22

February 22, 1958

Dearest Harry,

There will be no flutter test. If my husband is Byzantine on matters so minor as a dinner party, I assure you that he is Bach’s harpsichordist when it comes to tweaking Company strings. So, to pull you out of the clutches of Soviet Russia Division, Hugh chose the Right Gobsloptious Baron of your Western Hemisphere Division, J. C. King. J.C. is not the sort of fellow to welcome Soviet Russia Division’s poachers onto his preserve. You are saved. Isn’t it a fact that my husband can take care of everyone’s career but his wife’s?

Actually, Hugh and I have been getting along far better than ever, and since my illness he has been sharing a good deal more of his work with me. You don’t know what a great step that is for him. Hugh, for all emotional purposes, was scourged in childhood when his mother killed his father. Since he cannot know whether the death was accidental or purposeful, his Alpha and Omega, built, of necessity, on rival propositions, are like two hill kingdoms facing each other across an abyss. Conceive, then, how difficult it is for him to trust me with any details of his work. (Which, collaterally, is why it would be a disaster for him to know that we are corresponding.) You may ask how I can encourage our letters, then, and I say that Hugh and I belong to a typical bond-and-bombs marriage, which is to say, we are half-wed. Alpha-Hugh and Alpha-Kitt are as joined as our sacraments, but his Omega cannot allow him to put faith in any woman, and my Omega, eager to be free and alone and full of taste for life, is obliged to suffer in the iron parameters of our marriage.

After my illness we did talk about such matters for the first time. I was able to point out that some of our sense of mutual oppression might be relieved by allowing me to live with a few of his adventures, if only in spirit.

“They are not adventures,” he told me. “They are webs, and quite as sticky as spiderwebs.”

All the same, Hugh proved to be man enough, and husband enough to enter my horrors last summer. When he finally came to understand, despite all his cautions and incalculable filigree of paranoia, that by closing me out of his professional life he was helping to unbalance my mind, he began to reveal to me a bit here and there about the pieces on his playing board. So I may know more now about your situation than you. I wish to give you a warning. The KGB, according to Hugh, has taken great strides in these last few years since Stalin’s death. The all-out reign of terror is over, and they have begun to get fearfully skillful again. You might try worrying about them in serious respectful fashion. Hugh’s estimate of the Masarov picnic is as follows: The KGB has succeeded in placing a mole in the Soviet Russia Division. The best way to protect said mole is to insinuate a notion into the upper reaches of the Agency that the fellow is to be found in GHOUL. By Hugh’s estimate, the KGB set up the picnic in order to hand you a note that would point directly to Soviet Russia Division. This was done on the firm premise that Allen Dulles would then conclude the furry creature was to be located anywhere but in SR Div. Since you were the recipient of the note, but could not produce it, inasmuch as Boris had taken it back, a shadow would fall on GHOUL. The antipathy between GHOUL and SR Division is, after all, no secret. So we would have one more bad mark against Hugh. A provocation set up by the KGB in Uruguay would have been manipulated to great effect by the mole in SR Div back at Headquarters.

The purpose of the picnic, therefore, was not merely to injure GHOUL, but to crimp Hugh’s influence in the Agency. That would be a disaster. Hugh is not the man to make such a claim aloud, but I know he feels the KGB are going to be able to penetrate to the very top of the Agency if he is not there to stop them. And it won’t take all that many years.

Harry, I know you hate the idea of backing off from Masarov, so I’m going to offer the sum of my modest wisdom. I believe that people like you and me go into intelligence work in the first place because to a much greater degree than we realize, we’ve been intellectually seduced. And often by nothing more impressive than good spy novels and movies. We want, secretly, to act as protagonists in such ventures. Then we go to work for the Company, and discover that, whatever we are, we are never protagonists. We pop into the spy novel at chapter six, but rarely find out what was going on in chapter five, let alone earlier times. Just as seldom are we privy to what happens in the rest of the book. I offered this once to Hugh, and he said, “If you must feel sorry for yourself, read a book on the calculus of partial derivatives. That will give you paradigmatic solace, darling.” The key to our lives, Harry, is in the drear word patience. We are incompetent without it.

As a test of your patience, I now inform you that I have news, but it is not for this letter. To whet your appetite to a slather, I will only say that I have changed my slot in TSS. I am now behind one of the doors that Arnie Rosen used to call “Dracula’s Lair.” Yes, I am being trained for what we might as well term heavier work. I’ve decided it’s time to stop being a nice Radcliffe girl and step onto the dance floor with the barbarian in me who, breathing in great secret, does get somewhat short of wind over Lavinia’s stumps.

You had better tell me what you are up to, or you simply won’t get the next letter.

Love,
Kittredge