Blink of an Eye

by William S. Cohen

  As chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Falcone knew about the CIA’s involvement in the plot. He called Dake to chastise him for publishing a story that made the sultan, a friend of the United States, a potential target of assassination.

  “Maybe the sultan should have thought longer about the consequences before he gave in to the crazies at the Agency,” Dake had said. When Falcone thought about that remark, he realized that Dake had willingly made himself an accomplice of CIA officers who were, like the sultan, fighting rival forces.

  No one ever knew how much Dake actually had uncovered about operations he had exposed. He had a favorite technique: He would write only part of a major story and then wait for the calls to come in. Some callers confirmed what Dake knew and added new pieces of information. Others contradicted his story and unintentionally opened up new avenues for Dake to explore. All the while, he acted as if he were stumbling along in desperate need of assistance in order to get the story straight.

  *

  FOR all of the years that Falcone had known Dake, he was not really close to him. There was always a level of distance and unease about their relationship. Dake was friendly enough to Falcone, but Dake’s only loyalty was to his craft. He was a political big-game hunter who tracked his prey with a relentless intelligence that left his quarry no exit from the kill zone.

  Too many of Falcone’s colleagues had mistaken Dake’s easy manner and charm for a subtle offer of reciprocity, a you-take-care-of-me-and-I’ll-take-care-of-you deal. They thought that if they cooperated and gave Dake the information he was after—or the information they thought he could use—that would buy them protection against becoming one of Dake’s future victims.

  They learned the hard way that Dake was not in the protection business. He gave nothing in return for information. No reward. No safety.

  So why, Falcone asked himself, did he ever talk with Dake? Why invite him over to his apartment to watch a three-ring political circus? Dake was doing a book about President Oxley. So, why not run for the nearest exit? Let Dake go to some other staffer—Falcone reluctantly thought of himself as a staffer, someone of high visibility but still below cabinet level. Let someone else try to convince Dake that Oxley had everything under control, that the country was in great hands.…

  Falcone wasn’t looking to secure “favorable treatment”—two words that didn’t exist in Dake’s dictionary. Responsible journalism, like everything else in the country, was in a state of decline. The airwaves and print media were saturated with so much raw sewage that passed for news that it was almost impossible to know the difference between fact and fiction. He wanted Dake to get right the story about Oxley’s presidency. And no one was in a better position than Falcone to set the record straight. At least that’s how he rationalized why Dake was sitting in his living room.…

  Falcone took four eggs, a stick of butter, and a bottle of milk out of the refrigerator and pointed to a loaf of bread and a toaster on a counter. Dake interpreted the gesture as an order to make toast.

  “Nobody runs the world,” Falcone said. “But a lot of idiots think they can. And don’t worry about social meetings. I’ll let you know when you can quote me. And you can quote me on ‘idiots.’ You can make it ‘pompous idiots’ if you want.”

  In what seemed like one move, Falcone grabbed a pan from a rack over the stove, turned on a burner, dabbed butter on the pan, cracked the four eggs into a bowl, whipped in a little milk, and emptied the bowl into the pan. As he shook on salt and ground on pepper, he said, “How much do you know about Stanfield and Nolan?”

  “Well, they have something in common.”

  “Jesus Christ?”

  “And The Brethren of the Covenant of Jesus.”

  “So they are both Brethren?” Falcone asked. “I knew about Stanfield, from that Post piece you wrote. But Nolan? That’s surprising, real surprising. What else do you know about The Brethren?”

  “Not much.”

  “I don’t mean the kind of double-sourced information you’d write for the Post or your books. I mean, in your gut.”

  The toast popped, Falcone put plates and silverware on the counter, and served out the eggs. The two men sat next to each other on swiveling stools. As Dake talked about what he had written about the house on East Capitol Street and General Parker, he wrote an imaginary color paragraph: The interview continued in Falcone’s gleaming kitchen …

  “I think the key to Stanfield is General Parker,” Dake went on. “He’s been in the back alleys, in the places where ordinary people have never been, places that Americans don’t even want to know about. He did all that Stanfield wishes that he could have done if he had donned a uniform. It’s like Stanfield saw Parker as a source of heroism, the kind of God-directed warrior that Stanfield could never be.

  “Parker volunteered for the Delta Force right after he was commissioned, and he never left that secret world. He was in the Delta mission to rescue our hostages in Iran. He was in the Granada operation, the Panama invasion. He was a leader of the first Special Forces that went into Afghanistan after nine-eleven. He got involved in some nasty stuff that left a lot of drug lords dead in Colombia. He was badly wounded in the botched battle in Mogadishu—and that’s where the conversion came.”

  “What conversion? Born again?” Falcone asked. They had finished off the wine. Falcone left the stool to make coffee.

  “Born again in fire. He took a chest wound in Mogadishu. The medic on the evac chopper thought he was dying. But he recovered. And he called it a miracle, a real miracle. He told people that God had put him in the Delta Force and kept him alive for some special mission. A psychiatrist recommended that he be transferred to the regular army because—get this—he was too religious for Delta Force. But one of his superiors was even more religious than Parker. He became an inspiration. And the idea of a holy mission—a crusade—appealed to a lot of officers in the Special Operations Command.”

  “And that’s the gospel that Stanfield picked up?” Falcone asked. He took down mugs. “Sugar? Milk?”

  “Black.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Thanks,” Dake said, holding up his mug, which bore the logo of Meet the Press. “I think that when you try to figure the connection between Parker and Stanfield and their connection with The Brethren, you get into supposition, speculation. Or you have to do some heavy snooping. The Brethren is a tough bunch to crack. But I’ll tell you what my gut says. What we just saw at that convention is scary. A political coup by The Brethren.”

  “So that Praetorian guard that we saw muscle Nolan onto the stage … that was The Brethren?”

  “Looks that way to me,” Dake said. “There’s a brown-shirt tinge to those guys. There’s a fascist strain that runs through them. And ‘fascist’ is not a word I use lightly. It’s a bolt out of the blue, the way they’ve crashed into national politics.”

  “A surprise to most people,” Falcone said. “But not to Ray Quinlan. He was incensed that Nolan got on the Elkton committee after two impeachment resolutions.”

  “The resolutions wound up quickly as no-news. They’re absolutely forgotten.”

  “Right. And so was the impeachment resolution introduced against Nixon at the beginning of Watergate. Sure, it got nowhere at the time. But it was there, and its mere existence started making Nixon’s supporters take a closer look at him.”

  “There’s no comparison between where Nixon was and the way Oxley—”

  “That’s not the way Ray Quinlan sees it,” Falcone interrupted. “Quinlan has a lot of reasons to be pissed off at me. And I handed him another one when I suggested putting Nolan on the Elkton investigation committee. Quinlan thinks that I catapulted Nolan onto the national stage. And don’t quote me.”

  “Your suggestion?”

  “Right. I thought I could bottle him up in the committee, and that if he went off the reservation, he would look like an idiot and make his impeachment efforts look like the work of an idiot. I turned
out to be the idiot. Again, no quote. And here’s another quote that didn’t come from me: Quinlan predicted days ago that Nolan would get the vice presidential nomination. Get that quote from him.”

  “Amazing! What led him to predict that?”

  “Again, get that from him. I don’t know what he’ll tell you. But—again, don’t quote me—I think he got some information from the President.”

  “And the President got it from the Intelligence Community?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Falcone said, buttering a piece of toast and handing it to Dake.

  “Thanks,” Dake said. “Well, from what I’ve heard, The Brethren has been an intelligence target for some time.”

  “You know that would be illegal, Phil. The Brethren is legitimately—well, legally—a religion. So the FBI can’t snoop around. And it’s domestic. So the CIA can’t touch it, either.”

  “I didn’t say American intelligence.”

  Dake waited for a response. There was none.

  “It’s the intelligence service that we dare not speak its name,” Dake continued. “The Mossad. Supposedly it’s doing the snooping. Israel wonders about The Brethren. And after tonight, Israel will be wondering even more. Sure, the Brethren members support Israel—and they’d be gleeful if Israel bombed Iran’s nuke facilities.”

  To Dake’s experienced eyes, Falcone had begun looking uncomfortable. It was time for Dake to pivot the interview from asking questions to giving answers, moving Falcone back to his cooperative mood. Dake had tossed his jacket over a stool. He reached for the jacket and fished a thick envelope from an inner pocket.

  “I brought this along because I thought you might like to see it. It’s some notes and some noodling I’ve been doing for a book. It started out to be a book on The Brethren, and then I started getting information on Parker. I brought it along because I knew you’d want to know about The Brethren—and the Israeli interest.”

  “Funny you happened to have this in your pocket,” Falcone said, smiling. He did not reach for the envelope from Dake’s outstretched hand. “If I take this, what am I supposed to do with it?”

  “Call it a gift. Just unwrap it and decide whether you want to keep it.”

  “As you undoubtedly know, I have had some complicated relationships with Israel—and one Israeli especially.”

  “I remember. The Israeli connection to Senator Stock. When he was murdered—”

  “No need to go into that,” Falcone interrupted. “What I want to do is ask you a question. I think I know you well enough to know that you won’t lie to me.”

  “What’s the question?” Dake asked, putting the envelope on the counter.

  “Did an Israeli ask you to give me the information in that envelope?”

  “No.”

  “Did you get this from an Israeli?”

  “You know I can’t give you or anybody else my sources, Sean.”

  “Well, let me ask you another question. Were you surprised by Nolan’s nomination?”

  “I was surprised about as much as Quinlan would have been.”

  “Interesting answer,” Falcone said. He was remembering his visit to Dake’s home years before, when Dake was helping Falcone solve the murder of Joshua Stock and clear his name. Dake, Falcone remembered, had given himself the code name Music Man.

  Dake lived in his multi-tiered home in McLean, complete with what a friend once called his Book Factory on the third floor and his Music Room on the second floor. The Music Room’s centerpiece was his Steinway grand piano. Scattered around the room were cabinets containing his collections of recordings and sheet music. He was a nearly professional amateur who once had coaxed the conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra to allow him to play a concerto during a concert that featured Yo-Yo Ma. But while Dake loved classical music, he could just as easily slip into ragtime or R&B. Occasionally, he performed in a trio at Blues Alley in Georgetown, Washington’s premier jazz club.

  During that memorable visit to Dake’s home, Falcone had seen two assistants typing away at computers and filing thick folders into dozens of filing cabinets that lined the walls. Dake had a passion for finding information where nobody else even thought to look for it.

  No one had ever successfully challenged him on any substantial fact, but his conclusions and accusations created controversies—and made his books into bestsellers. In a book describing the administration that preceded Oxley’s, for example, Dake accused a high-ranking Pentagon official of getting kickbacks from defense contractors. When the official went to court to get an order that he give up his source, Dake refused and spent a month in prison for contempt of court. An appeals court freed him, upholding Dake’s right to keep a promise of confidentiality to his sources.

  “Okay, Phil. I’ll take your gift,” Falcone said, reaching for the envelope.

  12

  A FEW minutes after Dake left, Falcone went into the locked room that served as his office, opened the envelope, and took out several pages folded in thirds. At the top right-hand corner of each page was BRETHNOTES, followed by the page number. Glancing through the pages, Falcone saw the scrawled marginal notes, cross-outs, and written-in words of a work in progress. The editing had been done on the original printout pages; Dake had given Falcone copied pages.

  The numbering of the pages began with 18 and ended with 26. For some reason, Dake had handed over an excerpt from notes that went on for an unknown number of pages.

  Falcone saw that Dake showed his old-school preference for typewriters by choosing Courier for his computer font. As Falcone deduced the style, Dake used regular Courier type for what were probable paragraphs for the narrative text and boldfaced type for notes, some marked TK for “to come,” indicating something that he was still working on. The handwritten scrawls mostly improved sentences and did not change the thrust of the narrative. So Falcone mostly disregarded the scrawls and concentrated on the typescript.

  Possible lead-off: One day in 1932, prospective Democratic presidential candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt was having lunch with Rexford Tugwell, a member of the advisors Roosevelt called his “Brain Trust.” Lunch was interrupted by a phone call from Louisiana Governor Huey Long, a populist who preached a radical share-the-wealth campaign.

  After hanging up, Roosevelt told Tugwell that Long was the second-most dangerous man in America. “Who is the most dangerous?” Tugwell asked. Roosevelt answered, “Douglas MacArthur,” the Army chief of staff.

  Roosevelt had not needed to elaborate. With social unrest rising during the Great Depression, some Wall Street bankers plotted a coup that would be triggered by disgruntled veterans and eyed MacArthur as a potential front man. The idea had worked in Italy, where veterans had helped to put a dictator in power, and would soon be copied in Germany.

  MacArthur had shown his contempt for civil authority by going beyond President Hoover’s orders to peacefully expel the “Bonus Army,” the thousands of veterans who had come to Washington to petition for a promised payment to be given for service in World War I. MacArthur used tear gas and bayonets against the veterans and torched their camps.

  The bankers never managed to organize their coup, and MacArthur retired from the U.S. Army in 1937. He went off to the Philippines to become field marshal of an embryonic army.

  Now imagine President Oxley lunching with, say, his chief of staff, Ray Quinlan. The lunch is interrupted by a call from, say, Senator Mark Stanfield. If Oxley turned to Quinlan and said Stanfield was the second-most dangerous man in America and Quinlan asked him who was the most dangerous, a good contender would be General George William Parker, U.S. Army (Ret.).

  But, instead of exiling himself somewhere after he was asked to resign, General Parker stayed in Washington, took command of a fundamentalist Christian sect, recruited Stanfield and other powerful men as members, and decided to use his talents as a secretive Special Ops warrior to lead what he calls a crusade to transform America.

  Falcone was surprised to see that Dake was planning t
o start a book about The Brethren with an anecdote that implied that Parker was the power behind Stanfield. The proposed opening of the Brethren book went far beyond what Dake had said about Parker in his Post piece on “The House of The Brethren.” Looking back on the evening’s conversation and scanning the pages that Dake had given him, Falcone realized that since writing the Post piece, Dake had developed some extraordinarily good sources.

  On one page, Falcone read:

  [find place to work in:] “… had undergone sexual and physical abuse as child.… secrecy became his method of survival. Professional secrecy helped cloud loathed memories. Intensive violence became a pathway for bottled-up hatred and other emotions that could be relieved by danger and combat. Not legally insane but not normal. Fantasies (see “miracle” discussion) may interfere with Special Ops missions.” [CS13/2nd]

  CS—confidential source—was an abbreviation well known to anyone who had been exposed to CIA documents. The information may have come from an Army psychiatrist, maybe at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where Parker probably would have been treated and examined after being wounded in Mogadishu. 13 was probably the number Dake had given to the source, and, as Falcone remembered, Dake numbered his sources in the order he found them. So CS13 was the thirteenth source. The identity of CS13 and all the other CS people would forever remain in one of those locked filing cabinets or in some encrypted computer file.

  /2nd initially puzzled Falcone. Then he remembered a remark from Dake about how he had handled leaks from Senator Falcone’s intelligence committee. Dake had said that he gave more credence to an original source than a secondary source, “especially when the second source was just giving me something he had got—or maybe filched—from an original source.”

  So CS13 was the possessor of the information that had been given to Dake by 2nd, who had not been assigned a number. Falcone inferred from this that the notation was more a reminder that Dake had been given the information and had not got it directly from an interview. Another memory came to Falcone: a package of documents found outside his Senate office door; the documents were genuine; the whistleblower was never identified. Would that qualify for /2nd under Dake’s rules? Probably not. He insists that although he uses anonymous sources, he always knows who he is dealing with and never takes anything from anyone who wanted to be anonymous when giving Dake information.