Marco Polo, If You Can

by William F. Buckley

  At that moment the switchboard operator signaled, “Sir, Elgin, at Tel-Lab. He’s got the tape. Want me to put it through the loudspeaker?”

  “Yeah,” said Hoover. “We won’t need anything from Cover Two for the next minute or so.”

  Again, the pre-transmission hiss. The sound was strained, but the voices audible. The tape had obviously begun to roll after the conversation had started, but not much after.

  “Yes, Klaus,” a high-pitched voice said. “How’s the weather down there?”

  The guttural accents of Hans Steiner complied with the coded request. “Windy, east by south. And up there?”

  “The weather is changeable, but nothing important.”

  “Do you have a pencil?”

  The credentials had obviously been established.

  “Yes, proceed.”

  “The message is: ‘I have the Marco Polo Protocols. Will forward as usual.’ Please repeat.”

  “‘I have the Marco Polo Protocols. Will forward as usual.’”

  “Thanks very much, Willi.”

  “Any time, Klaus.”

  The click was heard.

  Hoover tried to look blasé. But Rufus—Rufus!—could not contain himself. He smiled. He then reached absentmindedly for a coffee, took Hoover’s cup and began to drink. Hoover looked over in dismay, raised his eyes in the direction of the overattentive aide, who nodded. A fresh cup was brought in.

  “Control One, Able Two has gotten out of taxi two blocks from residence. Is paying taxi. Proceeding by foot.”

  “Control One, Able Two has entered his residence.”

  All three men wrote down the time: 3:10. Rufus had said it all before, but he found it easier to say it again than to say nothing.

  “We must assume that he will proceed directly with the microfilming. Two pages of minutes, six of protocols: total, eight pages. Our telephone call should be made at four-twenty. We agreed on seventy minutes to make the negatives and the microdot reductions.”

  “Right,” Hoover said.

  At 4:19 Hoover lowered his index finger, giving the signal. A large lady of Slavic countenance was now sitting at the switchboard. She dialed a number.

  Hans Steiner picked up the telephone.

  “Steiner Photo. Yes?”

  The woman spoke in German. Her words were enunciated distinctly, telegraphically.

  “Klaus. They are coming. Conceal all evidence.”

  She hung up. Hoover nodded at her.

  Rufus again spoke out loud. “He’ll be hiding his negatives now. We want to give him time to do that—fifteen minutes. But of course you are ready if he attempts to break?”

  “Of course,” said Hoover. He nodded to Nichols. “Make contact.”

  “Control One to Cover Two. Are forces in position?”

  “Cover Two to Control One: Roger.”

  “Control One to Cover Two. Proceed to surround building. Entry to be made at four thirty-five. Acknowledge.”

  “Cover Two to Control One. Roger. He will be detained before four thirty-five only if he attempts to escape.”

  Hoover spoke. He faced the switchboard corner. “All right, proceed with arrest of Able Three, Able Four, and Able Five. Report progress on Channel Two, keep Channel One clear for Cover Two.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Hoover turned to a second aide: “Inform Secretary Herter all clear to serve expulsion papers on Baker One, Baker Two, and Baker Three.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Two agents of the FBI knocked at the door of 135 North Martine Avenue. A tall black woman opened the door.

  “Ma’am,” one of the officers said, “is Mr. William Stockley home?” The agents knew that he was.

  “Billy?” the woman roared. “Someone here to see you.”

  A huge black man, dressed in khakis and T-shirt, appeared.

  “Yeah?”

  “Mr. William Stockley, we’re agents of the FBI and we have here a warrant for your arrest. You are charged with violating the espionage laws of the United States. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can be used against you in court. You have the right to talk to a lawyer and to have him with you during questioning.”

  Five minutes later the car drove off to the Federal House of Detention on West Street in New York City.

  In Baltimore, John O’Brien was walking with his wife and children in the spring sun to a matinee, to see David Niven’s Please Don’t Eat the Daisies. A man approached O’Brien and asked if he might talk to him privately for a minute. A moment later John O’Brien, scientist with the Aberdeen Proving Grounds, said to his wife that she was to go on without him to the movie; something had come up, and he would be in touch with her. He took a twenty-dollar bill out of his pocket, and the children tugged at their mother to get on.

  Esther Meyerson, a clerk at the Records Section of the Edwards Air Force Base, couldn’t understand why the police car was signaling to her to pull over. She checked her speedometer—60 miles per hour. She pulled over to one side, determined to be argumentative on the matter: she was within the speed limit.

  As she drew to a stop she noticed that behind the state trooper’s car was a second car. Two men came out of it, and the three approached her. She put up a struggle and was therefore handcuffed, taken to the second car, and on into the Federal Detention Center in Los Angeles.

  Nichols looked at his watch, then over to Hoover. Hoover nodded.

  “Control One to Cover Two. Proceed with arrest.”

  Three men walked up the concrete steps to the door of 252 Fulton Street and rang the bell. On the street, six agents were strategically deployed.

  The door was opened by a slightly bald man in his mid-fifties, precise in his movements and neatly dressed, wearing slacks and a sweater.

  “Hans Steiner, we’re agents of the FBI and have here a warrant for your arrest for violating the espionage laws of the United States. You have the right to remain silent.…”

  At the end of the ritual sentences Steiner’s eyebrows rose. He reached out for the document. “I wish to examine it.”

  The agents had been instructed to give him ample opportunity to read the warrant. A second document authorized a search of his premises and a sealing off of the premises pending prosecution and trial.

  Hans Steiner asked if he might collect his toilet articles and perhaps some reading matter—“It will, I suppose, require a little while to establish my innocence of these outrageous charges.”

  The arresting official answered crisply: “My instructions are to take you directly into custody.”

  Twenty minutes later Hans Steiner was in the Federal Detention Center on West Street, and Hoover and Rufus were at 252 Fulton Street, together with two technicians. Rufus desired merely a feel for the place. There was a smell of smoke in the bathroom. Ah yes, but what had been burned had first been photographed, and Rufus knew that the negatives must be somewhere in this house. The house would of course be searched. But even if it happened that the searchers were so lucky as to come upon eight negatives, each one of them the diameter of a typewriter dot, Rufus would see to it that they were delicately returned to wherever Klaus had recently hidden them. The Protocols of Marco Polo would not leave 252 Fulton Street until Hans Steiner himself retrieved them. But no one would be permitted to set foot in 252 Fulton Street before then. It was sealed now, order of the federal court. No innocent cleaning woman. No lawyer representing Steiner. No one who didn’t take his instructions from Rufus.

  Benni was back, sitting in his favorite chair. He had adopted the American habit of drinking beer while watching televison. He tuned in to the news.

  He saw it all. More than five minutes was given over to it. Pictures of Klaus (his real name apparently was Hans Steiner)… of a technician at Bell Labs … of a scientist at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds … a clerk at Edwards Air Force Base … pictures of Soviet diplomats … a statement from the Secretary of State … protests to the Soviet Ambassador … talk of a trial that would expose t
he largest network—the words were those of John Edgar Hoover, who appeared before the camera, advising that his agents had been working “months and months” on the case of Hans Steiner—the largest spy network in postwar history.… The government would ask for the maximum penalties against Steiner and his agents.… Life imprisonment. Conceivably, death—if atomic secrets were involved.

  Maria wasn’t home. Since Michael’s death, she had taken to spending most of her time at the convent on Thirty-ninth Street doing volunteer work. Sometimes she wouldn’t come home at all. Benni went to the telephone. He dialed Amanda’s number. “Are you alone?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “You saw it on television?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “They don’t … know about us.”

  Amanda’s voice broke. “How can we be sure?”

  “We’ll know soon.”

  “Benni, I don’t think we should talk over the telephone.”

  “All right. On Monday, you come by the office—to see your father. We can have our usual cup of coffee.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “Don’t do anything unusual. And don’t use the machine.”

  “Don’t worry.” She hung up.

  CHAPTER 20

  On receiving the news by teletype, the KGB duty officer telephoned Colonel Anton Speranski. It was just after 2 A.M. Speranski had gone to sleep only a half hour earlier, after a long evening celebrating—what was he celebrating?… he tried to clear his mind—celebrating Saturday night, he supposed. The duty officer’s words sank into his mind like a poison pellet. Then, the little stab of pain, and as the poisons began to course through his consciousness, the disastrous implications of the news—they had arrested Klaus—were little by little conjugated. He had, up until now, presided over the most strikingly successful intelligence operation in Soviet history—certainly the most spectacular penetration since Kim Philby, and before that Richard Sorge. And what with the message—was it only three hours ago? (that was what he was celebrating! he suddenly remembered)—that Klaus had actually got hold of the Marco Polo Protocols, he had silently drained that last glass of vodka to celebrate what would surely develop within a matter of months, perhaps weeks: the highest honors, a promotion, his own dacha.

  And now …

  He kept the duty officer on the line while he gave thought to the single question he must answer without delay. Should he awaken Shelepin?

  What could Shelepin do? It was too early to get fuller reports. Should he be awakened—no doubt in his congenitally fearful mood, aggravated by this terrible reversal—in the middle of the night?

  On the other hand, if he didn’t wake him, Speranski ran the risk that tomorrow Shelepin would be enraged at not having been given the news immediately. Conceivably he would even call Malinovsky now. Conceivably he would even call Khrushchev!

  Speranski thought back, his whole frame shivering, on the single occasion when he had been present at one of those notorious late-night meetings at Stalin’s dacha. It would not have been necessary to wake Stalin at midnight—for him, that was early.

  Speranski was the juniormost KGB official in the room that night, and it had struck Stalin’s fancy to say—nothing. He simply kept Beria and the two generals and, of course, Speranski, standing there while he sat in his couch, the great bear rug under his feet, looking absently at the big log fire. The head of the KGB had finished his report, and Stalin made no comment. No gesture of dismissal. And so they stood. Twenty minutes later Stalin, without looking up, said to his aide, “Tell them to go.”

  “Good night, Comrade Stalin.”

  “Good night, Comrade Stalin.”

  “Good night, Comrade Stalin.”

  Never before or since had Speranski suffered so. Was he too unimportant to bid Stalin good night? Might it be considered … forward? He had seconds in which to decide. He compromised.

  He turned toward Stalin, and bowed his head deferentially. Stalin looked him full in the face. And then, that bolt of lightning shooting through the room.

  “Good night, Captain Speranski. I have heard about your fine work.”

  Speranski had opened his mouth, dumbstruck. Should he reply? Say, “Thank you, Comrade Stalin”? Instead, he merely repeated his bow, only this time he bowed even more deeply., Outside the inner sanctum, the door having been gently closed by Stalin’s aide, his senior colleagues looked at Speranski in utter amazement. Wordlessly, they put on their coats and went to their waiting vehicles. Beria thought to himself that only a man as perverse as Stalin would have done such a thing after so pointedly humbling Speranski’s superiors. Speranski had not slept that whole night, experiencing multiple orgasms of pride and excitement and pleasure, one after another.…

  But he was daydreaming, and the duty officer had permitted himself to clear his throat at the other end of the telephone. Speranski drew a deep breath:

  “Get me the Director on the line.”

  He shivered as he waited. A minute later he heard Shelepin’s voice. Clearly he had not been awakened. “Yes, what is it?”

  “I am sorry to disturb you, Aleksandr Nikolaevich, but there is a bulletin from Washington. They have arrested Klaus.”

  First a silence. Then, “Just Klaus?”

  “No. There were multiple arrests.”

  “You know of course why it is vital that we should have the exact circumstances.”

  “Of course, Aleksandr Nikolaevich. Right now we have just the bulletins. We have the alternative of waiting until fuller reports come in from regular channels, or making our own inquiries.”

  “Meet me in my office.”

  “Yes, Aleksandr Nikolaevich.”

  Speranski had further to travel to the Lubyanka than Shelepin or General Malinovsky. Both were at the Director’s office when breathlessly Speranski arrived. They were reading the news from the ticker. An aide brought in another installment. The story was being reported in considerable detail. Speranski sat, and took the sheet of paper already read by Shelepin and Malinovsky. In ten minutes they had all read what had been transmitted by Tass. Shelepin instructed an aide to rouse a translator and have the Associated Press wire story rendered in Russian. “And bring tea.” Which meant vodka as well.

  Shelepin said, “It is quite extraordinary. They do not appear to have arrested our principal Washington assets.”

  Malinovsky commented. “Perhaps they have, but haven’t announced it.”

  Speranski felt obliged to make a clarification. “General, in the United States they don’t make secret arrests. At least, I never heard of one. Arrests are made only pursuant to court orders, and these are instantly published.”

  Shelepin tapped his fingers on the table. “… Is it conceivable?” he was talking, really, to himself; “… Is it conceivable that they did not pick up the Washington penetration?”

  “Sir,” Speranski said, “it is surely conceivable. Because they have picked up fewer than half of Klaus’s assets.”

  “The Protocols,” said Shelepin. “The bloody Protocols. Did Klaus dispatch them before he was arrested?”

  This, of course, was the question on which Speranski had most vigorously concentrated in reading the dispatch. He had already drawn his gloomy conclusion.

  “It says here, Aleksandr Nikolaevich, that Klaus was arrested at his studio in Brooklyn at 4:35 New York time. We heard from Ottawa at 2:45. I greatly fear that he would not have had time to execute the usual arrangements before 4:35.”

  “I greatly fear you are correct.”

  Malinovsky: “Where, then, are the Protocols?”

  Speranski spoke. “They were certainly at the Fulton Street house at the time of the arrest. We do not know whether they were apprehended by the FBI. If Klaus proceeded instantly with the microphotography and destroyed the originals, then quite possibly the FBI did not find them. Klaus is a cautious man, and he could certainly have hidden negatives less than the size of a postage stamp before opening the door.”

&n
bsp; Shelepin: “On the other hand, if they found them—perhaps they were still in the developing room, or in the camera—then the FBI is almost certain to trace the source. Worse, Washington will know we have been seeing the minutes.”

  Shelepin rose. Characteristically he did so only when he was ready to give orders.

  “It is obvious that we need, instantly, to advise one of our lawyers—you know which one, Speranski. Instruct him to appear instantly—instantly—at the detention center and announce that he is the attorney for Hans Steiner and demand to see his client.”

  “Sir, if we get that lawyer, it will be rather obvious that Steiner is our man.…”

  “Bulldung, Speranski! The FBI will not have brought in Hans Steiner without plenty of evidence. I grant that the use of that lawyer will confirm the public position on Steiner, but that is of little concern at this moment.”

  He resumed. “Get him. What’s his name?”

  “J. Daniel Umin.”

  “Of course. Bright fellow. Now listen, get Ottawa to call Umin. Steiner will know not to disavow Umin. Probably he has made no motion yet to get a lawyer.”

  “Probably the government appointed a lawyer.”

  “Steiner can dismiss him, after having a word with Umin. Now we want Umin to get from Steiner the answer to three questions—you are listening, Speranski?”

  “Of course, Aleksandr Nikolaevich.”

  “One, did he send the Protocols? Two, if he didn’t, did the FBI get them? Three, if the FBI didn’t get them, where are they?” Shelepin took a deep draft of vodka. Malinovsky, as if to be companionable, did also. Speranski lifted his glass, but before it reached his lips—“Now move, Speranski. Report back here after Ottawa talks to Umin. I really cannot see why, if you apply yourself, we shouldn’t have an answer to those three questions before dawn. Ottawa has all Umin’s numbers?”

  “Of course, Aleksandr Nikolaevich. I trained Ottawa myself.”

  “Use my line, next door.”

  “Remember, sir, it’s Saturday night.”

  Shelepin stared at his associate. Speranski bolted out the door.

  J. Daniel Umin’s name made judges with cast-iron stomachs and nerves of steel moan. For twenty-five years he had defended Communists, crypto-Communists, saboteurs, seditionists, terrorists. His intrusion into a case meant a volcanic tremor, felt up and down the judicial vertebrae from jail guards to Supreme Court Justices. He was inevitably insolent, studiedly impolite, routinely obscene. There had been a dozen meetings, mostly surreptitious, among judges and officials of the New York Bar Association to inquire into the possibility of successfully disbarring him. That his contempt for the courts, his abuse of process, his outrageous personal behavior, would objectively justify removing him was not doubted by anyone who consulted the record (or read the papers). But J. Daniel Umin had acquired a perverse immunity. He had industriously advertised himself as a friend of the helpless, of the politically oppressed, as a bastion of political liberty, the prime mover in the anti-McCarthy movement in America; and as such he regularly worked the college circuit. He delighted in taking a judge—whoever had most recently ruled against him—and devoting an entire lecture to the judge’s background, making sexual insinuations, accusations of outright incompetence, innuendoes about the judge’s drinking habits, about scandals involving his brothers, sisters, mother, father, children, godchildren. He did this with such utter, righteous, communicable high-mindedness that he succeeded in causing several distinguished men of the bar to have nervous breakdowns and two to retire; one died of apoplexy, right in the courtroom. Umin never appeared anywhere without a) a cigar, b) a poetic tribute to the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments, c) a warning against the ideologization of justice by the military-industrial complex, and d) the suggestion that behind it all was: the Central Intelligence Agency, primeval enemy of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and Lillian Hellman. Notwithstanding that he was a traveling spectacular—the indigenous equivalent of Moscow’s May Day Parade—he was a careful scholar and brilliant legal parliamentarian. At Yale as an undergraduate he had had a distinguished career, during which he had shown no radical tendencies. But in his junior year he accepted election to the senior society Scroll & Key. More than one biographer of J. Daniel Umin had suggested that his rejection by the leading senior society at Yale was the root cause of his anti-American resentments. Soon after graduating from the Yale Law School he came out for abolishing all private colleges as “citadels of privilege.” He had a speech on just that subject which he delivered at least once to every college generation at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, and NYU, regularly receiving standing ovations.