We laughed. We applauded. He strode across the stage to an easel on which a cloth was draped. Whisking the sheet away, he revealed the first of our scrolls—an organizational chart. With a pointer, he informed us that the Agency had three Directorates which could be envisaged as analogous to three sister corporations, or three regiments of a division: “The Directorate for Plans oversees covert action and gathers intelligence. It directs spies. Learn a new word. Plans runs spies, even as you would run a business.” Since espionage and counterespionage were Harlot’s province, and covert action belonged to my father, the Directorate of Plans was nine-tenths of CIA for me.
Then he went on to speak of the Directorate for Intelligence, which analyzed the material gathered by Plans, and the Directorate for Administration, “which keeps in order the management of the first two directorates.” Needless to say, I had no interest in either.
“Gentlemen,” he continued, “you one hundred and three men”—he looked about—“or, if I avail myself of the indispensable tool of precision, you one hundred and one men and two women have been chosen for the Directorate of Plans. That is a fine place to be.”
We cheered. We stood up and cheered him, but not for long because next, Allen Dulles, now Director of Central Intelligence, came through the curtains to speak. On this day, Mr. Dulles had a genial, courteous, even benign warmth of the sort that would enable you to believe in any establishment with which he was associated, whether bank, university, law firm, or branch of government. Dressed in old tweeds with leather patches for the elbows, a nifty bow tie, his pipe in hand, his spectacles as bright with reflected light as intelligence itself, he was quickly successful in giving all one hundred plus of us the same impression he had given me at the wedding.
“Being with you here at the beginning, I can all but promise that you will have lively, worthwhile, exciting careers.” We applauded. “Winston Churchill, after Dunkirk, could only offer the gallant British people ‘blood, sweat, toil, and tears,’ but I can promise you dedication, sacrifice, total absorption, and—don’t let this get out—a hell of a lot of fun.” We whooped.
“You are all in Plans, an uncommon group. You will live, most of you, in many countries, you will doubtless see action, you will—no matter how tired and weary—never lose sense of the value of your work. For you will be defending your country against a foe whose resources for secret war are greater than any government or kingdom in the history of Christendom. The Soviet Union has raised the art of espionage to unprecedented heights. Even in times of so-called thaw, they wage their operations with unflagging vigor.
“In order to catch up, we are in the process of building the greatest agency for Intelligence the Western world has seen. The safety of this country depends on no less. Our opponent is formidable. And you, here, have been chosen to be part of the great shield that resists our formidable foe.”
You could feel the happiness in the room. No matter the small basement stage with its American flag to one side, we shared, at this moment, the warmth of a venerable theater as the curtain descends to a momentous conclusion.
He was hardly finished, however. It was not Mr. Dulles’ style to end on a major note. More agreeable was to remind us that we had been accepted into a fellowship; our privileges entitled us to hear a story at the expense of the leader.
“Years ago,” he said, “when I was as young as most of you, I was posted by our foreign service to Geneva during World War I, and I remember one particularly warm spring Saturday in 1917 when I was on watch for the morning duty. There was little to do in the office, and all I could think about was tennis. You see, I had a date for tennis that afternoon with a young lady who was lovely and comely and beautifully composed . . . a veritable knockout!”
Who else could speak in such a way? In this pre–Civil War basement which might, more than ninety years ago, have heard cannonading to the south, Allen Dulles was telling us of Geneva in 1917.
“Just before midday my phone rang. A most heavily accented voice was on the line,” said Allen Dulles, “a man who wanted a responsible American official to speak to. Verantwortlich was the word he used. He gave his speech in the worst German. One of those importuners, I decided. Someone with a tale of petty woe bound to tell it in the worst accent possible.
“Now, the only American official at the Embassy that morning who happened to be remotely verantwortlich was myself. Was I going to play tennis with a lovely English girl, or was I going to eat sauerkraut with some Russian emigré?”
He paused. “Tennis won out. I never saw the fellow.”
We waited.
“Too late I learned who the man happened to be. The voice with the dreadful German accent, frantic to talk to a responsible American official, was none other than Mr. V. I. Lenin himself. Not long after our phone call, the Germans sent Mr. Lenin across Bavaria, Prussia, Poland, and Lithuania in a sealed train. He arrived at the Finland Station in Leningrad to bring off in November of the same year nothing less than the Bolshevik Revolution.” He paused, giving us sanction to become hilarious at the size of Allen Dulles’ miscue.
“Al,” a voice cried out, “how could you do that to the team?”
It was my first glimpse of Dix Butler. His face was unforgettable. His head, his massive jaw and neck, his full mouth were as strongly formed as the features in a Roman bust.
Dulles looked pleased. “Profit by my error, gentlemen,” he said. “Reread your Sherlock Holmes. The most trivial clue can prove the most significant. When you are on duty, observe every detail. Do the damnedest fine job you can do. You’ll never know when the shovel turns up an unexpected gem.”
He canted his pipe back into his mouth, parted the stage curtains, and disappeared.
Our next speaker offered business. Burns, Raymond James “Ray Jim” Burns, case officer: Japan, Latin America, Vienna. He would be our instructor in an eight-week course on World Communism. He was also captain of the pistol team at Plans. He would, he told us, welcome anyone interested in improving his aim.
A man of medium height, he was there for us to study. He had short, reddish-brown hair, a trim build, and regular features with an unforgiving twist. His mouth was a short straight cut. He was wearing a brown jacket, a white shirt, a narrow brown tie, light pink-khaki trousers, and sunglasses shaded brown. His belt had three narrow horizontal stripes, brown, tan, and brown. His shoes were brown and cream and as pointed as his nose. He wore a heavy ring on his left hand and clicked it on the podium for emphasis. He had one decoration, a maple-leaf pin in his buttonhole, a spot of gold. I was feeling full of Mr. Dulles’ adjuration to observe each detail.
Ray Jim hated Communists! He stood on the podium and pinned us with his eyes. They were bullet brown, a deep lead brown, near to black, a hole impinging on you. He looked us over, one by one.
“There’s a tendency these days,” said Burns, “to give a little leeway to the Communists. Khrushchev is not as bad as Stalin; you’re going to hear that. Of course Khrushchev was called the Butcher of the Ukraine in his earlier days, but he’s not as bad as Stalin. Who could be as ruthless as Iosef Djugashvili, alias Joe Stalin, the purge-master? In the U.S.S.R. they have a secret police that has no parallel to us, no comparison. It’s as if you boiled the FBI, the Agency, and the state and federal prison systems into one big super-equivalent of the CIA, but lawless, unrestrained, ruthless! Their police—some of whom are even supposed to be in Intelligence—are kept busy purging millions of their own poor citizens, sending hordes of them by the million out to Siberia to die under forced labor and near starvation. Their crime? They believe in God. In the Soviet Union, you can slice up your grandmother before they’ll rate your crime on a par with believing in the Lord Almighty. For the Soviet think-police know how the force of God stands in their way, resisting all those Red dreams of world conquest. To that purpose the Red devotes his evil genius. You can’t begin to conceive of what we are up against, so don’t try to understand Communists by the measure of your own experience. Com
munists are ready to subvert any idea or organization which is a free expression of the human will. Communists look to invade every cranny of every person’s private activity, and seep into every pore of democratic life. I say to you: Be prepared to fight a silent war against an invisible enemy. Treat them like a cancer loose in the world body. Before you are done with this orientation course, you will be on the road to defusing their attempts to confuse world opinion. You will be able to counterattack subversion and brainwashing. You are going to come out of your training as different men”—he peered about—“and, seeing as they rationed me to one joke, two different women.”
We laughed that he had been good enough to release the tension, and then we stood up to cheer him. He was one of us. He was not, like Mr. Dulles, a little above the fray, but one of us. Since Ray Jim was dedicated, we too could aspire to such clarity of purpose.
Of course I was not taking close account of myself. Mr. Dulles was much nearer to my understanding. Ray Jim came out of that vast middle of America which goes from west of the Hudson out to Arizona, that huge tract which, in comparison to the neatly tended garden of my education, was a roadless desert, but I did not wish to say to myself that I did not know my own country.
In the heat of the standing ovation we gave Mr. Burns, we were administered the Vow. Standing under the grand seal of the CIA in the center of the proscenium arch, our hands upraised, we were inducted formally and legally into the Agency, and swore not to speak without permission of what we learned, now and forever.
That is a solemn vow. I have been told of Masons, inactive for years, who will nonetheless impart not one detail of the rites of the fraternity, not even to their sons. Some equivalent of that fidelity must have entered us. My fear of retribution was lashed at that moment to my sense of honor. I might just as well have been commingling my blood with another warrior’s. A sacred (and sweet) pang of emotion came to me on this instant of induction. If not for the perils of hyperbole, I would say that my will stood to attention.
This vow was not diminished by our training. It constrains one’s mind to describe the awesome loyalty that soon developed. To give away our secrets was to betray God! A mighty syllogism! I must say this oath still retains some of its essence after close to thirty years in the Agency. Of my own actions, I recognize that I am obliged to tell a good deal. I will break through—if need be—but I still feel inhibition at discussing our seminars in the use of such agents of influence abroad as could be found among native lawyers, journalists, trade unionists, and statesmen.
I will, however, describe our tradecraft as it was then. Most of these methods have been superseded, so it is relatively safe to go on about such matters. They are the stuff of spy novels. Besides, I may as well confess, it is what I enjoyed the most at the time. Courses in economics and administrative procedures made me fearfully drowsy. I got my marks, and was able to spout the stuff back, but my true love was tradecraft. I was not in the CIA to become a bureaucrat but a hero. So if this memoir is a tale of development, my purpose may be served if I relate my instruction in picking a lock and all the other wonderfully amoral techniques of my profession.
All the same, I must take one more pass at our instruction in the evils of Communism. Such studies may have lacked the zest of tradecraft, but they managed to convince me that any mischief we could work on our evil opponent left us clearly on the right side. I think that was the allure of tradecraft. Is there any state more agreeable than living and working like a wicked angel?
Well, I had far to go. Let me demonstrate.
7
ABOUT FOUR WEEKS AFTER I TOOK THE VOW, I HAD BECOME SO MAROONED in the repetitions of Raymond James Burns’ course in World Communism that I made the mistake of yawning in class.
“Hubbard, am I boring you?” Ray Jim asked.
“No, sir.”
“I’d like to hear you repeat what I’ve just said.”
I could feel my father’s temper stir in me. “Look, Mr. Burns,” I said, “I’m not bored. I get it. I know the Communists are treacherous, and double-dealing, and use agents provocateurs to try to subvert our labor unions and work double-time to befuddle world opinion. I know they have millions of men in their armies getting ready for world domination, but I have to wonder one thing . . .”
“Shoot,” he said.
“Well, is every Communist a son of a bitch? I mean, are none of them human? Isn’t there one of them somewhere down the line who likes to get drunk just for the fun, say, of getting drunk? Must they always have to have a reason for what they’re doing?”
I could feel by the shift in the class that I was by now marooned in Harry-Hubbard-Land, population: 1. “You’ve told us,” I went on, “that the Communists condition people to the point where they can only receive approved ideas. Well, I don’t really believe what I’m going to say next, but for the sake of argument”—I was obviously preparing for a graceful exit—“would you say that we’re receiving something of the same nature, although different in degree, and, of course, democratic, because I can speak in freedom without reprisals.”
“We’re here,” said Ray Jim, “to sharpen your instincts and your faculties of critical reasoning. That is the opposite of brainwashing. Specious political reasoning is what we’re on the lookout for. Find it and uproot it.” He was striking the palm of one hand on the back of the other. “Now, I like your example,” he said. “It shows critical faculties. Just carry them further. I’m willing to accept the idea that there’s a dedicated Communist here and there who might get a hard-on without Party approval, but I’ll tell you this. Before long, he’s got to decide. Is it his career, or his dick?”
The class laughed with him. “Hubbard,” he stated, “you can put all of the Soviet people into three categories. Those who have been in a slave camp, those who are in a slave camp now, and those who are waiting to go.”
I now rejoined the fold by saying, “Thank you, sir.”
One night, visiting the Montagues at their canal house, I brought it up with Hugh. He didn’t take long to reply. “Of course the question is more complex than good stalwarts like old Ray Jim would have you know. Why, we’re debriefing a Soviet defector right now who’s obsessed with one fellow he destroyed, a silly drunk whom he’d encourage to booze up in some black hole of a bar in Siberia. So much anti-Soviet sentiment was milked out of the drunk that not only the poor wretch but all of his family were sent off to a camp. All of them harmless. But our defector had a quota of arrests to make, in the same way New York police are given parking tickets to hand out. It revolted him. A human Communist, so to speak.”
“Let me ask a stupid question,” I started. “Why are Communists so awful?”
“Yes,” he said. “Why?” He nodded. “It’s very Russian to be awful. Peter the Great once beached a small fleet of his on the bank of some large lake in Pereslavl. Then he didn’t go back to the place for thirty years. Of course, his beautiful boats had just about rotted out on the muddy lakeshore. Peter’s rage is captured in a formal document. ‘You, the governors of Pereslavl,’ went his pronunciamento, ‘shall preserve these ships, yachts, and galleys. Should you neglect this obligation,’”—here Harlot’s voice rose in imitation of his idea of Peter the Great—“‘you, and your descendants, will stand to answer.’”
He nodded. “Extreme, would you say?”
I nodded.
“Normal. That is, normal to the pre-Christian view of things. Christ not only brought love into the world, but civilization, with all its dubious benefits.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Well, as I seem to recollect telling you, Christ adjured us to forgive the son for the sins of the father. That’s amnesty. It opened the scientific world. Prior to this divine largesse, how might a man dare to be a scientist? Any error which proved an insult to nature could bring disaster down on his family. The Russians are spiritual, as every Russian will rush to tell you, but their Greek Orthodoxy gagged on that gift from Christ. It would have wreck
ed the tribal foundations. Forgive the sons? Never. Not in Russia. The punishment must remain greater than the crime. Now they want to march forward into technology land, and they can’t. They’re too spooked. Deathly afraid of terrible curses from Mother Nature. If you sin against nature, your sons will perish with you. No wonder Stalin was a total paranoid.”
“In that case,” I said, “the Russians ought to be easy to overcome.”
“Easy,” said Harlot, “if the retarded parts of the Third World have a true wish to enter civilization. I’m not sure they do. Backward countries may dream of cars and dams, and rush to pave their swamps, but it’s halfhearted. The other half still clings to pre-Christian realms—awe, paranoia, slavish obedience to the leader, divine punishment. The Soviets feel like kin to them. Don’t sneer altogether at Bullseye Burns. It is awful over there in the Soviet. Just today a paper crossed my desk about a sect of twelve poor Doukhobors who were rounded up in some alley of an outlying town in some poor half-forgotten province. The present Soviet leaders know the potential power in a dozen starved clerks and workers. Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky and Bukharin and Zinoviev, all of that top layer, were also a ragtag circle once of impoverished clerks. In consequence, the KGB doesn’t cut down the sapling, it looks to extirpate the seed. That has huge effect. Suppose I hand you a six-chamber Colt with one round in it, spin the barrel, and say, ‘Now for Russian roulette.’ The chances in your favor are five to one as you pull the trigger, but in your heart it will feel no better than even money. Indeed, you probably expect to die. Ditto with extreme punishment. Let it fall on twelve individuals, and twelve million will shiver. Bullseye Burns is not so far off the mark.”