In good faith as well as bad, definitions vary of defense, security, justice, and our other best interests. Protection shades off into coercion, aggression, self-serving. The best cop on the force will Make Policy from time to time when he’s got a big fish right on the hook and knows the fellow’s going to slip through the cracks of the system. He becomes a small-scale Frederick Talbott. The Tragic View involves the realization that judgment, discernment, determination, vigilance, courage, goodwill, and the rest can only help keep in check what can’t be eliminated. We control and suppress the cancer as much as possible for as long as possible, though we can never cure it and may very well succumb to it ourselves.
Said Peter Sagamore I see and agree. Now you’ll tell me why you’re telling me.
I’ve told you nothing, Doug Townshend declared. I’ve only expounded, for several straight chapters. What I propose to do, with your consent, is tell you plenty: as much as I know of exactly what we’ve done and are doing in this line, and how we do it, and what I’m doing in the other direction, and what I have to do in their direction to cover my tracks. I propose to start small and work up, with your go or no-go at each level. I know what I’m about, Peter.
I can’t say I know what you’re about. Think who it is you’re talking to, Doug! Surely I’m the wrong repository.
No. You’re my literary repository; I have others. But the others have to decide whether to believe me and whether to act on what I tell them. All you have to decide is whether to listen.
Even for your literary repository, you should have an American Solzhenitsyn. My stories aren’t about those things.
About! Douglas Townshend’s pink face briefly reddened on the northeast quadrant of I-495: the nearest Peter Sagamore would ever see him approach the emotion of anger. Let them not be, he said then, calmly. There are different ways to be not about. Your stories are not about the Holocaust, either, for example; if you were a Jewish writer who’d survived the camps, your stories might still be not about the Holocaust—but they’d be not about it in a different way. What we’re dealing with here is no holocaust yet, but it’s a cancer in our own body. If your stories come to be not about that in a different way, I’ll have accomplished all I hope to accomplish on the literary front. I should add that you needn’t withhold from Katherine what I tell you on this first level, though obviously discretion will be called for.
He consulted his wristwatch and smiled his twinkly-pink Townshend smile. It’s Nineteen Seventy-four already. Yes or no?
Peter Sagamore consulted his. Considered. Shrugged.
YEAH.
Story is anchored at sunset behind Big Island on the Rhode, after our longest but not our best day of sailing in these pages. No babies yet. Hours of light and variable southerlies have ghosted us up and across the Bay to our first real pit stop of the voyage: Galesville, in the marina-fraught West River, next door. Thence—properly iced, watered, and provisioned now for several days’ cruising, should K’s uterus permit—we sculled two miles through the dying air to our anchorage, under a sunset like a baroque Ascensio
n. What did we speak about through this weighty exposition? Not about Douglas Townshend, John Arthur Paisley, the Doomsday Factor, the CIA—but not about them in a different way from the way we didn’t talk about them in more innocent seasons past.
Douglas Townshend became a special friend, our only one his age. That model of courtliness could, like Katherine, enjoy himself in many sorts of company while remaining quite himself. In those days we sometimes smoked dope with our younger friends—colleagues and graduate students of Peter’s; apprentice library scientists from the Pratt—sitting in a ring on the floor of our Stony Run apartment, firing up “zilches” made from knotted plastic trashbags hung over a tub of water. The young men wore beards and beads, bell-bottoms, shoulder-length hair; the young women wore miniskirts or jeans or Mother Hubbards, granny glasses, headbands, long straight ironing-boarded hair. Close-barbered, shinily shaved Douglas would lounge above us on a chair arm in English suit and club tie, sip a perfectly iced julep for which he had brought fresh mint and special tumblers with him, and benignly oversee the general narcosis. He was equally at home with the Sherritts and the Basses at Nopoint Point, and made us welcome in his Georgetown-Bethesda circle. The Alice Roosevelt Longworth lady was often with him, as often not. He had other close women friends, but there was an air of celibacy about him. Except for occasional marijuana, we younger folk were all putting cigarettes behind us, with more or less difficulty; not so Douglas. His match-hand, we noticed, sometimes shook. We would have enjoyed crossing paths again with Franklin and Leah Talbott, but that did not happen; Doug seemed to prefer it so. His friends were literate doctors, architects, lawyers, theater people, career civil servants from State, Justice, Interior. Or so they represented themselves.
Over the next two years—in Peter’s car around and around those belt-ways, in our apartment after dinner on evenings when Katherine’s manifold commitments required her presence elsewhere, over lunches in College Park or downtown Baltimore, aboard Story on occasional Kathless daysails, and in odd moments of privacy here and there about Nopoint Point—Douglas Townshend carried out the first level of his program.
