“I know why I’m here. I know why they’re here,” he said, waving toward the Cubans sprawled around the deck. “I don’t know what you’re doing here, Jack.”
“I’m here because I was ordered to come out and hold your hand, Roberto.”
“That’s horseshit and you know it. I heard you volunteered.”
“This is a hot assignment for a young officer looking for a promotion.”
“More horseshit, hombre.”
The shooting on the fo’c’s’le had stopped. Darkness had fallen abruptly, as it does in the Caribbean. Stars were still-dancing over the tips of the swaying masts. The bow wave, filled with phosphorescent seaweed, washed down the sides of the ancient hull. Jack polished off his rum. “In the beginning,” he told Roberto, “it was inertia. I was in motion—been in motion since they sent me off to Berlin ten years ago. And a body in motion tends to continue in motion. Then it was curiosity, I suppose. Where I come from you’re brought up to test yourself.” He thought of Anthony. “You climb to your feet, you fall down, you climb to your feet again. It’s only by testing yourself that you discover yourself.”
“So what have you discovered?”
“A center, a bedrock, a cornerstone, the heart of the heart of the matter. On one level I’m the son of an Irish immigrant buying into America. But that’s only part of the story. I came down here hoping to find the beginning of an answer to the eternal question of what life is all about. To give it a name, Roberto, I guess what I discovered was something worth rowing for besides speed.”
Dick Bissell’s Cuba war room on the ground floor of Quarters Eye had been transformed for what one Company clown had billed as a premortem autopsy on the cadaver known as JMARC, the last global review scheduled before the Cuban freedom fighters hit the beaches. Fifty or so folding chairs had been set up in semicircular rows facing a lectern. Folding metal tables off to one side were filled with sandwiches, soft drinks and electric coffee urns. There was a handwritten sign posted on the inside of the door advising participants that they could make notes for the purposes of discussion, but they were obliged to deposit them in the burn bin when they left the room. Dick Bissell, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his tie hanging loose around his neck, had been talking nonstop for one and a quarter hours. Now, turning to the wall behind him, he tapped the grease pencil marks on the plastic overlay to bring everyone up to date on the progress of the five freighters ferrying Brigade 2506 toward the beaches designated Blue and Red at the Bay of Pigs. “We’re at D-minus-three and counting,” he said. “Planes from the Essex, patrolling the airspace between Cuba and the invasion fleet, have seen no indication of increased air or sea activity on the part of Castro’s forces. We haven’t stepped up the U-2 overflights for the obvious reason that we don’t want to alert Castro. The single overflight on D-minus-four showed no unusual activity either.”
A Marine colonel sheepdipped to JMARC said from the front row, “Dick, the communications people on Swan Island did pick up a sharp increase in coded traffic between Point One and several militia units on the island. And the Pentagon is reporting more radio traffic than usual between the Soviet embassy in Havana and Moscow.”
Leo raised a finger. “There’s also that report from the Cuban government in exile in Miami about the two Cuban militiamen who fled in a fishing boat to Florida last night—the militiamen, from the 312th Militia Battalion stationed on the Isle of Pines, reported that all leaves have been cancelled until further notice.”
Bissell took a sip of water, then said, “So far we’ve been unable to confirm the report from the militiamen, nor is there evidence of leaves being cancelled anywhere else in Cuba. As for the increase in Cuban military traffic, I want to remind you all that we’ve known since late February that the Cuban General Staff was planning to call a surprise alert sometime in late March or early April to test the readiness of the militia to respond to an emergency situation. The alert even had a code name—“
Leo said, “The Cubans were calling it Operation Culebras.”
“That’s it,” Bissell said. “Culebras. Snakes.”
“Which leaves the Russian traffic,” Ebby noted from the second row. Bissell worked a cap on and off of a fountain pen. “If you take the traffic between any given Soviet embassy in the world and Moscow, you’ll see that it fluctuates from week to week and month to month. So I don’t see what conclusions we can draw from an increase in Russian diplomatic traffic. For all we know, a Russian code clerk in the Havana embassy could be having a hot love affair with a code clerk in Moscow.”
“That’s not very convincing,” Ebby muttered.
Bissell stared hard at him. “How would you read these particular tea leaves, Eb?”
Ebby looked up from some notes he had jotted on a scrap of paper. “It’s the nature of the beast that every morsel of intelligence can have several interpretations. Still, every time we see a detail that would appear to warn us off JMARC, we somehow manage to explain it away.”
And there it was, out in the open for everyone to see: the visceral misgivings of one of the Company’s most respected middle-level officers, a veteran of the CIA’s unsuccessful efforts to infiltrate agents behind the Iron Curtain in the early fifties, a holder of the Distinguished Intelligence Medal for his exploits in Budapest in 1956. The room turned still—so still that it was possible to hear a woman in the back scratching away on a cuticle with a nail file. Bissell said, very quietly, “Your every time we see a detail covers an awful lot of territory, Eb. Are you suggesting that we’re institutionally incapable of criticizing an operation?”
“I guess I am, Dick. I guess I’m saying it is an institutional problem—the Company has the action in Cuba, so it has become the advocate, as opposed to the critic, of the action it has. What criticism I’ve seen always seems to be confined to this or that detail, never to whether the operation itself is flawed.”
“D-minus-three seems to me to be pretty late in the game for second thoughts.”
“I’ve had second thoughts all along. I did raise the problem of our losing the so-called guerrilla option when we switched the landing site from Trinidad to the Bay of Pigs. When I was brought in on the logistics end of the operation, I wrote a paper suggesting that the obsession with being able to plausibly deny an American role in the invasion had adversely influenced the choice of materiel—we are using old, slow cargo ships with limited storage space below decks, we are using antiquated B-26 bombers flying from air bases in Central America instead of southern Florida, giving them less time over target.” Ebby, tormented by the possibility that the Company was treating the Cubans freedom fighters the way it had treated the Hungarians five years before, shut his eyes and massaged the lids with the thumb and third finger of his right hand. “Maybe I should have raised these points more forcefully—“
Bissell swatted at the air with a palm as if he were being strafed by an insect. “If those are your only objections—“
Ebby bristled. “They’re not my only objections, not by a long shot—“
“Mr. Ebbitt seems to forget that we pulled off this kind of operation in Guatemala,” a young woman working on the propaganda team commented from the back row.
Ebby was growing angrier by the second. “There’s been nothing but repression in Guatemala since we got rid of Arbenz,” he said, twisting around in his seat. “Ask the Mayan campesinos if we succeeded. Ask them if—“
Bissell tried to calm things down. “Okay, Eb. That’s what we’re here for. Let’s hear your objections.”
“For starters,” Ebby began, “it’s an open question whether the so-called Guatemala model will work in Cuba. Castro won’t scare off the way Arbenz did in Guatemala simply because we land a brigade of émigrés on one of his beaches. He’s made of sterner stuff. Look at his track record. He and a handful of guerrilla fighters sailed to Cuba on a small yacht, took to the mountains and survived everything Batista could throw at them, and finally walked into Havana when Batista lost his nerve and ran
for it. Today Castro is thirty-two years old, a confident and vigorous man on the top of his game, with zealous supporters in the military and civilian infrastructure.”
Ebby pushed himself to his feet and walked around to one of the tables and drew himself a cup of coffee. Behind him, nobody uttered a word. He dropped two lumps of sugar into the cup and stirred it with a plastic spoon as he turned back to face Bissell. “Look at the whole thing from another angle, Dick. Even if the invasion does succeed, the whole world will see this for what it is: a CIA operation from start to finish. The fact of the matter is that JMARC is likely to cripple the Company for years to come. We’re supposed to steal secrets and then analyze the bejesus out of them. Period. Using the Company to do covertly what the government doesn’t have the balls to do overtly is going to make it harder for us to collect intelligence. What business do we have mounting an amphibious invasion of a country because the Kennedys are pissed at the guy who runs it? We have an Army and a Navy and the Marines and an Air Force—they’re supposed to handle things like invasions.” Ebby opened his mouth to say something else, then, shrugging, gave up.
At the lectern, Bissell had been toying with his wedding ring, slipping it up and back on his finger until the skin was raw. “Whoever called this a premortem certainly knew what he was talking about,” he said uneasily. Nervous laughter rippled through the war room. “Anyone who assumes that we haven’t agonized over the points Ebbitt raised would be selling us short. What you’re saying, Eb—what we’ve said to ourselves so many times the words ring in my brain like a broken record—is that there are risks no matter what we do. There are risks in not taking risks. Risks in moving the invasion site to the more remote Bay of Pigs. Risks in using obsolete B-26s instead of Skyhawks. Risks in calculating how the Cuban people and the Cuban Army will respond to the landings. Our job up on the top floor is to calculate these risks and then weigh them against the downside. Which, believe me, is what we’ve done.” Bissell’s voice was hoarse and fading fast. He took another gulp of water. Then he straightened his stooped shoulders as if he were a soldier on a parade ground. “Let me be clear—I believe in the use of power, when it’s available, for purposes that I regard as legitimate. Ridding the hemisphere of Castro, freeing the Cuban people from the oppression of Communism, is clearly legitimate. So we’ll go forward, gentlemen and ladies, and win this little war of ours ninety miles from the coast of Florida.”
The Marine colonel hammered a fist into the air. A dozen or so people in the room actually applauded. Bissell, embarrassed, shuffled through his notes. “Now I want to say a word about the bogus coded messages we’re going to broadcast from Swan Island…”
Later in the day, after the premortem, a number of old hands went out of their way to stop Ebby in the hallway and tell him that they shared some of his reservations on JMARC; they had gone along, they admitted, out of a kind of group-think that tended to confuse criticism with disloyalty. At one point Ebby ran across Tony Spink, his old boss from Frankfurt, in the men’s room. Spink, who had been put in charge of air drops to anti-Castro guerrillas holed up in the mountains of Cuba, remarked that Bissell and the topsiders seemed so fucking sure of themselves, he’d begun to suspect there had to be an aspect of JMARC he didn’t know about, something that would tilt the scales in favor of going ahead. What are we talking about? Ebby wondered; what could tilt the scales, in your opinion? Maybe Kennedy has quietly signalled Bissell that he’s ready to send in American forces if it looked as if Castro was getting the upper hand. Ebby thought about this for a moment. Bissell may be calculating that Kennedy, faced with defeat, will relent and send in the Skyhawks, Ebby said. But if this is what Bissell was thinking he was deluding himself; why would Kennedy go to all the trouble and expense of unleashing a covert operation if, in the end, he planned to bail it out with overt intervention? It just didn’t make sense. You’ve got to be right, Spink said. It had to be something else, something such as…Spink, who was nearing retirement age and looking forward to returning to civilian life, screwed up his face. Didn’t you work for Torriti in Berlin before you came to Frankfurt Station? he asked. Yes I did, Ebby acknowledged, I worked for him until something I said about his alcohol consumption got back to him. So what’s the Sorcerer doing here in Washington? Spink asked. And he answered his own question: he’s running something called Staff D, which is supposed to be dealing with communications intercepts. Ebby got his point. The Sorcerer wasn’t a communications maven, he said. Spink nodded in agreement. He was liaising with the Mafia on Sicily at the end of the war, Spink remembered.
It dawned on Ebby what his friend was driving at. He smiled grimly. No, he said. It’s just not possible. Even Bissell wouldn’t do that. Can you imagine the stink if it ever leaked. No.
Spink raised his eyebrows knowingly. Maybe.
No. No.
But the idea was planted in Ebby’s head and he couldn’t dislodge it.
Returning near midnight to the small house he and Elizabet rented in Arlington, Ebby found his wife sitting on the couch in the living room, one weak bulb burning in a lamp, her legs tucked under her, a Scotch in one hand, the half-empty bottle on the floor. “Elliott, my sweet love, you are not going to believe what happened to me today,” Elizabet announced.
Ebby threw off his suit jacket and sank wearily onto the couch next to her; she stretched out with her head on his thigh. “Try me,” he said.
“The school phoned me up at State late this afternoon,” she began. “Nellie was at it again. She was caught fighting with a boy. This one was a year older and a head taller but that didn’t faze her. I found her in the infirmary with wads of cotton stuffed in her nostrils to stop the bleeding. The principal warned me the next time she picked a fight they would treat her like a juvenile delinquent and call in the police. Parents were starting to complain, he said. My God, Elliott, the way he talked about her you would have thought Nellie was a hardened criminal.” Elizabet laughed nervously. “She’ll be the first eleven-year-old to make it onto the FBI’s ten most wanted list. Naturally, Nellie’s version of the fight was different from the principal’s. She said the boy, whose name was William, had been teasing her because she spoke English with an accent. When she said she came from Hungary and spoke Hungarian to prove it, he announced to everyone within earshot that she was a dirty Communist. At which point Nellie socked him in the face. Which is when this William, bleeding from a cut lip, punched her in the nose. I have to admit, the first time this sort of thing happened I thought it was rather funny but I’ve stopped laughing, Elliott. What am I going to do with her? She can’t go through life socking someone every time she gets pissed at him, can she?”
Ebby said grimly, “I don’t see why not. That’s how our government operates.”
The cold fury in his voice made Elizabet sit up. She scrutinized what she could see of his face in the shadows of the living room. “Elliott, my love, I’m sorry—something’s very wrong, and here I’ve been carrying on about Nellie. What’s happening? What’s happened?”
Ebby let his fingers drift from her waist to the breast that had been injured in prison. She pressed her palm over the back of his hand, validating the complicity between them.
After a moment she said, very softly, “Want to tell me about it?”
“Can’t.”
“Another of your goddamned secrets?”
He didn’t say anything.
“How serious is it?”
“The people I work for are involved in something that’s going to blow up in their faces. I don’t want to be part of it. I’ve decided to resign from the Company. I’ve already written the letter. I would have given it to Dulles today but he’d gone by the time I got over to his office. I’m going to put the letter in his hands tomorrow morning.”
“You ought to sleep on it, Elliott.”
“Sleeping on it isn’t going to change anything. I have to resign in protest against what they’re doing. When the word gets around maybe others will do the same th
ing. Maybe, just maybe, we can head Bissell off—“
“So it’s Bissell?”
“I shouldn’t have said that.”
“As usual, I don’t have a need to know.”
“You’re a Company wife, Elizabet. You know the rules.”
Elizabet was not put off. “If it’s Bissell that means we’re talking about Cuba. Those Cubans who have been training in Guatemala are going to be turned loose. Oh my God, they’re going to invade Cuba!” Elizabet immediately thought of the Hungarian revolution. “Is Kennedy going to order American planes to protect them?”
“Bissell’s probably counting on it. He thinks he can force Kennedy’s hand.”
“What do you think?”
“I think…I think it’s liable to be Hungary all over again. People are going to climb out on a limb, then the limb will be cut off and they will be obliged to fend for themselves, and a lot of them are going to wind up very dead.”
Elizabet folded herself into his arms and buried her lips in his neck. “Surely you can make them see the light—“
“They’ve told themselves over and over that it’s going to work. If you repeat something often enough, it sounds possible. Repeat it some more and it begins to sound like a sure thing.”
“You should still sleep on it, my love. Remember what you told Arpád at Kilian the day you voted in favor of surrendering to the Russians? You belong to the live-to-fight-another-day school. Who will speak out against things like this if you’re not around?”
“What’s the good of speaking out if nobody listens?”
“There’s always somebody listening to the voice of sanity,” Elizabet said. “If we don’t hold on to that, we’re really lost.”
Sleeping on it, however, only reinforced Ebby’s determination to resign in protest; he had lived to fight another day, and fought—and nothing seemed to change. The CIA was still sending friendly nationals off to fight its wars, and watching from the safety of Fortress America to see how many would survive. At ten in the morning Ebby strode past two secretaries and a security guard and pushed through a partly open door into Dulles’s spacious corner office. The Director, looking more drawn than Ebby remembered, sat hunched over his desk, studying a profile on him that was going to appear in the New York Times Magazine. “Ebbitt,” he said, looking up, making no effort to hide his irritation; only the several Deputy Directors and the head of counterintelligence, Jim Angleton, had no-knock access to the DCI’s sacristy. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”