The Company

“Not the Turk, no. I never betrayed him. Our investigators concluded that the Russians had been tipped off by his wife’s brother when he failed to come up with the bride price he’d promised to the wife’s family.”

  “You didn’t betray the Cubans at the Bay of Pigs.”

  “Oh, God, no. I never betrayed the Cubans.”

  “You never passed word to the Russians that the landing had been switched from Trinidad to the Bay of Pigs?”

  Kritzky shook his head.

  “Somebody passed word to the Russians, because Castro’s tanks and artillery were waiting on the other side of the Zapata swamps when the brigade came ashore.”

  “The Joint Chief’s postmortem raised the possibility that Castro’s forces were there on a training exercise.”

  “In other words, chalk it up to coincidence?”

  “A coincidence. Yes. Why not?”

  “There were a lot of coincidences over the years.” Angleton remembered the E.M. Forster’s dictum, which had been posted over Philby’s desk back in the Ryder Street days: “Only connect!” That’s what he was doing now. “You never gave the Russians the brigade’s order of battle but the Cuban fighters who were released from Castro’s prisons said their interrogators knew it. You never told them that Kennedy had ruled out overt American intervention under any circumstances?”

  “No. No. None of it’s true.”

  “Let’s set the clock back to 1956 for a moment. The current DD/O, Elliott Ebbitt, was sent into Budapest under deep cover. Within days he’d been arrested by the Hungarian AVH.”

  “Chances are he was betrayed by a Soviet spy inside the Hungarian resistance movement.”

  Angleton shook his head. “The AVH Colonel who interrogated Elliott seemed to be familiar with his Central Registry file: he knew Elliott worked for Frank Wisner’s Operations Directorate, he knew that he organized émigré drops behind the Iron Curtain out of Frankfurt Station, he was even able to identify Elliott’s superior at Frankfurt Station as Anthony Spink.”

  Leo’s chin nodded onto his chest and then jerked up again.

  “You are one of the thirty-seven officers in Washington whose initials turn up on paper work relating to Ebbitt’s mission. I suppose you want to chalk that up to coincidence, too.”

  Leo said weakly, “What about the other thirty-six,” but Angleton had already turned the page and was struggling to decipher his own handwriting. “You were present in early November of 1956 when the DCI and the DD/O briefed President Eisenhower in the White House on American military preparedness in Europe in the event of war.”

  “I recall that, yes.”

  “What did Eisenhower tell our people?”

  “He said he wished to God he could help the Hungarians, but he couldn’t.”

  “Why couldn’t he?”

  “He and John Foster Dulles were afraid American intervention would trigger a ground war in Europe, for which we weren’t prepared.”

  “There’s a lot of internal evidence to suggest that the Soviet Politburo was divided on intervention and Khrushchev was sitting on the fence. Then, out of the blue, he came down on the side of intervention. It wasn’t because you passed on Eisenhower’s comment, was it?”

  “I never passed anything on to the Russians,” Leo insisted. “I am not a Russian spy. I am not SASHA.”

  “You denied these things when you were hooked up to the polygraph.”

  “Yes. I denied them then. I deny them now.”

  “The experts who read the polygraph decided you were lying.”

  “They’re mistaken, Jim.” One of Leo’s hands waved in slow motion to dispel the cigarette smoke accumulating between the two men. “I am agitated. I am exhausted. I don’t know whether it’s night or day. I’ve lost track of time. Sometimes I say things to you and, a moment later, I can’t remember what I said. The words, the thoughts, slip away from me. I reach for them but they are illusive. I have to sleep, Jim. Please let me sleep.”

  “Only tell me the truth and I’ll turn out the lights and let you sleep as long as you like.”

  A spark of bitterness flared for a moment. “You don’t want the truth. You want me to authenticate lies. You want me to vindicate all these years you’ve been turning the Company inside out looking for SASHA. You’ve never actually caught a mole, have you? But you’ve wrecked the careers of more than a hundred Soviet Division officers looking for one.” Leo licked dried blood from his lips. “I won’t crack, Jim. This can’t go on forever.” He looked up wildly; the lights blazing in the ceiling brought tears to his eyes, blinding him momentarily. “You’re recording this. I know you are. Somebody somewhere will read the transcript. In the end they’re going to become convinced I’m innocent.”

  Angleton flipped to another page in the loose-leaf. “Do you remember the Russian trade attaché in Madrid who offered to sell us the Soviet diplomatic cipher key, but was drugged and hustled onto a Moscow-bound Aeroflot plane before he could deliver?”

  Millie kissed Anthony goodnight, then made her way downstairs to find Jack in the living room fixing himself a stiff whiskey. Lately he always made a beeline for the bar when he came home. “Sorry,” he muttered, and he waved his hand to take in all the things he was sorry for: returning from Langley, once again, at an ungodly hour; getting back too late to help Anthony with his homework or take Millie downtown for a film; being down in the dumps.

  “Don’t tell me—let me guess: You had another hard day at the office,” Millie remarked testily. It was written on his face, inscribed in the worry lines around his eyes. Millie had compared notes with Elizabet over lunch that afternoon; Elizabet’s husband, Jack’s boss, Ebby Ebbitt, had been in a sour mood for weeks, leading the two women to suspect the worst. They teased out various possibilities from the clues they had: the DD/O was being shaken up; one or both of their husbands had been fired or transferred to the Company equivalent of an Arctic listening post; the Company had suffered an operational setback; some friend or colleague was dead or dying, or rotting in a Communist prison somewhere in the world. Both women agreed the worst part was that you couldn’t talk to them about their troubles. Raise the subject and they clammed up and went back to the bar for a chaser. “Jack,” Millie whispered, sinking down onto the couch next to him, “how long is this going to go on?”

  “What?”

  “You know. Something’s very wrong. Is it us? Is it our life together, our marriage?”

  “Oh, Christ, no,” Jack said. “It has nothing to do with you and me. It’s Company stuff.”

  “Bad stuff?”

  “Terrible stuff.”

  “Remember me, Jack? Millie Owen-Brack, your wife for better or for worse? I’m the guy who writes speeches and press releases for the Director,” she reminded him. “I’m cleared for anything you’re cleared for.”

  Jack tossed back half his drink. “You don’t have a need to know, Millie. Even if you knew I don’t see how you could help.”

  “Wives are supposed to be sharers of troubles, Jack. Just sharing will lighten the load. Try.”

  She could see he was tempted. He actually opened his mouth to say something. Then he blew air through his mustache and clamped his mouth shut again. He threw an arm over Millie’s shoulder and drew her against him. “Tell me about your day,” he said.

  Millie leaned her head against his shoulder. “I spent most of my time working up a press kit on this Freedom of Information act. Jesus, if Congress actually passes the damn thing, people will be able to sue the CIA to get their 201 records.”

  Jack nursed his drink. “Always has been, always will be a tension between an intelligence agency’s need to keep its secrets and the public’s right to know what’s going on.”

  “What if the American Communist Party sues the FBI to find out if their phones are being tapped? What then?”

  Jack laughed quietly. “We’ll draw the line where national security is at stake.”

  “You surprise me, Jack—I thought you’d be against this Freedom
of Information business.”

  “As long as there are safeguards built in, hell, I don’t see what’s so Godawful about it.”

  “Hey, you’re turning into a flaming liberal in your old age.”

  Jack’s gaze drifted to a framed photograph on the wall of two men in their early twenties, wearing sleeveless undershirts with large Y’s on the chests, posing in front of a slender racing shell. A thin woman in a knee-length skirt and a man’s varsity sweater stood off to one side. The faded caption on the scalloped white border of the photograph, a copy of which was on Leo’s living room wall, read: Jack & Leo & Stella after The Race but before The Fall. “I believe in this open society of ours,” Jack said. “God knows I’ve been fighting for it long enough. I believe in habeas corpus, I believe every man has a right to his day in court, I believe he has the right to hear the accusations against him and confront his accuser. We sometimes forget that this is what separates us from the goons in the Kremlin.”

  Millie sat up and caressed the back of Jack’s neck. She had never heard him wax passionate about the American system. “Say, Jack, what is going on at your shop?”

  He decided to change the subject. “You still short-handed over in PR?”

  Millie sighed. “Geraldine’s decided to take that private sector job. And Florence is out on maternity leave—hey, she had an ultrasonograph yesterday and found out the baby is a girl. She was disappointed—he husband was hoping for a boy—but I told her she ought to count her blessings.”

  Jack was barely following the conversation. “Why’s that?” he asked absently.

  “I told her I was speaking from experience—it’s hard enough to live with one man, two is twice as difficult. I mean, first off, when you have two men under the same roof they outnumber you—“

  Jack was suddenly gaping into Millie’s eyes. “What did you say?”

  “I said two men in the house outnumber you—“

  “Two men outnumber the wife?”

  “What’s wrong, Jack?”

  “And the two men who outnumber the wife—one is the husband and the other is the firstborn son!”

  “Well, yeah. It was just a joke, Jack.”

  “So if Florence were to give birth to a baby boy, I could send her a note saying ‘Congratulations on the Second Man?’”

  “Well, sure. If you count the husband as the first man.”

  Ebby had been on target: the answer was staring him in the face, it was just a matter of coming at the problem from the right direction. Jack bounded from the couch, plucked his sports jacket off the back of it and headed for the front door.

  “Where are you going, Jack?”

  “To find the first man.”

  Adelle was at her wit’s end. She’d spoken with Director Colby twice in the past five weeks. The first time, he’d phoned her to apologize for hustling Leo off to Asia on such short notice; he’d asked her to pack a suitcase and had sent a car around to pick it up. When three weeks had gone by without word from Leo, Adelle had put in a call to the Director. It had taken her three more calls and two days to get past the gatekeepers. Not to worry, Colby had said when she finally managed to speak with him. Leo was fine and engaged in vital work for the Company; with Leo’s help, Colby had said, he had high hopes that some extremely important matters might be cleared up. He was sorry he couldn’t tell her more. Naturally he counted on her discretion; the fewer people who knew Leo was out of town, the better. Adelle had asked if she could get a letter through to her husband; the Director had given her a post-office box number that she could write to and had promised to call her the moment he had more news.

  Her two letters sent to the post-box had gone unanswered.

  Now, five weeks after their return from France, she still had no direct word from Leo. Vanessa was starting to ask questions; Daddy had never disappeared before like this, she noted. Another week and he’d miss Philip Swett’s eightieth-birthday shindig, a Georgetown bash that was expected to attract Congressmen and Cabinet members and Supreme Court justices, perhaps even the Vice President. Vanessa, who doted on her father, looked so worried that Adelle swore her to secrecy and told Leo had been sent to Asia on an extremely important mission. Why would the Company pack the Soviet Division chief off to Asia? Vanessa wanted to know. It wasn’t logical, was it? It wasn’t necessarily illogical, Adelle said. Soviet Russia stretched across the continent to Asia; according to the newspapers, there were Soviet submarine and missile bases on the Kamchatka Peninsula that would be of great interest to the Central Intelligence Agency.

  The answer satisfied Vanessa but it left Adelle with the queasy feeling that Colby was being less than straightforward with her. She decided then and there to see if her father could find out where Leo had been sent to, and why.

  Philip Swett had grown hard-of-hearing with age and Adelle had to repeat the story several times before her father grasped the problem. “You trying to tell me you haven’t seen hide nor hair of that husband of yours in five weeks?” he demanded.

  “Not a word, Daddy.”

  “And that Colby fellow said he’d packed him off to Malaysia?”

  “Not Malaysia, Daddy. Asia.”

  “By golly, I’ll get to the bottom of this,” Swett swore. And he put in a call to Henry Kissinger over at the State Department.

  Kissinger returned the call within the hour. “Phil, what can I do for you?” he asked.

  Swett explained that his son-in-law, Leo Kritzky, who happened to be the Soviet Division chief over at Langley, seemed to have dropped from sight. Colby was giving his daughter a song and dance about Kritzky being off on a mission to Asia.

  “Where’s the problem?” Kissinger demanded. Here he was, trying to trim American foreign policy sails to weather the Presidential impeachment tempest brewing in Congress; he didn’t have the time or the energy to track down missing CIA personnel.

  “Tarnation, Henry, the boy’s been gone for five weeks and there hasn’t been a letter, a phone call, nothing.”

  Kissinger’s office rang Swett back that afternoon. One of the Secretary’s aides had checked with Langley. It seemed as if Kritzky was on a personal mission for the DCI. The Company had declined to give out any further information and had made it clear that it didn’t appreciate inquiries of this nature.

  Swett recognized a brush off when he saw one. By golly, he was going to have a word with that Colby fellow if he ran into him. There had been a time when Harry Truman tried out his speeches on Swett, when Dwight Eisenhower sought his advice, when young John Kennedy ruminated aloud in his presence about the imbecility of allowing the Central Intelligence Agency to organize an invasion of Cuba. Come to think of it, Charles de Gaulle had put his finger on the problem before he died four years before: Old age was a shipwreck, he’d said. This time next week Swett would be pushing eighty from the wrong side. Pretty soon folks wouldn’t even return his calls.

  Stretching out on the couch, Philip Swett made a mental note to phone his daughter when he woke up from his afternoon nap. Chances were Kritzky was off in Malaysia, just as Colby said; chances were he’d be back in time for Swett’s damn birthday party. Swett wouldn’t lose any sleep if he didn’t show up. Always wondered what the devil his mule of a daughter saw in Kritzky. Recently she’d dropped hints that their marriage wasn’t all that swell. Well, if she decided to divorce that Jewish fellow, he for one wouldn’t shed any tears…

  Philip Swett’s lids twitched shut over his eyes with a strange weightiness, blotting out the light with such finality he wondered if he would ever see it again.

  A filament of moonlight stole through the gap between the curtains on the window and etched a silver seam into the wooden planking on the floor. Wide-awake on the giant bed, Manny pressed his ear against Nellie’s spinal column and eavesdropped on her breathing. The night before, high on daiquiris and Beaujolais Nouveau, they had wandered back to her apartment from a small French restaurant in Georgetown. Manny had been quieter than usual. Kicking off her shoes and c
urling up on the couch next to him, Nellie had sensed he was preoccupied with something other than her. I could take your mind off it, she had murmured, teasingly pressing her lips into his ear, her breast into his arm. And shrugging off the shoulder straps of the silky black mini-dress, she’d done just that. There had been an impatient exploration of possibilities on the couch. Then they’d padded into the bedroom and made love a second time with lazy premeditation, spread-eagled across fresh sheets scented with lilac. Afterward, losing all sense of time, they had talked in undertones until traffic ceased to move through the street below Nellie’s apartment.

  In the early hours of the morning Nellie had gotten around to the subject that was mystifying her. “So why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why tonight? Why did you fuck me?”

  “I didn’t fuck you, Nellie. I made love to you.”

  “Oh, you certainly did, Manny. But you haven’t answered the question. Why tonight?”

  “I figured out that the object of intercourse is intimacy, and not the other way round. For reasons I can’t explain it suddenly seemed very important—I needed a close friend close.”

  “That may be the nicest thing a man’s ever said to me, Manny,” she had whispered in the slow, husky rasp of someone slipping into delicious unconsciousness. “Incest definitely beats…masturbation.”

  Now, while she slept, Manny’s thoughts drifted back to his most recent session with AE/PINNACLE. Late in the afternoon he’d debriefed Kukushkin in the living room of Agatha’s apartment near Rockville, scribbling furiously even though the tape recorder was capturing every word the Russian uttered. Kukushkin seemed edgier than usual, prowling the room as he delivered the latest batch of serials.

  —Moscow Centre had forged the letter from Chinese Premier Minister Chou En-lai, published in an African newspaper the previous month, which seemed to suggest that Chou considered the Cultural Revolution to have been a political error.

  —the KGB was financing a costly world-wide campaign in support of ratification of the Revised ABM Treaty, limiting the Soviet Union and the United States to one anti-ballistic missile site each.