“Yes,” said Matti. “He heads a team of Americans who are rebuilding the church at St. Anselm’s, which was practically destroyed during the war.”
The fried fish, tepid when served, were cold now. Bolgin drew Matti’s newspaper toward himself and deftly inserted a thick envelope into it, as deftly retrieved by Matti and placed in his pocket. He called for the bill, muttered, made a few comments to Matti and walked out, hailing a cab to the railway station, where he caught the 4:57 express to London, reaching his apartment at 6:15, and his vodka at 6:21. On the train he had reflected that Ilyich could wait until the next morning to get the news.
CHAPTER 6
“They gotta be nuts!”
“That’s what I told them, though I didn’t use that language.”
“Those Russian bastards make me so … goddamn mad. They’re all the same. I used to think it was just Stalin. Hell, they’re all like him. It doesn’t matter what you do, what you tell ’em, what evidence you give ’em—we’re backing Adenauer, not Wintergrin—still they won’t believe you. Christ, they think we want a third world war?” He looked at the legend on his desk reading “THE BUCK STOPS HERE” and revised his formulation: “They think I want a third world war?”
“Sometimes you would think that, the way they talk.”
“Sometimes I almost feel like shoving it to ’em. Strike that. I could call in that bastard ambassador and give him a piece of my mind.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“He’d think you were running the show yourself.”
“Well, Christ, I can’t think of any other show in town I should be running if not this one, if we’re supposed to take the threats seriously.”
“They haven’t formulated their threats, but it’s obvious what their ultimate threat is.”
“Move in?”
“Move in.”
The peppery man behind the august desk paused a moment, working his fingers on the paper pad in front of him. He spoke now more reflectively. “They think we’d just sit here and let ’em do it?”
“That’s what we don’t know. But they know they can get plenty out of us in return for pulling back from the brink.”
“What do you figure they know about what we could do to them if it came to that?”
“We can’t be sure. It’s nice to feel we’ve got some secrets left. They know we can reach any of their facilities, all the population centers.”
“What could we do in East Europe?”
“Report them to the Security Council.”
“Christ.”
“Almighty.”
He paused again. “If Eisenhower wasn’t so goddamn busy trying to be my successor, maybe he’d have left NATO in better shape.”
“Actually, it isn’t his fault. They’ve all got problems—Britain, France, the Low Countries. And anyway, nobody anticipated this problem.”
“You offered to remove our feller out there?”
“The very first thing I suggested. It didn’t stop him for a minute.” The Secretary mimicked the ambassador’s accent: “‘Removink one man vill not make Axel Wintergrin no less an American operation’ is what he said. He wants something more, but he isn’t willing to tell us what it is.”
“Shit, are we supposed to guess what’s on their minds? What’s he want us to do, penetrate the Politburo to find out what they want us to do, so we can do it?”
“They certainly want us to sweat over it.”
“Well, go talk with Allen Dulles, and come back when you’ve got a proposal.”
“All right, sir.”
The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency left the State Department and returned to his own office, calling in his deputy. “Have them get out the folder on Blackford Oakes, O-a-k-e-s, and bring it in. We’ve got work to do.”
In the subterranean repository where the files were kept, Colonel Bristol, aide to the deputy, presented himself. He showed his identification to the guard, who spoke through a microphone from his enclosed bullet- and gasproof cylindrical booth. Colonel Bristol stepped through the steel doors that lifted at the command of the guard—promptly closing again, admitting the aide. Inside the enclosure Colonel Bristol, using a wall apparatus, dialed the code for that day, then gave his name into the receiver to the guard billeted inside the huge vault. In a moment the doors to the inner sanctum opened and as promptly closed. Only the archivist could open them, by tapping in a code on the controls. He inspected the document in Colonel Bristol’s hand. Since it called for removal of a file, the authorization had to be personally authenticated by the deputy, whose private number he now dialed. “It says here, sir, to turn over the file on Oakes, Blackford, to Colonel Bristol.” Satisfied, he put down the telephone and walked off to a remote part of the warren, coming back in a minute with a locked steel briefcase, which he routinely handcuffed to the extended wrist of Colonel Bristol. Outside both doors an armed marine was waiting to escort the colonel to the office of the deputy. It was all maximum security. Nobody knew that Blackford Oakes was a member of the Central Intelligence Agency at this point except the archivist, Colonel Bristol, the deputy, the Director and the Russians.
The Director spread the papers on his desk, and as he went over them one by one he handed them wordlessly to his deputy, Jim Sanderson. Then he said, “I remember this one, Jim. He cracked the big one in London last January. Came close to going down along with the Brit. Rufus’s preference is always for not taking any chances. I personally authorized him to extricate Oakes. Here we are again, I guess you could say, up against the consequences of Western sentimentality. How the hell do you suppose they found out about him? None of the Brits have any idea he was our man. I know we aren’t supposed to think the Commies are superhuman, but it beats me how they find out about some of these things. Now, Joseph Stalin, Secretary of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, having discovered that one young Yalie, Oakes, CIA, is working at St. Anselm’s rebuilding Wintergrin’s church, has it all figured out: “We’re behind Wintergrin! Never mind that we’ve been investing in Adenauer for seven years. So the Soviet ambassador calls on the Secretary of State and chews and chews and chews his ass—sometimes I envy the ambassador, Jim—and says unless we ‘take care of the situation,’ Stalin will take care of the situation in his own way. Of course, he doesn’t tell us what Stalin would do, and he doesn’t tell us what we’re supposed to do. It isn’t as easy as recalling Oakes—the Secretary suggested that. No, sir, he wants much more. But he isn’t willing to say what.”
Knowing his boss, Jim Sanderson knew he was expected to give concentrated thought to what was being said; knew he wasn’t supposed to comment until the Director’s ruminative questions stopped being rhetorical. He did most of his thinking by soliloquy, preferably in the presence of one other person. Toward the end of his introverted trance, he would actually consult.
The Director leaned back and puffed on his pipe, which had lain unused on his table for ten minutes, suggesting the gravity of the emergency.
“I tell you what let’s do, Jim. Let’s drive out and see Rufus. He’s the best; and he has the advantage of knowing this Oakes, in case the recommendation we come up with requires some action at his end.”
Rufus, yielding to the entreaties of his wife, had finally agreed, after thirteen years abroad, to repatriation. The war years had been spent in England, the postwar years in France. Not given to expressing his feelings, he hadn’t told his wife—hadn’t succeeded, really, in informing himself just why he was averse to returning to America, even for a visit. After the Oakes crisis in London early in the year, he was ready to move back to their cottage in the French countryside and resume the tending of his beloved roses. The night after Viscount Kirk was killed, he took Muriel to the theater, and on to dinner at the Connaught. He ordered a whiskey—his first drink since taking on the case—and she drew courage to ask, Wouldn’t he now, nearing sixty, take her back to America? They were childless, bu
t her sister lived in Baltimore, and Rufus had two very old friends in Washington who always visited him when they traveled in England and France, giving him much pleasure. She asked why he resisted returning, and he forced himself to think the question through. He was silent—Muriel was no longer exasperated by this tic of her husband’s, rooted in him, against which no force of man or nature was effective: when Rufus was thinking, generals, prime ministers and wives simply sat there and waited. “I could have read through the novels of Jane Austen during Rufus’s pauses between 1941 and 1945,” the director of MI-5 complained to Churchill after the war. “If it hadn’t been for Rufus,” Churchill snapped back, “you would be reading Jane Austen in German.”
An exaggeration, of course. Everything Churchill said was an exaggeration. But this one was as close to the simple truth as Churchill ever came. Eisenhower explained Rufus to a skeptic: “Look at it this way: He was the man who kept the atom bomb from Hitler. And the guy who told me it was safe to move into Normandy.”
Eventually Rufus came out of it. He told Muriel, taking her hand under the table and pressing it, that during the war he had been responsible for saving a great many American lives.
“I know that, darling, I know that.”
“But I was also responsible,” he blurted out, “for killing Americans.”
Muriel did not react, though her hand turned lifeless now.
“I am talking about innocent Americans, Muriel.”
She knew that her role now was to supply the soothing background noises. Any attempt at moral analysis was not likely to advance what her husband had obviously already attempted; indeed, it would perhaps set him back to hear points he had already traversed analytical ages earlier. It was sufficient that he spoke now less emphatically than before about not returning. So all she said was what she felt she could safely say. “You tried to do not necessarily the right thing, but the better thing.” He looked at her, his eyes widening. The formulation, though only a variant of the cliché about choosing the lesser of two evils, struck him as fresh and liberating in this conjugation of it. That evening Muriel wrote to her sister to say that, although the decision had not finally been made, she thought it safe to predict that they were at last coming home.
It was an hour and a half’s drive to Westminster. Rufus had said over the telephone that he would have a light dinner waiting for them, after which they could go to his study while Muriel did the evening work at the nursery. On that understanding, Muriel went to the greenhouse, and Rufus washed the dishes, while Dulles and Sanderson dried.
“What do we know”—Rufus handed Dulles a wet saucer—“about the prospects for Wintergrin in November?”
“You ask the critical question, Rufus—as usual. We don’t know. This is September, and anything can happen. His movement might collapse tomorrow. He hasn’t been around long enough to be an ‘established’ national leader. There’s so much that works against him. He is thirty-one years old. He has never run for elective office. There must be a lot of Germans who resent his having fought against Germany, never mind Hitler. He has given out no elaborated plan of what he will do if he achieves office. He’s got people running for legislative office in every district. How many of them are going to risk associating themselves with the Reunification ticket?”
“That’s one side of the picture,” said Dulles. “Now—here Jim, your turn”—Dulles handed his deputy the wet coffee cup to dry. “The other is that he is becoming—has become—a national hero, and don’t underestimate that. He apparently speaks with a quiet eloquence that leaves people … consecrated. Leaves them hungry for sacrifice, for a national effort—to free East Germany and unite the German people. He tells them only an act of will can bring this about. That history and ‘right thinking’—I asked Father Avery what that meant, and he said it comes from ‘recta ratio,’ medieval Catholic abracadabra for the basis for doing the right thing—”
“Is he a Catholic?” Rufus interrupted.
“Yes. And excepting the political left, and the people who believe that good old Adenauer ought to be rewarded by being the first elected chancellor, he doesn’t really have any hard enemies. The free labor union people are suspicious, but not hostile. The students are fascinated by him—he’s given them the first taste of idealism they’ve ever had. Remember that. All the Germans have had to engage them during the last seven years is the rebuilding of their country—that’s kept their muscles busy. But aside from contrition over Hitler, there hasn’t been anybody around who’s asked them to make a national sacrifice. And what a cause! To liberate their fellow Germans!”
“Have there been polls?”
“Until the treaty goes into effect next March, political polls are technically forbidden. That was one of McCloy’s obscure precautions back in 1945. He didn’t want any radical movement ignited by poll fever. We know some of the big publishers are going to defy this and take some polls, and it isn’t clear whether the occupation authorities will go to court and try to get an injunction against them. Meanwhile we’ve taken our own poll, ostensibly a commercial poll testing German attitudes toward a number of economic products.”
“How does he come out?”
“Twenty-one per cent. And that was three days ago, Labor Day.”
“How are the other two parties doing?”
“Neck and neck. Ollenhauer’s SPD is logging thirty-three per cent, Adenauer thirty-six per cent.”
They were seated now and Rufus continued his interrogation.
“Gromyko said we have to come up with something, but wouldn’t say what?”
“That’s right. And he wouldn’t tell Acheson what Stalin would do if we didn’t do whatever we’re supposed to do, but he made it sound like the end of the world.”
Rufus rocked slowly in his chair, and thought. Dulles and Sanderson were silent.
“It seems to me Gromyko isn’t being all that difficult to understand.”
“About what he wants us to do?”
“About what he wants us to do. He wants us to kill Axel Wintergrin.”
CHAPTER 7
Blackford was told the political stratagem early in September, and instructed to try to get an idea what Wintergrin’s countertactic might be. Under no circumstances was he to bring up the matter until it was public knowledge. After that, he should evaluate Wintergrin’s reaction, and advise his contact in Bonn. Whether he would be able to get any reaction at all depended on the evolution of his relations with Wintergrin. Would their talk be confined to the church? Or would Wintergrin, committed to spending several hours per week with Oakes, digress to talk about other matters as well? If there were ways to do it, the CIA would have programmed Instant Friendship between Geoffrey Truax, a.k.a. Blackford Oakes, and Axel Wintergrin.
In fact it worked out. Although the day after they first met Wintergrin was formal at the rendezvous in his father’s library, by the end of the three-hour session he was clearly relaxed with Blackford. In the chapel, seated in Blackford’s makeshift little office, or in his father’s office surrounded by drawings and photographs, or back in the chapel talking with the carpenters or masons, or seated at the chromoscope, Wintergrin was clearly taking his relaxation from the exigencies of a week planned from breakfast to midnight with speeches, meetings, interviews, broadcasts, always in the company of his staff, a week harnessed to the single objective of taking political power. Once a week he would meet with two men whose identity was not known to any member of the staff save Himmelfarb, who would set up the appointments at times and in places where the three men could meet unnoticed. The first, known to the staff only as “Herr Mahler,” was a repatriated Jewish physicist at the University of Heidelberg whom Wintergrin had come to know during his college days, the second (“Herr Gottstein”) a businessman in West Berlin. Apart from these very private meetings, Wintergrin was away from his staff only when with his mother in the castle—and with Blackford Oakes in the chapel.
By the following weekend, Wintergrin felt at ease with
Blackford, to whom he would recount, when the mind wandered from the business of the chapel, something of the week’s experiences. At first he judged Oakes to be the unique combination: someone entirely apolitical who was however interested enough in the drama of which Wintergrin was the protagonist to be engrossed in the narrative. Later he discovered that Oakes, too, was highly engaged in the Cold War, though this did not distract him from his work in the chapel. Wintergrin liked, too, the extraordinary self-confidence of Oakes, whose easygoing competence had instantly disposed of any problems with his staff arising out of his relative youth and inexperience. And, besides, Wintergrin had not really known any Americans, though he had read American journals and American authors, and seen the usual movies. At Greyburn there were no Americans when he was there. A planned visit to America in the summer of 1939 was put off for the obvious reasons. In Norway there were no Americans, save the occasional few who came down in the dead of night in parachutes. The handful of Americans who worked at the University of Heidelberg were not typical of the breed. He saw in Oakes the self-confidence America fleetingly exhibited in the postwar years, a brightness of spirit, an appealing social audacity and wit, unmannered, uncultivated—that and a seriousness of purpose. In two weeks, after five meetings, they were, in fact, friends.
The CIA plan was to amend the Constitution of the Federal Republic so as to make it unconstitutional for anyone to serve as chancellor before he was thirty-five.
The plan had the drawback of being a bill of attainder not very different from a proposed constitutional amendment barring any chancellor with the initials A.W. As it stood, it had the virtue of simplicity, and a certain generic plausibility. What was so unreasonable about requiring that the principal executive officer of West Germany should be at least thirty-five? Wasn’t there a provision in the United States Constitution—paradigm for the world!—that demanded exactly the same thing?
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