“Right on,” said Rhubarb, looking up at the congeries of floodlights, most of them affixed to flexible stems in order to achieve any desired configuration. “What the Director won’t say is that the technological datum that brought us here was a jealous Italian mama.”
“Is that right?” Ollie commented.
“Shit,” said Rhubarb.
“What’s the matter?”
“I shouldn’t have told you that.”
“I’ve forgotten it. Steiner was fingered by a jealous Hungarian vamp.”
“I’m serious, Ollie.”
“Okay, mum’s the word. You can look at my bank account and tell I don’t have any press contacts.”
“I know, I know.”
They were gone an hour before Hans Steiner returned, in time for his four o’clock appointment with Pepperidge Farm. In a half hour, his studio smelled like a bakery, and he remembered the distinctive smell of fresh bread at the farm in Thuringia where his mother always rose before the dawn to make it.
The Directors of Central Intelligence and the FBI sat with Rufus going over two sets of documents, the first relatively dated, the second fresh as last week.
The first pile was from the dossier “GAITHER, Amanda.”
It contained the notorious forty-page questionnaire completed by applicants who desire to serve in the Agency, together with reports from FBI agents and special CIA agents. Few routine files in Washington are more copious, and Rufus sighed at the prospect of going over it, but much of it, of course, he could skim. The three men sat alongside each other at The Quarters, and Rufus would pass along a document to the Director of the CIA, who would then pass it on to the Director of the FBI. To review the first pile took over an hour. They all took notes.
Rufus addressed them. “It is clear that Miss Gaither was an enthusiastic supporter of Henry Wallace and was deeply involved in the Progressive Citizens of America, an operation dominated, particularly in its last period, by the Communist Party, and from whose ranks the Communists did their most vigorous recruiting during the late forties.”
“Yep,” Hoover added. “But most of them dropped out.”
“We are not talking about most of them,” Dulles said, with just a touch of stiffness.
“By the time she left Vassar, she seemed to have gotten away from the hard-core apologists for Stalin; in fact, she appears to have quarreled with them. In any event, the next three years, spent here in Washington with the Spanish Tourist Office, don’t seem to suggest any residual political obsessions. All her teachers and friends seem to like her.”
“Her boyfriends certainly seem to like her,” Hoover said gruffly.
“There is that,” Dulles agreed; “and the usual blackmail opportunity. But—do you realize that I have known her since she was approximately four years old?—to the great distress of her very proper parents, Amanda has never made much of an effort to conceal her … capacity for total infatuations. Nor does she appear to have been attached for any very considerable time to any one person, the ironic exception being Michael Bolgiano—with whom, however, there is no trace of a relationship going beyond the fraternal. She was often in the household of her godfather, Dean Acheson. I telephoned him a day or two ago and asked about her.”
“Did he say he would never turn his back on Amanda Gaither?” Rufus asked.
Dulles’s eyes moved quickly to ascertain whether the FBI Director had got the quip; he hadn’t.
“He said he found her consistently lively, amiable, and rather apolitical and apparently satisfied with her job.”
“Very well then,” said Rufus, “let’s look at the second dossier. It is—correct me if I am wrong, Mr. Hoover—a minute-by-minute account, to the extent possible, of her activities during the past week, correct?”
“Correct.”
Experienced eyes, trained to brake at the anomaly, read quickly through such material. Rufus wanted to focus especially on just where she went upon leaving the office of the Director of the CIA, and what she carried with her. The answers were there: no fixed pattern as to where she went. Monday it was to Camalier and Buckley, where she made a purchase. Tuesday it was to a bridal shower, Wednesday a Vassar tea, Thursday to her father’s office, Friday directly home to prepare dinner for six guests, none of them members of the Politburo.
She carried with her, on leaving, only her raincoat and a purse.
They studied a picture of her emerging from the office building.
“That purse isn’t large enough to contain a wad of papers,” Dulles observed.
That sort of thing went on for another exasperating hour, until finally Rufus, calling first for fresh coffee, said:
“Gentlemen, let us reason a posteriori. If we can rule out that the Director here is a mole, or his Deputy, then the transmission is necessarily being done by one of the four women in the office. The only one of these four women who operates the Xerox machine is Amanda Gaither. Moreover—I grant this could be coincidental—it is an employee of Amanda Gaither’s father who has been photographing the materials and serving as courier to our spymaster in New York. There cannot be any reasonable doubt that it is she. If we cannot deduce how it is that she actually takes the documents out of the building, why can’t we devote an effort to discovering how she takes copies from the Xerox machine? Mr. Hoover, is it feasible to install a moving-picture camera trained to film the Xerox machine when it is operated by Amanda Gaither?”
“Of course. It will be done tomorrow.”
Two days later they were again at The Quarters, one room of which had been turned into a makeshift theater with screen and chairs, blinds drawn. The Director of the FBI had not only provided a moving film, but one with sound.
It began with voices of women saying good morning and vague and garbled requests for coffee. The camera, recessed overhead, was tilted to capture the whole of the Xerox 914 and the desk of Amanda Gaither, a few feet away.
Oh my God, thought Dulles, reflecting on the renowned thoroughness of Mr. Hoover. Was he, the Director of Central Intelligence, the eyes and ears of the free world, going to have to sit through, minute by minute, Amanda Gaither’s eight-hour day? He decided to give the whole thing ten minutes, then go and leave it all to Rufus to endure.
But the camera was selective. There had been a live and discriminating operator, working from a monitor, who turned the camera on and turned it off, according as there was any action to record; an operator, moreover, who dominated the camera in its various capacities.
There were two OUT baskets so labeled on Amanda’s desk. The Director explained that the one colored red was one whose contents were designated for the Director himself. Any document placed there was instantly to be Xeroxed and the original deposited in the corresponding red tray in the Director’s office. If his door was closed, the document would be placed on the red tray on the Deputy’s desk. The single Xerox copy was taken directly to the safe and inserted into a slot designated merely by the date: February 23, 1960. The exception was NSC transcripts, which were inserted into the slot marked “NSC.” These documents were retrievable only under supervision, by security specialists who had the combination locks to the relevant lockers.
The camera proved versatile. A stopwatch signaled the hour on the film. At 9:43:03, a bouncy clerk came by Amanda’s desk and dropped two pieces of paper into the red basket.
“How’s Indonesia?” Amanda asked cheerfully.
“Bloody. They need clerical help. I’ve submitted your name.”
Amanda smiled. She finished the paragraph she was typing, then rose and took the two documents in hand to the Xerox machine. With her right hand she checked the on-off switch and evidently assured herself that the temperature was warm. She leaned over—the camera zoomed down on her fingers—and turned the numbers switch to “1,” signifying that a single copy was to be made.
She went then to face the machine. She pushed the triggering mechanism and the machine whirred, though to no apparent effect, because no copy was
disgorged. But Amanda was patient, and in a few seconds it whirred again, and this time a copy slid out on the tray.
She picked it up, along with the original, and walked directly to the safe, looking down to locate that day’s designated slot. She inserted the copy and then disappeared from the camera’s ambit, to reappear in a few moments and resume typing. Her telephone rang. Clearly a social call. She put off what must have been an old college friend. It rang again. This time she was faintly furtive, and her voice dropped while she took from her drawer that morning’s Washington News, folded at the relevant page. “Bowie, fifth race, five dollars across the board on number five. Got it?” She hung up and resumed her work.
A half hour later (by the camera clock—the sequence was immediate) a young man came with a pile of papers perhaps an inch thick. These he placed in the gray basket.
“Those are unclassified area reports,” Dulles filled in. “Résumés of foreign press reports from remote regions, Third World stuff mostly. My Deputy looks at it and decides whether there is anything I should look at. If so, he marks it; if not, he puts it back on Amanda’s tray and she sends it over to USIA—saves them a lot of work.”
“How does she send it?” Rufus asked.
“I don’t know. By courier, or by mail, I suppose. USIA is over at 1776 Pennsylvania. My guess is we mail it. Nothing urgent. If there were, we’d treat it specially.”
Three more times Amanda was called on to use the Xerox machine, and the procedure was duplicated. The stopwatch showed 4:45 as the final time she approached the machine. This time she appeared to have a little difficulty with it, and bent down apparently to clear the paper passageway. When she stood up, she lifted the copies off the tray, added them to those in her hand, walked into the safe, came back past her desk, and, as if distinguishing one set of papers from another, put one pile into her gray basket, and went with the other into the Director’s office.
“Let’s have that one again,” said Rufus.
After running it over three times, it became clear that Amanda was retrieving papers from a bottom cavity, and putting these to one side on the gray tray. The film went on. Immediately after returning from the Director’s office, she took from the day’s accumulation one pile and with a bold pen, using the Agency’s regular unmarked stationery, addressed it to United States Information Agency, P.O. Box 772, Benjamin Franklin Station, Washington, D.C., Attn. Mr. Rattner. The second pile she addressed to Department of United Nations Affairs, P.O. Box 1334, Benjamin Franklin Station, Washington, D.C., Attn. Mr. Elgar. To her own bundle she now added the outgoing mail from her three co-secretaries, dialed a number, and a messenger came to deliver the lot to the Agency post office.
It was another session with the technicians, and Rufus and the FBI Director stood while the two agents and the supervisor from Xerox examined the disassembled machine.
“It’s breathtaking,” the laconic Xerox official, perspiring from his excavations, seated on Amanda’s chair, began his summary. “With one hand on the calibrator you can add a number to the apparent number of copies you ask for. Then, standing in front of the traveler, she’d nudge the knob with her foot. The first copy slides down into the bottom chamber, which is really just a storage compartment. Then, once a day, she stoops down there, picks up her copies, and sends them to—? To where was that?”
“Never mind,” said Rufus. “Now, it’s important that you restore the machine to exactly how it was.”
“That’s simple. The only difference from the other ten thousand models is the rift in the traveling mechanism.”
CHAPTER 17
The day was now set: Saturday April 2, 1960. The timing, everybody kept saying—was the thing. Hoover’s men had been superbly productive during the three weeks since No. 48 Mittelstrasse. “Goddamdest thing I ever saw, Rufus”—the CIA Director was at The Quarters, reading the latest FBI reports—“this fellow Klaus, as they call him, is the biggest Mr. Big since Sorge in Japan. Klaus now has”—his pencil ran over the neat typewritten page—“thirteen people reporting to him that we know of, though none on the clockwork basis of our friend Benni. Hmm. I see two of his agents are with the Soviet delegation at the UN—that figures; two with Pravda in Washington; two with the Soviet Embassy, a couple in Ottawa, and five Americans. A nice catch. One hell of a catch.”
Rufus nodded. “There’s fresh news you don’t have. I had it over the telephone from Hoover just now. They’ve isolated a ham radio set in Canada run by one of Klaus’s agents—a set rarely used, but used periodically, the boys are convinced, to transmit Moscow-talk. We now know that Klaus is supposed to monitor that frequency at certain times.”
“How do we know?”
“We recorded a fragment in his studio this morning. It was interrupted by sharp static, but what we caught was plain.”
“What was it?”
“What was it? Well, of course it doesn’t make any sense, just a few words pulled out. But he was obviously trying to bring in the signal. It was a message for Klaus, in my opinion.”
“For God’s sake, Rufus, what did it say?”
“Just five words … MARCO POLO, IF YOU CAN.”
The Director smiled. He stayed silent, experiencing the pleasure. The Marco Polo diversion had evidently worked.
“The wording of the NSC meeting for the twenty-ninth has got to be just right.”
“I have a proposed draft,” said Rufus. He handed over a sheet of paper. “I would propose that the first part of the minutes be devoted to a discussion of the agreement of Khrushchev to the summit conference in May in Paris, then to general talk about the agenda in Paris, then to specific talk about the Berlin question, a brief report from you on fresh revelations from the U-2 operations, and then—” he pointed his finger to the typewritten sheet.
“The President asked the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency if he had any reports on the progress of ‘Marco Polo.’ Mr. Dulles reported that there had been a considerable breakthrough at Islamabad, that he expected that later that same afternoon he would receive the relevant documents, which he would distribute with the minutes of the meeting in the form of addenda. The President advised the Secretary of State that the Marco Polo development would have considerable implications for the Summit Conference and that every means possible would be taken to keep it confidential.…”
“Sounds right to me,” said Dulles. “Have you checked with the Attorney General on cordoning off Steiner’s studio?”
“I have. Apparently no problem. The prosecution will take the position that the entire studio is a part of the prosecution’s case, and that under the circumstances no one, Steiner’s lawyer included, can have access to it.”
“Is the man who’ll be tailing Steiner on the Saturday we pick him up equipped to hear what Steiner says over the pay phone to Canada?”
“He’ll have the best equipment we’ve got. Hoover says his gizmo will pick up a conversation in a pay phone from two hundred feet away. Fine. But even if it doesn’t, a second agent, two minutes later, will get on the identical phone and establish which was the most recent number called. If it’s our Ottawa number, we can pretty well assume what it is that Steiner will have relayed.”
Dulles leaned back in his chair and puffed away. Rufus looked drained.
“Have we overlooked anything?”
“No,” said Rufus. “But we haven’t done everything I think needs doing.”
“Oh God,” said Dulles. “What else do you have in mind?”
“A flight on a U-2 piloted out of our base in Japan along the Sino-Soviet border.” There had been quarrels over the question whether Rufus had ever been known to smile; a photograph of his expression at this moment would have won the argument for the affirmative. “My proposal—this one obviously has to be cleared by you, and then by the President—is really straightforward. The addendum we will attach to the NSC minutes will detail a specific agreement concluded after much negotiation between a special representative of the United States an
d a special representative of the People’s Republic of China, meeting in Islamabad. Concretely, the United States agrees to make available to the People’s Republic of China four of our U-2 aircraft over the next year, and to provide covert training for Chinese pilots and support personnel. As an earnest of our good faith, we shall send one of our own most skilled operatives to fly from South Korea to Turkey one day during the first week in April. The photography resulting from that flight will be made available to the representative of the PRC in Pakistan, from which he will derive firsthand knowledge of the miraculous capability of the U-2 aircraft. Given what we know about the mounting tensions between Mao and Khrushchev, the intelligence the PRC will then have concerning Soviet troop deployments will be of vital interest to the PRC.”
“What does the United States purportedly get in return?”
“We are, by the terms of the written ‘agreement,’ to get copies of all the information Chinese pilots subsequently collect while flying the U-2S from their own bases, reaching parts of the Soviet Union not accessible to us. It will of course be obvious to the Soviet Union that what we are really after is a rift in the Sino-Soviet alliance.”
Dulles neglected even to tamp his pipe. Finally he said, “It is a most … audacious … idea.”
“If it works,” said Rufus, always objective, “it will be of considerable consequence. Among other things, it could bring about a significant redeployment of Soviet military strength—away from Eastern Europe. And, Berlin being the great question during this period, the less concentrated Soviet strength in Eastern Europe, the better off Europe is.”
“And we are.”
“And we are.… In order to persuade the Kremlin that we have actually concluded such an arrangement with the Chinese (the Chinese will of course deny it, but would in any event), we must contrive to give the Kremlin access to the Marco Polo Protocols. These, I fancy, should be quite detailed. They should, for instance, quite specifically detail the route of the special demonstration flight in April. As though the route had been negotiated with some reference to plausible Chinese curiosity,” Rufus turned to the map behind him, “… it should cover, I’d guess, the industrial cities north of the Mongolian line—Chita, Ulan-Ude, Irkutsk, and then—oh, Semipalatinsk, the Tarbagatay Range, Alma-Ata—which would put the pilot within reasonable distance of our base in Peshawar in Pakistan.”
Marco Polo, If You Can Page 15
