OMEGA–3

SOUTH OF THE POTOMAC, JUST BELOW WASHINGTON, THE VIRGINIA WOODS were not well treated by the profit-taking of the last ten years. The wildland swamps had been drained and covered with asphalt, quartered with superhighways, studded with corporate implants—I speak of office buildings—and blindsided by molecule-like chains of condominiums. The parking lots in summer are now as bilious as natural gas. I was no lover of the development of the humid environs where I had worked for so long. And the drive from the Langley gate out to Harlot’s farmhouse was traffic-jammed for all fifteen miles. His place, a pre–Civil War small beauty which he purchased in 1964, used to stand alone on an old dirt road lined with maples, but now that the four-lane had been built, the house was left on an off-highway eyebrow just twenty yards from where the trucks blasted by. A depressing metamorphosis. It did not help that after his accident, the interior had had to be partially gutted to install a ramp permitting him to propel his wheelchair from the first floor to the second.

All the same, not many occasions in my life had been more momentous than the summer day in 1982 when Harlot had invited me to work again with him. “Yes,” he had said, “I need your assistance so much that I will forgo my true innings.” His knuckles, huge as carbuncles, fretted his wheelchair forward and back.

Harlot’s call to new work was well timed. At Langley I had been in the doldrums. I was sick of walking the corridors. At Langley we had corridors not unreminiscent of the fluorescent pedestrian routes in a huge airport—we even had a wall of glass looking on the central garden. One could pass hundreds of doors on any corridor, all color-coded, leaf green, burnt orange, madder pink, Dresden blue, designed by a pastel-minded coordinator to bring cheer and logic to our cubicles. The colors were to tell you what kind of work was done behind the doors. Of course in the old days—let us say twenty and more years ago—a number of the offices were being run undercover, so the color of the door was misleading. Now only a few such doors were around. I was bored with that. My office door practiced no deception these days. My career (and my wife’s) might just as well have been ended. In fact, as I will soon explain, Kittredge and I were not often in Washington anymore, not nearly so much as we stayed at the Keep. For a long time I had been walking a treadmill of no advancement under five Directors of Central Intelligence, no less than Mr. Schlesinger, Mr. Colby, Mr. Bush, Admiral Turner, and Mr. Casey, who, when he passed me in the hall either did not know me, or chose not to greet me by name (after more than twenty-five years in the Company!). Well, who could not see the shadow? Two former Chiefs of Station at two Third World republics, now back at Langley and ready for retirement, shared my office—what was left of my office. They served as my case officers—in this case, editors—for the books I oversaw and/or ghosted. They had reputations as burnt-out cases, much like me. Their reputations, unlike mine, were deserved. Thorpe was drunk at ten in the morning, and his eyes were like marbles, full of pep. They bounced, if they happened to meet your gaze. The other, Gamble, had a stone-dead expression and was of late a vegetarian. He never raised his voice. He was like a man who has flattened twenty years in a state penitentiary. And I? I was ready for a quarrel with anyone.

It was at exactly this time, when disaffection was collecting in my pores like bile, that Harlot summoned me to his rump office at the farmhouse in Virginia, much as he must have called in several other men like myself, still ambitious enough to know rage that their careers were in irons, yet old enough to suffer the knowledge that their best years were committed and gone. Who knows what Harlot cooked up for the others? I can tell you what he talked about with me.

We, at CIA, had gone through some considerable suffering on the exposure of the Family Jewels in 1975. Maybe a few bushmen in Australia had not heard how we labored to rub Fidel Castro out, but by the time the Senate Select Committee to Study Intelligence Activities was done inquiring, there were very few bushmen. The rest of the world had learned that we were ready to kill Patrice Lumumba as well, and had gone in for LSD experiments in brainwashing so exuberantly that one of our subjects, a Dr. Frank Olson (on government contract), had jumped out a window. We hid the fact from his widow. She spent twenty years thinking her husband was an ordinary suicide, which is onerous for a family to believe since there are no ordinary suicides. We opened mail between Russia and the U.S. and closed it again and sent it on. We spied on high government officials like Barry Goldwater and Bobby Kennedy; we had all of those activities advertised in the marketplace. Since we are, at CIA, a proud and secretive people, we felt not unlike a convention of Methodist ministers who are sued by a fine hotel for infesting the bed linen with crab lice. The Company has never been quite the same since exposure of the Family Jewels.

In its wake, many of our top men had to go. Harlot, however, could hardly be dismissed in these, the worst of times, since he had accumulated too much sympathy at Langley for his gallant perambulations down the hall in his wheelchair. He was allowed to stay and fish the eddies. He could work on matters that would attract no attention. Of course, it was generally agreed: Harlot, too, had been left to molder.

Seven years later, however, he was calling me to action. “I ask us, Harry boy,” he said, “to forgive the spears we’ve left in one another. There is a scandal forming that will prove worse than the Skeletons”—which was his term for the Family Jewels. “I’d estimate about as much worse as Hiroshima was an order of magnitude beyond Pearl Harbor. The Skeletons decimated our ranks; the High Holies, if not excised, will cut us right out of the map.”

When he said no more, I stepped back. “I like the name,” I said. “High Holies.”

“A good name,” he agreed. Whereupon he did a quadrille with his wheelchair, to and fro, wheel to one side, wheel to the other. He was in his late sixties by now but his eyes and voice belonged to a man who could still charge the troops.

“I vouchsafe,” he said, “that few things ever perplexed me as much as Watergate. We had so many ducks in the White House pond. As you have reason to know, I put in one or two myself.” I nodded.

“All the same,” Harlot went on, “I wasn’t prepared for Watergate. That was an extraordinarily dippy operation. Nothing adds up. I had to conclude we were being entertained not by one master plan, no matter how ill conceived, but three or four by different parties. All managed to collide. When the stakes are high, coincidences collect. Shakespeare certainly believed that. No other explanation for Macbeth or Lear.”

He had succeeded in irritating me. At this moment, I did not wish to discuss Macbeth or Lear.

“Call the break-in at Watergate act one,” he said. “Good first act. Full of promise. But no answers. Now comes act two: the crash, six months later, of the United Airlines plane 553 from Washington to Chicago. It’s trying to land at Midway Airport and falls short in the most unbelievable fashion. The plane rips up a neighborhood of small houses not two miles shy of the airport, and in the process kills forty-three of the sixty-one people aboard. Do you know who was on board that plane?”

“I suppose I did once.”

“The half-life of your memory retains no trace?”

“Obviously not.”

“Dorothy Hunt is the most significant passenger to perish.” He held up his hand. “Now, of course, Watergate had not yet cracked open. This is December 1972, a couple of months before Senator Ervin and his committee open shop, and quite a few weeks before our wallah, James McCord, is to sing his first note. Long before John Dean tunes up. Howard Hunt had, you must remember, been breaking a lot of noxious wind up White House way to the effect that, in his immortal words, he would not be a patsy, and Dorothy Hunt was certainly tougher than Howard. In a tight spot, you’d give her the pistol.” I shrugged. The point was moot. I had worked for Howard Hunt. “Still!” said Harlot, “that’s an awful lot of cannon to kill one bee. Scores of people dead. Who could have done it? Not the White House. They wouldn’t mug an airplane. After all, the White House couldn’t even give Mr. Liddy a fatal dose of the measles, not even at his invitation, nor did they put the fatal ray on Dean, nor on Hunt, nor on McCord. How, then, could they have given the go-ahead to something so wholesale as this plane crash? It could be sabotage. The White House is obviously aware of such a possibility. The same Butterfield who will later confess to the Ervin Committee that Richard Nixon taped everything but his trips to the loo is moved over to the Federal Aviation Administration, and Dwight Chapin of CREEP goes to United Airlines. The Nixon palace is obviously positioning itself against a runaway investigation. I think they also suspect us. Nixon, as an old China lobby hand, knows all about the plane that blew up years ago when Chou En-Lai was supposed to be on board. So he understands. We know how to sabotage a plane—they don’t. It poses a frightful question. If flight 553 to Chicago was buggered in order to get Dorothy Hunt, then she had to be holding on to no ordinary piece of information. You don’t demolish twoscore civilians in order to terminate one lady unless she is in possession of an ultimate.”

“What do you say is ultimate here?” I asked.

He smiled.

“I always,” he said, “refer to my own values when trying to solve these matters. What would get me up for that? Well, I reasoned, I would embark on such egregious slaughter if the target, Mrs. Hunt, knows who was behind the Kennedy assassination, and I cannot afford to let that get out. Or two, Nixon or Kissinger is a KGB mole, and target has the evidence. Or three, elements among us have managed to dip into the Federal Reserve pond.”

“What has the Federal Reserve to do with Dorothy Hunt?”

“Good Harry-boy, take a look at who else was in the Watergate Office Building back there in June 1972. The Federal Reserve kept an office on the seventh floor just above the National Democratic Committee layout. What makes you think McCord was bugging the Democrats? He could have been using the ceiling of the sixth floor to put a spike-mike into the floor of the seventh. McCord is not merely a religious monomaniac, you know. He happens to be talented.

“Try to conceive then of how long I’ve been brooding on these matters. It’s years since Dorothy’s crash. Yet I do keep coming back to the Federal Reserve. If a few of us were tapping into the seventh floor then, maybe we are at it still. Advance information on when the Federal Reserve is going to shift the interest rate is worth, conservatively, a good many billions.” He leaned forward. He whispered into my ear. Two good words. “High Holies,” he said. Then he turned his wheelchair toward me. “I have loads of stuff for you to do.”

We shook hands on it. We would be rogue elephants together. As I suspected, he was persona non grata in many an office where he needed a look at the files, and I still had access. Under one ghost’s name or another, I was helping on a few pro-CIA spy novels which were not as popular as they used to be—not the pro-CIA jobs, anyway—as well as overseeing one or two scholarly works, not to mention dashing off an occasional magazine piece on the new invidiousness of the old Commie threat. Will it help to explain that under various names I dealt with commercial publishers as agent, author, freelance editor, and even had my pseudonym on several books I did not write so much as midwife for others? Of course, I did a few jobs as full ghost myself. If a prominent evangelist took a trip to Eastern Europe or Moscow, intermediaries called on me afterward to boil the sap of his taped meanderings into homiletic American for the patriotic subscribers of Reader’s Digest. I mock my published work, and that is fair. My serious work had cost me more.

Indeed, I was by now my own semicomic legend at Langley. For years, ever since my return from Vietnam, I had been working, first at Harlot’s behest, then—after the rupture—on my own, over a monumental work on the KGB whose in-progress title was The Imagination of the State. Great hopes had been attached to this book early by Harlot, and by others. The job, however, was never honestly begun. Too monumental. Notes proliferated, yet over a decade and more the actual writing hardly progressed. I was bogged down in confusions, lack of desire, and too many petty literary jobs. A number of years ago, in secret with myself—I did not even tell Kittredge—I gave up The Imagination of the State in preference to the literary work I really wished to do, which was a detailed memoir about my life in the CIA. This book progressed apace. I had already, in the couple of days I could give to it each week, been able to describe my childhood, my family, my education, my training, and my first real job—a stint in Berlin, circa 1956. I had gone on to cover my station work in Uruguay and an extended stint in Miami during that period when we were having our undeclared war with Castro.

I thought my memoir was reading decently (even if I was my only critic), but I was tempted to call it a novel. It was impermissibly candid. I had included material on several of our assassination attempts. Some of that was public knowledge, but a good deal remained privileged. I felt much at sea. This very long memoir, call it my novel, had not yet taken me to Vietnam, nor back to my work in the Nixon White House during the early seventies. Nor did it include my affair with Kittredge and our marriage. I had navigated my way across half of a large space (my past) and if I put it in that fashion, it is because I did not see how I could publish the manuscript, this Alpha manuscript as I called it—working title: The Game. Of course, it did not matter how it was christened. By the pledge I had taken on entering the Agency, it was simply not publishable. The legal office of the Agency would never permit this work to find a public audience. Nonetheless, I wished The Game to shine in a bookstore window. I had simple literary desires. I even descended into depression at fashioning in secret so massive a work. Was I to be one of the first to create a manuscript that would have to be passed from hand to hand as a species of American samizdat? Could I take such a plunge? For if I did not, I was misrepresenting myself to myself. Such self-deception may be analogous to looking in the mirror and not meeting one’s eyes.

In any event, since my colleagues in the Company knew no more than that my work on the KGB had not gotten off the ground, I was being treated (and CIA is good at this) as one of the sad people. It is equal to being an unproductive child in a large and talented family. Indeed, I was encouraged to work on semi-sabbaticals at home in Maine for weeks, sometimes months, at a time. Yet, if I was thick with resentment on the one hand, it was joy on the other to be rid of those low Virginia suburbs. Of course, I still pretended to be taking work papers for The Imagination of the State back to Maine, back to the Keep, but, oh, how many trips I had made lately to Langley, how many odd memos I had been hunting down for Harlot along with files I needed for purported legitimate intellectual burrowings. Administratively speaking, my need to know was too complex to keep tabs on. I had been around so long that they preferred to ignore me. Seen as a self-absorbed nest-builder, I was able to get copies of hot stuff out in my briefcase along with reams of papers I was entitled to withdraw. It was worth one’s limbs to be caught on some of the high-temperature sheets I passed on to Harlot. The irony is that I journeyed all the way from Maine to Washington to pick up the consecrated bread, but delivered it just fifteen miles down the line from Langley to where Harlot still steered himself around in that small Virginia farmhouse once shared with Kittredge.

Yes, we were on a mission; the High Holies. And I could just about lose my neck for that—which is to say, my job, my pension, my freedom. Jail was conceivably on the horizon. Yet, not for anything could I trust Harlot’s sentiments toward me. All the same, I had signed up with him as if he were fate itself. There are more metastases in guilt than in cancer itself. I remember muttering in my throat at the power of such a premise even as I drove along in Maine.