5

CABLES WERE SENT BACK AND FORTH. I WAS ABLE TO INFORM MR. HARVEY that KU/CLOAKROOM had been changed to KU/ROPES. Now we had to decide whether to wait seventy-two hours to pick up the next shift of cryptonym, or put a push on Bridge-Archive:Control. Harvey told me to wait. Three days later, I was able to inform him that we were in South Korea, courtesy of DN/FRAGMENT.

“That is going to hold us up for two weeks,” he said.

“I can,” I offered, “hit Bridge-Archive hard.” Already, I was beginning to count on a contrary reaction to every move I proposed.

“No,” he said. “I want to mull this one around. Just initiate a request for DN/FRAGMENT. With all we’ve got to do, two weeks will pass before we can turn around.”

It was the truth. There was a lot to do. If, for the first few days, my role as aide-de-camp to William King Harvey had meant not much more than waiting for him to get into BLACKIE-1 (our bullet-resistant Cadillac), the job soon expanded to on-hand note-taker, intraoffice communicator of unhappy orders from the boss, plus monitor of the wastebasket product of significant hotel rooms in West and East Berlin delivered by chambermaids on retainer. There was also covert bookkeeping of our disbursements for special operational expenses, and various other payoffs that case officers passed over to me as chits with code names. I do not wish to suggest that I was on top of any of it. I had a little to do with a great many things, but most of the time I could give no close account of what was going on; it made more sense to recognize that we had a large-sized factory operation spread over the 341 square miles of West and East Berlin, and information of all varieties came in as raw material, was processed in our various intelligence shops and mills, and went out as product via cable and pouch to Headquarters back at the Reflecting Pool and other relevant offices in Washington. I was comparable to a clerk in the superintendent’s office who could brag that he had a desk near the boss. It was no boon. Harvey worked as hard as any man I ever met, and, much like Harlot, saw sleep as the interruption of serious activity. Daily, he would go through the hundreds of cargo manifests that had come in the day before at Schönefeld Airport, and since he could hardly read German, this cost us the output of a couple of translators who had to work through the night at CRUMPETS to number the apples and rifles. Harvey could make out flights, time and place of departure and arrival, and the amount of product; he knew the German words for cartons and cases, containers, and off-category loads; he had a vocabulary for kilograms and cubic meters. That was his linguistic limit. Because he could not recognize the names of the variety of different arms and commodities flown into East Berlin from Moscow, Leningrad, the Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Rumania, Hungary, et al., he had ordered his translators to assign a number to each kind of item. Since this included, as I say, everything from apples to rifles, and there were ten kinds of apples and several hundred varieties of small arms, Harvey had put together a vest-pocket code of several thousand numbers. In lieu of a dictionary, he kept a private black book with each number listed, but he did not have to refer to text often. He knew his numbers. Riding in BLACKIE, sipping on his martini, his other hand, one stubby finger extended, would be guiding his eye down a cargo manifest to which the translator had affixed the required numbers. Sometimes, when he wished to take notes, he would put the martini glass in its holder, or worse, pass it to me, and with his color-coding pen underline items in red, blue, yellow, or green, so that on the second pass through these pages, relations between various Soviet forces stationed in Berlin would start to speak to him. At the least, this is my supposition. He never explained any of it, but he certainly hummed like a handicapper reading the racing form. His mutterings sputtered in my ear with the agreeable sound of cracklings in a frying pan. “Twenty-six eighty-one, that’s got to be some kind of Kalashnikov, but I’ll look it up”—over came the martini to my hand, out came his black book—“damn, it’s a Skoda, not a Kally, should have known that 2681 is the Skoda Machine-Pistol Series C, Model IV. Wasn’t that discontinued?” He looked up. “Hubbard, take a note.” As I fumbled for my notebook and pen with my free hand, while holding his martini in the other, he took back his glass, drained it, set it in the holder, and dictated: “Sovs either dumping outmoded Skoda Series C, Model IV on Vopos and ilk, or starting up Model IV again. Or, option three, preparing a caper. Latter most likely. Only ninety-six Skodas in shipment.” He filled his martini glass from the shaker. “Put it in the Womb Room,” he said.

That was an extra large closet the size of a jail cell off his office at GIBLETS. The sides had been covered in cork to give him a four-wall bulletin board. On it he tacked every unanswered question. Sometimes he would taper off from a sixteen-hour working day by snooping around in that cork cavern, dwelling among his enigmas.

My day, then, was generally lived within parameters. I had a desk adjacent to each of Mr. Harvey’s offices at GIBLETS, BOZO, and Downtown, and I traveled with him, gathering together—if I could anticipate when he was ready to saddle up—all the papers I was working on, stuffed them, file folder and all, into my flunky-bag (the term he delighted in applying to my attaché case), and sprinted down one or another corridor after him. Off we went in BLACKIE, arsenal-style, driver, bodyguard riding shotgun, second shotgun (myself ), plus Chief, and if he wasn’t working on the radio-telephone, or extracting the essence from another swatch of papers, he would tell stories.

I once dared to remark to him that every leader I had known in the Company told stories. While the vast experience backing this remark was limited to Mr. Dulles, my father, Harlot, and Dix, Mr. Harvey did not ask for substantiation, but contented himself with replying: “It’s biologically adaptative.”

“Explain that, would you, Chief?” I was managing at last not to use “sir.”

“Well, the work assigned to the kids in this particular army is unnatural. A young stud likes to know what’s going on. But they can’t be told. It takes twenty years to shape a trustworthy intelligence operative. Twenty years in America, anyway, where we all believe that everybody from Christ—our first American—on down to the newspaperboy is trustworthy. In Russia or Germany it takes twenty minutes to get a new operator ready to trust nothing. That’s why we go into every skirmish with the KGB under a handicap. That’s why we even have to classify the toilet paper in the crap house. We must keep reminding ourselves to enclave the poop. Still, you can’t put too many limitations on the inquiring mind. Hence, we tell tales. That is the way to pass a big picture down in acceptable form.”

“Even if the stories are indiscreet?”

“You’ve put your finger on it. We all have a tendency to talk too much. I had a relative who was an alcoholic. Gave it up. Never touched the stuff. Except once or twice a year, he’d break down, go off on a toot. It was biologically adaptative. Something worse would probably have happened to him if he didn’t break out and drink. I guess I believe that in the Company it’s good once in a while if a secret gets told over a drink.”

“Do you mean that?”

“Now that I’ve said it, no! But we are living in two systems. Intelligence and biology. Intelligence would permit us to tell nothing unauthorized. Biology suffers the pressure.” He nodded at his own words. “Of course, there are discernable variations in our top men. Angleton is a super-clam. So is Helms. Director Dulles may talk a little too much. Hugh Montague, way too much.”

“How would you classify yourself, sir?”

“Clam. Three hundred and fifty days a year. Magpie for two weeks in summer.” He winked.

I wonder if this was not a prelude to informing me about VQ/CATHETER. I think he was beginning to find it difficult to live next to me every working day yet not be able to brag about his number-one achievement; besides, I was developing a need to know. My presence certainly got in the way of CATHETER-related conversations on the car radio. So there came a day when I was given clearance, and a new cryptonym, VQ/BOZO III-a, to classify me as an assistant in the high-clearance shop of BOZO himself.

It took another week to get to the tunnel. As I had surmised, Harvey made his visits at night, and often with visiting military celebrities, four-star generals, admirals, members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Harvey did not bother to restrain his pride. I had not seen such pleasure in an achievement since my father introduced me in 1939, at the age of six, to William Woodward, Sr., whose stable had won the Kentucky Derby with Omaha in 1935. Four years later, Mr. Woodward was still glowing at the mention of Omaha’s name.

In turn, Harvey was not about to downgrade the beauty of his operation. I heard him describe it for the first time on an evening which commenced with me riding shotgun in the front seat of BLACKIE. We had a three-star general in the rear (who was, so far as I could make out, on a tour of NATO facilities for the Joint Chiefs) and Mr. Harvey took pleasure in interrupting our drive on a side street of Steglitz. We pulled into a parking shed, changed the Cadillac for a bulletproof Mercedes, and took off again with Harvey now behind the wheel, his driver riding shotgun, myself in the rear with the General. “Finger the turns,” said Harvey, and his driver thereupon took up the duty of giving directions; we drove quickly through the outskirts of Berlin with much doubling back on side streets to make certain there was no tail. Twelve kilometers soon became twenty, and we passed through Britz and Johannisthal twice before coming to Rudow and its open fields.

All the while, Bill Harvey kept telling the General about problems faced in the building of the tunnel, sending this monologue over his shoulder. I was hoping the General’s hearing was good. Familiar with Harvey’s voice, I could barely pick up his words. Since the General managed, however, to share a rear seat without giving any acknowledgment that I was present, I soon began to enjoy his difficulties with this muffled orientation. The General reacted by helping himself to the martini pitcher.

“This was the only tunnel to my knowledge that had a sister tunnel built at the White Sands Missile Proving Ground in New Mexico to a length of four hundred and fifty feet, as opposed to our fifteen hundred feet, and for one reason,” said Harvey nonstop. “The soil bears comparison to the white-pack sand soil we were facing in Altglienicke. The softness was the problem, said our soil engineers. What if you dig the tunnel, putting in one steel ring after another to support it all the way, but the disturbance to the earth produces some small depression on the surface? That could appear as a rogue-line in a photograph. We can’t have an unaccountable phenomenon showing up in the Soviet’s aerial surveys. Not when we’re tunneling into East Berlin.”

“There was a lot of concern about that at the Joint Chiefs,” said the General.

“You bet,” said Harvey, “but, what the hell, we took a chance, didn’t we, General Packer?”

“Technically speaking, it’s an act of war,” said the General, “to penetrate another nation’s territory whether by air, sea, land, or in this case, from below.”

“Isn’t that a fact?” said Harvey. “I had a selling job here to Christmas. Mr. Dulles said to me, ‘Can we refer to this behemoth as little as possible in writing?’” Harvey kept talking and driving, pushing his tires through many a tight turn with as much aplomb as a symphony man clashing his cymbals in a well-timed accord.

“Yessir,” said Harvey, “this tunnel demanded special solutions. We had close to insuperable problems of security. It’s one thing to build the Taj Mahal. But how do you slap it together in such a way that your next-door neighbors have no clue? This sector of the border is heavily patrolled by the Commies.”

“What was it that somebody did with the Taj Mahal?” asked the General in a half-voice as if he could not decide whether it would prove more embarrassing to be heard or unheard. Having set down his glass, he then, on reflection, picked it up again.

“Our problem,” said Harvey, “was getting rid of the immediate construction product—tons of soil. To dig the tunnel we had to excavate approximately fifty thousand cubic feet of dirt. That’s more than three thousand tons, equal to several hundred average truckloads. But where do you dispose of that much earth? Everybody in Berlin has 360-degree vision. Every Kraut can count. Heinie is looking to supplement his income through the power of his observations. Okay, say you spread your dump all over West Berlin and thereby reduce the amount visible in any one place, you still have the truck driver to contend with. Ten truck drivers are ten highly vulnerable security packages. We came up with a unique solution: We would not truck tunnel dirt away from the site. Instead, we built a large warehouse right near the border of Altglienicke in East Berlin, and put a parabolic antenna on the top. ‘Ho ho,’ says the SSD, ‘look at those Americans pretending to build a warehouse, when they have an AN/APR9 on the so-called warehouse roof. And, look, Hans, the warehouse is heavily protected by barbed wire. The Americans are putting up a radar-intercept station. Ho hum, one more radar-intercept station for the Cold War. That makes no big history.’ Well, General, what the East Germans and the KGB didn’t know is that we built this large warehouse with a cellar that happens to be twelve feet deep throughout. Nobody worries about any dirt we cart away while we’re building the cellar for the warehouse. Not even the truck drivers. Everybody knows it’s a radar station pretending to be a warehouse. It’s only when we’re done with the trucks that we commence excavating the tunnel. Our cellar space proved adequate to receive the fifty thousand cubic feet of dirt we had to dig out. That, General Packer, was an elegant solution.” He whipped around a car, cut back in the face of an oncoming truck.

“So all that dirt has just been sitting in the warehouse cellar all this time?” asked the General.

“Well, it’s no worse than burying the gold at Fort Knox,” said Harvey.

“I get it,” said the General. “That’s why the dig was called Operation GOLD.”

“It’s policy among us,” Harvey said primly, “not to discuss cryptonym nomenclature.”

“Right. I find that a reasonable stance.”

“We’re here,” said Chief. At the end of a long, empty street that passed between empty fields on either side, we could see a large low warehouse in silhouette, back-lit by automobiles passing along the belt highway on the East German side. The warehouse had its own small floodlights around a barbed-wire perimeter and sentry lamps at a few windows and doors, but in the night it merely looked well guarded and somewhat inactive. I was more intrigued with the passing sounds of the cars and trucks on the Schönefelder Chaussee beyond. Their hum rolled through the night like ocean surf, and yet those vehicles knew nothing. Our warehouse would attract no more attention than one gives to any building at night on a desolate highway.

The sentry opened the gate, and we parked two feet from a small door to the warehouse. Harvey darted from his seat right into the building. “Apologies for running ahead of you,” he said to the General once we had followed, “but our E and A folk back at Headquarters say I’m the most recognizable CIA operative in the world. Except, of course, for Allen Dulles. So we don’t want the Commies wondering why I come here. Might start up their mental motors.”

“E and A? Estimates and Assessments?”

“A, actually, is for Analysis.”

“You fellows are as much in the alphabet soup as we are.”

“Just so the mail gets through,” said Harvey.

We walked down a corridor with a few partitioned offices on either side, most of them unoccupied at this hour, then Chief opened another door to a large windowless room with fluorescent lights overhead. For a moment I thought I was back in the Snake Pit. At endless rows of worktables, recording machines were stopping and starting. Up on a dais, lights blinked from a console the size of a pipe organ. Half a dozen technicians, seated before it, were studying their local configurations of signals, while other technicians trolleyed shopping carts of tapes and cartridges to the machines. The sound of 150 Ampex tape recorders—Mr. Harvey provided the number—moving in forward or reverse, electronic beeps signaling the conclusions or commencements of telephone conversations produced an aggregate of sound that stirred me in the same uneasy fashion as some of the more advanced electronic music I had listened to at Yale.

Was there one telephone dialogue between the East German police and/or the KGB and/or the Soviet military that was not being captured at this moment on one or another Ampex? Their humming and whirring, their acceleration and slowdown, were an abstract of the group mind of the enemy, and I thought the Communist spirit must look and sound like this awful room, this windowless portent of Cold War history.

“Everything here is just a small part of the operation,” Harvey said softly. “It’s quiet now.” He led us to a huge sliding door, pulled it back, and we strode down a ramp into an even more airless space, barely lit by an occasional overhead bulb. I could sniff the faintest odor of contaminated earth. What with the ramp, the minimal illumination and walls of dirt impinging on either side, I felt as if we were descending to the inner passage of an ancient tomb.

“Damnedest thing,” said the General, “how you get to notice the sandbags after you buttress a dugout. Some sandbags smell good; others, you hold your nose.”

“We had troubles,” said Harvey. “Fifty feet into the tunnel-dig we encountered earth encumbered with stench. It scared the constitution out of us. There was a graveyard just south of the projected tunnel which we certainly had to avoid since the Sovs would make mucho propagandistic hay out of Americans defiling German graves if there was discovery. So we aimed to pass to the north, although the graveyard offered more suitable soil.”

“Yet even so, there was a stink you had to get rid of,” said the General.

“Nope.” I do not know if it was my presence, but Harvey, if technically outranked by the General, was in no manner going to say “No, sir.”

“What did you have to get rid of then?” insisted the General.

“We could live with the stink, but we had to divine the source of the odor.”

“That’s right. You guys in Intelligence ought to know how to work your way into a stench or two.”

“You bet, General. We located it. A typical engineering nightmare. We discovered that we had invaded the draining field of the septic system built for our own warehouse personnel.”

“C’est la vie,” said the General.

We were on the lip of a cylindrical hole about twenty feet across and curiously deep. I could not estimate the depth. Looking down, one seemed to be studying the fall from a ten-foot diving board, but then it seemed more, a long dark plunge to the duckboards below. I felt an hypnotic vertigo, not so much disagreeable as magnetic—I had to go down the ladder that led to the base.

It descended about eighteen feet. There, at a cupboard on the floor, we exchanged our shoes for boots with heavily cushioned soles and put all our loose change away. A finger to his lips, as if he would draw all errant echoes into himself, Harvey led us along the duckwalk. The hypnotic, magnetic—I now called it the honorable—vertigo continued. Lit by an overhead bulb every ten or twelve feet, the tunnel stretched out before us to the vanishing point. I felt as if I were in a room of mirrors whose repeating view took us to infinity. Six and a half feet high, six and a half feet wide, a perfect cylinder, nearly fifteen hundred feet long, the tunnel took us down a narrow aisle between low walls of sandbags on either side. Amplifiers, set at intervals on the sandbags, were wired into lead-sheathed cables that ran the length of the tunnel. Harvey whispered, “Carries the sap from the tap to the bucket.”

“Where’s the tap?” whispered the General back.

“Coming attractions,” Harvey replied as softly.

We continued to walk with one carefully weighted step after another. “Do not stumble,” we had been warned. Along the route, we passed but three maintenance men, each isolated on his own watch. We had entered the domain of CATHETER. It was a church, I told myself, and immediately submitted to a chill on the back of my neck. CATHETER had its indwelling silence; one might as well have been proceeding down the long entrance to a god’s ear. “A church for snakes,” I said to myself.

Our path proceeded not much more than a quarter of a mile, but I felt as if we had been walking along the tunnel floor for the best part of a half hour before we came to a steel door in a concrete frame. A maintenance man accompanying us brought forth a key, turned a lock, and pressed four numbers on another lock. The door opened on silent hinges. We were at the terminus of the tunnel. Above us was a vertical shaft rising some fifteen feet into the dark.

“See that overhead plate?” whispered Harvey. “Right above, is where we made our connection to the cables themselves. That was one delicate deal. Our sources told us that the KGB sound engineers at Karl-horst sealed nitrogen into their cables to guard against moisture and had attached instruments to monitor any drop in nitrogen pressure. So, just about a year ago, right up above us, you would have been able to witness a procedure comparable in delicacy and tension to a world-famous surgeon going in for an operation never before attempted.” Standing next to him, I tried to conceive of the immaculate anxiety experienced by the technicians when the tap went into the wire. “At that instant,” said Harvey, “if the Krauts had been checking the line, it would have shown up on their meters. Just like a nerve-jump. So, ultimately, it was a crapshoot. But we brought it off. Right now, General, we are connected into 172 such circuits. Each circuit carries eighteen channels. That’s more than twenty-five hundred military and police phone calls and telegraphic messages that we are able to record at once. You can call that coverage.”

“You fellows,” said General Packer, “are getting good marks for this back home.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear the level of appreciation is rising.”

“The Joint Chiefs won’t be handed anything but good stuff from me.”

“I remember,” said Harvey, “when the Pentagon used to say, ‘CIA buys spies to tell them lies.’”

“No, sir, not anymore,” said General Packer.

On the ride back, Harvey sat in the rear with him, and they shared his pitcher of martinis. After a while, the General asked, “How do you handle the take?”

“The bulk of transmissions are flown back to Washington.”

“That much I know already. They took me on a tour of the Hosiery Mill.”

“They took you there?”

“Room T-32.”

“No right to open it up to you,” Harvey said.

“Well, they did. They gave me clearance.”

“General Packer, no offense intended, but I remember a time when high clearance was given to Donald Maclean of the British Foreign Office. Why, in 1947 he was issued a non-escort pass to the Atomic Energy Commission. J. Edgar Hoover didn’t even rate such a pass in 1947. Need I remind you that Maclean was part of the Philby gang and has been reliably reported to be making his home in Moscow these days. No offense intended.”

“I can’t help it if you don’t like it, but the Joint Chiefs did want to know a few things.”

“Such as?”

“Such as how much of the take is kept here for immediate processing and how much goes back to Washington. Are you in a position to give us twenty-four hours’ notice if the Soviet army is ready to blitz Berlin?”

I heard the soundproof window partition going up behind my ears in the Mercedes. Now I could not hear a word. I leaned toward the driver to light a cigarette, and managed a look at the rear seat. They both appeared considerably more choleric.

When we stopped at the parking shed to switch cars again, I heard Bill Harvey say, “I won’t tell you that. The Joint Chiefs can kiss every square inch of my ass.”

Now, reinstalled in BLACKIE-1, two new martinis poured from the Cadillac decanter, Harvey kept his partition raised. I was able to hear no more until the General was dropped off at his hotel, the Savoy. Harvey immediately lowered the glass to speak to me. “There’s a general for you. General Asshole. Stays at the Suh-voyyy.” He said it as if he were trundling an English accent over a notable bump. “I once was taught that generals were supposed to stay with their troops.” He belched. “Kid, you seem to be the troops. How do you like little old CATHETER?”

“I know how Marco Polo felt discovering Cathay.”

“They sure teach you juniors what to say in those New England schools.”

“Yessir.”

“‘Yessir?’ I guess you’re telling me I’m full of shit.” He belched again. “Look, kid, I don’t know about you, but time-servers like that General scratch my woodwork. I didn’t happen to be in uniform during World War II. I was too busy chasing Nazis and Communists for the FBI. So the military dogs irritate me. Why don’t we wax the floor with some serious booze and recuperate?”

“I never turn down a drink, Chief.”