by James Grady
But changing heroin into “something else … some kind of super-drug” was ludicrous. I was writing a novel whose power came in part from being as close to real as possible, and a super-drug insulted reality.
And letting the heroine live meant the hero had no trigger to transform into the kind of assassin he’d been fleeing.
So I came up with Condor only thinking she’d been killed (I left her crippled but maybe on the road to recovery), on the theory that that was good enough for his motivation.
As for heroin, this rube from Montana ran a Trojan horse idea past the faceless sophisticated New York City paperback editors: instead of heroin, have the bad guys smuggling bricks of morphine. “Wonderful!” was the response, and I realized at that moment that these editors who were cultural gatekeepers knew next to nothing about the gigantic narcotics scourge they feared and that they’d been motivated by junior high school-level analyses of what’s cool and what’s so been done. Nobody smuggles morphine bricks into America: it’s economically not worth it, in part because morphine is an early manufactured stage of … heroin. But for me, at least it was a real drug and not some editorial committee hallucinated super-drug that would have made Condor more parody than plain-speak.
Still, I was only a twenty-four-year-old first-time novelist. I was lucky to get off with the light editing Condor received. Hell, I was lucky to be published at all.
Some lucky novels are three books: the author’s original work, the edited published volume, and the story Hollywood projects onto the silver screen.
Casting for Condor locked up Robert Redford before I’d even met my great editor Starling Lawrence in the lobby of his office’s New York skyscraper.
And history that exploded outside in our streets after the manuscript’s acceptance inspired changes for the movie’s creative team.
Already the plot had been shifted from Washington, D.C., to New York because, I was told, Robert Redford had to shoot two movies that year: Three Days of the Condor and All the President’s Men. He and his family lived in New York and he didn’t want to have to uproot them to move to Washington for the year. Of the two movies’ plots, only Condor could be moved to New York.
More important was the MacGuffin.
Just before I left Montana for Washington, the United States got hit with its first oil embargo. The invisible world of petroleum politics suddenly dominated the way we all lived. That change in America’s reality, that change in Americans’ consciousness, was too creatively cool to ignore, so the MacGuffin’s addictive narcotic went from heroin to oil. And instead of my noir ending, the brilliant screenwriters came up with an even more chilling, culturally impactive Lady or the Tiger? climax.
Beyond such meta-changes, the movie absorbed jargon and language just then breaking into our cultural consciousness—dirty tricks from President Nixon’s attack-dog teams and new reportage on the intelligence community. Condor was one of the first movies to show such things as computers scanning documents—a revolutionary concept in 1974.
There’s no way to describe what it’s like for a novelist to walk onto a movie set that has created a three-dimensional, real-life setting from a vision born in the writer’s fevered dreams. The cast and crew welcomed me on the set. I drifted in a surreal daze.
Sydney Pollack showed me around, letting me see the exacting, painstaking detail with which he approached his art, right down to hand-selecting the never-filmed-before guns the assassins would wield. I listened in awe as he described how to create tension in a scene by having nothing happen—except, of course, that the ruthless killer and his prey ride the same elevator surrounded by innocent witnesses. Sydney explained that in film, telling a chronological chase story meant he couldn’t show Redford on the run for six days and night, so everything compressed into three days.
Redford went out of his way to be gracious. He stood outside with me one wintry Manhattan morning on the front steps of the set-decorated secret CIA office made real from my what if and talked about our work while we ignored two mink-coated high society women who’d imperiously breezed through the police lines only to look up and see who was standing there. Those two oh-so-sophisticated Manhattan matrons clutched each other like schoolgirls, hip-hopped past us in gasping glee. I’ve often wondered if Robert Redford has that kind of effect on women, too.
Few other book authors have been treated as well by Hollywood as I was. Dino, Pollack, Redford, and the rest took my slim first novel, elevated and enhanced it into a cinematic masterpiece. I’m so lucky and grateful to have been a first step in that wondrous process. My whole life has been blessed by the shadow of Condor.
But until the KGB story broke, who knew that shadow was so huge?
In the same year that the great American author of my generation, Bruce Springsteen, released his seminal Born to Run, my movie came out, Nixon had resigned, my Senate fellowship had ended, I had two more novels about to be published, and I’d jumped at a chance to join Jack Anderson’s handful of muckrakers. After all, Nixon’s thugs had plotted to murder Jack (luckily, they’d been worse at murder than they were at burglary), and Les Whitten, the man who’d graciously but inadvertently helped inspire my novel about the CIA, was one of my bosses. How cool and lucky was that! Redford arranged for me to see the movie before its 1975 premiere in Washington, so I took Shirley (still my girlfriend) and my Jack Anderson colleagues. I kept telling myself that this was the real world.
Though I’d rushed a traditional novel sequel into a successful and New York Times-bestselling life, I realized that the quintet of Condor novels I envisioned after selling Six Days would have to fly into the culturally branded image created by the great and deserving movie star of my times, Robert Redford. I did not want to compete with that.
So I let Condor fly away.
Until 9/11.
As that smoke cleared, Condor flew back.
First, he made me reveal what happened to Ronald Malcolm, that just-like-me-sixties rebel, but do so in a way that stayed true to the image of Redford—or at least didn’t do it violence.
So in one my favorite novels, 2006’s Mad Dogs, Condor has a crucial cameo in the CIA’s secret insane asylum.
That wasn’t enough.
But now the novella I wrote about our post-9/11 Condor—condor.net—lives as an ebook and, along with the essay explaining its birth, awaits only your eyes.
Condor’s been an angelic shadow on my life.
Even before I knew about the secret KGB 2,000-man division Condor inspired, convicted Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis told me his CIA codename had been Condor, though my work was not the inspiration for that or for the 1970s’ Operation Condor consortium of right-wing South American assassination squads. An assassin dressed as a mailman murdered a former Iranian diplomat inside D.C.’s Beltway in 1980, a tactic that intelligence and police officials insist came from Condor, though the admitted fugitive assassin with whom I made contact in Baghdad after 9/11 said he wasn’t sure if I’d provided his inspiration.
Condor inspired parodies on the TV shows Seinfeld, The Simpsons, Fraiser, King of the Hill, and cultural chatter references on shows like NCIS and Breaking Bad. The avant-garde rock group Radiohead samples the movie’s dialog on a song.
In his January, 2000, Washington Post essay on films of the preceding century, Pulitzer Prize-winning movie reviewer (a great friend and renowned novelist) Stephen Hunter picked Three Days of the Condor as the movie most emblematic of the 1970s, the film typical of its paranoid times. Also, wrote Hunter: “This marks the globalization of the cinema as Tinseltown has surrendered its own natural mantle of world centrality.”
And without Condor—picked by the International Thriller Writers as one of their “100 Must Reads”—I’m guessing I might not have been included with Charles Dickens, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and other of my literary heroes on the London Daily Telegraph’s 2008 list of “50 Crime Writers To Read Before You Die,” or gotten career awards from France and Italy.
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bsp; Condor opened hundreds of doors for me from Hollywood to journalism to publishing to homicide detectives’ cruisers. Condor gave me a reputation that let me run, survive, and leave America’s twentieth-century noir streets of terrorists, drug desperados, con men, killers, thieves, covert warriors, revolutionaries, cops, and spies—a saga I fictionalize in The Nature of the Game, also available as an ebook, thanks to The Mysterious Press.
But most of all, Condor gave me the freedom to fly with my dreams. Let me create what ifs for the world. Gave me a base to build a good life for me and eventually for my family. Gave me a chance to touch and, if not enlighten, at least lighten the lives of millions of my fellow human beings who I’ll never be privileged to know.
Like you.
Thanks.
James Grady
“… most significant triumphs come not in the secrets passed in the dark, but in patient reading, hour after hour, of highly technical periodicals. In a real sense they [the “patriotic and dedicated” CIA researchers] are America’s professional students. They are unsung just as they are invaluable.”
—President Lyndon B. Johnson, on swearing in Richard M. Helms as CIA director, June 30, 1966
BLOCKS behind the Library of Congress, just past Southeast A and Fourth Street (one door from the corner), is a white stucco three-story building. Nestled in among the other town houses, it would be unnoticeable if not for its color. The clean brightness stands out among the fading reds, grays, greens, and occasional off-whites. Then, too, the short black iron picket fence and the small, neatly trimmed lawn lend an aura of quiet dignity the other buildings lack. However, few people notice the building. Residents of the area have long since blended it into the familiar neighborhood. The dozens of Capitol Hill and Library of Congress workers who pass it each day don’t have time to notice it, and probably wouldn’t even if they had time. Located where it is, almost off “the Hill,” most of the tourist hordes never come close to it. The few who do are usually looking for a policeman to direct them out of the notoriously rough neighborhood to the safety of national monuments.
If a passerby (for some strange reason) is attracted to the building and takes a closer look, his investigation would reveal very little out of the ordinary. As he stood outside the picket fence, he would probably first note a raised bronze plaque, about three feet by two feet, which proclaims the building to be the national headquarters of the American Literary Historical Society. In Washington, D.C., a city of hundreds of landmarks and headquarters for a multitude of organizations, such a building is not extraordinary. Should the passerby have an eye for architecture and design, he would be pleasantly intrigued by the ornate black wooden door flawed by a curiously large peephole. If our passerby’s curiosity is not hampered by shyness, he might open the gate. He probably will not notice the slight click as the magnetic hinge moves from its resting place and breaks an electric circuit. A few short paces later, our passerby mounts the black iron steps to the stoop and rings the bell.
If, as is usually the case, Walter is drinking coffee in the small kitchen, arranging crates of books, or sweeping the floor, then the myth of security is not even flaunted. The visitor hears Mrs. Russell’s harsh voice bellow “Come in!” just before she punches the buzzer on her desk releasing the electronic lock.
The first thing a visitor to the Society’s headquarters notices is its extreme tidiness. As he stands in the stairwell, his eyes are probably level with the top of Walter’s desk, a scant four inches from the edge of the well. There are never any papers on Walter’s desk, but then, with a steel reinforced front, it was never meant for paper. When the visitor turns to his right and climbs out of the stairwell, he sees Mrs. Russell. Unlike Walter’s work area, her desk spawns paper. It covers the top, protrudes from drawers, and hides her ancient typewriter. Behind the processed forest sits Mrs. Russell. Her gray hair is thin and usually disheveled. In any case, it is too short to be of much help to her face. A horseshoe-shaped brooch dated 1932 adorns what was once a left breast. She smokes constantly.
Strangers who get this far into the Society’s headquarters (other than mailmen and delivery boys) are few in number. Those few, after being screened by Walter’s stare (if he is there), deal with Mrs. Russell. If the stranger comes for business, she directs him to the proper person, provided she accepts his clearance. If the stranger is merely one of the brave and curious, she delivers a five-minute, inordinately dull lecture on the Society’s background of foundation funding, its purpose of literary analysis, advancement, and achievement (referred to as “the 3 A’s”), shoves pamphlets into usually less-than-eager hands, states that there is no one present who can answer further questions, suggests writing to an unspecified address for further information, and then bids a brisk “Good day.” Visitors are universally stunned by this onslaught and leave meekly, probably without noticing the box on Walter’s desk which took their picture or the red light and buzzer above the door which announces the opening of the gate. The visitor’s disappointment would dissolve into fantasy should he learn that he had just visited a section branch office of a department in the Central Intelligence Agency’s Intelligence Division.
The National Security Act of 1947 created the Central Intelligence Agency, a result of the World War II experience of being caught flat-footed at Pearl Harbor. The Agency, or the Company, as many of its employees call it, is the largest and most active entity in the far-flung American intelligence network, a network composed of eleven major agencies, around two hundred thousand persons, and annually budgeted in the billions of dollars. The CIA’s activities, like those of its major counterparts—Britain’s MI6, Russia’s KGB, and Red China’s Social Affairs Department—range through a spectrum of covert espionage, technical research, the funding of loosely linked political action groups, support to friendly governments, and direct paramilitary operations. The wide variety of activities of these agencies, coupled with their basic mission of national security in a troubled world, has made the intelligence agency one of the most important branches of government. In America, former CIA Director Allen Dulles once said, “The National Security Act of 1947 … has given Intelligence a more influential position in our government than Intelligence enjoys in any other government of the world.”
The main activity of the CIA is simple, painstaking research. Hundreds of researchers daily scour technical journals, domestic and foreign periodicals of all kinds, speeches, and media broadcasts. This research is divided between two of the four divisions of the CIA. The Research Division (RD) is in charge of technical intelligence, and its experts provide detailed reports of the latest scientific advances in all countries, including the United States and its allies. The Intelligence Division (ID) engages in a highly specialized form of scholastic research. About 80 percent of the information ID handles comes from “open” sources: public magazines, broadcasts, journals, and books. ID digests its data and from this fare produces three major types of reports: one type makes long-range projections dealing with areas of interest, a second is a daily review of the current world situation, and the third tries to detect gaps in CIA activities. The research gathered by both ID and RD is used by the other two divisions: Support (the administrative arm which deals with logistics, equipment, security, and communications) and Plans (all covert activities, the actual spying division).
The American Literary Historical Society, with headquarters in Washington and a small receiving office in Seattle, is a section branch of one of the smaller departments in the CIA. Because of the inexact nature of the data the department deals with, it is only loosely allied to ID, and, indeed, to CIA as a whole. The department (officially designated as Department 17, CIAID) reports are not consistently incorporated in any one of the three major research report areas. Indeed, Dr. Lappe, the very serious, very nervous head of the Society (officially titled Section 9, Department 17, CIAID), slaves over weekly, monthly, and annual reports which may not even make the corresponding report of mother Department 17. In turn, Depar
tment 17 reports often will not impress major group coordinators on the division level and thus will fail to be incorporated into any of the ID reports. C’est la vie.
The function of the Society and of Department 17 is to keep track of all espionage and related acts recorded in literature. In other words, the Department reads spy thrillers and murder mysteries. The antics and situations in thousands of volumes of mystery and mayhem are carefully detailed and analyzed in Department 17 files. Volumes dating as far back as James Fenimore Cooper have been scrutinized. Most of the company-owned volumes are kept at the Langley, Virginia, CIA central complex, but the Society headquarters maintains a library of almost three thousand volumes. At one time the Department was housed in the Christian Heurich Brewery near the State Department, but in the fall of 1961, when CIA moved to its Langley complex, the Department transferred to the Virginia suburbs. In 1970 the ever-increasing volume of pertinent literature began to create logistic and expense problems for the Department. Additionally, the Deputy Director of ID questioned the need for highly screened and, therefore, highly paid analysts. Consequently, the Department reopened its branch section in metropolitan Washington, this time conveniently close to the Library of Congress. Because the employees were not in the central complex, they needed only to pass a cursory Secret clearance rather than the exacting Top Secret clearance required for employment at the complex. Naturally, their salaries paralleled their rating.
The analysts for the Department keep abreast of the literary field and divide their work basically by mutual consent. Each analyst has areas of expertise, areas usually defined by author. In addition to summarizing plots and methods of all the books, the analysts daily receive a series of specially “sanitized” reports from the Langley complex. The reports contain capsule descriptions of actual events with all names deleted and as few necessary details as possible. Fact and fiction are compared, and if major correlations occur, the analyst begins a further investigation with a more detailed but still sanitized report. If the correlation still appears strong, the information and reports are passed on for review to a higher classified section of the Department. Somewhere after that the decision is made as to whether the author was guessing and lucky or whether he knew more than he should. If the latter is the case, the author is definitely unlucky, for then a report is filed with the Plans Division for action. The analysts are also expected to compile lists of helpful tips for agents. These lists are forwarded to Plans Division instructors, who are always looking for new tricks.
