“Agreed.”
“We know we didn’t threaten him. Well, we threatened him in the sense that we made it impossible for his army to win in Afghanistan. But that story is public, and sending over the Stingers was a covert operation only at the beginning. By 1985, we were doing that pretty openly. But there was never any ultimatum there. So what are we talking about? Something that just pissed the hell out of Gorbachev? Soviet leaders don’t threaten nuclear war when they’re pissed off. If they did, we’d have had a nuclear war in 1949 … You know what I think?”
Mack had got used to the phrase. When the President used it, either he followed it immediately with what it was that he really thought, as in, “You ass, it’s that obvious …” or else he followed it with a pause. When he paused after using the locution, that meant he wished his interlocutor to jump right in and say, “What?” Or, even better, “What, Mr. President?”
“What?”
“I think the whole thing is … crap. Whatever Cyclops was, whatever he did, there’s no way he could have threatened war. So what we come down to is: What are we going to do about the Blanton bill? I started to ask you, did you see the ad in the Post?”
“Same thing appeared in the Times.”
“Who’s financing that drive?”
“Oh, the usual people. If you get a few thousand signatures, it doesn’t cost that much per person.”
The President picked up the paper and began to list the Blanton bill endorsers. “‘The People’s Peace Front.’ Is that the San Francisco group?”
Mack nodded.
“The Committee for International Justice.’ Is that the committee that wants us to try the South Korean gang as war criminals?”
“Among other things, yes. They’d also like it if we strung up Marcos.”
“Marcos is dead.”
“That doesn’t bother the Committee for International Justice.”
The President went on, reading out the names of the backers of the Blanton bill. He stopped. “‘The Gay-Lesbian Liberation Frat’—What in the hell does covert operations have to do with—”
“Maybe they think the CIA goes undercover in drag.”
The President put the paper down. “What do you think, Mack?”
“Mr. President, I don’t think you can stop the bill unless you come out on it. You don’t have to oppose it. Just suggest a compromise, the effect of which would be to dilute it. Why not say that perhaps covert action should be permitted only with the backing of the committee chairmen in the House and in the Senate, except when, in the opinion of the Executive, the national interest supervenes?”
“What do you mean, ‘supervenes’? Doesn’t that require me to describe a situation in which the national interest can’t be confided to the two chairmen?”
“Actually it does, but it never needs to be stated that bluntly. If a bill was passed with that proviso in it, you would have the same authority you now have. You would simply have to make a finding that this situation and that one are situations in which the national interest … supervenes.”
“You know something, Mack, Blanton is not only the darling of the left wing of the party. He also owns Illinois. The difference between Blanton working for me next year in Illinois and Blanton spending the campaign giving anti-covert-activity lectures in Frankfurt or—or Hiroshima could mean the difference of twenty-four electoral votes.”
Mack nodded. “We can always go back to my original suggestion.”
“Which was?”
“Give him the bill, and then ignore it.”
“You tell me it’s very tightly written.”
“So’s the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.”
The President nodded. And then said, “By the way, if Blanton doesn’t relent on the Blackford Oakes front I expect the National Guard to come down and release him. Christ, they might as well have put Lindbergh in jail, or MacArthur.”
“You’re right, Chief. That’s coming to a boil.”
“Maybe I should call Blanton in here?”
“Wouldn’t work. Nothing works with Blanton.” Mack looked at his watch. “Unless you want me to postpone it, Mr. President, I called a staff meeting for ten minutes ago.”
The President waved his fingers toward the door. “See you later, Mack.”
CHAPTER 19
OCTOBER 1986
When, at Reykjavik, the news was given out to fifty attending newsmen that General Secretary Gorbachev would be coming to Washington before the end of the year, and that not long after, Mr. Reagan would be paying a reciprocal visit to Moscow, there was spirited talk in Congress on the general question of security. It had recently been disclosed that the new U.S. Embassy in Moscow was a hundred-million-dollar piece of Swiss cheese, designed primarily to oblige Soviet eavesdropping. Congressman Dick Armey characterized the new building as “an eight-story microphone plugged into the Politburo.”
Where exactly would the U.S. delegation meet, Senator Dole wanted to know, in order to discuss the disarmament treaty? Normally, he explained to television interviewer Larry King, when in need of maximum security abroad U.S. diplomats retire to the “bubble.” That is a kind of electronic bunker within which, it had generally been supposed, not even one’s guardian angel can overhear you. But, Dole said, it turns out that even our bubble in Moscow had been successfully bugged. “And that which is bugged,” said Mr. Dole, “does not get debugged merely by the touch of a sweeper’s wand. The estimated cost of debugging the new embassy has been put at twenty-five million dollars.”
The bubble not being secure, one congressman gravely suggested that the Secretary of State bring to Moscow his own traveling van, “something on the order of what CBS News trots out when there is a local situation to be filmed.” But then a reporter released the judgment of an expert: Such vans could easily be made to emit the sounds even of whispers within. Columnist William F. Buckley suggested that U.S. staff meetings be held in a helicopter a couple of thousand feet over Moscow, but he was not taken seriously. Another congressman solemnly deliberated that perhaps the Secretary should retreat every evening to his Air Force jet and use it as an office, but the unspoken consensus was that this would not be dignified. The Senate reacted by voting 70–30 its conviction that in protest against this violation of privacy, Secretary George Shultz should postpone his visit to Moscow, where he was scheduled to meet with his counterpart to do the advance work on the proposed disarmament treaty.
At the daily meeting of the CIA’s senior staff, Blackford and Bill Casey discussed the uproar over the new structure in Moscow with some amusement, quite apart from the general alarm the Agency felt over the progressive porosity of U.S. security. Blackford reminisced that, as a boy listening to the Metropolitan Opera over the radio one Saturday afternoon, he had been fascinated by what the listening audience was told by Milton Cross, the master of ceremonies, during an intermission. He had spoken of receiving a letter from a listener in Chicago. The listener wanted to know: Who hears the opening strains of the Tannhäuser overture first, the people sitting in the balcony of the Met in New York, looking down on the stage—or me, in my living room in Chicago? The question had been turned over to the technicians, and now their verdict was in. Given the speed of sound (1,088 feet per second) contrasted with the speed of light (186,000 miles per second), which is the speed at which radio transmissions travel, the man in Chicago heard it first.
“I wonder whether Secretary Shultz, addressing arms control adviser Paul Nitze across a ten-foot table, will be heard first by Nitze, or first by the KGB and then by Nitze.” Casey reported that our diplomats throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were frequently reduced to communicating with each other by handwritten notes and on children’s blackboards with easily erasable chalk. “With denuclearization,” Casey said, “comes maybe the return of the palimpsest.”
And then, a few days after the Senate vote, it was revealed that two United States Marines—and then it was three U.S. Marines—and then it was four Marines—wer
e accused of reciprocating a Russian woman’s frequent gestures toward glasnost with their own opening: of the embassy safe. The State Department declined to specify what exactly lay in the safe, merely that it contained “precious secrets.” Speculating on what these might be, columnist William Safire said that the safe might have disclosed, for instance, our fallback position if, at the bargaining table, the Soviet Union said that it would consent to a reduction to XYZ intermediate range missiles, and not one more; but also a whole lot of other sensitive material. The safe in Moscow was not, a former ambassador said, answering a reporter’s questions, the major repository of United States secrets. Congressman Speath, a close student of the continuing spy saga, wondered whether there was any repository of United States secrets to which the Soviet Union hadn’t achieved access in recent times. Since 1984, the New York Times reported, “at least” twenty-six people have been convicted of charges of spying. Among them were spies whose findings “reached monumental proportions.” An estimated “billions” of dollars would be required to compensate for the damage.
“And we don’t know how to put a dollar figure on the damage done at another level,” Congressman Armey concluded his speech on the floor of the House. “There are, within the borders of the Soviet bloc, a few men and women who struggle against their tyrants by covertly helping the western alliance, even as what we called the Resistance struggled against the Nazis forty-five years ago. How many of them were fingered as ‘assets’ of the United States by these spies?”
It was a feverish few weeks, but eventually the uproar died down, and eyes fastened instead on what, if anything, would come of Gorbachev’s rejected initiative at Reykjavik.
Blackford answered the ring on the private phone in his office. It was Kathy. “He wants to see you. Same time, same place. Five forty-five. Okay?” Yes, Blackford said. He had no appointment (he smiled) that he would put ahead of a summons by the President of the United States to a private meeting.
At lunch in a secluded corner of the CIA dining room in Langley, Blackford talked to Anthony Trust. He hadn’t seen him since the news of Reykjavik, two days earlier. Trust greeted his old friend exultantly.
“By golly, as our leader would put it, our guy did it! He came through!” Anthony Trust spread his fingers in a V-for-victory sign, then grabbed his Coca-Cola, poured it into a Dixie cup as though it were a champagne glass, and ceremoniously touched it to his lips. “Old Gorbachev thought he’d take the Gipper to the cleaners. Abolish all nuclear weapons! Terrific idea. Take ten years or so—but, so what? Oh, and of course, beginning ten days from now you, Mr. President, will cease all work on Star Wars. So our guy says—I wish I had been there—Oh, by the way, No. N-y-e-t. And the unilateralists weep at this great loss of an opportunity to be the President who said goodbye to all nuclear weapons. And incidentally goodbye to our deterrent force.”
“Yes,” Blackford said, biting into his ravioli. “That session was dynamite. I look forward to Casey’s reading on it. You knew he headed straight to Florida? A week’s relaxation. He needs it. Have you read the cables?”
“Oh sure. Pretty much what you’d expect. The wimps are wimping. The smart money is pro-Reagan. Neil Kinnock threatens to commit suicide, and Margaret Thatcher suggests a national plebiscite on the question.”
They chatted about this and that. Blackford did not disclose that before the end of the afternoon he expected to hear directly from “our guy.” The commander in chief.
His mind turned to the question, Why had he been summoned? Amiable though their relations were, Blackford Oakes was not regularly consulted by the President on sundry matters. And if the purpose of the visit were social, it would not be at that hour, in that office.
It had to be Cyclops.
Twenty-four hours after returning from Iceland, the President was looking entirely fit. He bounded up from his desk and shook hands. Blackford reasoned that it would probably not be good form to congratulate the President on doing what he had done in rejecting Gorbachev’s proffered “exchange.” As chief of covert operations for the CIA, Blackford was not a lobbyist for one or the other position in foreign policy. So he put it to the President in the form of an intelligence report. “Our friends in Europe are very pleased with the action you took.”
“Well you know, Blackford, I made that decision quickly, granted. Because among other things it was a straight-out violation of the terms of our coming together. He had agreed we wouldn’t discuss his idea of suspending the anti-missile missile. But I got to tell you this: The idea of a world without atom bombs, that is a real dream. It won’t happen while I’m sitting here, but I wish I could be the President who did accomplish it.
“You know something?” The President looked up as if he were going to surprise Blackford with a state secret. “There are people around, I mean, people on our side, who are against eliminating the bomb altogether. Shultz, for instance. Henry Kissinger. Jim Baker. Of course, it’s true we have to have a defense against one of those wacky third-power people, Qaddafi types, coming up with a bomb. But if the SDI goes well, then we’ll have protection against the little powers, the kind of protection that doesn’t require Mutual Assured Destruction—the dumbest, most immoral policy I ever heard of.
“I said to Gorbachev, ‘Mikhail’—you know, we call each other by our first names. Not a bad idea. Helps to break the ice—I said, ‘Mikhail, let me tell you exactly why I would hand over to you all the technology we develop when we go after an SDI. You know why? Because between the time we develop that technology and the time we deploy it, you—I don’t mean you, Mikhail, I mean, some successor to you—might figure: This is the only moment we have left to launch a first strike against America. Tomorrow is too late, because tomorrow they’ll have their missile defense, and when they have it, they’ll be in a position to dictate to us anything they want, because our nuclear missiles won’t be a threat to them any longer.
“So I said, if we give you the whole technology, then the moment will never come when we could threaten you while safe under our SDI umbrella.”
“What did he say?”
“Oh, the usual thing. Ronald, he said, you know SDI is an invitation to another arms race, there would be weapons floating around in space …
“But you know something, Blackford? I know—hell, you’ve got to know, you’re the people who assemble all the information—we know why he is so insistent on this point. It’s just this easy: They can’t afford to continue to spend money, and more and more money, on a space defense race. Because they are up to their keisters in debt.
“But that isn’t what I asked you to come in about.” The President leaned forward and began to doodle with his pencil on the pad. “Have you got anything in the last few weeks from what’s-his-name, our contact in Moscow?”
“Cyclops?”
Reagan nodded.
“No sir. The routine once-every-three-weeks message. If there was any change on the question of the assassination plan, he’d have told me.”
“So it’s still being organized?”
“Presumably.”
The President swiveled around on his chair. “You know something, Blackford, something really interesting? The day before we left—Sunday—we were in one of those diplomatic waiting rooms, waiting to go in for dinner. Just the four of us. Gorbachev and me at one end of the room, Nancy and Raisa at the other end of the room. And he was talking about this and that, and then he pointed at Raisa—they couldn’t hear us, it’s a big room—and he said, ‘She is an atheist.’
“I didn’t get it. I mean, if I pointed at you and I said, ‘He is a Republican,’ doesn’t that mean that I’m not a Republican? I thought what the hell, could it be possible that the head of the Soviet Union is telling me he is a believer? Well, you want to know what I did? The next day was when we said our formal goodbyes, and we have those little exchanges, you know, before we drive off, so he said his usual thing about the peace of the world, and what I said was something my father used to say
when he went off on a trip. I wanted to push the Christian thing. So I watched him very carefully when I said, ‘As my father used to say:
May the road rise up to meet you,
May the wind always be at your back,
And may you be in heaven,
A half an hour before the devil knows you’re dead.’”
“Did you get any reaction?”
“None that I could see. On the other hand,” Reagan laughed, “he didn’t spit. The whole thing is pretty interesting. And that gets me to my point.” Reagan was silent again for a moment. And then, slowly, “We’ve got to stop the Cyclops business.”
Blackford drew a deep breath. “Are you telling me I’m to tell Cyclops to turn them in to the KGB?”
“I’d just as soon not get into details of that kind. I don’t know whether they’ve got to be turned in or not and I don’t want to know. I’m just saying that I think Gorbachev is different enough as a Soviet leader that we shouldn’t let him be derailed. That’s my conclusion.”
“You mean you want me to call the whole thing off.”
“Well …”
“You know, Mr. President, this isn’t an operation we control. It isn’t our plot.”
“Yes, I know that.”
“I’m not even sure, I mean, I have no idea whether Cyclops can control them. He can try to talk them out of it, I guess. But that might not work. Probably wouldn’t work, if they’re as set on it as I’d guess they are. I mean, Cyclops might get himself killed just trying …”
The president said nothing. Blackford paused. And then said, “The only sure way is for Cyclops to turn them in to the KGB.” He waited. The President said nothing.
Blackford got up. The President did not move his gaze from his desk. Blackford extended his hand. The President looked up, and took it, and Blackford saw the sadness in the eyes. It meant that he knew the full consequences of his decision.
A Very Private Plot Page 12
