2

ON TUESDAY, APRIL 18, 1961, THE SECOND DAY OF THE BAY OF PIGS, ROBERT Maheu had seen fit to inform the FBI that the arrest of the wiretapper Balletti in Las Vegas last October 31 had indeed involved the CIA, and that he, Maheu, had been told by Boardman Hubbard to refer all FBI inquiries on this matter to him.

Well, of course, my father had promised Maheu that if all went wrong, there would be rescue. Obviously, Maheu had decided—“prematurely,” remarked my father—that it had gone wrong. Now the FBI wanted to talk to Cal Hubbard.

My father knew what was to be done. He would inform the Bureau by letter that the CIA would object to Maheu’s prosecution since that was bound to reveal sensitive information regarding the invasion of Cuba. It was also decided that such a letter would be even more effective if Boardman Hubbard was not available for interviews. “Overnight,” Allen Dulles said, “I grew too old to protect you.”

Telling it to me, my father said, “I didn’t reply, ‘I’m the one who’s there to protect you,’ but what the hell, it was exactly what I was doing.”

It was agreed that Cal would take up a post in the Far East once more. “Japan,” said Cal when asked what he wanted, and added to me, “I’ll pry Mary loose from that little Jap she’s looking to marry. Banzai!”

So, changes commenced. I, who did not know at that moment whether I wished to go back to Miami, stay in Washington, or become assigned to a far-off station, inherited my father’s apartment, and, in acknowledgment, I expect, of Cal’s present services to the Director, I was assigned to Mr. Dulles’ office as one of his assistants. I would help to oversee the move from the I-J-K-L to the new mega-complex in Langley now being completed fifteen miles out on the Virginia side.

It was nepotism. I only objected within, and then by half. If I knew that I could never respect my own career until I brought off something impressive for the Agency on my own, free of father and godfather, I was ready all the same to remain in Washington. I wanted to see Kittredge. I had the hope she would not continue to keep herself apart.

My job took me through the late spring, summer, and fall. Alan Shepard, our answer to Yuri Gagarin, became the first American in space, and on that same date, May 25, a number of Freedom Riders in Mississippi were attacked, beaten, and arrested. On June 4, Kennedy and Khrushchev had a summit meeting in Vienna, and there were other rumors that Khrushchev had been derisive about the Bay of Pigs. By late in July, sharp increases in military spending were being called for in Congress.

I cannot begin to describe how separated I felt from these events. I list them in the order they occurred; it offers the character of my reaction. Events went by like signposts. I was discovering that one’s wounds need not be visible nor personal, and I was mending from the Bay of Pigs. I was not too unhappy to be busy with the endlessly detailed but essentially modest scenario of moving Mr. Dulles’ office over from Foggy Bottom to Langley. The hot working days went by in a Company car. The Virginia forest was burgeoning by the Potomac, and the shade trees of a Southern summer offered their presence.

One approached the citadel of Langley by taking a turn off the highway at a small sign saying no more than BPR (for Bureau of Public Roads), and the approach drive was on a narrow two-lane that went a half mile to the guardhouse, which gave no more than a glimpse of a red-and-white-checked water tower. Beyond was Leviathan itself. To me, it looked not unlike a huge, maladroitly designed passenger liner. Langley was, if encountered less metaphorically, merely a mammoth building seven stories high with a continuous band of windows running all the way around the second floor and the seventh floor; this may have given the illusion of upper- and lower-class decks. Fields and trees and immense swatches of asphalt parking space surrounded the area; we were on 125 acres; we had cost $46 million. It was whispered—for the architect was never allowed to know exactly—that more than 10,000 people were going to be using it before long. Sometimes, when my car would be trapped on the George Washington Memorial Parkway behind an endless file of green shuttle buses carrying people from the I-J-K-L to Langley, I would swear that total was too small. The Mausoleum, for that also became its name, was in fulfillment of Allen Dulles’ dream that all of the CIA might operate someday in one edifice, to the vastly improved efficiency of us all—it was a common criticism that Allen Dulles was a remarkably inefficient man. He was, at the least, possessed by too many ideas and liked to pursue them all, as was visible to anyone who encountered the clutter on his desk; such men dream of efficiency.

We were given it. There were those who said that from inside, the Mausoleum looked like a set of corporate halls and offices, forever debouching into more halls. There were intimate lobbies and wings that reminded one of a bank, or of a hospital. We had a great white marble lobby by the entrance with our seal embedded in the floor, and on the wall to the right was a bas-relief in profile of Allen Dulles, and a wall of stars on the other side honored all those who had died for us in the line of duty. High on the wall was an inscription from the Gospel According to John, eighth chapter, second verse: “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” The truth, I told myself on one of the worst moments of the summer, was that in order to be free, we had put up a building that made you feel as if you were working in a fascist state. Immediately, I regretted the extreme metaphor of such a remark, but there was enough unhappy evidence to keep the thought lurking. Once the monumental task of bringing over our records, division by division, branch by branch, Desk by Desk, was accomplished, it was no longer feasible to get around in the place. You had to muster different badges to get by different guards. On the first floor, where the corridors were wide, the Agency housed its service functions—infirmary, travel office, credit union, the cafeterias for different ranks, and the vaults for records management; we had another wide corridor for all the clubs in CIA—photo club, art club, hiking club, chess club; we had shops; we were a foretoken of all the small-town shopping centers that were yet to come with their closed-in, all-weather malls.

Upstairs, our corridors went on forever, and as we moved into offices through summer and fall, problems arose with air-conditioning. If one of the unspoken reasons for leaving the I-J-K-L was the smell of drains in the Washington lowlands, now, unhappily, despite advanced designs carefully installed, the offices still stank. Our thermostats did not work, and we perspired. That is, the thermostats did work, but since the heat was now adjustable for every room, people were always turning the temperature up and down until the system overloaded. Administration then turned off the individual thermostats and we were air-conditioned as a gross whole, which in practice meant that some offices became too hot and some too cold. Before long, many of the younger officers, retaining the skills acquired in Locks and Picks, found ways to take the little padlocks off the levers. After all, we were people with a taste for manipulation and control. So we put our heat levels back on individual choice, and the system as a whole broke down again. The contractor was finally sued for faulty installation, but the case went nowhere; the Agency was not ready to supply the data necessary to make its brief for fear of revealing collateral matters.

Before long, we had rising waves of security procedure, and some rose to high tide and never went down again. In every corridor were armed guards. At night, it was impressive to see them stalking the halls. For years there were none of us who did not lock every last piece of paper in our safes, and put whatever needless notes were left into the paper-shredder, but if one was in a hurry to get out after work, we deposited trash and empty milk cartons in our private safe to be disposed of in the morning. Reprimands for leaving any kind of paper behind were too serious.

I do not know what else it accomplished, but it gave gravity to our labors. Each piece of paper that one handled took on a density more palpable than ordinary paper until sometimes in the outside world, reading a magazine or merely handling a piece of stationery for an ordinary letter, one would be struck with its ineffable lightness, and so much so that years later on reading Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, I thought immediately of the difference between papers that were secret and full of their own weight, and the lightness of free paper that you could throw away without any concern larger than that you might not be totally tidy. Certainly there were enough official notices to dispose of. Each day, through all those months of July, August, September, and October of 1961, bulletins came into every office to describe progress on the new building.

One hot day in August, an all-office memo on particularly stiff beige bond paper was distributed to every cubicle at Langley:

NEW BUILDING, TOILET FACILITIES

While adequate for the transition period, toilet arrangements, after full personnel-investment of the New Building is completed, may prove inadequate. To anticipate the contingency that distressed individuals could form up in long lavatory queues, a time-consuming and stressful procedure, this directive is now issued to sanction personnel afflicted by inadequate queue lead-time to exercise free and fair use of the shrubbery contiguous to the circumference of the main building.

WARNING

Despite the concerted efforts of Agency gardeners, said shrubbery has not yet been wholly checked-out for poisons oak, sumac, and ivy, which flora have been known to initiate exacerbated tinglings in mucous-bearing enclaves. A picture is therefore attached to this bulletin of the most prevalent of these plants, the Rhus vernix, commonly termed poison sumac, a.k.a. poison dogwood. Full view and profile appended should accelerate process of recognition thereby avoiding itchy implosions of said mucous target zones which, once aroused, can prove counterproductive to those research projects requiring sedentary work postures for sustained periods.

Old Rice and Beans Cabell, soon to leave the Agency, may have been giving vent to the hurricane of foul spirits left in him by recollections of Quarters Eye, for he pushed Security to find the authors of the prank.

Our culprits turned out to be two Junior Officers in Training, former members of the Harvard Lampoon, who had joined the Agency together, trained together at the Farm, and were now to be discharged side by side.

On the top and seventh floor, Mr. Dulles’ office had become as deluxe as government standards would permit. It was paneled in walnut, thickly carpeted, and the nonstop sequence of picture-glass windows gave us a vista of the hills rolling out from our CIA estate. Mists rose from the Potomac. Early in the morning one could watch that mist come in off the river.

Mr. Dulles’ secretary, a formidably dear old lady, instituted a tradition of feeding the birds who visited the seventh-floor patio. Before long, the three baboons guarding the Director’s office were assigned by her to clean out the feeders each morning. Other daily rituals commenced. The Director, who had worked for years to raise Langley, seemed to know, as we installed the last details of his office, that he would not inhabit his seat for long.

I suspect he was not all that happy with the realization of his dream. He did not really move over from E Street until his new office was wholly completed, and even then, by the end of summer it was evident that he would invest his new quarters in not much more than ceremonial fashion.

Occasionally I would be invited to ride along in his limousine and he would speak cordially of my father, and express his pleasure that Cal and Mary were together again, a piece of news I had barely received myself in a postcard, but for the most part, the Director was like a man in mourning. If he could rise sufficiently to be cheerful for a minute or two, he rode for the most part in a silence close to stupor.

On September 28th, he accompanied John McCone to the Naval War College at Newport, and there President Kennedy announced at the graduation ceremony that Mr. McCone would be the new Director of the Agency. Howard Hunt, who had been working busily in Mr. Dulles’ old E Street office on the official history of the Bay of Pigs, happened—lucky Howard!—to be along with Mr. Dulles on the drive back to Boston after the ceremonies at Newport. It came as no surprise to me that they traveled without conversation, Mr. Dulles’ gouty foot up on a stool and pillow. Finally the Director did remark, “I am tired of living sub cauda,” upon which he fixed Hunt with a look, and added, “Hunt, you are the Latinist. How would you translate sub cauda?” “Well, sir,” said Hunt, “not to be rude, but I believe it means more than its literal translation. I should say a good English substitute might be ‘under the cat’s tail.’” “Yes, excellent,” said Dulles, “but it’s the cat’s bum, you know, that I’m referring to,” and then, as if he were all alone in the car, he said to no one in particular, not to Hunt, the chauffeur, nor even to himself, but to the gods, I would wager, of admissions waiting on the next stage, “The President said to me in private that if he had been the leader of a European power, he would have had to resign, but in America, since he can’t do that, it must be me. That’s all very well, but don’t you think Robert Kennedy might have been asked to step down as well?”

Toward the end of October, shortly before John McCone was installed as the new Director, Mr. Dulles did make the full move to Langley and hobbled around like a wounded buffalo for a couple of weeks. I had a feeling that he hated the place, and wrote a letter to my father in which I said as much. Cal responded in surprisingly strong language.

Oct. 10, ’61

Yes, son, I took the tour of Langley before I left and couldn’t agree with you more. I sometimes wonder if, under it all, Allen has no comprehension of how important is architecture for making the man. I fear for us at Langley. The I-J-K-L was certainly dreadful, but one could get fond of all those falling-down shacks and barracks. Allen lost sight of the prime point—charm has to be preserved. I-J-K-L may have been full of old pull-chains and quirky corridors and hideouts and secret closets from which you could exit into an adjacent hall, but that creaking old mess was, at least, ours. Langley is going to be memos and meetings. Technical collection is going to get more and more of the budget, and working with good agents will become a lost craft. Farewell to chamber music. Hello, Muzak!

How could Allen have done this to us? The poor man knows so much and finally didn’t know better.

Now we have McCone. Bechtel, Inc. A compact man. Short. Light hair. Blue eyes that you will find to be as cold as ice. He wears steel-rimmed eyeglasses. I would suspect his heavier product does not come out in turds, but slices.

It had been a reasonable letter until now, but I had learned that when my father made references to excrement, we were going to move from urbanity to maniacality.

As you gathered from my postcard, Mary and I are together again. It’s not love, I suppose, so much as the deep inroads of habit. After twenty-five years, giving up a wife is as bad as cutting out drink and cigarettes. In fact, it can hardly be done. I’m very fond of the girl, as you know—she’s my big white whale. I went back to Japan to push that little Japanese businessman right out of her life, but do you know, it’s horrendous, she won’t admit it, although I can divine as much, but there was some kind of unholy letch between them. It becomes obsessive for me on occasion, that damned little Japanese bugger all over her front and back with his kamikaze war cries, the little son of a bitch. I get hateful to Mary when I think of it.

This is one hell of a thing to pass on to one’s son, but you, Rick, are the only soul who may have the decency not to laugh at me for too little. I am worried about keeping full control of my temper. I had a hell of a shock a couple of months ago when Hemingway committed suicide. God Almighty, I beat him once in arm wrestling at the Stork Club, on a night in 1949, and I feel, therefore, one part in a thousand responsible, for he saw the light in my eyes and I saw the misery in his. Sherman Billingsley nearly eighty-sixed me for lèse-majesté.

In any event, Ernest’s death is the worst thing. Suicide with a shotgun in the mouth! I’d like to think it wasn’t really a suicide. He probably had cancer, and you know the cure for that. No doctor would dare to admit it, but I know. It’s to dare your death, night after night. Look at the evidence. There was Hemingway, singing songs all evening and cheerful with his wife Mary. Then, blasto! Goes alone to a room and blows his brains out? No. He had to have been playing with it for nights. Exploring all the no-man’s-land between life and death, the places where the dread fog gathers. I propose that that brave man went in every night, put the barrel of the shotgun in his mouth, reached down for the trigger, and pulled it ever so gently into no-man’s-land. If he went too far with the squeeze, he would be dead; otherwise, he might gain a little life. A species of cancer cure. The doctors can go flog themselves as far as I’m concerned, but that is what Ernie was doing, daring death, and he probably got away with it for many a night. Then, on July 2, he dared to pull that trigger a little too far. He couldn’t do anything physical anymore, not really, not ski, not box, might have had his pecker down below the horizontal, but, by God, he could still dare death. That is my hope. My secret fear is that he just crapped out and blew it all up. Son, I’ve been dogged-down by these deaths. Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Dash Hammett, now Hem. It’s taking its effect. It makes me hate that son of a bitch Jack Kennedy even more. I don’t want to be too damn bigoted, but the fact is you can’t trust Catholics—there could have been some esoteric Vatican tie-up between Kennedy and Castro. There, I’ve said it. Castro had a religious boyhood, did you know that? Research him in SOURCES, cross-check him in VILLAINS. He and Kennedy in cahoots would explain why Fidel is always holding an ace to our king.

I know I rave, but the wrath builds up. Until I screw that little Jap right out of my thoughts, I am simply not getting the benefit of being back with Mary. Do you understand it? I never missed her very much. I missed the habits, the dull habits most of all. I missed playing double solitaire with her—that, somehow, was able to anchor all the mischief I was enjoying outside. Now, I have to wonder what there is worth protecting.

Rick, I’m probably going to pick up my pen tomorrow and apologize for this letter. You may as well know, son, we Hubbards have a vein of mixed bile and madness. Even the Headmaster. He used to whip the stuffings out of me—didn’t I for good cause deserve it!—but as you ought to know, we Hubbards do our best to keep it under cover. For good cause. The output, once expressed, is too god-awful.

Miss you, good roommate.

Dad

I was beginning to fear that I now understood why my father, years ago, had been so eager to have my head operated on.