6

I RETURNED TO THE KEEP IN JUNE FOR THE MARRIAGE OF HADLEY KITtredge Gardiner to Hugh Tremont Montague. My father and stepmother, my brothers, my uncles, aunts, and cousins, were there in the gathering of good Maine summer families. The Prescotts and the Peabodys came, the Finletters and Griswolds, the Herters, and the Places. Even Mrs. Collier from Bar Harbor together with half of the Bar Harbor Club took the crooked twenty-mile journey west across the fifteen miles of the island to the backside. Contingents were present from Northeast Harbor and Seal Harbor, and David Rockefeller attended. Desmond FitzGerald was in view, and Clara Fargo Thomas; Allen Dulles flew up from Washington with Richard Bissell and Richard Helms, Tracy Barnes and Frank Wisner, James Angleton and Miles Copeland. One of my cousins, Colton Shaler Hubbard, who liked to see himself as the operative definition of a wag, was heard to say, “Drop a bomb on this shindig and U.S. Intelligence is gone to smithereens.”

It is no part of my intention to expatiate on the floral arrangements chosen by Maisie, nor the sober character of our Episcopal church, St. Anne of the Trinity in the Woods (which has been quietly criticized since the turn of the century for its penurious Presbyterian air), and I am certainly not equipped to describe the niceties of the wedding-gown brocades. I speak of the nuptials because they confirmed my suspicion that I was in love with Kittredge, and that proved to be the most inexpensive, self-sustaining, and marvelous love a young man could attach himself to. For a long time, it cost me no more than the luxurious enrichment of my self-pity, which was promoted on the day of the wedding from the spiritual equivalent of a sigh to the deepest mahogany melancholy. I was in love with a beautiful, brilliant girl who was married to the most elegant and incisive gent I had ever met; there was no hope for me but, oh, the love was beautiful.

Mr. Dulles seemed to agree. Soon after we assembled back at the Keep for the wedding party, he stood up and (very much in his function as Director of CIA) gave the first toast. I still remember how delicately he held his glass yet with what a sense of gravity.

“The Greco-Roman concept of the healthy mind in the healthy body is personified by our good and brave colleague, Hugh Tremont Montague,” were Dulles’ first words. “Indeed, if it were not for the one prodigality he shares with me—no, let me say in which he surpasses me—at squandering the once rich crop of his hair, we could speak of the perfect fellow.” Polite but happily unweighted laughter passed gently through the room. “For those few of you who are not connected to the legends of his heroic exploits in OSS during the war, let me say that you must take it on faith. His feats, for the present, remain in the bailiwick of the highly classified. For equally good cause, I cannot begin to describe the work he does now except to hint that he is always threatening to become indispensable before he is even properly middle-aged.” Sweet, light laughter. “Nonetheless, for all his sterling attributes, he is still the luckiest fellow in the world. He is marrying a young lady of incommensurate beauty who, if I dare to grow portentous on so festive an occasion, has also become by dint of inspiration, talent, and study, a psychological theorist of a power and persuasion to inspire all Jungians and confound all Freudians. When she was still an undergraduate at Radcliffe, I happened to be shown her senior thesis and it was a wonder. I break a little confidence by saying I was quick to tell her, ‘Kittredge, your thesis is a marvel and I can promise you that some of us just might need it. You, Kittredge, are coming aboard.’ How could a young lady, confronted by such admiration, not give assent? I, holding this cup for the toast, raise high my heart as well. God bless you both. May He sanctify your marriage, handsome, half-bald Hugh Montague, and our own Hadley Kittredge Gardiner, here with us, yet remaining on such close terms with the divine.”

Afterward, I had been introduced in a rush as the Director was leaving, and there was time to receive no more than a foursquare handshake and the friendliest smile. “Your father is one whale of a fellow, Harry,” he said with eyes to twinkle at all the rich findings between the lines. Mr. Dulles, I decided, might be the nicest man I met at the wedding. My impatience to hook up with CIA was hardly less lively.

Of course, I was also feeling the presence of many men whose names had been legends to me ever since my father began to speak of them in the intimate tones reserved by a god for fellow gods; such names as Allen and Tracy, Richard and Wiz, Dickie and Des, were already installed in an amphitheater of my mind. While none of these personages was as handsome as my father, many were as tall, or as forceful; their persons offered the suggestion that one should not impinge on them for too little. They had bottom. “Something in me,” said their presence, “is inviolable.”

I gave up the last semester of my senior year at Yale, making a quick decision right after the wedding to enroll immediately in summer school so that I could graduate at midterm in January and thereby apply to the Company six months earlier. It was a sacrifice, the first conscious one I had made, for I was comfortable at Yale, liked my rooms, and still had the idea from time to time that I might want to spend a year after college writing fiction. I even had the means to write late at night for I had carefully chosen no classes that began before 10:00 A.M. I also had friends of all the shades and affiliations you make after three years at a good college, and was otherwise ensconced. I even had some small chance of making the Varsity Eight after slaving at crew the last three seasons. By my lights, I was giving up a lot. Yet I wanted to. If I wished to serve my country, I could start best by making a sacrifice. So, I went to summer school, and was graduated eight accelerated months later onto the slushy streets of Washington in early February, a midyear diploma-holder, a bear cub without hair. But I was proud of my sacrifice.

I will not describe the tests I took for admittance. They were numerous, and classified, but then, given the Agency officers who may have been enlisted in support of my application, I suppose I would have had to do poorly not to get in.

Of course, you were expected to do well. Only a few out of every hundred who applied were able to make it all the way through the IQ tests, the personality tests, the lie-detector, and the security questionnaire. I remember that in the Personal History Statement, there was the question: On a scale of 1 to 5, how would you rate your dedication to this work? I put down a five and wrote in the space allowed for comment: I have been brought up to face ultimates.

“Explain yourself,” said the interviewer.

“Well, sir,” I said, and I had been waiting to make this speech, “I feel that if I had to, I could stand trial before an international tribunal.” When my interlocutor looked at me, I added, I thought not unadroitly, “The point I’d like to make is that although I am a moral person, I am ready to get into activities where I might have to stand trial for my country, or, if it ever came down to it, die for ultimate purposes.”

I had more trouble with the lie-detector. It was the test to dread. Although we were warned not to talk about it with applicants who had already taken it, we met with them as soon as possible after the drear event; usually they said as little as they could and consumed prodigies of beer.

I still see my polygraph interview in transcript. It is an imaginary transcript. What the interviewer and I said to one another at the time cannot be what I now remember. I offer a false memory, then, but it is imprinted. The face of the interviewer has, in recollection, become long-jawed and bespectacled; he looks as gray as a personage in a black-and-white film. Of course, we were installed in a dingy-white cubbyhole off a long crowded hall in an edifice called Building 13 off the Reflecting Pool, and much of my memory of those wintry days is, indeed, in gray and white.

I offer what I recollect. I do not vouch for anything in this reconstructed transcript other than its ongoing psychological reality for me.

INTERROGATOR: Ever had a homosexual experience?

APPLICANT: No, sir.

INTERROGATOR: Why are you having such a large reaction?

APPLICANT: I didn’t know I was.

INTERROGATOR: Really? You’re giving the machine what we call a flush.

APPLICANT: Couldn’t the machine make a misinterpretation?

INTERROGATOR: You are saying you are not homosexual.

APPLICANT: Certainly not.

INTERROGATOR: Never?

APPLICANT: Once I came close, but held off.

INTERROGATOR: Fine. I can read you. Let’s move on.

APPLICANT: Let’s.

INTERROGATOR: Get along with women?

APPLICANT: I’ve been known to.

INTERROGATOR: Consider yourself normal?

APPLICANT: You bet.

INTERROGATOR: Why am I getting a flutter?

APPLICANT: You’re asking me to volunteer a response?

INTERROGATOR: Let me rephrase it. Is there anything you do with women that community consensus might consider out of the ordinary?

APPLICANT: Do you mean—unusual acts?

INTERROGATOR: Specify.

APPLICANT: Can I be asked a specific question?

INTERROGATOR: Do you like blowjobs?

APPLICANT: I don’t know.

INTERROGATOR: Overlarge response.

APPLICANT: Yessir.

INTERROGATOR: Yessir what?

APPLICANT: Yes, to the blowjob.

INTERROGATOR: Don’t look so unhappy. This won’t keep us from accepting you. On the other hand, if you were to lie in this test, it could hurt you a lot.

APPLICANT: Thank you, sir. I understand.

I get a whiff of the old perspiration. I was lying to the lie-detector: I had still not lost my cherry. Even if two-thirds of my class at Yale could probably say the same, anything was better than such confession. How could a CIA man be a virgin? Down the line, I would learn that many another applicant lied to protect the same green secret. That was all right. The tests were looking to screen out men who might be vulnerable to blackmail. Well-raised college graduates, however, claiming more amatory experience than they’d earned could be accepted just as they were.

During those weeks of testing, I lived in the YMCA and shared meals in drugstores with other applicants. They, for the most part, had come from state universities and had taken their majors in government, or football, or languages, in foreign affairs, economics, statistics, agronomy, or some special skill. Usually, one of their professors had had an exploratory conversation with them, and if interest was there, they received a letter that spoke of an important government career with foreign duties, and were told to reply to a post office box in Washington, D.C.

I pretended to have been approached like the others, but given my lack of gov, ec, pol-sci, or applied psych, I pretended to have made some studies in Marxism instead. None of my new acquaintances knew much about that. I got away with it until I met Arnie Rosen, whose father was a third cousin of Sidney Hook. Rosen, in homage, perhaps, to this family tie, had read Lenin, Trotsky, and Plekhanov in his adolescence, not, he assured me, to become an advocate of such ideas, but to set himself up as their future antagonist. As he put it to me one morning over pancakes and sausage, “From the word go, I knew the cockamamie elements in V. I. Lenin.” Yes—Rosen, Honors, Phi Beta Kappa, Columbia. I disliked him to the quick.

For those four or five weeks, my life in junction with other applicants was spent in promenade from one processing building to another in the I-J-K-L complex, a set of four long buildings in a row that ran from the Lincoln Memorial for more than a quarter mile along the Reflecting Pool toward the Washington Monument. On gray and barren winter mornings those buildings looked not wholly unlike pictures I had seen of Dachau, same long, two-story sheds that went on forever. We were jammed into quarters thrown up for government offices during the Second World War. Since we had other facilities dispersed over many a side street, and in many a fine old house, special bottle-green government buses took us from building to building in Foggy Bottom. We filled out questionnaires and walked in self-conscious groupings, obviously inductees.

All the while, I pretended, as I say, to be just like my new friends. In truth, so dislocated was this existence from all I had known at Yale that I felt myself a stranger in my own land. Such feelings were most likely to come over me in the course of listening to a lecture in one of our ubiquitous classrooms with its beige walls, blackboard, American flag in a stand, and its dark gray stain-compatible carpet and portable lecture chairs with their small one-arm writing tables attached. My classmates showed the same good American crew cut as myself (good for at least 80 percent of us), and if our collective demeanor was somewhere between the YMCA and the Harvard Business School, it did not mean I was yet like anyone else. I was discovering how little I knew about my countrymen, at least those who were trying like me to get into CIA. Nor did I feel altogether real to myself. That, on reflection, was a familiar wind in my lonely harbors.

Occasionally I voyaged out to the canal house in Georgetown which Kittredge and Harlot had bought in the first year of their marriage, and such evenings were full of stimulation for me. Some of their dinner guests were grand. Henry Luce was there one night, and he took me aside long enough to inform me that he knew my father. Mr. Luce had white hair and hugely heavy black eyebrows. His voice turned husky as he said to me, “It’s a wonderful life you’re going to have. Momentous decisions, and the best of it is that they will count! I’ve worked on occasion on endeavors much larger than myself or my own interests, and I can tell you, Harry, since we share the same diminutive, whether from Herrick or Henry, that there’s no comparison. Doing it for the larger dream is what it is all about, Harry!” Like a reverend, he did not release me until he took his hand from my shoulder. Nor could I pretend to myself that I was ungrateful for the speech, since after evenings at the Montagues, I would go back to my brother dogs at the Y to find them worrying where the next bone was going to be thrown. I, however, would feel like a radioactive dog. I would glow within. I had seen the Company, and it was there. The CIA was not merely long, shedlike buildings, or the dead-tank smells of people crowded into impossibly small office spaces, nor leering inquisitors who strapped belts and instruments to your body; no, CIA was also a company of the elegant, secretly gathered to fight a war so noble that one could and must be ready to trudge for years through the mud and the pits. Ah, those evenings at the canal house! Indeed, it was Harlot who was the first to tell me I was in, certified and in, on the day after my last test. My roomies at the Y would have to wait three more days to obtain as much knowledge, and I suffered with the secret I could not relate to them, and so discovered that holding a confidence when one wishes to let it out is comparable to thirsting for a shot of liquor on an awful day.

After acceptance, we reported one morning for our orientation lecture. Perhaps a hundred of us were taken by bus from the 9th Street Personnel Pool to an old five-story house with a Queen Anne roof behind the State Department. There we crowded into a small basement auditorium. A man sitting up on the stage whom I would have taken for an Ivy League professor stood up to welcome us and said, “In case any of you are wondering, you will now be working for CIA.”

We laughed. We applauded. He strode across the stage to an easel on which a cloth was draped. Whisking the sheet away, he revealed the first of our scrolls—an organizational chart. With a pointer, he informed us that the Agency had three Directorates which could be envisaged as analogous to three sister corporations, or three regiments of a division: “The Directorate for Plans oversees covert action and gathers intelligence. It directs spies. Learn a new word. Plans runs spies, even as you would run a business.” Since espionage and counterespionage were Harlot’s province, and covert action belonged to my father, the Directorate of Plans was nine-tenths of CIA for me.

Then he went on to speak of the Directorate for Intelligence, which analyzed the material gathered by Plans, and the Directorate for Administration, “which keeps in order the management of the first two directorates.” Needless to say, I had no interest in either.

“Gentlemen,” he continued, “you one hundred and three men”—he looked about—“or, if I avail myself of the indispensable tool of precision, you one hundred and one men and two women have been chosen for the Directorate of Plans. That is a fine place to be.”

We cheered. We stood up and cheered him, but not for long because next, Allen Dulles, now Director of Central Intelligence, came through the curtains to speak. On this day, Mr. Dulles had a genial, courteous, even benign warmth of the sort that would enable you to believe in any establishment with which he was associated, whether bank, university, law firm, or branch of government. Dressed in old tweeds with leather patches for the elbows, a nifty bow tie, his pipe in hand, his spectacles as bright with reflected light as intelligence itself, he was quickly successful in giving all one hundred plus of us the same impression he had given me at the wedding.

“Being with you here at the beginning, I can all but promise that you will have lively, worthwhile, exciting careers.” We applauded. “Winston Churchill, after Dunkirk, could only offer the gallant British people ‘blood, sweat, toil, and tears,’ but I can promise you dedication, sacrifice, total absorption, and—don’t let this get out—a hell of a lot of fun.” We whooped.

“You are all in Plans, an uncommon group. You will live, most of you, in many countries, you will doubtless see action, you will—no matter how tired and weary—never lose sense of the value of your work. For you will be defending your country against a foe whose resources for secret war are greater than any government or kingdom in the history of Christendom. The Soviet Union has raised the art of espionage to unprecedented heights. Even in times of so-called thaw, they wage their operations with unflagging vigor.

“In order to catch up, we are in the process of building the greatest agency for Intelligence the Western world has seen. The safety of this country depends on no less. Our opponent is formidable. And you, here, have been chosen to be part of the great shield that resists our formidable foe.”

You could feel the happiness in the room. No matter the small basement stage with its American flag to one side, we shared, at this moment, the warmth of a venerable theater as the curtain descends to a momentous conclusion.

He was hardly finished, however. It was not Mr. Dulles’ style to end on a major note. More agreeable was to remind us that we had been accepted into a fellowship; our privileges entitled us to hear a story at the expense of the leader.

“Years ago,” he said, “when I was as young as most of you, I was posted by our foreign service to Geneva during World War I, and I remember one particularly warm spring Saturday in 1917 when I was on watch for the morning duty. There was little to do in the office, and all I could think about was tennis. You see, I had a date for tennis that afternoon with a young lady who was lovely and comely and beautifully composed .  .  . a veritable knockout!”

Who else could speak in such a way? In this pre–Civil War basement which might, more than ninety years ago, have heard cannonading to the south, Allen Dulles was telling us of Geneva in 1917.

“Just before midday my phone rang. A most heavily accented voice was on the line,” said Allen Dulles, “a man who wanted a responsible American official to speak to. Verantwortlich was the word he used. He gave his speech in the worst German. One of those importuners, I decided. Someone with a tale of petty woe bound to tell it in the worst accent possible.

“Now, the only American official at the Embassy that morning who happened to be remotely verantwortlich was myself. Was I going to play tennis with a lovely English girl, or was I going to eat sauerkraut with some Russian emigré?”

He paused. “Tennis won out. I never saw the fellow.”

We waited.

“Too late I learned who the man happened to be. The voice with the dreadful German accent, frantic to talk to a responsible American official, was none other than Mr. V. I. Lenin himself. Not long after our phone call, the Germans sent Mr. Lenin across Bavaria, Prussia, Poland, and Lithuania in a sealed train. He arrived at the Finland Station in Leningrad to bring off in November of the same year nothing less than the Bolshevik Revolution.” He paused, giving us sanction to become hilarious at the size of Allen Dulles’ miscue.

“Al,” a voice cried out, “how could you do that to the team?”

It was my first glimpse of Dix Butler. His face was unforgettable. His head, his massive jaw and neck, his full mouth were as strongly formed as the features in a Roman bust.

Dulles looked pleased. “Profit by my error, gentlemen,” he said. “Reread your Sherlock Holmes. The most trivial clue can prove the most significant. When you are on duty, observe every detail. Do the damnedest fine job you can do. You’ll never know when the shovel turns up an unexpected gem.”

He canted his pipe back into his mouth, parted the stage curtains, and disappeared.

Our next speaker offered business. Burns, Raymond James “Ray Jim” Burns, case officer: Japan, Latin America, Vienna. He would be our instructor in an eight-week course on World Communism. He was also captain of the pistol team at Plans. He would, he told us, welcome anyone interested in improving his aim.

A man of medium height, he was there for us to study. He had short, reddish-brown hair, a trim build, and regular features with an unforgiving twist. His mouth was a short straight cut. He was wearing a brown jacket, a white shirt, a narrow brown tie, light pink-khaki trousers, and sunglasses shaded brown. His belt had three narrow horizontal stripes, brown, tan, and brown. His shoes were brown and cream and as pointed as his nose. He wore a heavy ring on his left hand and clicked it on the podium for emphasis. He had one decoration, a maple-leaf pin in his buttonhole, a spot of gold. I was feeling full of Mr. Dulles’ adjuration to observe each detail.

Ray Jim hated Communists! He stood on the podium and pinned us with his eyes. They were bullet brown, a deep lead brown, near to black, a hole impinging on you. He looked us over, one by one.

“There’s a tendency these days,” said Burns, “to give a little leeway to the Communists. Khrushchev is not as bad as Stalin; you’re going to hear that. Of course Khrushchev was called the Butcher of the Ukraine in his earlier days, but he’s not as bad as Stalin. Who could be as ruthless as Iosef Djugashvili, alias Joe Stalin, the purge-master? In the U.S.S.R. they have a secret police that has no parallel to us, no comparison. It’s as if you boiled the FBI, the Agency, and the state and federal prison systems into one big super-equivalent of the CIA, but lawless, unrestrained, ruthless! Their police—some of whom are even supposed to be in Intelligence—are kept busy purging millions of their own poor citizens, sending hordes of them by the million out to Siberia to die under forced labor and near starvation. Their crime? They believe in God. In the Soviet Union, you can slice up your grandmother before they’ll rate your crime on a par with believing in the Lord Almighty. For the Soviet think-police know how the force of God stands in their way, resisting all those Red dreams of world conquest. To that purpose the Red devotes his evil genius. You can’t begin to conceive of what we are up against, so don’t try to understand Communists by the measure of your own experience. Communists are ready to subvert any idea or organization which is a free expression of the human will. Communists look to invade every cranny of every person’s private activity, and seep into every pore of democratic life. I say to you: Be prepared to fight a silent war against an invisible enemy. Treat them like a cancer loose in the world body. Before you are done with this orientation course, you will be on the road to defusing their attempts to confuse world opinion. You will be able to counterattack subversion and brainwashing. You are going to come out of your training as different men”—he peered about—“and, seeing as they rationed me to one joke, two different women.”

We laughed that he had been good enough to release the tension, and then we stood up to cheer him. He was one of us. He was not, like Mr. Dulles, a little above the fray, but one of us. Since Ray Jim was dedicated, we too could aspire to such clarity of purpose.

Of course I was not taking close account of myself. Mr. Dulles was much nearer to my understanding. Ray Jim came out of that vast middle of America which goes from west of the Hudson out to Arizona, that huge tract which, in comparison to the neatly tended garden of my education, was a roadless desert, but I did not wish to say to myself that I did not know my own country.

In the heat of the standing ovation we gave Mr. Burns, we were administered the Vow. Standing under the grand seal of the CIA in the center of the proscenium arch, our hands upraised, we were inducted formally and legally into the Agency, and swore not to speak without permission of what we learned, now and forever.

That is a solemn vow. I have been told of Masons, inactive for years, who will nonetheless impart not one detail of the rites of the fraternity, not even to their sons. Some equivalent of that fidelity must have entered us. My fear of retribution was lashed at that moment to my sense of honor. I might just as well have been commingling my blood with another warrior’s. A sacred (and sweet) pang of emotion came to me on this instant of induction. If not for the perils of hyperbole, I would say that my will stood to attention.

This vow was not diminished by our training. It constrains one’s mind to describe the awesome loyalty that soon developed. To give away our secrets was to betray God! A mighty syllogism! I must say this oath still retains some of its essence after close to thirty years in the Agency. Of my own actions, I recognize that I am obliged to tell a good deal. I will break through—if need be—but I still feel inhibition at discussing our seminars in the use of such agents of influence abroad as could be found among native lawyers, journalists, trade unionists, and statesmen.

I will, however, describe our tradecraft as it was then. Most of these methods have been superseded, so it is relatively safe to go on about such matters. They are the stuff of spy novels. Besides, I may as well confess, it is what I enjoyed the most at the time. Courses in economics and administrative procedures made me fearfully drowsy. I got my marks, and was able to spout the stuff back, but my true love was tradecraft. I was not in the CIA to become a bureaucrat but a hero. So if this memoir is a tale of development, my purpose may be served if I relate my instruction in picking a lock and all the other wonderfully amoral techniques of my profession.

All the same, I must take one more pass at our instruction in the evils of Communism. Such studies may have lacked the zest of tradecraft, but they managed to convince me that any mischief we could work on our evil opponent left us clearly on the right side. I think that was the allure of tradecraft. Is there any state more agreeable than living and working like a wicked angel?

Well, I had far to go. Let me demonstrate.