Marco Polo, If You Can

by William F. Buckley

  “We begin with this.” From the refrigerator Blackford brought out a carefully selected bottle of Riesling, which he uncorked. “At eight, a Japanese girl will come around with something or other. It will taste good.”

  “Hmm.” Singer, dressed in khaki pants and a light sweater, leaned back in an armchair. “This is good! Ugh, what a flight. The things I do for you, Black. And I mean, all you have to do is fly a few thousand miles over Central Asia!—Did I tell you I figured out an easy way to navigate? Well, you make sure that on your left, there are five Communists for every Communist on your right. That way, you’ll fly right between Khrushchev’s Russia and Mao’s China, without missing a thing! Here’s to you, boy.” Singer raised his glass and gave Blackford a fatherly wink.

  Blackford was anxious for news of Tango. The arrests had taken place the Saturday of his departure. The English-language press in Tokyo had carried a fairly full account, together with a statement by Hans Steiner’s lawyer.

  “I see he got himself old J. Daniel Umin.”

  “Yup. Umin is having a ball. He has told the press that the injustice already done to Hans Steiner—he always refers to him as ‘the internationally renowned artist’—is the greatest injustice since Dred Scott.”

  Blackford’s laughter was the closest he had come to release since Michael’s death. The days with Sally in Bermuda were days that had brought him nourishment of an entirely different order. This was the laughter of the trade. The kind of amusement professional students of Soviet behavior derive from reading a bald lie in the Communist press, inevitably introduced by the phrase, “As everyone knows …” Intraoffice jokes. They are the most satisfying. Inside jokes. Yes, gallows humor, even. “I caught him on television, Black. I’ll tell you, that character is the meanest, funniest son of a bitch I ever saw. I got to confess I’d give one nut to stick J. Daniel Umin in a Soviet courtroom for just one hour.”

  “Is he doing Steiner any good?”

  “I don’t think Seneca could spring Steiner.”

  “Is there a trial date?”

  “Hell, no. Umin has introduced enough motions to delay a trial till fall at the earliest. Which, as you know my dear Blackford, doesn’t bother Rufus one bit.”

  “Yeah, right. But tell me, did they find the mole?”

  “Yup.”

  Blackford waited. “Are you going to tell me who it was?”

  “Under the circumstances, I can. The mole is Amanda Gaither.”

  Blackford put his glass down. He stared at Singer, his lips parted. Singer could hear the exhalation of breath.

  “What the hell,” Singer said, struggling at once to console and dismiss. “You can make out a solid case for the inconceivability of most of them. Look at the social background of Lawrence Duggan, Alger Hiss, Donald Maclean.… She was recruited while at Vassar.”

  “Who by? The President, I suppose you’re now going to tell me.”

  “No. It was done out of New York.”

  Again Blackford paused, his wineglass forgotten, his eyes glazed.

  “… How did she … bring it off?”

  Singer poured another glass of wine.

  “Well, my boy, it happens that your old friend Singer Callaway was in the very room when J. Edgar Hoover’s technician explained it—or tried to—to Rufus. He even brought in the piece.”

  “The piece of what?”

  “The piece of hardware, I’d guess you’d call it. Maybe ‘electronic hardware’ would be more accurate. But before I explain how it worked, let me tell you what happened, okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “As you know, Amanda” (It crossed Singer’s mind to amuse himself by characterizing her “your every-now-and-then-girlfriend Amanda,” but he pulled away from jocularity in reaction to the gravity of the expression he looked up at. Singer resolved to cant the analysis of what happened on the technical, rather than the human end, at which level he was in any case better prepared to cope, having very little original to say to explain why Amanda Gaither would choose to work for the people who operated Gulag, rather than for the people who wanted to confine Gulag’s boundaries.) “Amanda worked—I’ll tell you, in a minute, why I’m using the past tense (she doesn’t work for him any longer)—in the office of the Director himself. Among other things, she was in charge of the beautiful new Xerox 914. Seven copies per minute … neat, dry stuff—you’re familiar with it.

  “Anyway, that was one of her jobs, to run the thing, keep up the paper supply, teach authorized assistants how to work it—that kind of thing. How she brought it off was by a thing the FBI have called the ‘diverter.’”

  “The what?”

  “The diverter. First let me tell you what she did, then I’ll tell you how it worked. Or do you care?”

  “I care,” Blackford said. He leaned almost unnoticeably forward on his chair, running his finger around the undrained wineglass.

  “Okay. Well, under the rig was—is—a foot switch. If activated, which our Amanda could do by a slight movement of her toe as she bent over the machine to put down the documents, the diverter stayed activated till she nudged the switch again.”

  “Come on, Singer.”

  “Easy. So, she would push the switch. Then put the document, as usual, face down on the glass plate on top of the machine, positioned for the scanner. Then she’d press the Run button, and the machine would begin to crank, delivering whatever number of copies she had designated on the counter. The magic of it was simple: the diverter would make an extra copy.”

  Blackford intruded. “Couldn’t people see the extra copy being made?”

  “No, no, you don’t understand. The diverter didn’t extrude an extra copy on the tray. If the orders were for, say, two copies of a document, she’d set the exposed counter button at ‘two.’ And two copies would pop out of the machine. But, ho ho ho, a third copy had been made. In sequence, it was actually the first copy. But instead of ejecting into the delivery tray, it was kicked down into the bottom of the machine, where it sat under the internal mechanism. Sat there until Amanda retrieved it. Retrieved them.”

  “Retrieved it—them—when?”

  “We filmed her. Toward the end of the day, usually, Tidy-up time. She’d open up the big panels on the 914, normal practice: check the feed mechanisms, take out mangled sheets of Xerox paper, that sort of thing. While at it, she would pick up copies of the national treasures. Take them, casually, and put them on one of the file baskets where papers are habitually collected for USIA. One of her jobs was to address them. Simple. She addressed the unclassified papers to USIA, at their post office box number, and the classified papers to a Soviet drop, using an official-type post office box address … Benni’s box.” Singer looked up cautiously. It was not his assignment to come to Tokyo to upset the principal field executive of the Marco Polo operation. He could tell that Blackford had absorbed the Michael-Benni shock.

  “How did the diverter actually work?”

  “Remarkably simply. Even I understood it, though maybe only because Hoover made his guy repeat it about five hundred times.

  “To begin with, our friends in the KGB tracked the new Xerox 914 machines coming off production. We still haven’t picked up the cutie-pie at that end of the business. That was last July.

  “Anyway, next thing we know, a unit is at a Washington distributor, more or less ready for delivery, and some guy shows up after hours and corners the technician who’s supposed to check out the machines pre-delivery. He Has a Secret. It’s worth a couple of grand to him if the technician will make a few adjustments in the machine. ’Cause the guy’s principal competitor in the real estate business is going to get delivery of the machine, and our guy would like to know who his clients are he’s sending prospectuses of real estate property to … and, you know, we live in a competitive society, got to make a buck. The Xerox technician bites, and says, ‘Well, what you got in mind?’ Our guy says, ‘Well, it happens when I was at M.I.T., my roommate was an engineering nut, and now works in the r
esearch center in Rochester, and he showed me how easy it would be to install a ‘diverter.’ Amazing. A solenoid-driven—”

  “What’s ‘solenoid-driven’?”

  “Beats the shit out of me. A ‘solenoid-driven’ metal blade intercepts the Xeroxed copies of the secret documents, sliding them into the bottom of the machine. There’s a spring-loaded unit operated by a black box of some kind, with wires to the foot switch, power supply, and wire leads into the control box where the ‘number’ gauge is. The black box is nicely hidden, behind where anyone would look except at overhaul time, and if that was scheduled, our Amanda, otherwise Tovarich X23-Z, could remove the black box and its fittings, in like maybe three minutes.

  “Anyway, when Amanda had that foot switch kicked over, a metal blade would intercept the first copy of any run, directing it into the cavity at the bottom of the machine. Amanda’s role was that simple. With the kick switch on, she’d push the Run button. The machine goes into motion and comes up with the designated number of copies. But—before it ejects the first of those copies, it has made an extra copy, diverted to the bottom of the machine. A complete one-document cycle (the Xerox boys are real proud of this) takes exactly 9.1 seconds. But a nonexpert has no idea how long the warm-up period takes. In the case of Amanda’s machine the warm-up period, sounding in with a gentle purr—you guessed it—took 9.1 seconds before the visible copies would start going through. The purr period was making copies for the Kremlin.”

  Singer was clearly caught up with the mechanical excitement of it all, which he had mastered at such pains, thanks to Mr. Hoover’s corresponding incapacity to grasp technical detail easily.

  “See, Black, just when the first copy starts to climb up out of the bottom of the machine to arrive at the delivery tray, the diverter goes to work. A metal blade—the FBI people call it the ‘guillotine’—comes down. Catches the leading edge of the paper and drives it down through the gap. One of these, and the black box cuts off the current to the solenoids, the springs snap the blade back up out of the way, and the machine operates in a conventional way. But put in another first copy of paper, and the pressure reactivates the black box for a return performance. Neat?”

  “Neat. The technician did it for two grand?”

  “Claims it took him only two nights’ work, period. His ‘client’ came up with the black box, ‘anniversary present’ from his old roommate at M.I.T. Needless to say, we have no lead to the ‘client.’ It was all cash.”

  “I’ll be damned.”

  “Hoover’s reaction exactly. The Xerox mechanic says he had every reason to believe the unit was going out on a purchase order to the Drexel Real Estate firm.”

  Blackford laughed. “Maybe that was the cover name our leader Mr. Dulles was giving the Agency last summer.” His voice sobered. “But tell me about Amanda.”

  “Well, of course, Rufus had instructed that there should be no difference whatever in procedures on the Monday after the arrests, nothing to make Amanda suspicious. On the other hand, Benni had no one to take secret papers to, at least not until the KGB reinstructed him, which would take time; so we were set to just, well, let things ride. Let Amanda go on using the diverter without knowing who’d pick the stuff up from Benni. She saved us the trouble.”

  “How so?”

  “We had her under continuous observation, of course, from the moment we found out. We watched her when Klaus was arrested. She stayed home. On Sunday she called a professional delivery service and gave the messenger boy a letter to deliver to Benni.”

  “Did you intercept?”

  “Uh-huh. And consummated delivery to Benni within a half hour.”

  “Saying?”

  “Saying that she was not going to sit around Washington waiting to be picked up. She was leaving that afternoon for Mexico, where she would tuck in with the Mexican consul she had one of her flings with last year. She told Benni maybe she’d marry him, maybe she wouldn’t, but in any case she could be reached in care of her loverboy, and she gave his address.”

  “So much for that problem?”

  “Wait. So Benni gets this communication. Apparently it gives him the shakes, because the next thing he does is board a plane for Rome. We establish that he has called Maria and told her that his first cousin is dying, and Benni wants to be with her.… Blackford, have you ever seen a truly sad man? I mean, a truly wretchedly sad man?”

  “Well, yeah, I guess so.”

  “No, you haven’t. I’d have said I had. But I hadn’t. Not till I saw J. Edgar Hoover at The Quarters on Sunday afternoon, when we sat there with information that a Central Intelligence mole was en route to the airport to fly unmolested to Mexico, and her superior was en route to the airport to fly unmolested to Rome. He began by saying that of course he would not permit it. Rufus said, ‘Mr. Hoover, you have got to understand. Tango is over and out; now all that matters is the success of Marco Polo.’ It was obvious, but the sheer agony of Hoover, letting two prime spies who’d have faced life sentences sashay out of the country … He made Dulles promise that at the earliest opportunity the CIA would release a statement saying that the FBI had permitted the spies to go out for overriding reasons of national importance.”

  “What did Dulles say?”

  “He said if Marco Polo works, it’s going to be a long time from now before we’ll reveal that we were ever onto the Amanda-Benni operation.”

  “I must say, rather neat for our team, if you leave out the punishment angle.”

  “Right. Especially since when Benni gets to Rome he’ll establish contact there, and give them Amanda’s address in Mexico so the KGB won’t think she’s ducking out on them.”

  “What about the diverter?”

  “We’re going to leave it in the machine for a couple of months. Just in case there’s another mole anywhere in the building who might have a reason to check whether we’re onto it. All he’d have to do is reach with his foot and see if the stud pin’s still sticking out. If it is, the diverter is still presumably in place. A couple of months from now, a Xerox inspector can stumble onto it, remove it, and file some sort of confused report on it, which we can ignore.”

  Blackford was summoned to the door. He opened it and a lissome Japanese girl followed by a male assistant came in, followed by a trolley with a half-dozen covered trays of hot food. Blackford went for another bottle of wine.

  “How do you feel, Singer?”

  “I’m beginning to feel good. How do you feel, Black?”

  “I’m beginning to feel lousy.”

  Singer laughed. The laugh was not entirely wholesome. It was sound psychology at once to make light of the danger of a mission, while staying safely on the short side of trivializing it. It was a blend Singer could effect, and Blackford was soon smiling and together they enjoyed the long evening, during which at regular intervals Singer would do his imitation of J. Daniel Umin affirming the chastity of his client. Blackford, in bed, thought about the passionate Amanda and struggled to recall whether she had ever betrayed her extralibidinal preoccupations, but he could recall only, every now and then, her enthusiasm for the prospects of some stallion or other. He doubted she ever could interest herself in a gelding. So it was Amanda, in whose arms he had lain on the eve of his departure for Berlin to work his labyrinthine way from No. 48 Mittelstrasse … back to the beautiful, saucy, dangerous girl who loved—to make love, and probably understood herself, manipulating the Xerox machine, as involved in making love to all of mankind.

  CHAPTER 22

  At midnight Thursday April 7, Tokyo time (2 P.M. Greenwich time), the meteorologist gave what he called his “90 percent go” signal. Blackford had been on a carefully supervised diet during the entire day, and at nine he was given a tranquilizer intended to induce sleep. When he was awakened at 4 A.M. he couldn’t quite remember whether it had worked or not. He had hardly slumbered, yet he could not remember tossing and turning. In any event, the laxative he had been given was effective, and he took his light meal, washed d
own with a little skimmed milk. Coffee, a diuretic, was proscribed. At five, in the hangar, he would submit to the pre-breathing discipline for two hours before takeoff. He had always found it the single most tedious aspect of the whole U-2 exercise, but the denitrogenization, during which he was given pure oxygen to breathe, protected him against any possibility of bends when at high altitudes. During the two hours, one had to make the conscious effort to reverse the normal process by which one breathes. Ordinarily, inhaling requires a slight expenditure of energy, while exhaling is entirely automatic. Under pressurization, the process is reversed. Conversation would be excluded, so that he and Singer spoke their goodbyes before the helmet was put on. Blackford knew that although Singer departed the hangar, making it possible for Blackford to hasten the passage of the time by reading a paperback novel, Singer would be there when Blackford was summoned by Colonel Sharpies to board his aircraft: as indeed, at 6:50 A.M., he was.