The Domino Conspiracy

by Joseph Heywood

“It’s closer to the Kremlin.”

  “How many more oversights will we have to deal with?” The man was peeved but in control of himself, and he had the leader of the Soviet Union on the defensive. Khrushchev was impressed. How did Petrov find such people?

  “This will be the last time.”

  “How can we be sure?”

  “Are you trying to bully the General Secretary of the party?”

  “I’m trying to bring some order to an old man’s sloppy thinking.” The words were out before he could stop them, but having said them he did not regret them.

  Khrushchev stared at him for a long time, then grinned and showed him the palms of his hands in a gesture of submission. “What’s your name?”

  “Ezdovo.”

  “You have the courage of your convictions, Comrade Ezdovo. I like that in my people.”

  “I have a job to do, no more, no less.”

  “Tomorrow I will dictate a complete list of locations. Will that satisfy you?”

  “It should have been done weeks ago.”

  Another rebuke. “Have you no sense of caution?” Khrushchev’s voice was up an octave and his face was red, but he was amused, not angry.

  “It is a sense of caution that motivates me. Caution on your behalf, comrade.”

  The General Secretary raised his hands above his head. “I surrender.”

  “I ask for trust, not surrender.”

  “They’re the same thing.”

  “Perhaps in the Politburo, but not elsewhere.”

  Khrushchev went over to the lone couch and sat down heavily. “Get us some coffee, lots of coffee. And some dark bread and hard butter. I need to chew on something and fill my belly.”

  That had been half an hour ago. Now Ezdovo was back with two Spetsnaz men who put trays draped with linen towels on the floor and departed. Unlike the General Secretary’s former guards, who avoided his gaze, the new men regularly made direct eye contact and kept it. These Spetsnaz fellows were clearly a different breed and a force to be considered in the future. Men like this could be enemies as easily as allies; in the future he would see to the welfare of Spetsnaz because one day they might prove to be valuable assets.

  Ezdovo lingered after the men departed. “Will you require anything more?”

  “Yes. Sit with me.” Khrushchev patted a cushion. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I simply want to talk, one comrade to another.” Ezdovo draped his coat over the couch and sat down on the floor. Khrushchev poured coffee, gave him a cup, stretched his short, thick legs out in front of him and kicked off his shoes. “You believe my thinking is sloppy?”

  “Only in personal security matters.”

  “Don’t retreat.”

  Ezdovo took a deep breath. “Pogrebenoi says that you jump around and that there is no continuity to your thoughts. You are like a frog among endless lily pads, never long on any one, always moving.”

  “But she seems to be able to follow me perfectly well.”

  “Most around you do not. They fear your power.”

  “My power is an illusion. To be with Stalin was to see real power and be petrified by real fear.” He sipped his drink. “But you are not afraid of me?”

  “No.” It was true, Ezdovo realized. Wary, yes; afraid, no.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t analyze my feelings. I’m not, that’s all.”

  “Do you understand what has taken my attention today?”

  “Bits and pieces. Cuba is under attack.”

  The General Secretary smiled. “You were outside my office.”

  “There is often more to be learned outside an office than in it.”

  “You’ve been eavesdropping on my advisers?”

  “My mission is your security. I take information where and when it’s available.”

  “Meaning?”

  “To your people I’m merely a guard. If I’m present, then that is what I must be. Prejudices can be turned to advantage. People see what they expect to see: a guard is like a piece of furniture.”

  Khrushchev was impressed. How many of his colleagues had such powers of logic? “Say that you had an enemy and that one day this enemy sent mercenaries to wipe you out. Your enemy has its own army and vast resources, yet it chooses to attack with a small force of intermediaries. How would you interpret that?”

  “As a wish to maintain anonymity. From the perspective of others it would appear as if we had simply suffered misfortune, an act of God, but this is no hypothetical situation. You’re talking about Cuba.”

  “Why would the American president choose a strategy that could fail? Cuba is in his backyard and Castro is a political amateur, a nothing.”

  “The Americans have always been sensitive about maintaining a particular image among other nations. They want Cuba to fall, but they don’t want to be accused of direct intervention. We acted the same way in Laos and in the Congo.”

  “But not when it was really important and close to the Motherland.” Khrushchev countered with the examples of Poland and Hungary. “It is their flaw,” he decided. “The American president must live in two worlds and justify every action in each. Eisenhower understood this. So did Roosevelt and Truman. There is always more meaning in actions than in words. Kennedy shows me weakness and I keep asking myself why? To govern, one must exercise power, sometimes subtly and other times forcefully, but always in view of the whole world. If one doesn’t exercise the necessary power when the need is obvious, there must be a reason. Why does Kennedy act as if he’s impotent? Nurturing an image is not an adequate explanation.”

  “I lack the information to make such a judgment.”

  “One never has all the information one desires,” the General Secretary said. “One takes what is available and extrapolates. Kennedy fears us. That’s the secret heart of the matter. If he has not taken direct action, it’s because he fears our intervention.”

  “Would we?”

  “Too difficult to supply and support,” the General Secretary said quickly, “but we could exert pressure elsewhere.” Berlin, he thought. “Castro is a nothing, a banana-republic opportunist. When he was in the mountains fighting Batista, the Americans supported him and made it possible for him to prevail. I’ll tell you something: Castro is not even a Communist.”

  Ezdovo did not understand. “Then what is he?”

  “See, you didn’t know! A socialist, yes; a Communist, no. The Americans never understood this and pushed him into our camp. Fidel is a revolutionary, which means he needs total control. Lenin was the same. Because the Americans helped Castro, they felt this entitled them to control and influence like their other Latin American puppets, but Fidel balked at such interference. We saw this and used it. We’re both socialists, I told him. I won’t accept interference, only assistance, he said. Now he calls himself a Communist and the Americans are frantic to be rid of him. Thus, an invasion was not unexpected. We saw it coming, though the timing was uncertain. The Cubans are hot-blooded, and Cuban capitalists even more so because Fidel swallowed their assets, just as we relieved the Czar of his. The Cubans are like the Albanians, forever imagining insults and swearing blood oaths of revenge. But unlike the Albanians, who live in isolation like Neanderthals in their caves, the Cuban expatriates have American power to support them. They created a small army—bakers, accountants, lawyers, gigolos. Not much of an army, but an army nevertheless.”

  “And now that army has attacked.”

  “Yes, but virtually alone, not with direct American involvement. That’s what makes no sense to me. If Cuba is a true threat to American security, then why not remove it permanently? Castro wanted missiles but I put him off. Without missiles what threat can the Cubans be? Would Fidel invade Florida in his fishing boats? No. Yet the Americans sponsor a veiled invasion.”

  “Which seems to have failed.”

  “Which might fail. We don’t have all the facts, but it appears that actions could have been taken to give the invasion force an increased chance of succ
ess.”

  “Such as?”

  “Air support. It seems that there were only two attacks beforehand, and only with ancient aircraft. Fidel’s few jets survived. Kennedy could have stationed one of his carriers off the island and created absolute air cover. This young president neglects to understand that any action or failure to act can create more than one image. He worries about his image among nonaligned nations, not how we might view his failure. He has miscalculated.”

  “If the Americans have not been directly involved, then the failure is not theirs.”

  “I see it as their failure.” Suddenly Khrushchev rose and crossed the room to a window that looked out on the city’s few lights.

  “Get away from the window,” Ezdovo told him. “There are no curtains and your silhouette makes a good target; even a nearsighted sniper would have no trouble picking you off.”

  The General Secretary’s eyes were hard. “At this moment I can clearly see Kennedy,” he said. What he saw was a man trying to look like a leader rather than leading, and it was a critical difference. “He thinks his image is intact,” Khrushchev said, “but I see him for what he is.”

  “Get away from the window,” Ezdovo repeated.

  “Where’s Pogrebenoi?” the General Secretary asked as he stepped back.

  “Working.”

  “What’s your relation to her? Second in command?”

  “Something like that,” Ezdovo said. “I’m her husband.”

  115THURSDAY, APRIL 20, 1961, 8:45 A.M.The Lido, Venice

  Sultana Fregosi was thirty-six, had never married, and held two degrees in anthropology from the University of Padua. Her grandfather owned a tailor shop, the smallest of many business holdings in Venice, real estate in Genoa and Milan, and a villa at the base of Mt. Vesuvius near Naples, where he now lived under round-the-clock nursing care, with four sons counting his every breath in the hope that the end would come soon, and their inheritances immediately thereafter. Sultana had tried anthropology, but her skin reacted to the sun and she hated teaching; in front of a crowd her legs turned to jelly and her voice fled. She had tried other jobs but abandoned them all for one reason or another, and in the end her grandfather had given her responsibility for the tailor shop. She had surprised him and her father and uncles by doubling sales and tripling profits in less then four years. Eventually the shopkeepers on the Lido had accepted her as one of them, though she was aloof, while her grandfather held her up to his sycophantic sons and brothers as an example of what he expected from his kin.

  Adolf Van Geer was only her second lover. The first had been when she was seventeen; he had been fifty and virile. The relationship had lasted only six weeks and the sex had not awakened her libido; it was pleasant enough, but she laughed when she thought how ludicrous the act itself must look; it was difficult to understand why people made such a fuss over such an insignificant matter. It had been nearly twenty years since “all that,” as she now thought of it, but Van Geer stirred something anew in her and she had given in to it without much analysis or anguish.

  During her second night with Van Geer she told him how the men on the Lido called her the Virgin. Many had made a play for her, but they had given up, some sooner than others, all of them eventually concluding that she was unconquerable. She had slept with Van Geer for the past three nights; tonight she took him to a large stucco house with twenty rooms that was connected to her shop by an underground tunnel.

  “You should move in with me. When business is slow, I can pop over. Besides, it will save money.” Above all else, Sultana Fregosi believed in frugality. Frash agreed; in the hotel there was always a chance that he might run into somebody he didn’t want to see.

  The hotel’s cashier held court over a narrow gray marble counter. He was a young man in a well-cut double-breasted suit and slicked-back hair that looked as if he had just stepped out of a shower. “Was everything satisfactory?” His voice suggested that it would be impossible for Frash not to have been satisfied; here nothing less than complete satisfaction was allowed.

  “How much?” Frash asked.

  The cashier passed the bill to him on a small silver plate. Frash paid in cash.

  “You’re leaving Italy?” the man inquired.

  “No—” He didn’t finish the sentence. Ali cursed Albert’s stupidity. Tell him nothing.

  “May I see your passport?” the clerk asked.

  Frash stiffened. What the hell was going on? He smiled and began patting his pockets. “I must have left it in my briefcase.”

  The cashier smiled. “I’ll wait.” This new rule was unnecessary because it disturbed the guests, but the directive had come from the general manager, and a rule was a rule. The passport numbers of all guests were to be recorded and forwarded to the police. He guessed that they were searching for someone, but why at the Excelsior? This was not a place where undesirables congregated. The Excelsior had three stars and was a special place for only the best people. It was an insult to irritate guests with this sort of nonsense. Tawdry and regrettable, to be sure, but it was required.

  It’s nothing, Frash told himself. He could try to wheedle his way out, but he saw that the young cashier was the sort of dutiful employee who did what he was told. Ali wondered if the man would scream just before his neck snapped; Albert overrode the impulse. No scene, it’s nothing. This is routine; besides, the passports are untraceable. Frash pulled the document from an inside pocket and slapped it on the marble counter. “Must have missed it.”

  The cashier bowed, slid the passport off the marble top, disappeared through blue curtains, and was back in less than five minutes. When the document was returned to him Frash stuffed it in his pocket and walked downstairs.

  The cashier went to the window that faced the street and saw the man walking with a woman pushing a bicycle; she glanced backward as they walked. For a moment he thought it was the Fregosi woman, but how could this be? She was a confirmed man hater. Impossible, he concluded; your eyes played a trick on you.

  116THURSDAY, APRIL 20, 1961, 11:50 P.M.Alexandria, Virginia

  Earlier in the evening Arizona had spent two uncomfortable hours with Allen Dulles. A cable had arrived from the Brits and he was anxious to follow up on it, but when Dulles marched into your office you were there for as long as he wanted. The CIA director was tall and distinguished-looking, with pink skin and rimless spectacles that barely covered his eyes; he had a receding hairline with short white hair on the sides brushed neatly back like wings, a neatly trimmed white mustache, a prominent chin and a Scottish briar pipe that hung straight down from the corner of his mouth. A flap of skin hung over his Adam’s apple and showed his age. His customary dark suit and polished black shoes created a funereal impression.

  “I offered the president my resignation,” Dulles said matter-of-factly.

  “His reaction?”

  “None, which is tantamount to acceptance.” Arizona offered no commiseration. These things happened, and Dulles understood it better than any of them. “Dick Bissell will have to go too. Ultimately this was his show. The fundamental plan was sound, but the president wouldn’t authorize the necessary air support, and that doomed us. Nevertheless we made enough errors of our own, and for this our critics will exact a price. Our information about the level of opposition among the natives was wrong; they were not ready to revolt. The people may loathe Castro and his regime, but not enough to risk their lives. In any event we failed to alert rebel leaders of the invasion times, so there was no possibility of a coordinated uprising even if they were so inclined. Too many serious errors in analysis and execution. Our Cubans fought beyond expectations, but the landing sites were poorly chosen and we gave them no escape option.”

  “By design,” Arizona reminded him. “There’s no better motivation for going forward than the sea at your back.” Normandy was the classic example.

  “I understand the reasoning, but I reject the philosophy; it grew out of prejudice, not strategy. We feared that the Cubans woul
d be less brave than white boys.”

  “The Cubans are amateurs.”

  “We defeated the Nazis and the Japs with amateurs,” Dulles reminded him. “Congress and the press will have a heyday with the Bay of Pigs. I expect lots of investigators to use this sad event as a way to probe into our organizational marrow. There are a lot of people who can’t or won’t understand the nature of clandestine conflict; they argue that covert operations violate the spirit of the Constitution.”

  What Dulles was saying was true. Arizona tugged a drooping sock up his leg. When Dulles wanted a reaction, he would look at him. The director believed in orderly, sequential communications, not sloppy give-and-take.

  “The timing of the invasion is being questioned by the president’s brother,” Dulles said. “There is something both honorable and frightening about that man. ‘Why now?’ he asked me. ‘Couldn’t we have waited?’”

  Arizona cringed inwardly. The answer was because REBUS had led them to believe that MiGs would soon be deployed, information that could not be reverified now that Frash had disappeared and Lumbas was dead.

  Allen Dulles rubbed the back of his neck, exhaled a smoke ring and looked for the first time in Arizona’s direction.

  “Bobby Kennedy is a zealot,” Arizona said.

  “Worse,” Dulles responded. “I suspect he has his own political agenda.” The director set his pipe on the desk. “What about the asset who provided the information on the Cuban pilots? REBUS?”

  “I don’t understand.” Arizona’s stomach was tightening.

  “The timing of the operation was based on your asset’s information.”

  “It was and is accurate. Cuban pilots will rotate from Czechoslovakia in early June. The Russians are giving them MiG 17s.” Dulles knew nothing about Frash or the identity of his Russian asset, and Arizona wanted desperately to move the discussion off this subject.

  “The information needs reverification,” Dulles said. “Bobby Kennedy is saying that there was not enough time to examine the invasion plan; he alleges that we pressed the administration. That timing could become a focal point of the failure, which means that you could have a problem.”