Shadow of the Condor

by Grady, James

  The organizational chart of the U.S. intelligence community shows a maze of crossing communication and control lines, with management and liaison committees scattered in what the official bureaucratic cartographer and chief planner claim is a representative picture of orderly decision-making process. Since the orderly decision-making process is usually an unadmitted operating myth, any validity the chart has is purely coincidental.

  On the subcommittee level alone, there are fifteen interagency groups whose job it is to coordinate the intelligence and security "product." On top of these small subcommittees sit eight important coordinating groups. Black lines on the organization chart connect all these groups to the various members of the intelligence community. All the black lines eventually lead to the President. A small box in the chart's upper left-hand corner encloses Congress. No black lines connect Congress to anything. The chart shows no place for the judiciary.

  The most visible and prominent of the coordinating groups is the National Security Council, a group whose composition varies with each change of Presidential administration. The NSC always includes the President and Vice President, and usually includes most of the major Cabinet members. The NSC is the legislated overseer of, and policymaker for, the intelligence community.

  But probably the most important group in the American intelligence community is the Forty Committee. Secret Order 54/12 created the Forty Committee early in the Eisenhower years. Its existence was virtually unknown to the outside world until reporters David Wise and Thomas Ross exposed it in their landmark book on the American intelligence community, The Invisible Government. Largely because of' that exposure, this committee, which was then known as the 54/12 Group, underwent a series of identity changes and at various times has been called the Special Group and the 303 Committee.

  The Forty Committee is very small. Its composition also varies with each administration, but its duties remain basically the same. It is to the Forty Committee that agencies go for approval of their operations and plans, and it is the Forty Committee which is the major guiding hand for the intelligence community. The Forty Committee was originally created to help keep the mushrooming community under control. The degree to which the committee succeeds at that task is largely influenced by the President. It is the President who ultimately decides who will serve on the Forty Committee and how they will serve.

  In the Kennedy and Johnson administrations the key man on the Forty Committee was George Bundy. The other members were McCone, McNamara, Roswell Gilpatric and U. Alexis Johnson. in the Nixon and Ford years by far the most important man in American intelligence was Henry Kissinger. Kissinger chaired the Forty Committee. Among others who served with Kissinger on Forty were CIA Director William Colby, Deputy Secretary of State Robert S. Ingersoll, Deputy Secretary of Defense William P. Clements, Jr., and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General George S. Brown.

  The Forty Committee most recently came into national prominence when the cover blew off its approval of massive CIA covert activities against Chile's Marxist government, measures which contributed greatly to the 1973 coup which left Chilean President Allende dead and a tough military junta in power. The Forty Committee's major task, however, that of coordinating and governing the intelligence community, is still not understood by the majority of the American public.

  The overseeing functions of the Forty Committee are a massive problem. To a large degree the committee must rely on the work of the other liaison committees and on the members of the community themselves. Its problem is a classic government dilemma: The overseers must depend on those they oversee for much of the information necessary for regulation. The Forty Committee usually acts as a ratifier of policy "suggestions" sent to it by those it supervises. It is like the farmer depending on the fox to help him guard the chickens.

  The Forty Committee can also initiate policy. It must act through a system composed of jealously guarded bureaucratic empires. Even on those rare occasions when all the members of the community are working together, the fragmented authority of the agencies is a major obstacle. For example, if an American scientist spies on this country while employed by NASA then defects to Russia and continues his spying based out of France, which American agency is responsible for his neutralization? The FBI, since he began his activities under its jurisdiction, or the CIA, since he shifted to activities under its purview? In an area where petty bureaucratic rivalries escalate into open confrontations obscuring the original mission, such questions take on major import.

  Shortly after it was formed, the Forty Committee tried to solve the problems of internal information and fragmented authority. Forty established a small special security section, a section with no identity save for that of the staff of the Forty Committee. The special section officially maintains an "informal" existence. The section is not shown on any organizational chart. The original Forty hoped this, "informer” status would keep the special staff group free of Parkinson's inexorable bureaucratic laws. Their successors on Forty still cling to that hope, although time and events have greatly eroded their optimistic base.

  The special section's duties include liaison work, and the director of the special section serves on a liaison board composed of leading staff members from all intelligence agencies. The liaison board is usually referred to as Staff Liaison Board. The director has the power to arbitrate jurisdictional disputes, although his decisions are subject to review by the Forty Committee and the DCL The special section also has the responsibility of independently evaluating all the information given to the Forty Committee by the intelligence community. But most important, the special section is given the power to perform "such necessary security function as extraordinary circumstances might dictate, subject to Group [the Forty Committee] regulation.

  To help the special section perform its duties, the Forty Committee assigned a small staff to the section chief and allows him to draw on other major security and intelligence groups for further personnel and authority.

  Forty knows it has created a potential problem. The special section could follow the natural tendency of most government organizations and grow in size and awkwardness, thereby becoming a part of the problem it was created to solve. The special section, small though it is, has tremendous power as well as tremendous potential. A small mistake by the section could be a problem of great magnitude. Forty supervises its creation cautiously. Forty keeps a firm check on any bureaucratic growth potentials in the section, carefully reviews its activities, keeps the operational work of the section at a bare minimum and places only extraordinary men in charge of the section.

  The American intelligence community underwent a reorganization in the early days of the Nixon Administration, with the CIA's divisions being renamed and reshuffled. Basically everything remained the same. One of the changes, a change fought by the staff director of the Forty Committee, was that the special staff received a name: Liaison Group, often abbreviated as L or L Group. The staff director, who relished the many benefits of being a minister with an ambiguous portfolio, lost his struggle with the bullheaded and powerful White House aide who told him, "I can't get a handle on you people if you don't have a name."

  The Liaison Group director decided not to try to revert to the old days of anonymity after the White House aide vacated his seat of power. Us "quasi-formal" status did not greatly hinder the director. The reversion might also call too much attention to L Group and was not worth the trouble.

  The old man whom General Roth visited that morning directs L Group.

  Kevin Powell sat in the same chair the general had occupied four hours earlier. Kevin didn't share the general's paranoia. He looked forward to visiting the old man again. Kevin thought he liked the old man, as much as you could like anybody in the business. To really like someone, to feel unequivocal affection, you have to trust the other person, to think that the person you perceive is the person who really exists, not a deliberately -adopted character. 146, matter how much Kevin’s emotions told him that the kin
dly old man was his friend, was trustworthy, was basically what he seemed, Kevin's mind told him to be careful. But Kevin thought he liked the old man.

  Kevin knew he didn't like Carl. He also knew it was foolish to trust Carl outside of the limits the old man established. Carl's pervasive asexuality caused much of Kevin's antipathy, but Carl's asexuality was only a symptom of even more disgusting attributes Kevin couldn’t label. There was just something innately repulsive about Carl. Kevin was glad when the secretary closed the door after admitting him to the old man's presence.

  "Kevin, so good of you to come." The old man rose and shook Kevin’s hand.

  "I'm glad to be here, sir."

  "Sit down, Kevin, sit down'."

  The two men exchanged pleasantries for several minutes before the old man inquired, "And what do you have lined up for the near future, Kevin my boy?"

  Kevin smiled. The old man knew that Kevin was between assignments, but Kevin allowed him the opening. "Oh, nothing much, sir."

  "Would you mind helping me out with a little project?"

  As if I have any choice, thought Kevin, even though it probably would be interesting to work for the old man again. He said, "No, sir, not at all. What do we do?"

  The old man smiled. "Do you know General Arnold Roth?"

  “No sir” replied Kevin, “although the name rings a bell.”

  "General Arnold Roth is a large pain in the Air Forces ass," explained the old man. "As you know, Air Force

  Intelligence is massive. With its National Reconnaissance Office, Air Force Intelligence is the largest intelligence agency we have. But most of its efforts and manpower are devoted to aerial and technical intelligence. Computer and camera spying, I like to call it. Compared to the CIA, AF1 has few actual intelligence operatives in the field. They rightly don't consider classic espionage part of their primary function. About half of the field agents they do have are commanded by General Roth.

  "The general has a very influential Congressman for a brother-in-law. The general thinks he commands a crack intelligence team, and so does his brother-in-law. Rather than offend a vote on the House Ways and Means Committee, the Air Force lets General Roth play spy master, within limits, of course.

  "Most of the general's men are bunglers, romantics looking for Mata Hari. They flit through Europe and Central Asia, hanging out in bars, monitoring meetings, running minor security errands, making innocuous contacts. The agency keeps tabs on them to make sure they don't get in over their heads. The general thinks he's another Gehlen, the Congressman is pleased, the funds keep coming in, and everybody's happy.

  "Every once in a while one of the general's men stumbles into something too big for him to handle, too-big for the general's Air Force amateurs. Usually the general's superiors let the agency take over right away, but every now and then something snafus and there is one hell of a mess. One of his men got blown in France in 1965 while trying to destroy the French Communist Party singlehandedly. It took a quarter of a million to buy him out, and his stupid plot wrecked a promising network. Three years later one of the general's men got blown while under arrest for murdering a native over a girl in Iran. That matter still hasn't been completely cleared up. There have been other cases, most of them less spectacular. Now we have a doozy.

  "About two days ago one of his better agents--one whom your agency had thought of pirating, by the way turned up dead in Montana after disappearing in Europe two weeks earlier. The agent, one Donald Parkins, was stationed out of London, where he was last heard from when he filed a rather strange report. We have no idea how or why he ended up where he did. The details, what we know of them, are in that first file folder in the pile on my desk. You can get them later if you decide you want to work on it."

  "I don't need time to think about my decision, sir. I'm very interested. Very interested."

  "I thought you would be," the old man said gleefully. "I thought you would be! There is a good deal to do, and we have to move as quickly as possible before this thing gets cold. You have a lot to study before I set you loose, but first you have a trip to make, a very important trip. To Cincinnati."

  "Cincinnati? Why?"

  The old man smiled and leaned back in his chair. It had taken him ten minutes to find an adequate metaphor. The old man liked to play with words. Weaving concepts through words made thinking so much more interesting. He cocked his head as he spoke to Kevin. "You’re going to Cincinnati for something special, something very special: a little fledgling we are going to turn into a fine hunting bird. It's time our Condor left his roost."

  2

  Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversation in it, 'and what is the use of a book/ thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversation?'

  Ronald Malcolm sighed as he pushed the broom halfway under the bed. He knew he should move the bed away from the wall to do a thorough cleaning job, but he salved his conscience with a minimal amount of sweeping. The sunlight filtering through, the venetian blinds highlighted tiny flying dust particles disturbed by Malcolm's cleaning efforts. The flecks spun wildly through the air with the first shock waves of motion, then floated aimlessly away, disappearing until the next cleaning session. Malcolm inhaled deeply. The faint smell of pollen mingled with the musky pungent odor of household dirt. He wondered briefly if the allergy shots would work this year.

  Malcolm propped the broom against his bedroom wall and shuffled into the living room. A cup of almost cool coffee sat on the coffee table. Malcolm slouched on the couch next to the table, put his tennis-shoe-clad feet on the artificial wood surface and let his eyes roam around the room for the hundredth plus time that day.

  It was a fairly large living room for a living room in a modern apartment complex." The couch and two end tables didn't take up all the space along the wall. The door and short hallway were to Malcolm's immediate right. On the wall to his left were tables supporting his stereo, his records and the broken television set. The set died three months before, freeing Malcolm from the hated, addicting presence of the uncontrolled world in his living room. Bookshelves covered the wall opposite Malcolm. Most of the shelves were filled. The books included a spattering of philosophy, some elementary psychology textbooks, several historical volumes, a shelf of biography, two shelves of classical literature and an almost unused accounting book he had been unable to return to the bookstore after he dropped out of the business class on the second day. A Picasso pen-and-ink print hung from the middle of the bookshelves. Behind the print were copies of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, Ed McBain's Hail to the Chief: An 87th Precinct Mystery, Rex Stout’s The Silent Speaker and Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, all garnered with nervous guilt from a secondhand paperback bookstore. The teapot in the small kitchen ("complete with serving bar") to Malcolm's right whistled as the water boiled. No sound came from Malcolm's small bedroom behind the wall with the bookshelves or from the bathroom behind the wall with the kitchen stove. Even the shower's normally incessant drip was still that morning.

  The teakettle whistled for almost a minute before Malcolm swung his legs to the floor and slowly walked to the kitchen with his coffee cup. He threw the tepid liquid from his cup into the sink before he turned the burner off. When he carefully tried to level the teaspoon of instant coffee with his finger, he accidentally jiggled the spoon, spilling brown particles to the sticky counter.

  "Fuck it," he said, plunging the spoon back into the jar. He shook the spoon until it held what looked like a level teaspoon of grounds, dumped the coffee into his cup and poured the bubbling water.

  On his way back to the couch Malcolm stopped at the stereo table long enough to raise the discs on the spindle and turn the unit on. He watched the first black circle plop to the slowly rotating turntable. The stylus jerked from its resting point like a Queen's guard snapping to attention, then moved stiffly to its appoi
nted position before lowering to its objective. A couple of scratches, then strains from Carmen came through the speakers. Malcolm listened to a few notes before he unconsciously shook his head and hit the reject lever. The machine -repeated its process, but this time the worn, familiar sounds of an undergraduate college days Righteous Brothers album came through the speaker. Malcolm returned to the couch.

  The fifth cup this morning, he thought. I'll kill my kidneys. Why not, he answered himself, what else do I have to do? There are no more classes to cut, assignments to delay or conferences to miss this morning. Maybe the speedy sensation the caffeine is building will help me make my executive decision of the day: What shall it be, a walk in the park, an afternoon spent ogling young quasi-innocent coeds whose hips have barely spread for childbearing or an exciting trip to the neighborhood rip-off grocery store? Decisions, decisions, decisions. He smiled as he raised the cup to his lips.

  Malcolm looked at the print. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, black-ink figures on white paper. In the, background stood a black-ink windmill, minuscule in perspective compared to the two figures. Malcolm shook his head. A few simple ink lines on plain paper and complex characters lived. Complexity in a black-and-white world.

  The picture was the only tangible memory Malcolm kept (besides his clothes, a few books, records and some furniture) of his tour as a CIA "agent." Actually, Malcolm had never been a CIA agent, even though, like all CIA employees, he had a code name: Condor. Malcolm had been a researcher, a mundane, nine-to-five, two-week paid vacation researcher for Section 9, Department 17, of the CIA's Intelligence Division. The Picasso print had hung on Malcolm's office wall.

  Until the previous year Section 9 had been an almost forgotten offshoot of the CIA's massive research team, a small group which spent its time "analyzing nonfactual data," i.e., reading spy thrillers and murder mysteries, for any items of use to the agency. The section operated out of a lovely white stucco town house on Southeast A Street in Washington, D.C., just behind, the Library of Congress, working under the innocuous pseudonym of the American Literary Historical Society. No one in the agency cared about the society, no one cared about Malcolm. No one paid much attention to the society until the section's bookkeeper accidentally uncovered traces of a private smuggling operation which had used the society as a cover. The bookkeeper, in his zeal to protect himself and explain the strange things he had found, made the mistake of reporting his discovery. The report got into the hands of the smugglers, several of whom worked in America's intelligence community. Malcolm came back from-lunch one day and found his co-workers murdered.