by James Philip
Given the Warsaw Concerto provocations of the last couple of months Operation Looking Glass had assumed – other than in the days after the Kingdom of the End of Days had nuked several American cities nearly thirteen months ago - a sudden, uncomfortable significance with its aircraft ever-watchful for Soviet hostile intent, and its crews reminded of the absolute need to maintain invulnerable airborne command and control of the global battlefield.
Rachel had shrugged.
“Some girls get all the luck.”
The Director of Central Intelligence had already worked out that his guest was not in an overly sanguine frame of mind. He said nothing, braced himself.
“Why have you brought me back to DC?” Rachel asked.
Richard Helms opened his mouth to speak but a knock at his door cut him off. A buttoned up, bespectacled, middle-aged secretary entered the office to deliver a coffee tray.
Rachel counted the cups.
“Who else are we expecting?” She inquired suspiciously.
“Somebody who has been wanting to talk to you again for a long time, Lady Rachel.”
Rachel was a little bit jet-lagged, irritated by having to wear her ‘second’ dress – she had only packed for a short stay and had not attempted, or rather, had not been permitted by her minders, to go shopping since she arrived in the United States – and she was feeling, although not looking, dowdy and a little tired.
The other thing, which she had not expected, was how much she was missing Dan. Not least the calming, pacific effect he seemed to have on her. Even after such a short separation, still only a few days, she was afraid she was inexorably morphing back into her former persona. The profession of violence became her; and she it. Disturbingly, having half-convinced herself that she was weary of hurting people, that weariness had faded, it was as if having rested, reflected, recovered from the nightmares of the Battle of Malta and only months later, the traumas of the Wister Park Siege, she was a little afraid that she was beginning to revert to type…
Perhaps, sensing this, The Director of Central Intelligence was looking uncharacteristically…fidgety.
With a shock Rachel suspected she might have inadvertently given Richard Helms a look which communicated a lot more than just feminine impatience.
“I asked the ADDOCI to sit in on this meeting,” he said quickly.
Rachel, who like Helms had been standing, now poured herself into the nearest comfortable chair around the coffee table set to one side of the Director’s airy, spacious room.
“That bastard put a price on my head the first time I was posted to Washington,” she reminded her host, much like a cat raking its claws across glass.
“Yes, well. You killed two of his operatives…”
Rachel arched an eyebrow.
Okay, so this was about Operation Maelstrom; up until now she had wondered if, not how, Kurt Mikkelsen’s re-appearance five years after ‘doing a fade’ and ‘going black’ – in trade terminology, disappearing – was linked to James Jesus Angleton’s machinations.
Now she knew that Kurt’s return home was anything but an inevitable, or a random consequence of his history.
This, she decided, was definitely not an interview the Director of Central Intelligence or his own, personal cloak and dagger Machiavelli, wanted a woman like Caroline Constantis-Zabriski sitting in on!
“So, what?” She mused, thinking out aloud. “The Gray Ghost is going to try to pretend that Billy the Kid’s return is all some kind of a Soviet counter-play?”
Richard Helms passed her a coffee, unsweetened, no milk.
He stuck to the script he had prepared as soon as he had been notified Rachel had agreed to return to the United States. Only a fool, or worse, somebody with a death wish left anything to chance with a woman like…her.
“The United Nations thing has been on the cards ever since the end of the war in the Midwest. The Soviets always used to play the long game. Why wouldn’t they be doing the same now? The Warsaw Concerto exercise makes very little military sense; other than to increase British pressure on the Administration to put GI boots on the ground in France, and inevitably, West Germany and Scandinavia, and to send a fleet back to the Mediterranean…”
Richard Helms’s voice trailed off because the woman was suddenly studying him with the intensity of a Leopardess eying its next meal.
He was relieved when there was another knock at the door.
James Angleton walked straight in.
Rachel, who had had her back to the door – CIA Headquarters was the one place in the world, now the dungeons of the Lubyanka were an irradiated hole in the ground in the ruins of central Moscow – where not being able to see who came in and left through a given door was remotely pertinent to her prospects of survival. If the CIA did not want her to leave the complex that was that, there was nothing she could do about it. Thus, normal tradecraft was superfluous. Now, she rose slowly to her feet, smoothed down her frock and turned to confront the man who had once, and for all she knew, still had, or had again, put a price on her head.
From what she had gathered from one of Angleton’s hit men – there was only so much useful intelligence one could glean from a man choking in his own arterial blood – the contract had not specified ‘dead or alive’.
Angleton looked older than she had expected.
That might just have been a result of his brush with one or other of the war plagues, or a consequence of the wounds he had sustained during the Battle of Washington back in December 1963. Losing half a lung and nearly bleeding to death on a city sidewalk, were the sort of mishaps which ought to leave their marks on a man…
The Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counter Intelligence halted in his tracks half-way into the room as Rachel rose to her feet.
He sniffed, scowled.
“We meet again,” he observed dryly.
Rachel studied the thin man with the bearing and demeanour of an austere-faced college professor. Angleton was notorious for his inability to tolerate fools – a problematic flaw in a man whose role required him to interface with so many of DC’s glitterati – not to mention his legendary arrogance and a propensity for secretiveness unusual even for a career spook. It was reputed that he kept his own set of files separate from CIA archives, for his eyes only and occasionally to be doled out to his shrinkingly small trusted inner circle of other confidantes. The Gray Ghost was just one of his Company and Capitol Hill handles; others were Virginia Slim, or the Fisherman, in the 1940s he had got addicted to fly-fishing in England. Other nicknames, few uttered other than out of spite were Skinny Jim, or the Black Knight. A man of well-known obsessive, compulsive habits, legendarily there was no lock Angleton could not pick. Hence, the sobriquet the Locksmith, reflecting a talent which had led to rumours that whenever he did one of his periodic morning, afternoon or evening ‘flits’, going absent without warning, that he was somewhere in Washington picking somebody’s lock. However, his burglarious activities apart, Rachel had always thought that the Scarecrow fitted him as well as any, although the post-October 1962, MI6 files she had read at the new Embassy in Philadelphia, after the Wister Park atrocity seemed to favour the Gray Ghost…
Richard Helms had moved so that he could, at a pinch, step between the man and the woman; not that he imagined for a single second that if Rachel took it upon herself to conclusively right old wrongs there would be much, if anything he could do to stop her.
‘Understand that the Angel of Death referenced in your files has not gone away,’ Caroline Constantis had told him. ‘For the moment, that persona, psyche, whatever you care to call it, is dormant within her. If you like, simply accept that presently the better angels of her nature are in control. No, I can’t rule out that one day she might snap, become again the killer, the merciless hunter she was back on Malta or in the nightmare of Wister Park; but on balance, I think that is unlikely. If it happens it will be a progressive process, not an instantaneous flicking of a switch…’
Right
now, this was a not wholly reassuring prognosis to the ears of the Director of Central Intelligence.
The tension in the room thickened.
And dissolved in a nanosecond.
Because Rachel quirked a smile.
“No,” she corrected the tall, angular man wearing a suit which hung off his shoulders as if off a coat-hanger. “We have never ‘met’. Although, we have been close, many times, Mister Director, without being formally introduced.”
James Angleton thought about this.
“Yet, still, here we are…”
“The last time I was in America your people started calling me the Angel of Death,” Rachel went on, her smile fading. “You ought to listen to what Caroline says to you. No psychopath likes to actually be called ‘a psychopath’. That’s a thing you should have worked out for yourselves, by the way.”
It was as if the ambient temperature in the office had dropped twenty degrees and their breath ought, suddenly, to be frosting in their faces.
Now that Rachel had both men’s whole and undivided attention, she turned to the probable reason for her recall to the East Coast.
“I assume that old faggot Hoover has finally fallen over Operation Maelstrom?” She asked rhetorically. “Or,” she smiled tight-lipped, “he thinks he’s entitled to hitch a ride on it as his personal getaway car when the Warwick Hotel Scandal eventually hauls him up before a grand jury?”
The two men looked one to the other, remaining silent.
Rachel felt an urge to vent a girlish giggle.
This was almost too delicious…
“Oh, I see?” She murmured. “It’s even worse than that? Everybody thought that Operation Maelstrom was just about taking down the bad guys during the Civil War, a leftover from the failed coup of December 1963. Now everybody is going to find out that JFK flagged it in the days after the October War and like topsy, it has grown and grown ever since!”
Neither of the men in the room cared for her flippancy.
But… She was not the kind of woman any sane man took to task over a piffling little thing like that. A man’s dignity and self-esteem were important; but not worth risking one’s life to preserve, in a setting such as this.
“I’m sorry,” Rachel apologised, perfunctorily. “This really isn’t funny at all, is it?”
At last, something all three of them could agree upon.
It was then, materialising out of nowhere that Rachel suddenly recollected – for no apparent reason – an interview she had had with Ben Bradlee in Harrisburg back in the summer of 1964.
Bradlee, at the time was still the Philadelphia Bureau Chief of Newsweek. In those odd days after the US Government had shifted to Philadelphia in the aftermath of the Battle of Washington - ostensibly to allow the reconstruction of the badly damaged capital to proceed at breakneck speed under the direction of Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara and the US Army Corps of Engineers – Bradlee had lived and worked in the big city five days a week, and tried to get back home for the weekends. Things hardly ever worked out that way; but like others within his privileged circle, most of whom had CIA or other, long-standing connections with the Kennedys – he came from an old ‘Boston Brahmin’ family, his wife was a Pichot, the sister of one of JFK’s mistresses - he was not the only man who joked that ‘the next time there is a nuclear war’ that he was going to feel a lot happier about it knowing that Antoinette, ‘Tony’ and the kids were not living in a big city…
Those had been strange times; but then when had times not been ‘strange’ in the last few years?
Rachel remembered thinking that before the October War a man like Ben Bradlee, would have felt guilty about being a member of a class that could afford to park his family in the country, just in case there was another war. Back in June 1964, Rachel had been the de facto Head of Station of MI6 in North America, albeit in charge of a skeleton staff still barely a pale shadow of that decimated during the Battle of Washington, and barely recovering by the time it was practically wiped out, during the Wister Park siege. She had not been alone in wondering how ‘the rebels’ had contrived to target so many British Embassy staffers and their families during the fighting in December 1962, as it turned out, just a cruel prelude to the mayhem which was to transpire at Wister Park only seven months later.
However, that day she had met Ben Bradlee in Harrisburg, all that had lain in an unknowable future and she had been intent on reminding Bradlee – then being touted to be the next Managing Editor of The Washington Post – that his whiter than white liberal credentials, somewhat sullied because of his involvement in the CIA’s propaganda-misinformation machine back in the day, were only a paper-thin shield in this brave new post-cataclysm world.
Rachel recollected every detail of that day, that meeting and of a brief, passing personal equanimity soon to be consumed by the madness…
As she and Bradlee had walked along the bank of the slow flowing Susquehanna River, at that time of year the river was beginning to fall again after the spring floods, exposing the muddy flanks of the scrub-topped islands in the stream, she was at pains to reassure him that she was no kind of skeleton in his cupboard. Quite the reverse. The last time she had been ‘in town’ – DC was actually more like a huge feudal village in those days before the war - she had been Hannah Ziegler, a German émigré courtesan, way out of his class. She had had burning red hair then, and a reputation for predatory conquests. Everybody had assumed that she was spying for somebody; but nobody had known for whom, and she had had so many powerful friends and patrons that nobody had been brave enough to ask too many questions.
Or rather, nobody except James Jesus Angleton, whom with his wife, a Midwestern lumber heiress, was another leading member of the tight-knit circle of Kennedy insiders, Democrat literati and CIA apparatchiks within which the Grahams, Philip and Kay, and the Bradlees had moved during the 1950s. Most of the people in that milieu had links to the CIA, or military service in common, or had simply been born into the wider, born to privilege Georgetown-based elite of the District of Columbia. They had all considered themselves to be movers and shakers, the conscience of their country, or at least, they had until the catastrophe of the Cuban Missiles War.
Except perhaps, James Angleton, who had always been convinced that the failed, bloody coup of December 1963, the first uprising in Wisconsin, and then the subsequent Civil War, had all been, in part, the work of the Soviets and ‘traitors within’ the DC bubble.
“No,” Angleton grunted. “It is not funny at all.”
Even at the height of the war in the Midwest there had been no little unease in some quarters about the reach and penetration, of the deep, surveillance state which had somehow, seemingly from out of thin air, been ‘switched on’ to hunt for ‘End of Dayer extremists and fifth columnists in our midst’. Most Americans liked to, or in any event, chose to believe that the ‘police state’ methods – like those their government had told them had been among the greatest evils of their Marxist-Leninist foes – were no more than a brief, transient wartime necessity. It was a thing that had had to be borne in order to defeat the fanatical, nihilistic evil doers of the Kingdom of the End of Days. The implicit promise had always been that, as soon as victory had been won, the ‘extraordinary measures’ employed during the period of hostilities would, as if by magic, evaporate.
Of course, that pre-supposed that the aforementioned ‘extraordinary measures’ were in any way exceptional, or in any sense, a strictly ‘wartime expediency’.
This was, of course, a complete misnomer because neither clause had ever applied.
Thus, James Jesus Angleton had been, and remained, the high priest of the surveillance state he had begun building up as long ago as 1959, from around the time the true extent of his personal and professional betrayal by the British, ‘Cambridge Spy’, and close friend, Kim Philby had begun to warp, and eventually so twist his world view that his subsequent paranoia would have been instantly recognisable to any of the former denizens of t
he now, obliterated Lubyanka.
No man in the history of espionage had been personally responsible for the death of so many British, American and allied agents than Harold Adrian Russell ‘Kim’ Philby; yet, in some indefinable way, it would have been kinder by far if James Angleton had died with them when the dreadful truth of his betrayal became known.
It was not as if Angleton had been the only man taken in by the charming, debonair son of the famous Arabist, St John Philby, an advisor to the King of Saudi Arabia, Ibn Sa'ud. An old boy of Westminster School, a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge; Philby had reported for The Times from the Nationalist side of the Spanish Civil War and enjoyed a stellar career in intelligence in the Second War. Later, Philby’s stellar intelligence career had resulted in him being, for a short period, the de facto MI6 Head of Station in Washington in the early 1950s, and for Angleton those had been glory years, the happiest days of his life…
Angleton had come into contact with Philby, and fallen in love with the world of counter-espionage and the heavy-drinking, devil may care ways of MI6 while working for the X-2 – Counter-Intelligence - Branch of the Office of Strategic Services, in London in the winter of 1943-44. Philby, as no other man, had awakened Angleton’s imagination to the possibilities of the secret world. Even when the first gossip surfaced about Philby, and then his alleged confederates, Burgess and MacLean, and of communist cells formed in the 1930s in their college days, Angleton had never believed his old friend was a traitor.
And then one day Dick White, then the Head of MI6, had had to make the fateful telephone call to Washington to break the awful news; and James Angleton’s world had changed forever.
What had started as a mole hunt within the US security community – if the British could have been compromised so easily for so long; it seemed axiomatic that the CIA, the FBI and every organ of the Federal Government must also be similarly ‘penetrated’ – had gradually consumed more and more of the CIA’s assets, ever-spreading its tendrils of inquiry and suspicion until, gripped by post-October 1962 paranoia, regularly fuelled by further national and international disasters and incontrovertibly confirmed by the evidence of the coups and rebellions, Operation Maelstrom had long ago, come to assume the proportions of a crusade consuming the resources of the greater part of the whole counter-intelligence community of the Central Intelligence Agency.