by W. T. Tyler
Some punster had added a fourth name to a fourth figure, not among the Wehrmacht storm troopers, but in the grainy sidewalk crowd visible across the cobbled street just to the right elbow of the battalion guidon—a small blank-faced, jug-eared blond boy looking on, awestruck, from the curb. The head had been circled and identified in the margin with a felt-tipped pen: “U.S. Obergruppenwunderkind Jimmy Carter.”
To the right of this poster was a much-enlarged reproduction of a U.S. satellite photograph taken on a winter afternoon some hundred and forty miles above Moscow. The resolution was not as fine as that obtained by recent satellite imagery but accurate enough so that the digitalized radio pulses revealed a score of figures just dispersing from the Palace of Congresses within the Kremlin walls, astrakhan and felt hats visible, like the Zil limousines and the mounds of snow heaped at the foot of the steps. The enlarged photo had been sent to the DIA special-watch group following an interagency squabble a number of years earlier involving the Air Force, DIA, CIA, and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in the interpretation of certain telemetry intercepted from the Soviet missile-testing facility at Tyuratam. The Air Force and the CIA had won the bureaucratic battle, and the gloating Air Force interpretation team had sent the photograph to DIA, captioned “Another Triumph for Air Force Technocracy.” The photo had been taken on the day of an important Politburo meeting and Brezhnev was thought to be among the departing figures.
A disgruntled DIA analyst, one of the team losers, had penned in his own riposte, “And Another Victory for CIA/AF Photo-Interpretation!” attaching identities to those heavily bundled individuals meandering toward their limousines: “Dr. Spock (in dark glasses)”; “Joan Baez (carrying guitar case)”; and “Chairman Brezhnev and Jane Fonda (drums and vocal).”
Judged too sophisticated for the golf club literati at Air Force intelligence, the poster had remained in the Gallery.
Further along near the Xerox machine was a large multicolored poster from some long-forgotten Pentagon briefing session for a congressional committee, apportioning global shares of the U.S. foreign military assistance dollar, the largest of which went to Israel. Someone had mounted the graph in the A ring corridor not long after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Pentagon resentment at Israel’s insatiable weapons demands was growing, not merely because of the political costs to the U.S. in the Arab world, but because many in the Pentagon were convinced that weapons transfers to Israel had seriously depleted U.S. inventories in Europe and elsewhere and had dangerously eroded U.S. military readiness.
A critic of U.S. economic and military support for Israel had scrawled in the caption: “Support Israel! Buy U.S. Savings Bonds.” The poster had appeared originally in the corridor outside the office of an assistant secretary, but had been quickly removed by one of his deputies, who was often visited by officers from the Israeli defense attaché’s office. It had reappeared in the DIA special-watch anteroom, a highly restricted area where unaccompanied visitors weren’t allowed, a special pass was required, and senior officials seldom strayed. Over the years, additional in-house graffiti had been penned in, reflecting a growing cynicism about the Israeli lobby. “Support Golda’s Goyim,” one exhortation read: “Henry Jackson for SecDef!” Or: “Watch out for Meir’s Mafioso on the Hill! Report all Congressional Briefings to FBI!”
But the most recent graffiti was more subtle, more elusive, and, for Nick Straus, more ominous. An early advocate of détente, of nuclear arms reductions and minimal deterrence, he’d paid a price for his policy views. The admonition which most depressed him was one scrawled on the poster just recently by an anonymous hand. It read: “Support Menachem Begin’s New Irgun! Demolish Détente!”
He’d had no difficulty guessing its meaning.
But this rainy evening, his mind was on other things. He was copying a series of DIA and NSA intercepts describing Soviet troop movements along the Afghan and Iranian frontiers during the 1979 crisis. He’d already been retired from the Agency at the time, and these months were voids in his historical memory. An archivist by nature, solitary and tenacious, he was convinced that such fragments would inevitably yield a better logic to Soviet depredations than those credited to Moscow by the Carter innocents or the new chauvinists of the Reagan administration. In the overstuffed safes of the DIA special-watch group, he’d discovered a windfall of such documents, some dating to 1970.
He’d been copying them for three months now, choosing them selectively from the cache he’d discovered, but it was risky work. The noise of the Xerox machine muffled the sound of the cipher lock being operated in the corridor, and he’d once been surprised at the machine by a returning secretary who’d missed her car pool. He’d had difficulty explaining why these old documents interested him. What could he tell her—that the official or public version of Soviet activities from Cuba to Afghanistan was inaccurate and that successive U.S. administrations had known more of these clumsy reactive postures than they understood or had dared reveal?
He cleared the machine and looked quickly at a second folder of papers, a collection of intercepted Soviet messages deploying the airlift in 1973 to relieve the encircled Egyptian army trapped on the east bank of the Suez Canal. But these documents were familiar to him, intercepts he’d seen while still at the Agency; and he turned off the machine, relieved, assembled his copies in an envelope, and carried the folders back to the suite of deserted offices. Like the anteroom, these offices were lined with safes and cabinets, leaving barely enough room for the desks. He shared the outer room with two other analysts, one a Russian linguist, like himself, and the other an Air Force major. The two secretaries worked in alcoves just outside the two small rooms belonging to Colonel Dillon, the watch section chief, and his deputy.
On their desks, as on those in the outer office, lay the only conspicuous evidence of the special watch’s mission, the daily monitoring of Soviet missile dispersion, movement, and replacement, from which was defined, by others, the calculus of Soviet strategic intent. This evidence stood on individual desktops: missile replicas distributed by a West Coast aerospace giant with a Washington staff twice the size of the Soviet embassy. Each desk in the section held a cluster of miniature missiles, Soviet as well as American, mounted on plastic pedestals and pointing toward the low acoustical ceiling. The small American Minuteman was dwarfed by the massive Soviet SS-20, a bone-and-city-crushing tyrannosaurus rex from the bogs of the Dnieper, all the more ominous when compared with the graceful American bird, a dove from the cities of light, the product of a more sophisticated, more advanced evolutionary lineage. In recent months, the missile clusters had become popular Pentagon desk pieces. A more expensive chrome model, with nose cones opening up to become cigarette lighters, could be found in the larger, more prestigious offices.
Straus had taken the documents he’d been copying that evening from a bottom drawer of one of the safes in Colonel Dillon’s office. Dillon was a former defense attaché in Moscow, a man of staff school intelligence and shaky historical memory, and his intellectual vagueness when dealing with anything less certain than the Soviet global design was responsible for the windfall of documents Nick Straus had discovered. The office had become a historical lumber room. Telegrams, intercepts, staff studies, and option papers that should have been retired years ago had been kept to nourish Colonel Dillon’s dim historical wick. New safes and bar-lock cabinets had been moved in to accommodate the overflow, squeezing two of the special-watch staff out the front door to an adjacent office down the corridor.
Yet if Nick Straus was grateful for Colonel Dillon’s obtuseness, he’d also begun to despair at ever completing his covert after-hours projects. How would he find the time to pilfer the most important documents from this vast archive and to write the definitive history of post-1972 Soviet foreign policy, stripped of its burden of hysteria, secrecy, cant, and executive privilege, like his still top-secret analysis of the Cuban missile crisis.
The project had become an obsession. He had too little ti
me. Always the first to arrive, always the last to leave, he spent twelve to thirteen hours a day in the special-watch catacomb. His weekends were no longer his own. In his race against time, he wasn’t aware of the ghost he’d become. His hair was thinner, his face grayer. He was slightly stoop-shouldered. The flannel and tweed suits he’d fancied since his Harvard graduate days had given way to cotton wash-and-wear, whatever the season, the better to ease the dry prickly heat of the windowless, low-ceilinged cubicles that had become his tomb. The pebble-grained oxfords had been replaced by black electrician’s shoes with ripple soles, which he’d purchased in an army-navy store in the Pentagon mall on the advice of a Navy chief he’d overheard one day in the Pentagon cafeteria. The chief had been rambling on to his luncheon companion about the ripple soles and how they eased the hemorrhoids, prostate spasms, and muscle aches brought on by the impact of the Pentagon’s miles of concrete corridors. Nick Straus, who experienced similar complaints and had been to a doctor to find relief, immediately folded away his New York Times, pushed his tray back, and rushed down to the mall to buy a pair.
The others in the section saw nothing unusual in his habits. They’d discovered a mild little man who could be trusted to stay behind and lock up after they rushed off to join their car pools or their racquetball partners, someone who would make sure that no safes were left unlocked, no classified documents forgotten in an out box or on a desktop, and that the coffeepot in the anteroom was unplugged, rinsed out, and ready for the following morning’s brew. A few of his younger, more vigorous colleagues in the special-watch section, those late to arrive and quick to depart, might have attributed his long hours and his willingness to substitute for them during their weekend or holiday duty hours to some kind of domestic problem, to an unhappy life or an unathletic physique, or simply to that Jewish melancholia they saw lurking in those sad brown eyes. He’d been retired from the Agency, eased out by an aggressive beltway defense consulting firm, four of whose senior staff had joined the Reagan administration, but was rescued by an old friend, Leyton Fischer, a prim, fussy deputy in policy and plans at the Pentagon who was searching for experienced Soviet specialists to improve DIA’s analytical base. But it was a nonpolicy position, after all, a humiliation for a man of his talent and experience. So Nick Straus seemed to the others in the section a pathetic case, a man desperate to succeed but who wouldn’t, already beginning to fade into inconsequentiality, a man who, had he not become an intelligence analyst, would surely have become a scholar or librarian, and perhaps with better success, a shy, solitary little mouse, hidden behind the wainscoting.
On his knees now in the corner of Colonel Dillon’s office, the bottom drawer of the combination safe open, Nick Straus tried to force the borrowed folder of NSA intercepts into the drawer. His face was damp, his palms wet. The phone had rung twice. He thought he heard a footfall in the anteroom, and got up quickly to look. The anteroom was deserted, but he heard footsteps in the corridor beyond. He waited until they passed and returned to Dillon’s office. He couldn’t force the file folder in: the drawer was crammed with documents. He searched for the metal release on the rear panel that held the files upright, but the panel was flush against the back of the drawer. He pulled the drawer forward as far as he could and discovered a tattered manila envelope, folded double, thrust awkwardly into the end of the drawer. After he removed it, the borrowed folder slipped in. He unfolded the thick envelope to return it to the drawer and saw the red crayon notation on the flap: Eyes Only Intercepts: No Dissem.
He couldn’t recall seeing the envelope earlier and now he opened it curiously, removing a bundle of tissue copies of NSA and FBI phone intercepts. Puzzled, he carried them to Colonel Dillon’s desk and leafed through them. Most were transcriptions of phone conversations dating from the early seventies. Some were direct phone taps; others were NSA intercepts of domestic and transatlantic telephone circuits. The participants included various executive agency bureaucrats, including State Department, ACDA, Pentagon, and White House officials, a few senators and their aides, congressmen, defense industry lobbyists, political pressure groups, and a handful of foreign embassies in Washington.
Among them he recognized the defense consulting firm he’d worked for briefly after he’d been retired from the Agency. The firm’s founder and board chairman was there, General Gawpin, who’d been recently selected by the White House for a senior position with the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Les Fine, a former Senate staffer, Kissinger associate at the National Security Council, and now the Pentagon’s deputy arms control strategist, was also named.
He paused over a phone intercept of a talk between Les Fine and an unidentified military attaché at the Israeli embassy, fearing the worst:
Fine: We’ve got to get him off the Geneva delegation right away; he’s giving us problems.
Attaché: I know. We’ve tried. Why don’t you talk to the senator again, get him to call ACDA?
Fine: I’ve tried, but he wants to wait. The point is, Afghanistan is box office these days and we’ve got to make the most of it while we can, finish them off, bury any possibility of reaching any agreement, whether at Geneva or anyplace else.
Attaché: Box office? (Laughter) Whose line is that?
Fine: Mine. The point is to use it to the max. We don’t want to let them put us back in the box again, like they did in ’73; never. We can’t live with that.…
Straus read on in dismay. He could understand those who opposed arms control, détente, or any easing of international tensions out of ignorance or their own barbaric fears, but he couldn’t forgive those far more sophisticated minds who opposed it in pursuit of their own narrow realpolitik, as this attaché and Les Fine were doing.
He didn’t know the man the two were conspiring to remove from the Geneva arms talks. It hadn’t been Straus but it might have been, and the memory of his own misfortunes returned—first banishment, then retirement, and most recently dismissal. He sat for a long time at Colonel Dillon’s desk, reading through the phone logs and finding additional fragments of an informal kind of conspiracy, organized by a few tragically misguided zealots and ideologues working under diplomatic or humanitarian cover.
As he left the suite that night, his eyes rested for a moment on the old poster hung near the Xerox machine:
SUPPORT MENACHEM BEGIN’S NEW IRGUN! DEMOLISH DÉTENTE!
He decided, as he closed the door, that he might have to do something about that.
2.
Rita Kramer had been waiting alone in Wilson’s borrowed office when he returned from the Fairfax County courthouse that afternoon. Her raw presence was already in possession of the second-floor suite, as inescapable as the scent he’d identified in the stairwell and in the gold-carpeted reception room. She seemed more subdued that day. Her dark eyes and wide mouth were as flawlessly made up as before, but she was tired. Her auburn hair was drawn severely from her forehead and temples, small shadows lay like bruises under her eyes, and the harsh light of the office betrayed a coarseness high on the cheekbones that cosmetics couldn’t disguise. She’d arrived in a taxi and wanted to see Grace Ramsey’s house for a final time. It was the only house she’d seen that interested her, even if the price was too high, and if she didn’t negotiate a contract soon, her husband would arrive from Los Angeles. She didn’t want to spend another week looking at houses and she had no faith in her husband’s taste.
“We’d end up in some blintzy bachelor condo, and that’s not what I want,” she said. “Maybe Artie’s got a lot of things going for him, but taste isn’t one of them.”
They talked for a while in Wilson’s office and waited for Mrs. Polk to return, but Mrs. Polk was delayed and Wilson drove her out to the Ramsey house himself.
“I might have known you were a Democrat,” she said as she saw the bumper sticker on the old station wagon. “Where’d you get this bomb? Something left over from the Carter campaign committee?”
The day was partially sunny, with broken clouds ove
rhead, driven from the north.
“I didn’t mind getting away from L.A. for a while,” she told him as they drove away, “but I’m not that crazy about Washington, not yet, anyway. I told that Georgetown broker Artie wanted to be on the Potomac and she showed me Alexandria, Georgetown, and Capitol Hill. Artie wouldn’t live there. He wants to see the Potomac when he gets up in the morning—that’s the last thing he said to me before he put me on the plane in L.A. He’s patriotic that way. He wants the goddamned Potomac in his backyard, wants the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial there when he gets up in the morning, like some grade school kid.”
“You could find something in Georgetown.”
“Washington’s a jungle after dark—don’t you read the papers? I don’t want to get mugged; I don’t want potheads or black guys jiving me when I walk down the street, either. I looked at this town house on Capitol Hill, did I tell you? There were mom and pop tourists from out of town parked all over the place—these tacky campers.” She opened her purse and took out a cigarette case. “What I want is a little privacy, someplace with a little class where Artie can entertain his political and business friends and feel good about it, not like some little Lithuanian fur trimmer who’d cut his wrists to break into the big time. It’s about time word got around. Artie’s arrived.”
