by John Barth
Speaking with scarcely a movement of his lips as was his habit in these sessions, Doug said What I’ll be telling you now is mostly secondhand, Peter, and might possibly be disinformation, though I think not. I’m resigning because they’re nudging me out to pasture anyhow because they’re pretty sure I’ve been leaking to Congress and the Post, but they can’t prove it because I know how to diddle the polygraphs.
Before we hit the Beltway, Doug: Did the Agency do your heart attack?
Douglas Townshend smiled. No way to tell; that’s the beauty of it. Rick Talbott says some people can be warned off with a glance, while some need a nine-millimeter bullet in the cerebellum to get their attention. In between, I suppose, is the perfectly ambiguous cardiac episode.
They were driving out Massachusetts Avenue in P’s old BMW, which Kath had come to call the Expository Vehicle. The man you saw me with on Hoopers Island lives up there these days, Doug said, nodding at a nondescript apartment building. His neighbors are KGBers from the Soviet embassy, one of them in Wet Affairs. John is fluent, and his specialty is Soviet strategic weapons strength. Now that Bill’s out and George is in, John’s as busy as he ever was. He told me last week that he has less time for sailing these days than he did before he retired.
Oh? Bill was Colby. George was Bush. John was Paisley, whose present assignments had to do with Doomsday Factors. Having written nothing since that six-pager, Peter went up to Boston late in the summer for bilateral reanastomosis of his vas deferens. Marcie Blitzstein, now a freelance feminist filmmaker, dropped by Mass. General to inspect his operation scars for old times’ sake, but he wouldn’t show them to her. That much he told Katherine, who said You’re allowed, you’re allowed, for Christ sake; just don’t put the thing in her. But he didn’t tell Kath about Bill and George and John.
John Arthur Paisley, reader, was born in 1923. At age seventeen he joined the U.S. Merchant Marine and was trained as a radio operator. During the war he made several Lend-Lease runs to Murmansk, learned the Russian language, and became established in three of what were to be his four lifelong loves: things nautical, things electronic, and things Russian. The fourth came toward the war’s end, when, still in his very early twenties, he was apparently recruited to do OSS work under Merchant Marine cover. In 1948 he went to Palestine with Ralph Bunche’s United Nations mission, which laid the groundwork for establishing the new state of Israel. According to Douglas Townshend, Paisley was already working for the equally new CIA, and under UN cover helped set up a radio intercept system for monitoring traffic both among the Arab governments and between those governments and the Soviet Union, at a time when it was feared the Soviets might make a power play in the Middle East.
The conversation in our house was about waiting for Peter’s sperm to come down their new pipeline; it was not about John Arthur Paisley’s marrying Maryann, fathering children, and receiving advanced CIA training under State Department cover at the Defense Nuclear Agency and in the Air Force staff course in ballistic missiles. It was not about his working with the Color Hearing and MK Ultra programs afore-exposed, or his helping to develop Octopus, the Agency’s computerized data-bank on all matters Soviet, or his association with our airborne espionage program via the U-2 and SR71 “Blackbird” aircraft and SAMOS, our early spy-in-the-sky satellite.
We crossed our fingers and waited. Come on, spermies, Kath encouraged. They’re shy, Peter worried; they’ve been underground too long. Following the Nosenko interrogations, he didn’t tell her, Paisley was assigned to the U.S. embassy in London under light cover to attend the Imperial War College and do Soviet-surveillance work out of our nuclear weapons depot and SR71 base at Newbury Air Station. A very senior spook by 72, he took part in the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty negotiations—SALT I—in Vienna and Helsinki, as an expert on satellite surveillance of Soviet compliance with the agreements. Here (so said Doug Townshend, who was doing the same dangerous thing) he made contact with one or more potential Soviet defectors and/or double agents, of the status of Yuri Nosenko—and we approach the Doomsday Factor.
P. Sagamore’s stories through that fall, had he written any, would have been not about the fact that in the period just prior to and after John Arthur Paisley’s deputy directorship of the Agency’s Office of Strategic Research, the CIA’s estimates of Soviet military capability (the preparation of which was that office’s principal responsibility) were regarded by the hawkish, especially in the national defense establishment, as consistently too low. Inasmuch as high estimates, whether correct or exaggerated, would lead to an increased American armaments buildup, it was clearly in the interest of the USSR that those estimates be low. Doug himself believed them to be very close to correct and the complaints against them to be inspired by Pentagon paranoia and the greed of the Doomsday Factors in our weapons industry. Others, however, believed the Office of Strategic Research to have been misled by the likes of Yuri Nosenko into under-estimations clearly to the Soviets’ advantage in the SALT negotiations. In 1976 the Agency was prevailed upon to compare the estimates of its in-house experts—the “A Team”—with those of an ad hoc committee of independent authorities on such matters: the “B Team.” To do its work, the B Team needed access to all the classified data from which the A Team made its calculations; someone knowledgeable in the field but not currently an active Agency officer was required to coordinate the experiment, supply the B Team with its materials, act as liaison between the two groups, and draft a report on the comparative findings. Director George Bush, Doug said, called Paisley out of “retirement” for this work.
The following year, the year of our reanastomosis and our crossed-fingered vigil, the Doomsday Factors moved again, Doug said, and Paisley was given an even more consequential assignment. The SALT II negotiations were approaching: Great powers being what they are, it was assumed by each side that the other would demand more arms cuts from its adversary than it expected that adversary to agree to, offer less than it expected its adversary to demand, fall back in both areas toward more acceptable positions, and, if agreement should be reached, cheat as much on that agreement as it could get away with. It was therefore of the first importance to each side to know in advance what the other’s “fall-back” position was, how the other intended to cheat on that position should it be agreed upon (so that appropriate surveillance technology could be developed to detect that cheating), and what anti-cheating surveillance technology the other intended to deploy (so that appropriate cheating technology could be developed to get around it). In Douglas Townshend’s opinion, faithfully unreported in our family conversation and unreflected in Peter Sagamore’s unwritten stories of 1977, John Arthur Paisley had been approached in Helsinki during SALT I by his KGB counterparts and “pitched” to double. He had reported the approach to J. J. Angleton and been advised like unlucky Captain Shadrin to “take the pitch” and—this was Operation KITTY HAWK—had fed the Soviets certain data on our fall-back position: Whether information, disinformation, or supercoded disinformation, Doug did not know.
Either stung or encouraged by that experience, the KGB then scored one enormous success and was strongly suspected of having scored yet another. Between 1975 and 1977, two genuine young Doomsday Factors (from the U.S. point of view), Christopher Boyce and Andrew Lee, sold thousands of pages of technical data on our spy-in-the-sky satellites to the Soviets, with the help of which, it was feared, they were cheating on SALT I with impunity. As we looked for sperm, the pair was arrested, tried, and jailed—and John Arthur Paisley, Doug declared, was given the job of assessing our loss and the USSR’s gain. Specifically, in addition to his rare “all-building” pass to CIA headquarters and safe houses, Paisley was issued portable high-technology equipment to detect and monitor Soviet interception of U.S. spy-satellite transmissions—and now we come to Sagamore Flats, the end of the year, and the fulfillment of one of Mr. Paisley’s lifelong wishes.
Sperm! Sperm! Sperm! cried in order Dr. Jack Bass, Peter Sagamore, and Kat
herine Sherritt, examining in turn, like spies in the sky, a glop of Peter’s ejaculate under the doctor’s microscope at Thanksgiving. To the delight of all hands, we wed, in a much smaller December ceremony at Nopoint Point than Irma Sherritt had had in mind: the family, some neighbors and friends, including May Jump and Doug Townshend—fewer than a hundred guests in all. We honeymooned on a chartered sailboat in the British Virgin Islands, endeavoring to make a baby and to write something not about Doomsday Factors, while back in cloak-and-daggerland the KGB prepared a stunning follow-up coup.
The principal U.S. espionage satellites by this time, replacing our older SAMOS designs, were the Keyhole series: KH11 and KH12, nicknamed “Big Bird” after a popular character on an American television show for children. They are almost unbelievably perceptive instruments: The best LANDSAT photograph of Chesapeake Bay—a false-color image taken from 570 miles up, on which we can clearly see not only Nopoint and Shorter Points but Katydid IV lying at its dock and every shoal we’ve ever run Story aground on—was made from “inferiorized” Keyhole technology, to prevent the Soviets from knowing exactly how good the real thing is. Big Bird, Doug told Peter, could distinguish between lamb chops and T-bone steaks on Katydid’s taffrail grill. It was Keyhole technology that the Soviets were principally after in their dealings with Boyce and Lee; there could be no realistic SALT II agreement until the loss of all that data was assessed and somehow repaired. Early in the spring, Doug said, under the cover of his job at the accounting firm of Coopers & Lybrand, John Arthur Paisley worked with an intelligence think-tank called Mitre Corporation, who determined that the Soviets would require even more information on Big Bird’s workings in order to make best use of what they already had. If they were successfully intercepting the Bird’s transmissions, then they had somehow got that additional information; if they were not, then getting it must be among their highest intelligence priorities.
Katherine Sherritt Sagamore menstruated. We retried and reretried; she remenstruated, reremenstruated. Likewise the muse. George Bush was followed at the CIA by a retired Navy man, Admiral Stansfield Turner, to whom, Doug told Peter, John Paisley proposed a project combining for the first time all of his several enthusiasms, and by whom (Doug said) he was given permission and additional equipment to carry it out. While still preparing his draft report on the A-Team/B-Team experiment, he outfitted Brillig with yet more exotic electronic gear lent him by the Agency, so that while sailing he could “sweep” the Chesapeake area between the Sagamore Flats safe house on Hoopers Island, the National Security Agency complex at Fort Meade, and the Soviet embassy’s vacation compound on Corsica Neck, next door to The Deniston School at the confluence of the Corsica and Chester Rivers, where (said Doug) the KGB maintained its principal electronic installation within the United States. If KH11’s transmissions to Forts Meade and Belvoir were being intercepted on Corsica Neck or, worse, relayed there by a deep mole at Sagamore Flats, Brillig would intercept those interceptions, confirm and assess the damage to Big Bird’s usefulness, and perhaps uncover the mole as well.
John’s riding higher than the Prince of Darkness, Doug said. He reports directly to Stan Turner, and he’s a great friend of Comrade Nosenko these days, who is back in the Agency’s graces and may even be involved in the project.
To heat matters up yet further, Doug said—shades of the Nosenko affair—we had as of April a first-class new defector: Arkady Schevchenko, the Russians’ UN ambassador and one of their disarmament experts. Schevchenko, according to Douglas Townshend, was now telling his interrogators just what Paisley wanted to hear and the hawks didn’t: that the A Team’s low estimates had been accurate, and the B Team’s were substantial exaggerations of Soviet military strength. Not surprisingly, the B Team suspected Schevchenko of being another high-level KGB plant and Paisley of “delivering” him to discredit their report, if not for more sinister reasons. The interrogation was continuing.
Doug’s own current consultancy was not unrelated to the Big Bird business, though his equivocal standing in the Agency kept him more removed from the main action than Paisley, not to mention the Prince of Darkness. The Iranian revolution would surely cost the CIA its listening outpost and SR71 base near Tabriz, partly for the sake of which we had supported the shah, helped train his infamous secret police, and thereby indirectly fueled the revolution. Diplomatic negotiations with mainland China had led us to shut down our surveillance station at Lien Ko in Taiwan, from which we monitored China’s missile and nuclear weapons testing facility at Lop Nor. Part of Doug Townshend’s new job was liaison work among the Agency, the NSA, and the governments with whom we must arrange new installations to make good those losses. His real interest in the assignment stemmed from the fact that the “take” from both of those listening outposts was sometimes funneled into the KH11 for transmission to Fort Belvoir, and he suspected that other Doomsday Factors were to be found around the Big Bird’s nests. Perth, Australia, he told Peter, where our National Aeronautics and Space Administration already maintained a satellite and spacecraft tracking center, was one feasible fall-back from our abandoned listening-post at Lien Ko. He expected to have business in Perth.
The KGB’s next blow fell, however, not in Perth or Ankara or Helsinki but in middest America: in Hammond, Indiana, where in August—owing partly to Rick Talbott’s undercover work—the FBI arrested a young Agency watch officer named William Kampiles on charges of having sold to Soviet agents in Greece the most intimate technical manuals for KH11, including one signed out to former director George Bush himself. Indiana! Doug had groaned in July, just before the arrest. Who could have guessed that SALT II would be torpedoed in Indiana? The Big Bird was now so seriously penetrated, he believed, that hawkish senators opposed anyhow to arms-limitation treaties would use its compromising as a strong argument against our ratifying the new Carter-Brezhnev negotiations. As there was every prospect of an enormous conservative resurgence in the 1980 U.S. elections, Doug feared that the days of Soviet-American detente were numbered, and that the new decade would see us at best prodigiously escalating the arms race, at worst preparing to wage a “winnable” nuclear war.
Sore-souled Peter Sagamore did not tell his wife about the Doomsday Factor in Indiana—though the fuss was soon enough in the papers—or about the intensified new Deep Mole hunt subsequently initiated by Rick Talbott in almost as freelance a style as John Paisley’s waterborne search for links between Sagamore Flats and Corsica Neck. The two enterprises Doug understood to have overlapped, to the point where Paisley and the Prince of Darkness were said each to have named separately the same man to Stansfield Turner in their short list of suspects—as well, it was rumored, as naming each other.
Who cared, reader? While the mushroom-clouded specter of the 1980s approached, and Peter Sagamore appealed to his muse in virtual vain for stories not about the end of civilization, one of his June swimmers turned out to have made its way after all through Katherine’s plumbing and to have penetrated successfully her floater-of-the-month. In July she missed a menstrual period for the first time in fifteen years. We held our breath . . . and Peter his tongue on the subject of Doomsday Factors. In August, as young Mr. Kampiles joined the arrested ranks of Boyce and Lee. and Arkady Schevchenko’s interrogation continued, and Frederick Mansfield Talbott spent more and more time at Sagamore Flats, and Congressman Porter Baldwin, Jr.—a newly appointed member of the House Intelligence Committee—stridently denounced, among other evils, the SALT II Sellout and the Carter Administration’s Betrayal of Our Great Ally the Shah of Iran, and John Arthur Paisley tended Brillig’s sails and twiddled his dials, she missed another. After consultation with Jack Bass, we announced to the Sherritts that we were pregnant.
Clear tears in his gray eyes, joyous Henry at once established over Katherine’s objections a mighty trust fund for his first grandchild. You did that back in Poonie’s administration, Kath reminded him, and look what happened: I don’t trust trusts. Irma counseled Let Daddy have his fu
n, and we did. Alfred North Whitehead, Peter said, said that worship is the natural human response to the perception of order in the universe; trust funds are the natural response of the affluent to pregnancy in the family. Chip Sherritt, among whose pastimes that summer was biological mathematics, named our fetus Katydid V and for our amusement calculated on his Apple computer the odds against any given human spermatozoan’s accomplishing its mission. They were satisfactorily astronomical.
Speaking of Kate’s former husband (Douglas Townshend told Peter Sagamore toward that happy summer’s end), Rick Talbott sees a Doomsday Factor in the making there, and our differences on that question are coming to a curious head. Have I told you that among Congressman Baldwin’s anonymous supporters these days is the KGB.
He had not; he now did. It was expected that reelection to his House seat in the fall would set Porter Baldwin, Jr., up to run in 1980 against Maryland’s liberal Democratic senator, particularly if the Republican presidential candidate that year turned out to be a strong one. It had come to Frederick Talbott’s knowledge that the KGB hoped to penetrate the Congressional intelligence-oversight committees—not by way of the doves, as might be expected, but via their most hawkish members. In Poonie’s case, their tactic was to be homosexual entrapment followed by anonymous blackmail: Their prediction was that Baldwin would sell his soul to cover his ass: that having first helped elect and then crucially compromised him, they could at least pressure him to vote their way in committee, at best tap his access to U.S. intelligence, even groom him to be a high-level Doomsday Factor. Rick Talbott’s intention was to thwart this penetration by arranging a scandalous exposure: not of the KGB connection, of which the congressman was ignorant, but of the gay connection, which ought to be enough to end Baldwin’s political career despite the fact that an estimated one out of every ten male DCers is AC/DC.
