24
March 15, 1958
Beloved Man,
I am so glad you seem to have accepted my sermon on patience, since I cannot tell you any more at this point about Dracula’s Lair. I have taken too many vows of silence concerning the matter and am just not able to find the sanction in myself to fill you in. Yet, I am still dying to send you letters. When is devotion ever so alive as in wholly private correspondence? Which we have, dear friend.
You took your courage delicately in hand and asked me about Alpha-Ego and Omega-Ego. I must have frightened you in the past for stepping on my preserves! How decent it is of you to live with my theories when everyone else has decided they are last year’s intellectual fashion.
Well, it is interesting that you fix on this aspect of my work. Do you know that is where I began? The first crude questionnaires I laid out to try to locate the separate properties of Alpha and Omega did focus on their separate egos. I had an insight at the time, you see: The best approach would be by way of memory tests.
It was an interesting concept. Memory, after all, is often sinister. Nothing within ourselves betrays us quite so much as memory, and ego, I came to decide, was the overseer of memory. It does not matter what we may retain at deeper levels; the ego controls the surface and so will distort a recollection if that is necessary to maintaining the ego’s view of things.
Well, contemplate the hurdles to be faced with two egos, one for Alpha, one for Omega. No wonder people could not bear my theories. Yet, one characteristic was soon clear to me. Because Alpha and Omega maintain separate banks of recollection, memory was not going to be at all identical in them. Their respective egos have too many separate needs, and, given enough need, memory becomes no more than a servant of the ego—which, I expect, is exactly why the memoirs of successful men are usually so awful.
The easiest route, I concluded, to uncovering the distinctive properties of Alpha and Omega would be, then, to study the respective development of their egos. I would offer each subject some material to memorize, then question him on retention. I expected to discover patterns of recollection coupled with the most surprising lack of recollection, and I did, but I also found that my test did not work with certain kinds of strong and ruthless people engaged in high-level work. They consistently broke the pattern. They had what I came to call ultra-ego. They could remember a hideous deed perfectly, and with no large signs of disturbance.
Consider, for example, the indescribably powerful psychic force that enabled monsters like Hitler and Stalin to live with the millions of deaths they left in their wake. At a more modest level, but not vastly more comprehensible, are those responsible for the deaths of thousands. It occurs to me not all too comfortably that Hugh can aspire to that category. Taken by intimate measure, Hugh’s ultra-ego is curiously intoxicating to me, and feeds, I suspect, the impulse now driving this girl to become one of Dracula’s ladies—an outrageous exaggeration, and yet not altogether. You see, I have never lost completely my presentiment that the transactions of the spirit underworld are very much connected to us here. In this vein, a man named Noel Field is most relevant to my fears. Do you know that I have days when I cannot think of Allen Dulles without invoking Noel Field’s image, for he has been incarcerated in Soviet prisons for years and Allen put him there back in 1950. Very much with the help of Hugh.
Believe it, my dear husband did confide in me about this exploit. Allen, I learned, was made to look a hell of a fool by Noel Field back in Zurich during World War II. For some reason, Allen trusted Field enough to add his personal recommendation to the names of a number of Europeans proposed by Field for important jobs with the Allied armies. Many of them turned out to be Communists, and Noel, who had more or less known that, never informed Allen of their political bent. (Like many another Quaker, Noel Field did go in, I fear, for the most overweening permissiveness in dealing with Communists.) Well, Allen paid for that mistake in a number of ways, and never forgave Noel. But it took Hugh, in company with Frank Wisner, to come up with an idea how to pay this enterprising Quaker back. In 1949, we managed to get the word out to a few high Soviets that Noel Field was CIA. Pure disinformation. Hugh handled that part and, you may be certain, left no American signature on it. I expect Dulles, Wisner, and Montague assumed that just as soon as Field took his next Red Cross or CARE trip over to Warsaw he would be imprisoned as a spy and some of his close Communist cronies might have to suffer a bit along with him. It went, however, a lot further than that. Stalin was hopelessly insane by then. Field was thrown incommunicado into a Warsaw jail cell, and before the affair was over just about every Communist with whom he had had dealings, plus their numerous circles of cohorts, were either shot, tortured, or imprisoned for confessing to deeds they had not committed. Some put the number of Party victims at a thousand dead; some at five thousand. When I inquired of Hugh, he shrugged and said, “Stalin gave us another Katyn Forest massacre.”
Well, I never knew whether to be proud of my husband’s skills in this matter or aghast, and, of course, the Agency now engages in levitations that can be seen as amusing or scandalous, depending on one’s point of view. Over these last years, we have certainly financed a number of liberal but resolutely anti-Communist organizations who set up a programmatic hue and cry to free the American martyr, Noel Field, from Soviet-Polish oppression.
Later, Harry, during that awful time when I passed through the loneliness of living with my own career failure, I began to think about all those Polish Communists who were falsely executed as traitors. Here was one more example of an evil masterpiece committed by us in the name, and, I believe, ultimately, in the cause, of good, but, oh, the anguish of the victims. I began to wonder if we had not touched some vulnerable edge of the cosmos. I hope this is not so, but I do fear it. I think of the frightful way Herr Adolf massacred millions of people in clean places. They walked into the gas chambers believing they were going to bathe their dirty, tired bodies. Get ready for hot showers, they were told. Then the fatal vents were opened. As I was going under in my own Easter madness, I used to feel as if I could hear those victims screaming in rage, and I began to brood on the possibility that when a death is monstrously unfair, it can send out a curse upon human existence from which we do not necessarily recover in full. Not altogether. Some days when the smog in Washington is inhumanly bilious I wonder if we are not breathing some baleful message from the beyond. You can see how disturbed I am still. Which of course leads me to brood on your dealings with your agent, Chevi Fuertes. What about his life? How responsible are you for what is happening to him? And to the people around him.
Well, I’ve gotten into awfully solemn stuff, have I not? Let us say I am feeling nervous about my upcoming venture, which may prove no picnic either.
Would you divert me? I know it seems like a small request, but if Howard has indeed gotten around to taking you to one of those estancias, would you write to me about that little event? I like the social comedies you get into, and am certain any description of Howard Hunt cavorting with rich Uruguayans will be milk and honey for me—certainly much better than my paranoid fantasies that you are off on brothel expeditions.
Really! We all have to lie so much that a straightforward account is balm to the soul.
Love to you, dear man,
Kittredge