Harlot's Ghost

  “So all that dirt has just been sitting in the warehouse cellar all this time?” asked the General.

  “Well, it’s no worse than burying the gold at Fort Knox,” said Harvey.

  “I get it,” said the General. “That’s why the dig was called Operation GOLD.”

  “It’s policy among us,” Harvey said primly, “not to discuss cryptonym nomenclature.”

  “Right. I find that a reasonable stance.”

  “We’re here,” said Chief. At the end of a long, empty street that passed between empty fields on either side, we could see a large low warehouse in silhouette, back-lit by automobiles passing along the belt highway on the East German side. The warehouse had its own small floodlights around a barbed-wire perimeter and sentry lamps at a few windows and doors, but in the night it merely looked well guarded and somewhat inactive. I was more intrigued with the passing sounds of the cars and trucks on the Schönefelder Chaussee beyond. Their hum rolled through the night like ocean surf, and yet those vehicles knew nothing. Our warehouse would attract no more attention than one gives to any building at night on a desolate highway.

  The sentry opened the gate, and we parked two feet from a small door to the warehouse. Harvey darted from his seat right into the building. “Apologies for running ahead of you,” he said to the General once we had followed, “but our E and A folk back at Headquarters say I’m the most recognizable CIA operative in the world. Except, of course, for Allen Dulles. So we don’t want the Commies wondering why I come here. Might start up their mental motors.”

  “E and A? Estimates and Assessments?”

  “A, actually, is for Analysis.”

  “You fellows are as much in the alphabet soup as we are.”

  “Just so the mail gets through,” said Harvey.

  We walked down a corridor with a few partitioned offices on either side, most of them unoccupied at this hour, then Chief opened another door to a large windowless room with fluorescent lights overhead. For a moment I thought I was back in the Snake Pit. At endless rows of worktables, recording machines were stopping and starting. Up on a dais, lights blinked from a console the size of a pipe organ. Half a dozen technicians, seated before it, were studying their local configurations of signals, while other technicians trolleyed shopping carts of tapes and cartridges to the machines. The sound of 150 Ampex tape recorders—Mr. Harvey provided the number—moving in forward or reverse, electronic beeps signaling the conclusions or commencements of telephone conversations produced an aggregate of sound that stirred me in the same uneasy fashion as some of the more advanced electronic music I had listened to at Yale.

  Was there one telephone dialogue between the East German police and/or the KGB and/or the Soviet military that was not being captured at this moment on one or another Ampex? Their humming and whirring, their acceleration and slowdown, were an abstract of the group mind of the enemy, and I thought the Communist spirit must look and sound like this awful room, this windowless portent of Cold War history.

  “Everything here is just a small part of the operation,” Harvey said softly. “It’s quiet now.” He led us to a huge sliding door, pulled it back, and we strode down a ramp into an even more airless space, barely lit by an occasional overhead bulb. I could sniff the faintest odor of contaminated earth. What with the ramp, the minimal illumination and walls of dirt impinging on either side, I felt as if we were descending to the inner passage of an ancient tomb.

  “Damnedest thing,” said the General, “how you get to notice the sandbags after you buttress a dugout. Some sandbags smell good; others, you hold your nose.”

  “We had troubles,” said Harvey. “Fifty feet into the tunnel-dig we encountered earth encumbered with stench. It scared the constitution out of us. There was a graveyard just south of the projected tunnel which we certainly had to avoid since the Sovs would make mucho propagandistic hay out of Americans defiling German graves if there was discovery. So we aimed to pass to the north, although the graveyard offered more suitable soil.”

  “Yet even so, there was a stink you had to get rid of,” said the General.

  “Nope.” I do not know if it was my presence, but Harvey, if technically outranked by the General, was in no manner going to say “No, sir.”

  “What did you have to get rid of then?” insisted the General.

  “We could live with the stink, but we had to divine the source of the odor.”

  “That’s right. You guys in Intelligence ought to know how to work your way into a stench or two.”

  “You bet, General. We located it. A typical engineering nightmare. We discovered that we had invaded the draining field of the septic system built for our own warehouse personnel.”

  “C’est la vie,” said the General.

  We were on the lip of a cylindrical hole about twenty feet across and curiously deep. I could not estimate the depth. Looking down, one seemed to be studying the fall from a ten-foot diving board, but then it seemed more, a long dark plunge to the duckboards below. I felt an hypnotic vertigo, not so much disagreeable as magnetic—I had to go down the ladder that led to the base.

  It descended about eighteen feet. There, at a cupboard on the floor, we exchanged our shoes for boots with heavily cushioned soles and put all our loose change away. A finger to his lips, as if he would draw all errant echoes into himself, Harvey led us along the duckwalk. The hypnotic, magnetic—I now called it the honorable—vertigo continued. Lit by an overhead bulb every ten or twelve feet, the tunnel stretched out before us to the vanishing point. I felt as if I were in a room of mirrors whose repeating view took us to infinity. Six and a half feet high, six and a half feet wide, a perfect cylinder, nearly fifteen hundred feet long, the tunnel took us down a narrow aisle between low walls of sandbags on either side. Amplifiers, set at intervals on the sandbags, were wired into lead-sheathed cables that ran the length of the tunnel. Harvey whispered, “Carries the sap from the tap to the bucket.”

  “Where’s the tap?” whispered the General back.

  “Coming attractions,” Harvey replied as softly.

  We continued to walk with one carefully weighted step after another. “Do not stumble,” we had been warned. Along the route, we passed but three maintenance men, each isolated on his own watch. We had entered the domain of CATHETER. It was a church, I told myself, and immediately submitted to a chill on the back of my neck. CATHETER had its indwelling silence; one might as well have been proceeding down the long entrance to a god’s ear. “A church for snakes,” I said to myself.

  Our path proceeded not much more than a quarter of a mile, but I felt as if we had been walking along the tunnel floor for the best part of a half hour before we came to a steel door in a concrete frame. A maintenance man accompanying us brought forth a key, turned a lock, and pressed four numbers on another lock. The door opened on silent hinges. We were at the terminus of the tunnel. Above us was a vertical shaft rising some fifteen feet into the dark.

  “See that overhead plate?” whispered Harvey. “Right above, is where we made our connection to the cables themselves. That was one delicate deal. Our sources told us that the KGB sound engineers at Karl-horst sealed nitrogen into their cables to guard against moisture and had attached instruments to monitor any drop in nitrogen pressure. So, just about a year ago, right up above us, you would have been able to witness a procedure comparable in delicacy and tension to a world-famous surgeon going in for an operation never before attempted.” Standing next to him, I tried to conceive of the immaculate anxiety experienced by the technicians when the tap went into the wire. “At that instant,” said Harvey, “if the Krauts had been checking the line, it would have shown up on their meters. Just like a nerve-jump. So, ultimately, it was a crapshoot. But we brought it off. Right now, General, we are connected into 172 such circuits. Each circuit carries eighteen channels. That’s more than twenty-five hundred military and police phone calls and telegraphic messages that we are able to record at once. You can call that coverage.
”

  “You fellows,” said General Packer, “are getting good marks for this back home.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear the level of appreciation is rising.”

  “The Joint Chiefs won’t be handed anything but good stuff from me.”

  “I remember,” said Harvey, “when the Pentagon used to say, ‘CIA buys spies to tell them lies.’”

  “No, sir, not anymore,” said General Packer.

  On the ride back, Harvey sat in the rear with him, and they shared his pitcher of martinis. After a while, the General asked, “How do you handle the take?”

  “The bulk of transmissions are flown back to Washington.”

  “That much I know already. They took me on a tour of the Hosiery Mill.”

  “They took you there?”

  “Room T-32.”

  “No right to open it up to you,” Harvey said.

  “Well, they did. They gave me clearance.”

  “General Packer, no offense intended, but I remember a time when high clearance was given to Donald Maclean of the British Foreign Office. Why, in 1947 he was issued a non-escort pass to the Atomic Energy Commission. J. Edgar Hoover didn’t even rate such a pass in 1947. Need I remind you that Maclean was part of the Philby gang and has been reliably reported to be making his home in Moscow these days. No offense intended.”

  “I can’t help it if you don’t like it, but the Joint Chiefs did want to know a few things.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as how much of the take is kept here for immediate processing and how much goes back to Washington. Are you in a position to give us twenty-four hours’ notice if the Soviet army is ready to blitz Berlin?”

  I heard the soundproof window partition going up behind my ears in the Mercedes. Now I could not hear a word. I leaned toward the driver to light a cigarette, and managed a look at the rear seat. They both appeared considerably more choleric.

  When we stopped at the parking shed to switch cars again, I heard Bill Harvey say, “I won’t tell you that. The Joint Chiefs can kiss every square inch of my ass.”

  Now, reinstalled in BLACKIE-1, two new martinis poured from the Cadillac decanter, Harvey kept his partition raised. I was able to hear no more until the General was dropped off at his hotel, the Savoy. Harvey immediately lowered the glass to speak to me. “There’s a general for you. General Asshole. Stays at the Suh-voyyy.” He said it as if he were trundling an English accent over a notable bump. “I once was taught that generals were supposed to stay with their troops.” He belched. “Kid, you seem to be the troops. How do you like little old CATHETER?”

  “I know how Marco Polo felt discovering Cathay.”

  “They sure teach you juniors what to say in those New England schools.”

  “Yessir.”

  “‘Yessir?’ I guess you’re telling me I’m full of shit.” He belched again. “Look, kid, I don’t know about you, but time-servers like that General scratch my woodwork. I didn’t happen to be in uniform during World War II. I was too busy chasing Nazis and Communists for the FBI. So the military dogs irritate me. Why don’t we wax the floor with some serious booze and recuperate?”

  “I never turn down a drink, Chief.”

  6

  ONCE WE WERE BACK IN GIBLETS, AND INSTALLED IN HIS LIVING ROOM, Mr. Harvey’s fatigue offered its manifest. He would fall asleep as we were talking, the glass undulating in his hand like a tulip in a summer breeze. Then he would awaken with a well-timed swoon of his wrist to compensate for the near spill of his liquor.

  “I’m sorry my wife couldn’t stay up tonight,” he said, as he came out of a ten-second snooze.

  She had greeted us at the door, made our drinks, and tiptoed out, but I could feel her moving about upstairs, as if, after my departure, she would come down to steer him to bed.

  “C.G.’s a wonderful woman. Top of category,” he said.

  The injunction not to say “Yessir” cut off the easiest response to many of his remarks. “I’m sure,” I said at last.

  “Be double sure. Want to know the kind of individual C.G. is? I’ll give you an idea. A woman living in the Soviet sector left a baby on the doorstep of a Company officer down the street. Right outside his home! I won’t tell you the fellow’s name because he went through a lot of flak. Why did this East German woman pick a CIA man? How did she know? Well, you can’t clear yourself on a crazy drop like that, so let’s forget his side of it. What’s essential is that the woman left a note. ‘I want my child to grow up free.’ Enough to turn your heartstrings, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Wrong. You don’t take anything for granted. Not in our work. But my wife says, ‘This baby could have been dropped on us from Heaven. I won’t let her go to an orphanage. Bill, we have to adopt her.’” He shook his head. “Just the night before, I was sitting with C.G. looking at an East German TV newsreel to see if I could pick up a couple of clues about their order of battle from the outfits who were in their military parade—never feel superior to your source, no matter how mundane—and one of their bands went by. An entire platoon of glockenspiels. I looked at the ribbons they put on those glockenspiels—real Heinie froufrou—and I said to C.G., ‘Why don’t they hang prison-camp skulls on these instruments, ha, ha,’ and next day, she picks me up on it. If I hate the Sovs all that much, she informs me, then it’s my duty to adopt the baby.” He burped, gently, sadly, fondly. “Make a long story short,” he said, “I have an adopted baby daughter. Phenomenal, right?”

  “Right,” I said. I did not wish to echo him in order to be contradicted again, but he just grinned and said, “Right. My daughter is lovely. When I get to see her.” He stopped. He looked at his glass. “Fatigue is your mother in this kind of work. You’d think it was a waste of time with the General, but it wasn’t. You know why I was selling CATHETER so hard?”

  “No, Mr. Harvey.”

  “The Director asked me to. I received a call from Allen Dulles just this afternoon. ‘Bill, fellow,’ he said to me, ‘give their three-star General Packer the tour. We need to fluff a few feathers.’ So I dedicated myself this evening to selling CATHETER to General Asshole. Do you know why?”

  “Not yet, exactly.”

  “Because even the Joint Chiefs’ flunkies live high on the military hog. They have battleships to visit and nuclear warning systems. It’s hard to impress them. They’re used to touring underground facilities as huge as a naval station. Whereas, we have just a dirty little tunnel. Yet we’re picking up more intelligence than any operation in history. Any nation, any war, any espionage endeavor ever. Got to remind them of that. Got to keep them in their place.”

  “I could hear some of the things you said in the car. You were certainly keeping him at bay.”

  “It wasn’t hard. The fact of the matter is that he didn’t really want to know what we’re picking up. Right here in Berlin we don’t spot-check more than one-tenth of one percent of our total take, but that’s enough. You can re-create the dinosaur from a few bones in the tibia. What we know, and the Pentagon hates to hear this, is that the state of the railroad tracks over on the Sov side of the line through East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland is execrable. Only word for it. And their rolling stock is worse. The Russians just don’t have the choo-choo trains to invade West Germany. There’s not a blitzkrieg in sight for years. Well, I hate to tell you how tight the Pentagon would sit on that news. If Congress ever got wind, it could strip the Army of billions of dollars in tank contracts yet to be allocated. And General Packer happens to be in tanks. He’s touring NATO scared. Of course Congress won’t even get wind unless we break a little over in their direction, and we won’t fart unless the Pentagon goes out of their way to insult us. Because the bottom line, Hubbard, is that it’s highly improper that Congress be given any inkling. They’re too malleable to public reaction. And it is a mistake to reveal any Russian weakness to the American public. They do not have the appropriate background in Communism to appreciate the problem. Do you p
erceive, then, the parameters of my double game? I have to scare the Pentagon into thinking that we might shoot their future budget ducks right out of the water, when actually, I’m prepared to protect said ducks. But I can’t let them know I belong to their team, or Pentagon won’t value us. Anyway, it may be academic, Junior. The Hosiery Mill that General Asshole was talking about is already two years behind in translating the gross product we send them from CATHETER, and we’ve only been in existence one year.”

  He fell asleep. The life in his body seemed to move over into his glass, which perambulated further and further out to the side until the weight of his extended arm woke him up.

  “Which reminds me,” he said. “How are we doing with CLOAKROOM? Where is he now?”

  “In England.”

  “From Korea to England?”

  “Yessir.”

  “What’s the new cryp?”

  “SM/ONION.”

  Harvey sat up straight for a moment, put down his drink, grunted, reached over his belly to his ankle and raised his pants leg. I saw a sheath knife strapped to his ankle. He unhooked it, drew it, and began to pare his fingernails, all the while looking me over through bloodshot eyes. It had been a couple of weeks since he had put me to squirming in his presence, but now I could not say if he was friend or foe. He grunted.