The Berlin Conspiracy

by Tom Gabbay

  “How long have you been standing there?” I asked.

  “Since you came in.”

  “I mistook you for a rat.”

  He smiled stiffly and turned a small flashlight on the floor. We were standing in the middle of a rat convention. Hundreds of them. They didn’t seem to worry about us, but why would they?

  “You’re among friends,” I said.

  “Lucky for you I’m still here.”

  “Yeah, I’m catching all the breaks.” He turned the flashlight off so all I could see was the lit end of his cigarette moving around. “Very dramatic,” I noted. “Did you go to the Boris Karloff School of Espionage?”

  He brushed by me and pushed the big door shut. “How did you get here?”

  “Three taxis, four trains, and a couple of mules,” I replied. He didn’t think it was funny, and I guess it wasn’t. “Nobody followed me,” I assured him.

  “Why were you late? Did you have trouble?”

  “I overslept.” I could feel him looking at me from behind, through the darkness, like he had bat eyes. “Look,” I insisted. “I was exhausted and I overslept. Everything’s fine.” I turned to face him, but all I got was a shadow.

  He was silent for a moment while he took a long draw of smoke, making up, I guess, for the nicotine-free minutes he had endured while standing across from me in the dark, making some kind of pointless point. He finally threw the butt on the floor, immediately lit another.

  “What I have to tell you is extremely sensitive,” he rasped. “It must not be compromised.”

  “If you don’t want it to be compromised, don’t tell me.”

  “I’d like to believe I can trust you,” he said almost sincerely. Up until now he hadn’t treated me like a jerk. If I didn’t set him straight, it would only get worse.

  “Let’s skip the bullshit, Colonel,” I said sharply. “If you really are a colonel, that is.”

  Hostile silence, so I kept going.

  “I’m sorry to be blunt, but if you think there’s any way you can trust me, then you’re not what you claim to be. Now I’ve got some fairly heavy people very pissed off with me because, so far anyway, I’ve played this thing by your rules. And the only way I get out of it with my head still attached to the rest of me is for you to give me something so juicy that these guys can’t carve me up and ship me off to the four corners of the earth, which is what they really want to do. But you know all that, you set it up that way, so you must also know there’s no way in hell I’m not going to use what you give me to save my ass. … And that’s why I say let’s skip the bullshit.”

  He grunted, possibly a STASI version of a laugh. Then he took a deep breath and exhaled. A sigh almost.

  “The information was uncovered quite by accident, in the course of our normal intelligence activities,” he began. “However, we are unable to take appropriate action, which is why you have been called upon. Unfortunately, you won’t have much time to act.”

  “Act? I don’t think you have the right idea about me, Colonel. I don’t act.”

  “Perhaps you will feel compelled to when you hear what I have to say.”

  “I’m all ears,” I said.

  He took a moment, then spit it out without any frills.

  “There’s a plan to assassinate your president.”

  Of all the crazy, unlikely stories I had prepared myself to hear, this sure wasn’t one of them. It was too crazy. I mean, there were always assassination threats, the Secret Service dealt with them all day long, but here was a fucking colonel in the goddamned East German secret police threatening the president. … Or was he threatening? What the hell was he doing?

  “Tell me about it,” I managed.

  “It’s planned to take place here, in Berlin.”

  I waited for more, but it didn’t come. I laughed reflexively, even though I knew he wasn’t joking. “Come on, Colonel,” I said. “Even you guys aren’t that crazy.”

  “It’s not our operation,” he answered coolly.

  “Who then?”

  “You’ll have to find out.”

  He didn’t move, just kept looking at me through the darkness and puffing on his weed.

  “That’s it?” I asked incredulously. “Somebody has a plan to knock off the president of the United States while he’s in Berlin. You have no other information—no clues, no leads, no hints—nothing except there’s a plan out here, somewhere.”

  “That’s correct,” he replied.

  I was feeling claustrophobic, had to get some air. I turned to where I thought the door was, but couldn’t find it. “Give me some fucking light,” I demanded, and he obliged, shining the flashlight into my eyes.

  “I don’t have to tell you what the consequences might be should this happen. If you choose to leave now, there’s nothing more I can do.” He moved the light from my face onto the door. “There is your exit,” he said.

  I pulled the door open and stepped onto the porch. I knew I wasn’t going anywhere and the Colonel probably did, too. After a couple of minutes, he stepped out and offered me one of his cigarettes. I accepted. It seemed bright outside after the blackness on the other side.

  “Look, if you want me to buy this, you’re going to have to give me more.” I could see his face now, but it wasn’t going to reveal anything.

  “I don’t have more to give.”

  “How did you come across it?”

  “As I said, in the course of our normal intelligence activities …”

  “Come on, Colonel. …”

  He shrugged, like he agreed but could do nothing about it.

  “Is it KGB?”

  “No,” he said quickly.

  “There are a hundred threats a week on the president’s life,” I said. “Thanks for the heads-up, but it’s not exactly gonna make headlines.” The cigarette tasted worse than it smelled, but I smoked it anyway.

  The Colonel looked up into the sky, searching as if there was something to see. “This threat comes from inside your government,” he said softly.

  “What… ?”

  “They’ll try to make it look like it was our side. … But it will be your side.” He looked at me, ready to gauge my reaction. I drew a breath, took in too much smoke, and choked.

  “For Christ’s sake,” I coughed. “You expect me to believe—”

  “No,” he interrupted. “I don’t expect you to believe. I expect you to find out.” I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing. He tossed his cigarette onto the ground, crushed it with his foot, and walked away, leaving me standing speechless, alone in the dark.

  FIVE

  I met John F. Kennedy once, the result of another one of Sam Clay’s surprise phone calls. I was spending Christmas Day of 1962 laid out on my backyard lounger, soaking up sun and tequila, trying to ignore the Season of Joy (it’d been a long time since I believed in Santa Claus), when the telephone started ringing and wouldn’t quit. I was able to ignore it for a while, but curiosity finally got the better of me and I staggered inside.

  “I hope you’re having as shit of a day as I am,” Sam’s voice cheerfully greeted me.

  I told him I was having the time of my life and he spent a few minutes grumbling about his ex-wife, how he had to spend every Christmas at her place in order to keep peace with the kids and grandkids. “It’s a goddamned misery,” he concluded. “I’d rather spend the holiday with Attila the Hun.”

  “You’ve got the same gripe every year,” I reminded him.

  “I get the same shit every year.”

  “So stop going.”

  “What the hell else am I supposed to do on Christmas?” he bristled.

  “Come down here, we’ll go fishing.”

  “Yeah, maybe next year,” he brushed me off. “Anyway, that’s kind of why I’m calling. I’m headed down your way in a couple of days.” I didn’t have to ask why because it’d been all over the papers for a week.

  “Should be quite a show,” I said.

  “Wanna co
me along?”

  “Me?”

  “That’s who I’m talking to, isn’t it?” He took a sip of something on the rocks, probably good scotch, and waited for my answer.

  Going down there hadn’t even crossed my mind, probably because I didn’t think there was a snowball’s chance in hell that I’d be invited. There were plenty of reasons to stay away, that’s for sure, but my calendar wasn’t exactly jammed with social engagements. It would get me out of my T-shirt and cutoffs, anyway.

  “Make up your mind, Jack, because I’ve got a very large turkey waiting for me in the other room.”

  “Right. Give my regards to the old girl,” I quipped, getting a modest chuckle out of Sam. I told him I wouldn’t miss it for the world and we arranged to meet at the stadium and have a drink together afterward. Then Sam went off to carve up his bird.

  The event was a kind of welcome-home party for Brigade 2506, the 1,189 Cubans who’d spent the last twenty months in a Havana prison thanks to the Bay of Pigs fiasco. The Bay of Pigs was nothing more than an obscure beach on the deserted south coast of Cuba until it became world famous in April 1961 as the site of the CIA’s first public humiliation. In an attempt to overthrow the Cuban government without obvious U.S. involvement, the agency had trained and supplied 1,400 anti-Castro exiles to hit the beach, move inland, and liberate the country. The beach was as far as they got. The brigade was cut to shreds. A few managed to swim off the island, where they were picked up by U.S. Navy vessels, but most weren’t that lucky. One hundred and fourteen were killed, the rest were captured.

  Kennedy managed, after eighteen months, to buy their freedom with $53 million in food, medicine, farm equipment, and other goodies prohibited by the new trade embargo. A State Department spokesman described it as “a goodwill gesture to the people of Cuba” and Castro called it “war reparations.” If anybody had asked me I’d have said it was a good old-fashioned shakedown, but nobody asked.

  Anyway, Kennedy had invited all the Cubans in Miami to the Orange Bowl one afternoon a few days after Christmas so he could take credit and try to make peace. You had to give him points for guts because he wouldn’t be facing a particularly affectionate crowd down there—the Cuban exile community had expected to have Havana’s roulette wheels spinning again by now and the fact that Castro was still taunting them with four-hour speeches didn’t really endear the young president to them. And it was a fair bet that the returning vets themselves had less than warm and fuzzy feelings for him. In their minds the U.S. government—and the White House in particular—had pretty thoroughly fucked them over.

  In truth, it was hard to disagree with them. Of course, “truth” when it came to Cuba was like light through a prism—it depended entirely on your angle, and there were a hell of lot of angles in that island gem. But I understood more than most why the Cubans felt betrayed. I was there when they were handed “The Big Lie.”

  I’d been pretty heavily involved in the Cuba Project during the buildup to the invasion, running a disinformation campaign and launching special ops out of Happy Valley, the World War II airfield on the coast of Nicaragua that was being used as the main staging area. But it wasn’t until the second week of April 1961—a few days before the attack was scheduled—that I got my first look at the Cubans who were going to hit the beach. They were flown in from Guatemala, where they’d spent the last eighteen months in the jungle, being trained by agency-run Green Berets. As I watched them file off the C-54 transport planes I thought they looked young, intense, and, it seemed to me, pretty anxious. Of course, they had reason to be. Castro had a whole army waiting for them.

  The commanding officer at Happy Valley was a Marine colonel named Robert “Rip” Harkin, a hulking six-foot-four-inch former All-American quarterback from Oklahoma who’d been one of the soldiers to plant the original Stars and Stripes at Iwo Jima, two days before it was re-created for the famous photo. But he was just on loan from the Pentagon. The guy actually running the show was Henry E. Fisher.

  Henry was credited with conceiving the plan that overthrew the Guatemalan government in 1953. Not that it was much of a plan—a couple of dozen lightly armed farm boys were sent to shoot up a couple of villages while Henry and his crew broadcast radio reports that an army of thousands was on its way to the capital. They buzzed the presidential palace a couple of times with an unarmed warplane and the entire government fled the country. It gave Henry a lot of credibility at Langley, and after a stint as chief of station in Uruguay, he was made top field agent in the Cuba Task Force.

  A tall, lanky New Englander in his early forties, he had a receding hairline, a bulbous nose, thin lips that seemed incapable of an honest smile, and a serious disposition that you could mistake for dignity if you didn’t know better. He was known as a clever, resourceful operative, but I had my doubts. Castro wasn’t gonna surrender based on radio reports.

  On the day before the landing, Colonel Harkin summoned the brigade commanders to a final briefing. I went along uninvited and took a place at the front table beside Henry. The Cubans sat facing us in several rows of vintage school desks, eyes glued to Harkin, who stood at a blackboard running down the logistics of the invasion. He went into great detail about landings, communication, resupply, everything they needed to hear. Then, after about thirty minutes, he stopped, shifted gears, and told them what they wanted to hear.

  “Let me add this final note,” he began, narrowing his eyes and honing in on the audience. “I’ve seen more than a few fighting forces in my time and I can tell you in all honesty that I have never seen a group of soldiers more motivated, better trained, or more vigorous than the men you will lead onto Cuban soil at dawn. You are well organized, well equipped, and well disciplined. And you are ready for battle.” He let that sink in for a moment, taking time to look every one of the young officers in the eye before hitting them with the news they’d been waiting for.

  “And so are we,” he said solemnly.

  The room went dead quiet, waiting for more. After a dramatic pause, Harkin gave it to them, playing it for all it was worth.

  “I can report to you that at this hour there is an armada of U.S. Navy destroyers sitting twenty miles off the Cuban coast. On board those ships is a contingent of United States Marines. … And let me assure you that they are ready and eager to follow you into battle.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing! And he wasn’t finished yet!

  “Once you’ve held that beachhead for seventy-two hours,” he continued, “I promise you that we will be beside you for the next step.” He straightened his back, furrowed his brow, and came to the emotional climax.

  “Gentlemen … God and the United States of America are with you all the way. What more could you ask for? … I wish you every success in your mission.” I thought he was going to start crying. Instead, he turned and walked out of the room to a spontaneous round of heartfelt applause.

  I was stunned. There was no way in hell those Marines were going anywhere near Cuba. No way! Kennedy, the joint chiefs, the national security adviser, they’d all made that abundantly clear at every turn. And Harkin’s own telex to the White House the day before had confirmed it: The Brigade Officers do not expect help from the U.S. Armed Forces, it had said. So what the hell was this?!

  I turned to Fisher, who was clapping his hands and nodding his head enthusiastically. “Why did he say that?” I whispered.

  “Say what?”

  “That we’re gonna send in the Marines.”

  “I didn’t hear that, Jack.” He stopped clapping, turned toward me. “And neither did you.” He stood up and started shaking hands with the euphoric Cubans and I had no choice but to do the same. They crowded around, slapping us on the back and saying things like “God bless America” and “Kennedy is a man who means business.” Harkin had told them the one thing they needed to hear—the one thing that would ensure they’d have no second thoughts about stepping onto that beach. It was a brutal deception.

  Don’t get me w
rong. I’d been involved in plenty of deceitful behavior in my time with the Company—it was part of the game and I’d never been squeamish about it. But these men weren’t playing in our game; at least they didn’t think they were. They were soldiers, men we’d recruited, trained, and equipped to fight a battle that we couldn’t be seen to be fighting. Sure, it was their cause, too, but if they were willing to put their lives on the line, they should know what the deal was. At least that’s what was going through my mind while the Cubans slapped us on the back and told us how wonderful we were.

  Fisher evaded me for the rest of the night, so at around midnight, after a few rum and Cokes, I barged into his quarters. He was spread out on his cot in a T-shirt and Jockey shorts, reading a dog-eared copy of Peyton Place.

  “Don’t bother knocking,” he said, laying the book facedown on the bed.

  “If I didn’t know better, Henry, I’d think you’ve been avoiding me.” I invited myself in.

  “It’s kind of late, Jack….”

  “Yeah, and I can see you’re busy,” I said, picking up the paperback and leafing through it. “Seen the movie?”

  “About three years ago,” he moaned, snatching it back.

  “I guess I’m a little behind the times.” I smiled and straddled a desk chair across from the bed. I think I just stared at him for a minute or two.

  “What’s on you mind?” he asked painfully.

  “I was wondering why we told those men that the cavalry’s gonna ride in and save the day when we know it ain’t gonna happen.”

  “Like I told you before, it was never said.”

  “Henry,” I scolded him, “You and I both know there’s no fucking way Kennedy’s gonna send in those Marines.”

  “Look, Jack.” He swung his long legs around and sat on the edge of the cot. “You’re not in the loop on this one, so just forget about it.”

  “What loop?”

  “Really. Forget it.”

  “What happens when the Cubans realize they’ve been set up?” I persisted.

  “What makes you think they’re being set up?” He pulled himself up and headed for the John.