by Paul Wolfe
What if you came upon a code?
I asked it casually, but in my sweat there sat a lie, discernible perhaps to the lie detector hidden in his nostrils. He stared blankly, and my eyes disappeared into the slice of lemon in his glass, such a bright yellow against the brown whiskey. I said the code begins with two capital letters, J and M, and they are followed by a slash, and the slash is followed by the word reset, spelled out in capital letters.
“JM slash RESET?”
I nodded. He asked me where I had seen such a code, and my body registered that a mistake had been made. Frank is customarily quite light with me, quite comforted in some way by my presence. I occur to him differently from the other women in our circles. His electroshocked Cold War psyche seems at ease with me, a woman who demands nothing of him, who brings her own happiness to the occasion. But the mention of a code had set off flash warnings, so I made light of it, sick to death of danger and a life where lives are lived under cover. I laughed that the code was simply something overheard at a party. “There’s nothing but codes at some of these parties,” I said, an absurd attempt at whimsy. “They have more codes than hors d’oeuvre!”
Frank was quiet. Many things transpire at parties in Georgetown. Cases of hard liquor flow without end. Assignations occur secretly in walk-in closets and pantries. An Amazon River of gossip, rumor, truth, and untruth flows through the conversations of men who run the government, men who spy, men who scribble opinions in newsprint, and all the women who accompany them, like mothers overseeing an alcoholic playground. But the casual tossing about of secret codes is simply not a staple of these parties.
“JM slash RESET?” he asked once again.
“Yes, that’s it, I think.”
“It’s a CIA cryptonym.” He said it wearily.
“Of course,” I said, wondering if he could hear the blood racing down a speedway in my head, wondering how many more friends and how many more enemies I would be condemned to irritate before the world has had enough of me.
“It’s a code name. That’s how we designate operations in the Agency. Names always begin with a digraph. A two-letter prefix. A prefix indicating the geographical or functional area of the operation.”
He asked me to repeat the prefix, though I knew he remembered it. “JM. Which stands for . . .” I paused.
“Yes,” he said. “Cuba.”
JANUARY 27
I took out the organization chart and laid it on my desk. Frank Wisner had provided the key, and suddenly the language of code became obvious. It was the architectural blueprint for a CIA operation in Cuba. “Cubans” had been there all along, but just as with Ad Reinhardt’s black squares, I hadn’t seen it. Now I could see there were three groups comprising this mission: AGENCY referred to the CIA operatives; MOB, the mobsters working in partnership with the CIA; and CUBANS, the anti-Castro Cuban underground working in confederacy with both groups. There is a shooter with CORSICA in front of his name, but I don’t know what CORSICA is code for.
JM/RESET is the name of the operation. They are doing a reset. Of course. they are doing a reset of Cuba. After the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs . . . after Jack’s refusal to be maneuvered by Allen Dulles into sending in air support that would have turned the invasion of Cuba into an official US government action . . . after abandoning 1,400 soldiers on a beach in Cuba . . . after adding the fury of anti-Castro Cubans to the blood oaths already sworn against Jack and Bobby by mobsters . . . after all this, they are at it again. I have uncovered a CIA plan to assassinate Castro.
FEBRUARY 4
Just when I thought I could bear no more secrets, I noticed the shutter ajar by my front door. When I looked closely, I saw a message taped to it.
Connect the dots.
National Cathedral 2 PM Thursday.
V
I thought V was gone. I thought he had done his job, had explicated the dark, sad story of LSD gone wrong and then moved on, leaving me helpless with the information. What can I do about MKUltra? But he was back, the first contact since the assassination, and I headed to meet him at the cathedral yesterday, carrying a heart of loss. The time comes when you long for the world to be the world, and not a vast intrigue where pieces of evil keep falling into your lap.
The cathedral is a house of death, I thought, unsure why, looking up at the vast assemblage of gray stones. A strange music box built for eternity. And now it would become a house of truth and lies. In its shadows, in the shadows of the Washington National Cathedral, I sat on a park bench and saw V walk toward me.
“Frank Olson.”
“Yes?”
“I told you Frank Olson fell from that hotel window? Dead on the streets of New York. Well, the man who pushed him was a hit man, a drug runner and intelligence asset named Pierre Lafitte. Now you must follow the string. Massive crimes succeed because people do not follow strings. Here is the string. Pierre Lafitte once worked at William B. Reily, a coffee company in New Orleans. William Reily was a fanatical anti-Communist and financier of a CIA-funded propaganda outfit called the Crusade to Free Cuba. He had worked for the CIA for years.
“So here is this thug and intelligence asset, Pierre Lafitte, working with another intelligence asset named Reily in a business smack in the center of the intelligence community in New Orleans. So who else is working at that coffee company at exactly the same time as Lafitte? Lee Harvey Oswald. This supposed Communist who supposedly defected to Russia at the height of Cold War anti-Communist hysteria, when people are practically being arrested for attending socialist meetings, this guy comes back from Russia after proclaiming that he gave secrets to the Russians, and what does the US government do to him? Nothing.”
“He was an asset,” I said.
“He was an asset.”
I looked over. A group of children were filing into the side of the cathedral, all holding a rope as they walked. They were an organism, and the rope was their spine. They entered the cathedral innocent and uncomprehending. Innocence was their job for the moment, I thought, but our jobs change, and they will lose their innocence in due course. That is the way it is. And in Washington, DC, they may lose it in dramatic fashion.
“I’ll run this by you again,” said V. “Lafitte and Oswald are both working for the same CIA-affiliated, Kennedy-hating, anti-Castro fanatic in New Orleans. Now follow this. As an assassin, Pierre Lafitte uses all sorts of pseudonyms. One pseudonym is Louis Hidell. So in March of 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald purchases a mail-order Carcano Model 91/38 carbine rifle with a telescopic sight, using the alias A. Hidell.
Both Lafitte and Oswald used the same alias: Hidell.
I told V I had heard enough. There was another matter I needed to discuss. I told him a document had come into my possession that I needed to decipher. He said he would meet me back at the cathedral in three days.
“Are you in any danger?” I asked him.
“I’m already dead,” he said.
FEBRUARY 17
Why are you dead? I asked V when we met again in the shadows of the cathedral. I was haunted by his ominous remark, and he stared in his typical fashion, without aspect. He said two words: “Operation Cleanse.” Ever since the assassination, agents had been disappearing. Agents who knew things, agents who felt that the obsession with Cuba had distorted the mission of the agency, had rendered the CIA indistinguishable from the criminal underworld it had joined hands with. V said that his time was limited, he was certain of it, and his job was to tell the tale while he still could.
“To make the invisible visible” were the words that suddenly flashed through my mind, like the Force That Has No Name who has delivered us all out of invisibility. Maybe I had a fever. Maybe my LSD trips were flashing back. Maybe I could not process what was taking place. One more person was being taken away from me, and I didn’t even know his name.
I told V I had come upon an organization chart, written in code. I needed to understand it. I was not ready to share the original document with him, I couldn’t even tell him why,
but I had written out some names for him. He took the page and said to meet him on the same bench in two days.
I turned to go, but V said he had something else to say. Someone had told him that James Angleton and Katharine Graham had been seen having dinner together over the weekend, and this person had overheard her discussing my plan to turn the men of power on to LSD.
I felt sick to my stomach. An unbearable heat of blood flooded the veins of my temples. “The witness said Katharine appeared amused, telling Angleton something to the effect: ‘Could you imagine Phil whacked out on LSD and bringing peace to the world!’ Whereupon James Angleton replied quietly, referring to me: ‘Well, you know, Mary’s an artist, and artists come up with the most creative solutions to things!’ My contact felt he wasn’t being truthful. That something had stunned him about the LSD experiments, and it may be in your interest to rethink them.”
Chantilly Lace was dead.
FEBRUARY 22
The Hindu goddess has blue skin and wears an impenetrable smile. She sits beatifically on the skin of a dead tiger, while a candy-colored landscape soars backward toward a fairy-tale infinity. She is focused on me.
The postcard of the goddess arrived several weeks ago. I taped it to the refrigerator, hoping for whatever blessings the blue goddess had to deliver—I am so blessing-deprived of late. On the back of the postcard was a phone number and a short note. “All is flux. Timothy Leary.”
So Tim returns to my life. We are both misfits, both targets of the invisible power that I first married into, then divorced from, the power that stands immovably in the way of human evolution. Tim seems to ride above the power like a surfer on turbulent waters, while I feel earthbound and weary. I dialed the number on the postcard this morning.
I no longer felt the fiercely determined woman who had phoned him at Harvard what seems like an awfully long time ago. A man with an Indian accent answered. I asked for Timothy Leary, the phone was handed over, and there was the mellifluous voice once again. I exploded. I told him I’d been betrayed. I told him I had been naive, had not realized the dangers of trust, I had unwittingly been a bull in a china shop of secrets. Someone had spread word of the psychedelic wives’ project, and it had now reached the highest echelons of the CIA. He asked if I was in danger, and I told him I didn’t know anymore. You can’t trust anybody, I told him, not even women, or especially women—it was a woman who had betrayed me, so be careful. I never thought I would be saying that. I had never thought of myself as anything but an artist and a mom, simply that, a mom with eccentric tastes perhaps, because normal moms don’t generally sleep with married men who run the world, but a mom nonetheless. And then it all explodes in your face, like you are vomiting into a storm and you realize you are naked.
Tim said he lived in a mansion now, on an estate surrounded by verdant woods. He had opened it up to a rather bohemian cast of characters who continued the psychedelic quest, who were imbibing the latest iterations of chemical expansions both indoors and out . . . LSD, DMT, mescaline, mushrooms, peyote . . . strange people showing up at the estate every day from who knows where, dancing naked on the roofs with bare-chested rock ’n’ roll bands blaring away on the lawns, playing to nobody and everybody and the woods. He told me to escape Washington once and for all. Leave the hellhole of the power delusion and come to paradise in Millbrook, New York, he said. I could stay as long as I wanted. And paint. There were all sorts of artists there, he said, many of them painting on the walls. Jasper Johns had taken acid there one day and painted the piano pink.
I told him I would think about it, I would figure it out, I would contemplate my next move. I would be in touch. I didn’t know anymore.
“Remember—” He laughed as I hung up. “The universe is an intelligence test.”
MARCH 15
We are guests in a private world of occurrence; my life is what occurs to me, your life is what occurs to you, and we are all making do until everything is washed away, till no one remembers you, no one remembers me, till new people live in our houses and repaint them accordingly.
I walked the leafy sidewalks of untruth this morning, in this town named for a forgotten king. I waved hello to Anne Chamberlain on her daily jog. She is such a physical specimen. She will live a long time. I contemplated the nature of facts and asked the trees: Is the CIA eliminating the existence of truth, or is life a conspiracy even more diabolical?
MARCH 18
The assassination has wiped the smile off the face of Georgetown. There are still dinners in stuffy living rooms, people still jabber incessantly about politics and drink themselves sick, Lorraine and Vangie and Bebe still gossip and judge breaches of decorum harshly—but my heart is not in any of it. I have too little spirit and too many secrets. My Georgetown adventures among the drunk and powerful have faded to an unremembered series of cigarettes and salons. My dreams of Planet LSD seem embarrassingly naive. My plans for love are buried in Arlington Cemetery. All I have is a chart. The breakers-in, the hidden watchmen, the clandestine brotherhood of Cord Meyer and James Angleton and Kirkland Jennings . . . they are no longer kidding with me, they are charmed neither by my breasts nor my paintings nor the aristocratic pronouncements that flow from my lips. They are unthrilled with my performance as a supporting female on the stage of Georgetown, and they would commit the unspeakable to get this diary. Out of breath, out of ideas, all I have left against them is a chart.
MARCH 21
This chart exerts a kind of totemic power over me, with a code that substitutes for language just as lies substitute for truth. It is as if my life ebbed and flowed like a Mississippi River through the middle years of the twentieth century and culminated in a chart. It has dawned on me that with this chart, this unofficial official document, with this indisputable proof, I could bring down the entire apparatus of Central Intelligence. The entire assassination machine. And then, perhaps, with the house of lies in smoking ruins behind me, I could gather up my paints and brushes and sons and move on. Back to Grey Towers?
“I will show you the original document next time,” I told V, still unclear of my own reticence. “I just need verification of what this chart means. I need to know who these people are.”
“Nobody can know you have this document,” he said, and when I nodded, the revelations of information began.
“HARV stands for William Harvey, head of the assassination apparatus of the Agency. Executive Action—those are the code words for assassination. Harvey is a drunken beast, a thug of the first rank who happens to be a legend in the CIA.” I nodded and scribbled some notes. “William Harvey was up to his eyeballs in the Bay of Pigs and every one of the Company’s anti-Castro operations, the ones Kennedy knew about and the ones he didn’t. This whole initiative was code-named ZR/RIFLE, and Harvey was still organizing raids on Cuba at the height of the missile crisis, while Kennedy was negotiating with Khrushchev. When Bobby Kennedy got wind of it, he almost tore Harvey’s lungs out. Harvey was exiled to Rome to run the CIA office there but Company guys never disappear. They just forge new secrets. Rome is where Bill Harvey became intimate with the Mafia.
“OK, the men under the heading AGENCY. EHH stands for E. Howard Hunt. He’s like a black-ops popinjay, active throughout Latin America, but he turns up everywhere some covert action is going down. He was in Dallas on November twenty-second. That’s all I’m going to say about him. Now DATPHIL—that’s David Atlee Phillips, director of Western Hemisphere operations for the CIA. The guy in charge of Cuban operations for the CIA in Mexico. I’m told he was a case officer for Oswald and met with him in Mexico City shortly before Dallas. DFITZ is Desmond FitzGerald. He is a guide for the new director, McCone. OK?” I wrote swiftly, as if I was back in class, taking notes. I was overwhelmed. He said he would have more for me in two days, on the towpath by the Key Bridge.
MARCH 28
I handed V the document, an evil configuration of codes that entered my life through the innocent hands of my son. Something gripped my chest as he took
possession of the paper; the transfer was the crossing of a line. On the other side of the line, V would carry the document back where it came from, back to Central Intelligence, where he would ask questions no one wanted to answer. He studied the chart, and I became aware of the steady hum of traffic on the bridge above us, like the hum of the universe that is always there since the beginning of time but we never hear it.
He held up the document and pointed to names.
“First, under the heading MOB, JROS stands for Johnny Rosselli, the Silver Fox of Las Vegas, one of the heads of the mob in America. He is William Harvey’s link to the Mafia. He organized the meeting at the Fontainebleau Hotel that launched the underworld plot to kill Fidel Castro. Rosselli, Sam Giancana, and Santo Trafficante all met in Rosselli’s suite with John T. McRogers, operations chief of the security division of the CIA. STRAF stands for Santo Trafficante, who ran the casinos in Havana until Castro seized them and evicted Trafficante along with the full complement of American gangsters and executives of the United Fruit Company. Trafficante heads the mob in Florida now.
“CMAR stands for Carlos Marcello, head of the mob in New Orleans and Texas. He is crucial here, in case that wasn’t obvious. He must be paid attention to. His empire includes Dallas, in case that wasn’t obvious either. Bobby Kennedy went after Marcello ruthlessly, relentlessly, finally deporting him one day with no warning. Marcello didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye to his family. That’s when he swore a blood oath against the Kennedys.
“Under the heading of CUBANS, DMORAL stands for David Sánchez Morales. He’s an assassin, pure and simple—a cold-blooded killer and CIA operative in the Directorate of Plans, the department responsible for Executive Actions. His nickname is El Indio, because he’s dark-skinned and Mexican and he was a close associate of Bill Harvey on ZR/RIFLE. Morales was sighted in Dallas. You can draw your own conclusions. Finally, MANART stands for Manuel Artime, one of the most vociferous Cuban exiles in the war against Castro. He led one of the brigades in the Bay of Pigs.”