8
AFTER EIGHT WEEKS OF MR.BURNS’ COURSE IN THE RECREATION AND SERvices Building on The Communist Party: Its Theory and Tactics, I could offer exposition on the organization and tactics of the Comintern, the Cominform, the Cheka, the GPU, the NKVD, and the KGB in each of its twelve directorates. If the material required memorization of long, inhospitable lists, be certain I devoted the same concentration a medical student gives to his lectures out of the unholy fright that should he fail to store away one item, a future patient might perish. It was tough. Burns stuffed us like sausage. Word passed through the class that he had once been a counterintelligence man in the FBI. No surprise if we had to store away such memorabilia as “The Eleventh Directorate of the KGB, also called the Guard Directorate, is responsible for safeguarding the security of the Praesidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in the U.S.S.R.” I, who had never found it routine to pay attention while suffering instruction, was now trying to reorganize my nervous system.
We were also introduced to the machinery for routing messages through the hierarchy of our offices, and learned how to write in government language (no small matter!). We took instruction in how to compartmentalize an agent’s dossier, biographical material in one file, reports on his activities in another. We, too, in future, would be given our separate cryptonyms for different transactions. Harlot had, at one time, as he later confided to me, eight, one of which was DEUCE. Running an operation in Africa, the tag became LT/DEUCE, LT to indicate that Africa was the theater. Another job in Vienna would list him as RQ/DEUCE, RQ for Austria. Later, during the Austrian endeavor, for one or another reason, he might metamorphose into RQ/GANTRY. Like a lazy body after a week of stiff workouts, my mind, imbibing all this input, felt stiff and sore and livid with new sensation. I thought the change of name itself ought to be enough to alter one’s character—ZJ/ REPULSE should call for a different personality than MX/LIGHT—my thoughts took sensuous turns. Perhaps it was due to my sexual virginity, but I was now so pervasively libidinous that I could even take pleasure in such courses as Locks and Picks, Flaps and Seals, or Reversibles. Best of all was the mnemotechnic we were provided for recalling telephone numbers. Intimations of buried wealth streamed into strange corners of my psyche.
I was very young. I loved, for example, Flaps and Seals, that is, unsealing letters. Methods ranged from the use of a teakettle spout all the way over to highly classified chemical swabs. By whatever means, I enjoyed the moment when the flap, supposedly protecting inviolable contents, relaxed its grip. The small sound elicited by that act produced what I thought was a private reaction, but the instructor was ahead of me. “Ever hear of the chorus girl who was horny?” he asked our class. “She did a split and stuck to the floor.” We moaned at our own merriment.
Then came Reversibles. In preparation for shadowing a man, we practiced quick changes. We would dart into a vestibule off the classroom, doff our raincoat, turn it inside out, and reappear (eight seconds allotted) in a tan Burberry rather than a blue waterproof, a simple enough matter, but even as shifting one’s cryptonym called forth a new potentiality for oneself, so was there a shiver of metamorphosis in this alteration of appearance.
I could say, to stretch a point, that we were being schooled in minor arts of sorcery. Are not espionage and magic analogous? I took unholy enjoyment in the stratagem for memorizing a phone number once that process was mastered. Of course, no immediate gratification was found at first, since there was much stress on the need to concentrate. We would stand at the front of the class and an accomplice walking past us would whisper a telephone number, and move on. Another trainee would come up from the other side to offer one more number. As the exercise grew more demanding, we built to as many as five telephone numbers at once. Finally, we were put into competition: Our winner managed to retain nine of ten numbers. (I was, by the way, that winner—which still provides a freshet of recollected glory.)
The point, from which I digress, is that this technique, so full of tension in class, became agreeable on the edge of sleep. The seven digits of a telephone number became a boudoir.
That may be worth expounding upon. We were assigned a specific color for each number. White represented zero; yellow was 1; green equaled 2; blue, 3; purple, 4; red, 5; orange, 6; brown, 7; gray, 8; black, 9.
Next, we were asked to visualize a wall, a table, and a lamp. If the first three digits of the telephone number were 586, we were to picture a red wall behind a gray table on which was sitting an orange lamp. For the succeeding four numbers, we might visualize a woman in a purple jacket, green skirt, and yellow shoes sitting on an orange chair. That was our mental notation for 4216. By such means, 586-4216 had been converted into a picture with seven colored objects. Today, in training, the area code has to be added. Now, the room has a window to look out on sky, water, and earth, a woe my class did not suffer. I think of brown sky, red water, and blue earth for the area code 753, an interesting day for Gauguin! We, however, had to visualize no more at the sound of 436-9940 than a purple wall, a blue table, and an orange lamp. Our lady—Yolanda was the name we gave her—sat in the purple room with the blue table and the orange lamp; she was wearing a black jacket, black pants, and purple shoes as she installed herself on her white chair: 436-9940. It seems like the long way around, but I became so proficient at these equivalents that I saw hues so soon as I heard numbers.
We can skip over lock-picking. Those simple but elegant swages we employed are still marked SECRET, and for a Junior Officer Trainee like myself, able to find sexual stir in the flap of an envelope, what was to be said for cracking a door? That was primal stuff. Each lecturer took entitlement to one off-key joke, and for this course, our instructor was there to tell us: “If you can’t figure out a way to get this little pick into this old lock, well, fellows, I don’t know what you’ll do when you get older.”
I never did use lock-picking until 1972 when I had all but forgotten the techniques. Then I used it in the White House, and twice in five minutes, once to open a door, once to open a desk, but that is down the road. Codes is next on my list, but I do not care to get into Codes either, for its study took up a good many hours during winter and spring in Washington, and it is certainly too technical a subject. I will say that it was so sealed a curriculum that even the cryptographic labs were an introduction into the logic of real security: barred windows on either side of the hall; credentials necessary in every section; receptionists and armed guards; even food-servers for the special pre-packaged sandwiches in the cryptographer’s cafeteria were chosen because they were blind and so could never identify any of the workers in Codes by photographs if, perchance, the KGB turned one of them.
Let me move to a more agreeable discipline. Anyone who has read a spy novel is familiar with dead drops, but active instruction in the practice is another matter. All twenty-three trainees in my class left our homeroom, and filed down the corridor past the bulletin board notices to the men’s lavatory where, predictably, ritual jokes were offered to the lone woman in our group; she, in ritual repayment, was good enough to blush. For that matter, I felt my cheeks reddening. I was uncomfortably aware of the unabashed odor coming up from the open urinals, but then 1955 is a long time ago.
Our first dead drop! The instructor took a handful of paper towels out of the metal dispenser by the sink, removed a roll of 16mm Minox film, the size of a thimble, from his vest pocket, put it in the dispenser, and replaced the towels. In turn, to much laughter, each of us repeated the act. The laughter derived, I believe, from how quickly a few of us could accomplish it and how slow were the others. Soon the paper towels were hopelessly mangled. Admonished to practice on our own, we were then shown other possibilities to be extracted from this same rest room, including the cardboard cylinder at the core of the toilet-paper roll. Such dead drops, we were assured, were only suitable when the contact could make rendezvous soon after. Brush drops, therefore, were preferable. You did not have to worry whether the agent had found your parcel.
To become familiar with brush drops, we were taken on a field tour to the aisles of a Washington, D.C., supermarket. Having enriched my shopping basket with a can of Campbell’s Tomato Soup and a pound of Armour’s Hickory Smoked Bacon, I bumped into my assigned mate, and in the course of such collision, managed to drop a roll of film into his basket, after which, exchanging apologies, we moved on.
It must have looked odd to any housewife buying food. The aisles, invariably empty at mid-morning, were now packed with a platoon of men bumping vigorously into one another and whispering loudly, “No, you hacker, it’s my turn.” What can I add? The brush was electric. One waited for sparks to jump from basket to basket.
Later that night we were taken on a tour of a private estate beyond Chevy Chase and given further instruction about dead drops in more rural areas. If, for example, the agent liked to take daily walks, we looked for a loose brick in a garden wall, or a split in a dead elm. I became aware all over again of the cavernous recesses in a tree trunk. Groping about in the dark of the estate forest, my crevice seemed hairy. What a transaction! I could not find the film at first, and when I did, whipped my hand out so quickly as to draw a remonstrance from the instructor, “Casual, buddy, keep the thing casual.”
On our last night, Bullseye Burns threw a party for our class in his small apartment in a newly built four-story complex of middle-cost housing in the outskirts of Alexandria, Virginia. He had three kids, all boys, all towheads, and I learned on this night that he and his wife were high school sweethearts from Indiana. Mrs. Burns, plain-faced, slab-shaped, served us the casserole dish of cheese and tuna and hot dog relish that had been her party fare for twenty years. (Or, as she called it, her “main-eventer.”) It was obvious that she and Ray Jim barely bothered to speak to each other anymore, and I must say I studied them like a foreign student looking for insight into American customs of the Midwest and the Southwest. I concluded that people like Ray Jim did not quit their marriages until they were feeling inclined to take an ax to their mate.
So I was surprised at how good the casserole tasted. Somehow, it did. We were eating in the fold of the Vow and drinking what Ray Jim called “my favorite Italian red ink. It’s my favorite because it’s cheap.”
A Junior Officer Trainee named Murphy started to gibe at Bullseye Burns. “All right, sir,” he said, “for eight weeks you have given us JOTs a lot of hints about how you guys dispose of spooks. In special circumstances, that is.”
“Yessir,” said Ray Jim, but the arm holding his glass became as stiff as erectile tissue.
“Well, sir, to satisfy our ravenous class curiosity, did you ever personally pull the plug on a double-crossing foreign individual?”
“Decline comment.”
“Never had to call on your Browning?” asked Murphy. “Not even once?”
“Policy is against drastic termination,” Burns stated. “Individual solutions cannot be, however, disallowed.” He made a point of staring straight ahead.
“I get it,” said Murphy, making a pistol of his forefinger and fist. “Ping, ping,” he said, offering two shots. I was one of the men who made the mistake of laughing.
We were not to get away unmarked. After supper, Burns took out a tin box from which he extracted bits of note paper one by one. “I collect doodles,” he said, “from the work desks of the Junior Officer Trainees. I recommend their study.” He held one up, squinted, and said, “This is Murphy’s. Shows he is impulsive, and self-destructive.”
By now, a lot of us were drunk on vino tinto, and we jeered at Murphy, who had a habit of punching hallway walls in the YMCA when he got drunk.
“This doodle is Schultz’s. Schultz, are you ready?”
“Yessir.”
“You are showing me what I know already.”
“Yessir. What is it, sir?”
“You, Schultz, are tight as a tick.”
It was my turn.
“Hubbard, your doodle is one hell of a dilly.”
“Yessir.”
“It shows that you are up to something difficult.”
“What, sir?” I made the mistake of asking.
“You are engaged in the noble attempt to fly up your own asshole.”
I think he had time to offer his kind verdict on ten more of us before my normal pulse came back to me. To the Farm!
9
ON THE WEEKEND LEAVE BEFORE THE COMMENCEMENT OF FIELD TRAINING at Camp Peary, I went up to New York on Friday night to see a Mount Holyoke girl who was in town for Easter vacation, had a routine date that would spark no memories for either of us, and took my mother out to lunch on Saturday at the Edwardian Room of the Plaza.
I do not know if it is a reflection of how complex was our relation, or how superficial, but my mother and I were not close, and I never confided in her. Yet she had that delicate power which immaculately groomed blond women can always exercise. I was constantly aware of pleasing or displeasing her, and such critical emanations began with the first glance she took of my person. She could not bear unattractive people; she was generous to those who pleased her eye.
On this noon, we were off to a bad start. She was furious; she had not heard a word from me in two months. I had not told her I was in the Agency. Her animosity toward my father, a dependable reaction in a loose and caterwauling world, suggested that I not advertise how closely I was following his example. In any case, I was not supposed to inform her. Theoretically, one’s wife, one’s children, and one’s parents were to be told no more than that one did “government work.”
Since she would see immediately through such a phrase, I presented her instead with vague talk of an importing job I had taken on in South America. In fact, I was actually looking forward to using some of the Company’s more exotic mail-routing facilities for sending her an occasional postcard from Valparaiso or Lima.
“Well, for how long are you planning to be there?” she asked.
“Oh,” I said, “this import stuff could keep me terribly active for months.”
“Where?”
“Everywhere down there.”
I had made the first mistake of the lunch. When around my mother, I always made errors. Did I like to think of myself as razor-keen? Her powers of detection sliced my intelligence into microscopic wafers. “Darling,” she said, “if you’re going to South America, don’t be bland about it. Tell me the countries. The capitals. I have friends in South America.”
“I don’t want to visit your friends,” I muttered, calling by habit on the old sullenness with which I used to greet her men friends when I was an adolescent.
“Well, why not? They’re wonderfully amusing people, some of them. Latin men are so concentrated in their feelings, and a Latin woman of good family might be just what you need for a wife—someone deep enough to bring out the depths in you,” she murmured half caressingly, but for the other half, most critically. “Tell me, Harry, what sort of importing is it?”
Yes, what sort of case officer would I make when I had not even developed my cover story? “Well, it’s precision military parts if you want to know the truth.”
She put her head to one side, her cheek resting against one white glove, her blond hair all too alert, and said, “Oh, my Aunt Maria! We’re traveling to South America for precision military parts! Herrick, you truly think I’m blissfully stupid. You are joining the CIA, of course. It’s evident. I say, three cheers. I’m proud of you. And I want you to trust me. Tell me it’s so.”
I was tempted. It would make this lunch considerably easier. But I could not. That would be transgression of the first injunction given us. Worse, she would let every one of her New York friends in on the secret—only-for-your-ears! Might as well drop an announcement in the Yale Alumni Magazine. So I stuck to my story. Well, I told her, she might have her dear friends in South America, but I happened to be a far less contemptuous person than she about the Latin people’s potential economic possibilities. When it came to casings and gunpowder, quite a few Southern Hemisphere nati
ons could bid most competitively with our own bullet folk. There was money to be made. I wished to make money, I told her. For my sense of pride and self, if nothing else. I was speaking with enough indignation to convince my own ear, but her eyes filled, and in complete disregard of the damage to her highly crafted eyelashes, a tear ran down, depositing mascara in its train. The misery of her life sat on her stained cheek. “I think of all the people I’ve loved, and, do you know, Herrick,” she said, “none of you have ever trusted me.”
Lunch went on, but that was the true end to it, and I left New York on the first train I could catch, and returned to Washington and went down the next day, which was Sunday, to the Farm.
That involved a bus to Williamsburg, Virginia, and a cab to drop me and my luggage at a fresh-painted shed and gate in an endless chain-link fence beside a sign that read: CAMP PEARY—ARMED FORCES EXPERIMENTAL TRAINING ACTIVITY. In answer to a phone call made by the sentry, a Jeep finally arrived driven by a drunken Marine who kept wheeling his head up and down or from side to side while he steered, as if his shaven skull happened to be a small craft. Sunday was obviously the day to get drunk.
Down the twilight we motored along a narrow road between tidewater pines, passing fields of thicket full of thorny scrub that spoke of ticks and poison ivy. It was a long two miles to reach a parade ground. Around it were wooden barracks, some buildings that looked like hunting lodges, a chapel, and a low cement-block structure. “The Club,” said my driver, speaking at last.
I dropped my bags on an empty cot in the barracks I had been told to report to, and since nobody was about except for one fellow sleeping in the upstairs dormitory, I headed over to the Club. My classes would begin in the morning, and all day people in my group had been arriving. Dressed in clothing suitable for Washington on Sunday, we stood out as rookies. Not yet issued camouflage fatigues and combat boots and cartridge belts like the veterans around us (first rule of the military I learned was that a veteran has a week of seniority on you), we did our best to show our mettle by slugging down mugs of beer. Men at the pool tables and ping-pong tables set up a counter-din to the far end of the bar, which was being used for parachute landings. Veteran trainees in camouflage uniforms would hop up on the mahogany, shout “Geronimo,” and drop the yard and a half to the floor, feet together, knees bent, as they rolled over.