18
FROM A LETTER TO KITTREDGE ON SEPTEMBER 12, 1962:
. . . This is news of a dispute I called to Hugh’s attention. Since he may not have kept you abreast, I will confide that an ominous event is on the horizon. Last Saturday, September 8, Harvey called me up to Washington. I went with no inner grace, since one of the small punishments King Bill visits on me for serving as Hugh’s conduit is to keep me at work over a weekend. Be certain, if he shows up on a Saturday or even a Sunday at his office in Miami or in Washington, I will get called in.
This time, however, the job is important. A photograph from the Directorate of Intelligence has been smuggled over to Task Force W’s basement in Langley; that is a high order of contraband. A contest of wills between Operations and Intelligence may soon commence.
Indeed, I am coming to learn that Intelligence is not a well-chosen collection of secret facts, but a designed product; the form is derived from whose will is stamped upon the facts: Harvey says the Soviets are exporting medium-range nuclear missiles to Cuba, and the Directorate of Intelligence is arguing that they are not. Since medium-range missiles can reach from Havana to New York, Washington, or Chicago, these are no small peas we contend over. U-2 overflights do reveal missile launching pads in the area west of Havana, but the Directorate of Intelligence insists that the sites in question can handle no more than ground-to-air antiaircraft missiles. Apparently, there was an understanding reached in Vienna between Kennedy and Khrushchev that Castro can deploy defensive weapons such as SAM missiles, which only have a range of twenty-five miles. This, of course, in no way permits medium-range nuclear-strike powers.
Well, what I call the Saturday photograph was slipped over to Harvey on Friday night. It was taken of the Soviet freighter Omsk out at sea one hundred miles from Havana. The ship’s hatches are covered with their tarpaulins, so all one can determine on superficial reading of the evidence is that this type of freighter may be equipped with very large hatches in order to load lumber, but the Russians are not shipping timber to Fidel, not with all those Cuban forests thick as revolutionary beards, no, something other than gross lots of wood has to be in the hold. One of Harvey’s camera experts, after scrutinizing the photograph, determines through the shadow thrown by the hull of the Omsk that the ship is riding very high in the water so its hold has to be filled with large objects of low density. “Medium-range missiles,” growls Harvey, “fulfill that category.”
I have never seen Wild Bill so happy. He already knows that Oatsie Porringer, with whom I worked for years at Montevideo Station is one of my contacts at the Directorate of Intelligence, so he asks me to rout Oatsie out on this Saturday. Porringer is the only example I can name of a good case officer who has switched over from Operations to Intelligence. Now, according to his own evaluation, he is making a name for himself in “a rat-shit corner of technology.” Porringer, it seems, has become our expert in cratology, the science of calculating by its size and shape what a crate or carton is likely to be holding.
Well, Porringer and I don’t like each other all that much, and I don’t get along with his wife, so I haven’t spent one social evening with them since we’ve both come back to the States, indeed, two quick lunches in the Company cafeteria has been the scope of our communitas, and both repasts were unpleasant. Porringer, bitter at the lack of recognition his stint in Uruguay received, is envious of my assignments. I know he thinks I do not deserve them.
So soon as he hears, however, that it is Harvey who wants him to come over, he is wholly cordial to the idea. He has been wanting to meet the legend for many a year, and they get along on this Saturday fairly well. It is unorthodox for Harvey to receive him, but I know my boss by now. His instinct tells him that we are dealing with medium-range missiles, so he is going to need his personal cratologist for the next few weeks. Therefore, he gives an audience to Porringer, and the Omsk’s cargo is narrowed down to missiles, plastic toys, toilet paper, wicker furniture, or any of five other lightweight cargoes. Only medium-range intercontinental missiles, however, require hatches as large as the Omsk can provide.
Since that Saturday meeting, I have been kept busy through the weekend and now into Monday riding herd on two Junior Officer Trainees who work with me at checking every possible route out of Bahía Parva, a harbor west of Havana where the Omsk docked on September 9 and immediately proceeded to unload in the middle of the night. We have been checking every road that is wide enough to transport a missile over a distance of one hundred miles out from Bahía Parva. That is not as impossible a study as you would think; the road, after all, has to be able to accommodate a truck trailer some eighty feet long going through tight corners in the villages and around hairpin turns in the mountains.
Needless to say, most of the thoroughfares out of Bahía Parva sooner or later prove unfeasible, but we do come up with one likely route, and Harvey actually has an agent occupying a house on a street in the town of San Rosario, through which the delivery will presumably pass. Rest assured, radio messages are being delivered to our agent. He has to be one of our more important people in the area since he is already in possession of a burst transmitter.
From letter to Kittredge, September 14, 1962:
. . . It is coming to climax sooner than expected. Our agent in San Rosario radioed back on the night of September 12 that a trailer truck towed a large missile past his house. Says he was able to estimate the length closely because he has already measured the frontage of the villa across from him. The missile is twenty-three meters in length. That has to be a medium-range nuclear torch.
Harvey has instructed our fellow to pack a suitcase. We are going to get this agent out of Cuba.
I will keep you posted . . ..
From Kittredge to me on September 16, 1962:
I pray devoutly that the Fat Man is wrong. A great bag of bile is playing on a fife. All this means to Harvey, should he be correct, is that he is on his way to becoming Chief of the Soviet Russia Division, but I see Christopher in my arms as the great bombs go off. Castro is a monster. How dare he let the Russians feed him missiles? Or, worse, did he ask for them himself?
From Kittredge to me on September 17, 1962:
I’ve calmed down. I realize one’s job has to be followed through, hour by hour, task by task. Do keep me up, please, on exactly what is happening. I would ask Hugh (who is particularly quiet these couple of days) but even though the world may be approaching its end, I do not dare to violate the secret of our correspondence.
From my letter to Kittredge, September 18, 1962:
Sherman Kent of the Board of National Estimate has told McCone that there has been no Soviet installation of missiles. McCone disagrees. He is banking on Harvey’s estimate. Harvey, as you predicted, is in his element. McCone said to Harvey, “You had better be right,” and Harvey said he was. Here I come, sings Harvey in the bathroom, Soviet Russia Division, here I come.
From Kittredge’s letter to me, September 20, 1962:
Although Sherman Kent is no fool and has good people working for him, Hugh, of course, disagrees with the Board. He rates the personnel over at the Directorate of Intelligence as much too soft. I know he is thinking of the round-shouldered, clammy-palmed, clerical look of so many of their ex-professors. The root of it, Hugh thinks, is that many of them were Stalin-worshippers during the war without quite realizing it, and still see the Soviet Union as a crippled giant needful of peace to bind the wounds. “They don’t understand,” opines Hugh, “that Marxism is a faith for which people are willing to die. Reason always collapses before the inner readiness of others to give up their lives to a vision. I am ready to die for Christ, and these intoxicated warriors of Communism are willing to die for the mystical bonds of materialism. Irrationality is the only great engine in history.”
Harry, I see the Company as one huge Alpha and Omega with the D of I as the more rational component, and Operations, obviously, as the faith. I am, on ninety-nine out of a hundred occasions, happy to live with you and Hugh in the phratry of Operations, but, oh, God, I am praying tonight that Sherman Kent is right and Wild Bill Harvey is wrong.
Incidentally, I ought to tell you what I know about McCone since you might be having close dealings with him soon. He is not, by superficial measure, a nice man. On the day he took over from Allen, he happened to take notice of the Great White Case Officer’s bulletproof limousine. “Oh, yes,” Allen told him, “it’s nifty. One can immerse oneself in a paper, and never have to wonder if some espontáneo down the road can take a potshot through your window.”
Well, that night, just as McCone was leaving in his un-armor-clad Mercedes-Benz limousine, he gave an order. He wanted to depart from Langley on the next evening in his own duplicate bulletproof limo, whereupon twenty frantic slaveys went to extraordinary lengths through the night to get General Motors to make one ready, and, yes, fly it in on a cargo plane—how fortunate that we have an accordion valise for a budget! They were even soldering the last connections onto the dashboard when McCone came down with his attaché case, strolled over to the new vehicle, got in, and had the chauffeur drive him off without saying thank you to a soul. Duty is its own blessing and needs no reward. I fear people like that. Hugh laughs and says, “When it comes to our real work, McCone can’t distinguish between his sphincter and his epiglottis, so he does his best to keep us at arm’s length. That is exactly where Helms and I want him.”
It’s true. McCone does put a moat around himself. He has, for instance, sealed off the door between his Deputy’s office and his own. He doesn’t want the Deputy able to pop in on him. Marshall Carter has to come through the anteroom like the common folk. Carter, who has his own sense of humor, attached a fake but most lifelike-looking hand to the sealed-off frame of the interoffice entry as if his arm had been cut off at the wrist when the last slam was heard. Of course, McCone is so standoffish that Carter need never fear a surprise visit from his boss.
I tell you this as a form of escape from the heavy concerns you have loosed in me. Perhaps it is a small warning as well. If you have dealings with McCone, do not expect your ego to come out unscathed.
From my letter to Kittredge, September 25, 1962:
. . . Well, I’ve been on the job through the weekend again. Last Thursday, September 20, our Cuban agent completed his odyssey from San Rosario to Opa-Locka. Kittredge, I can hardly believe it. He is an accountant. That profession seems to breed half the unsung heroes of the Cuban resistance! At any rate, he proved to be a tall, well-built fellow with a large nose, strong black mustache, and a high-pitched nervous laugh. I would have had to dream up Alpha and Omega all by myself to account for Señor Enrique Fogata.
Harvey came down to JM/WAVE for the interrogation (wanted to take a look at our prize before we shipped him over to the D of I), and of course I was there to serve as Wild Bill’s personal translator.
Our Spanish-speaking interrogator started off by scourging Fogata (per Harvey’s instructions) with the news that many an exile has come over full of tales about missiles in empty fields, empty stadiums, and empty swimming pools. All the stories have been disproved.
Fogata replied, “I know what I see.” (Lo que veo, conozco.)
“That is just what we are going to find out,” the interrogator told him, and presented Enrique with drawings of a great variety of missiles from every major arsenal of the world. All the pictures, however, were the same size. Your only way to choose was by the shape of the profile.
Fogata seemed in no trouble, however. The object he had seen was clearly imprinted on his mind. Without hesitation, he pointed to a Soviet medium-range ballistic missile.
“What length was it?”
“Twenty-three meters.”
Enrique was flown up to Washington that evening. It took more than a day before the Directorate of Intelligence would communicate back to Harvey, and then their comment was that they did not buy our agent’s story. They are arguing that the object he saw was probably twenty-three feet long, rather than twenty-three meters and he had confused the measure and was still confusing it. (I think they assumed we had told him the correct length.) As I wrote to you over a week ago, intelligence derives from whose will is stamped upon which facts. McCone—thank you for the warning—is going along quietly with Harvey, but there is whole unhappiness between Intelligence and Operations. At present, this is where matters stand.
I don’t wish to worry you, but I did have the following conversation with Harvey.
“When the facts come out,” he said, “we will have to lay an air strike on Cuba.”
“What if the Russians escalate?”
“They won’t,” said Harvey. “They’re only shipping missiles because they think we won’t do anything. They’re trying to show the world that they can stand on tiptoe right on our window ledge. I say, knock them off.”
Kittredge, half the Pentagon feels exactly the way Bill Harvey does.
As for me, I am beginning to wake up in the middle of the night with a great weight on my chest. This may be the first time that I do not wish I was standing in John F. Kennedy’s shoes.