Blackford, clutching his books with his right hand, and with the uneaten cake cupped in his left hand, was led courteously back to his cell. On reaching it, he put everything down and stretched out on the couch, his eyes closed, his heart pounding. Suddenly he opened his eyes and, wrestling with the button on his shirt pocket, took out the document. He read just the name and the new date, folded it neatly, and put it back. Again he closed his eyes, and tried to frame his thanks.
CHAPTER 25
At 1 P.M., Anthony Trust for the CIA, Charles Wilkinson for the FBI, and Assistant U. S. Attorney John Ames for the Justice Department sat in the back seat of the limousine outside the Federal House of Detention at 427 West Street in Manhattan. Five minutes later, the door opened and a guard emerged, handcuffed to the tall, spare photographer. Beside them was J. Daniel Umin, who had insisted that his client would not discharge him until after Steiner was airborne. Ames, acting on Rufus’s instructions, wrested from Umin the guarantee that he would not speak to or otherwise communicate with any member of the press between the time his client left the House of Detention and the time he boarded the Constellation at McGuire Air Force Base. To this Umin agreed, attaching the condition that he must be permitted to accompany Steiner everywhere he went, which meant also to the Fulton Street residence.
In the front seat of the limousine, Umin sat alongside the policeman who drove. In the jump seat was Steiner, still handcuffed to the guard. Behind them were Trust, Wilkinson, and Ames, all three carrying handguns. Rufus had warned of the possibility of Steiner’s attempting suicide, although the operative conviction of the entire maneuver was that Steiner desired to deliver the Marco Polo Protocols to his patrons.
They drove directly to Fulton Street. The guards had been alerted, and it had been days since the last of the newspapermen covering the little building had abandoned their monitorship. Anthony Trust and John Ames stayed in the car. Umin, his handcuffed client, and—two paces behind them—the FBI’s Wilkinson moved to the door. The signal was given, and it was opened from the inside by another agent.
Steiner advised the agent that he desired three large suitcases from the attic floor. When these were brought down, he asked that he be released from the handcuffs so that he could negotiate the packing of the especially delicate camera equipment. To Umin, Steiner said, “Here is the list of books I want to take. Would you pick them up from the library wall? They’re all over in that area”—he pointed. Umin, cigar in mouth, began transporting books into one of the open suitcases. Steiner disassembled camera equipment and used sheets and towels to protect them as he placed them in the second bag. Into the third bag went selected shoes and suits from the wardrobe assembled from closets upstairs. In an hour all the bags were shut and locked. Umin insisted they be sealed, and provided tape for this purpose.
They drove then—a police car in front, another behind—over the Brooklyn Bridge, around the Battery, and through the Holland Tunnel. Steiner said nothing. Umin was incapable of saying nothing. He began to complain about things in general, and Anthony took extreme pleasure in causing the automatic partition window in the limousine to rise, cutting Umin off, so to speak, without a cent; though he could be seen complaining to the driver, who did not reply.
At McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, the detachment drove directly to a C-118 Constellation. The crew had instructions not to inquire about the cargo. At 5:20, Steiner shook Umin’s hand and accepted from him a package of Swiss bank notes, as per arrangement. The plane took off moments later, and Umin looked over to see the driver of the limousine and the two police cars speeding away, leaving him far out on the tarmac, alone. It had begun to rain, so that by the time Umin reached the pay telephone at the dispatcher’s office, he was very wet. And very angry—at being ditched in the downpour. But, withal, still very pleased with himself. He called for a taxi.
The airplane stopped at Wiesbaden for refueling, and arrived at its destination, Tempelhof Airfield in Berlin, just before one in the afternoon of the next day. Steiner was taken to a cell at Andrews Army Base in Berlin, where he was kept under observation. His clothes were taken from him, and he was given cordless pajamas. His three sealed suitcases were stored in the empty cell opposite, which was then locked.
At midnight at the Lubyanka—why do so many things happen at midnight in the Soviet Union? Blackford wondered—his cell door was opened, and the major appeared. More news about the delay? Was the stay of execution still in force—or had they found out? Then Blackford noticed: The major carried a suitcase.
“You are going to Berlin, where you will be released. I am not authorized to say more. It will all be much easier if you do not attempt any conversation.”
Blackford could have wept with joy. Conversation? He would dance the rhumba with the major, if he followed his inclinations. These, with overpowering discipline, he managed to restrain. He affected an air of pure fatalism.
“What are my instructions?”
“In the suitcase you will find a suit approximately your size. I will come to fetch you in ten minutes.”
Blackford was ready in three. The ten minutes went slowly. One hour later he was airborne. Five hours later he landed, at dawn, in East Berlin. He was given breakfast in the airplane, in which he sat until 7:30. A car then drove up. The major, a guard, and a plainclothesman escorted him, handcuffed, into the waiting car. Wordlessly, they drove toward an unknown destination.
At exactly 8:30, in the early morning fog, the two parties approached each other over the Glienecker Bridge. The American party lugged three suitcases on a trolley. The Russian party brought only the single suitcase, carried by the guard.
Just short of the white line at the center of the bridge the major from the KGB stepped forward, by prearrangement, to identify Steiner. Anthony mused that this procedure would not have been sanctioned by J. Daniel Umin. Steiner, an innocent victim of McCarthyism, could hardly have been identified by a KGB official. The major looked at Steiner, muttered something in a low tone of voice, inaudible to anyone else, and nodded.
Anthony Trust, charged to identify the American, stepped over the white line. “How’re you doing, buddy?” he asked softly.
“As of the moment I’m all right, thanks, A. But when I get in I’d like some Pepto-Bismol.” This, thought Anthony smiling as he retreated across the white line, was the authentic man.
Ames handed Steiner two documents and indicated where he must sign the instrument giving up his United States citizenship, and the court order consenting never again to enter the United States in any capacity. Steiner signed the two papers, using one of his suitcases as a writing surface. The two documents having been executed, Ames drew from his pocket Attorney General William P. Rogers’ release. Wilkinson removed his handcuffs. Without uttering a word, Steiner stepped over the white line, whence his three escorts, characteristically appropriating the West German trolley, wheeled his baggage to the end of the bridge. He got into a car that slipped quickly into the fog.
That was on May 11. On May 13, Chairman Khrushchev summoned the press to the Kremlin and proceeded to make one of the most startling speeches in the annals of diplomacy. He ripped into Eisenhower. “I think that when the President stops being President, the best job we could give him in our country would be as director of a children’s home. He would not harm children. But as head of a mighty state, he is more dangerous and might do a lot of harm. I saw the way he behaved at the Geneva conference in 1955, when every time the President had to speak he took another note prepared for him by Secretary of State Dulles.… One shuddered at the thought of what a great force is in such hands. Foster Dulles died, but Allen Dulles lives on.” On and on he went. When finally he stopped, there was a most extraordinary uproar, unprecedented in Kremlin press conferences. The question of course was whether, in the light of his verbal offensive against Eisenhower, the Chairman still planned to go on to Paris for the scheduled summit conference the following Monday.
Khrushchev replied that he would g
o to Paris, but that he would demand from Eisenhower an apology for the U-2 flight and for all other violations of Soviet territory, plus a promise that they would never be repeated, and that those who had authorized the flight that had ended at Alma-Ata—and here Khrushchev paused and added, “and I mean everybody”—should be “disavowed and punished.”
Khrushchev then announced—and this vaguely perplexed analysts around the world who studied his entire statement—that if the scheduled summit conference did not materialize, and another one was subsequently scheduled, he would “personally insist that it include the Chairman of the People’s Republic of China.” It had heretofore always been assumed that the head of the Soviet Union spoke for the united Communist world.
The next few days were of course given over to hectic exchanges between a deeply distressed Harold Macmillan, an imperiously distracted President de Gaulle, and an American President whose attentions oscillated from sheer animal rage at Khrushchev’s choice of words, to a calm consideration of what next to do.
He had now three objectives. The first to persuade his allies that he would not repay Khrushchev’s tirade by pulling out of the summit. “Everybody knows I don’t like summits, especially with the Soviets. But if this summit doesn’t come off,” he snapped at Herter, “it’ll be because Khrushchev pulls out.” A second objective was to persuade the American public that he was not easily intimidated. Nixon had told the President, immediately on hearing of Khrushchev’s tirade, that if President Eisenhower actually went on to apologize to Khrushchev after he, Nixon, had publicly defended the U-2 flights, citing them as necessary responses to the Soviets’ refusal to endorse President Eisenhower’s earlier Open Skies proposal, then Nixon, facing the Democratic candidate, would be saddled with one hell of a burden: Either he would need to repudiate his own President, or else he would have to swallow his words about the strategic necessity of the U-2 flights—both alternatives politically disastrous. Eisenhower meanwhile sensed that the American people would be appalled by any categorical apology. He disclosed to Herter, Gates, and Dulles that he would propitiate the Soviet Union only to the extent of agreeing, in Paris, that no further flights would be dispatched. Nixon was not informed of this concession, with the embarrassing result that, on television the Sunday night before the summit convened, Nixon affirmed the continuing necessity of U-2 flights to guard against surprise attack.
Eisenhower’s third objective—and this he stressed in his personal conversations with Macmillan and de Gaulle over the telephone—would be to interpret cautiously but decisively an aborted summit as effective postponement of the Soviet Union’s ultimatum on Berlin. That crisis, after all, was the major one on the international agenda. On the one hand the Soviet Union had said A: a separate peace treaty with East Germany, unilaterally consummated, will deprive you—the United States, Great Britain, France—of any juridical right of access to Berlin. And to this position, the United States had said: Not-A. That meant: Confrontation. What all the world, including presumably the superpowers, wished to avoid. “Notice,” Ike had said to Macmillan over the telephone, “that Khrushchev … said, you know … cut it out … to the … well, friendly countries that our U-2S come from.” (Khrushchev had said, “Rocket forces will destroy the bases from which they take off.”) “But in making again the threat to conclude a separate peace treaty with East Germany, he said that he would proceed ‘unilaterally’ unless a settlement was reached ‘in a reasonable time.’” When Macmillan, over the telephone, questioned Ike as to whether he had any explanation for Khrushchev’s violent, aberrational outburst after allowing the whole U-2 episode to die down and going so far as to exchange the American pilot, condemned to death by a Soviet court, Eisenhower was uncomfortable. He did not wish to deceive his old friend. But he knew, as a soldier, the primacy of confidentiality. All he could bring himself to say was that when they met in Paris he, Ike, would perhaps speculate on possible reasons for Khrushchev’s behavior.
The American public was up in arms. Influential congressmen, in high oratorical form, urged the President not to go to Paris. Several pundits opined that Khrushchev’s volatility validated the thesis that summit conferences were generically hazardous. Go-to-Paris petitions and don’t-go-to-Paris petitions were intensively circulated. On Thursday, Eisenhower directed press secretary Hagerty “for godsake” to stop giving out daily reports on the ratio of telegrams pro-con to the White House (they were in fact running about 70–30 against Ike’s going to Paris). And when, at 7 P.M. on May 14, he stepped out of his limousine at Andrews to board Air Force One, the President pointedly ignored the microphones that had so hopefully been set up by newsmen against the possibility that he would finally break the stoic silence and say something about his reaction to Khrushchev’s atavistic blast. But then the President suddenly stopped at the top of his companionway, turned to the cameras, grinned his famous grin, and waved goodbye to the American people. Entering the aircraft, he headed straight for his private quarters.
“Bring me Secretary Herter and a bourbon,” he said to his aide.
“As you were. Bring me a bourbon and Secretary Herter.”
CHAPTER 26
Sunday morning he rested. In the afternoon he called on President de Gaulle, who was volubly displeased by the background noise to the summit but which noise, he announced, he proposed to ignore. Returning to the residence of the American ambassador where he was staying, the President had dinner with his son, went early to bed, and the next morning breakfasted with Macmillan who, thankfully, didn’t bring up the question of what might have motivated Khrushchev’s notorious outburst. Macmillan had in fact evolved a thesis: the Kremlin had decided it was fruitless to negotiate seriously with a lame-duck President. This was hardly a point he wished to make to the lame duck, so he indulged the prerogative of speaking with an accent so exaggeratedly British, and with so many ers and ahs, that he was not certain Eisenhower understood his oblique reference to “the American elections.”
The French press that Monday morning gave equal publicity to the awful tension that would shroud the cabinet room at the Élysée Palace when Eisenhower and Khrushchev encountered each other, and to the five-ton Soviet “spaceship” (with a dummy astronaut aboard) which had been launched, without previous publicity, the preceding day, one of those exquisitely subtle coincidences for which the Bolsheviks are renowned.
To the dismay of French protocol officials, Khrushchev sent word that he desired a one-hour postponement, from 10 A.M. to 11 A.M. The principals had been requested to arrive promptly, at three-minute intervals. They were telephoned to move the schedule back by one hour.
Khrushchev, accompanied by General Malinovsky, Foreign Minister Gromyko, and assorted aides and interpreters, arrived first. President de Gaulle greeted him and escorted the party up the large staircase to the ornate salon which had been a favorite dining room of Madame Pompadour and now was used for meetings of the French Cabinet. The small room was distinguished by four huge French windows, the pale green walls trimmed in beige silk, a crystal and gold chandelier dangling over the round conference table, covered with the traditional green felt cloth. Khrushchev was escorted to the far end. Prime Minister Macmillan was next to arrive, and was seated opposite Khrushchev. He murmured a greeting, but Khrushchev, remaining seated, ignored it.
President Eisenhower was then brought in. He went to his seat between Khrushchev and Macmillan. He and Khrushchev exchanged neither word nor glance. President de Gaulle sat down opposite Eisenhower, his back to the black marble fireplace with the ornate gold-leaf decorations on the mantelpiece.
As host, De Gaulle opened the meeting. He asked whether anyone had a statement to make.
Khrushchev snapped, “Yes.”
Eisenhower said he also would make a statement.
Macmillan said he would reserve the right to comment on the two statements after they were made.
De Gaulle then turned to Eisenhower, who as chief of state as well as chief of government outranked bot
h Khrushchev and Macmillan, and asked him to proceed—
At which point Khrushchev began talking.
Though the imagery was substantially subdued, it was a reiteration of his press performance in Moscow. While he spoke, Eisenhower made notes on his prepared statement. De Gaulle, with Premier Debré on one side and Foreign Minister Couve de Murville on the other, was impassive. Harold Macmillan, on the other hand, soon looked as though he were about to weep. Eisenhower’s face became red. Khrushchev finished his diatribe against U.S. aggression with two statements calculated especially to inflame Eisenhower. The first was that if Eisenhower did not apologize and the summit was aborted, the Soviet Union would regretfully conclude that this administration in Washington did not want peaceful coexistence, but perhaps the succeeding one would. “Therefore, we would think that there is no better way out than to postpone the conference of heads of government for approximately six to eight months.” Macmillan looked meaningfully at his Foreign Minister. And, finally, Khrushchev said that as to President Eisenhower’s projected visit to Moscow during the summer—an invitation agreed to at Camp David the preceding September—“unfortunately” the Soviet people could not receive Eisenhower “with the proper cordiality”; accordingly the visit should be “postponed.”
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