by James Philip
For a moment, Clyde Tolson paused to organise his thoughts; that had got a lot harder lately even though he knew he had recovered as much as he was ever going to, from the stroke which had laid him low last year.
He stared at the stuffed animals, trophy heads on the wall; oddly juxtaposed with Hoover’s favourite – by DC standard’s avant-garde and esoteric – actually rather tame erotic paintings.
If only his enemies understood that Edgar was a complicated guy…
“Adams is a good man,” Hoover mused aloud.
“Yeah, he’s had a lot of face to face time with Christie in San Francisco,” Tolson returned, his mind slowly focusing on how he was going to tell his friend the bad news. “It may be that Rachel Piotrowska levelled with Adams before she came back to DC…”
Hoover raised a suspicious eyebrow.
“Have we found her yet?”
Tolson shook his head, waited patiently to defuse an explosion that never happened.
“No,” he told his friend. “We reckon she probably got on a Greyhound at Grand Forks bound for Fargo. She could have got a flight from there…”
“How would she have paid for that?”
“I don’t know, Chief.”
“She could be anywhere!”
Tolson nodded. “Agent Adams is sending me the notes he put together after he talked to her. I think she got him thinking, questioning some of the assumptions we’ve been making about Christie.”
Hoover had stopped frowning. “Such as, Clyde?”
“Adams used to be an attorney. He says we’d get our fingers burned if we tried to indict Christie for nine-tenths of the crimes he claims to have committed…”
“We ran polygraphs on the guy at Quantico?” The Director of the FBI objected. His voice was never quite so rat-a-tat when he was alone with Tolson. His persistent, childhood stutter virtually disappeared when he was in his friend’s company. “The bastard passed them all.”
“But there were anomalous results on several of the tests.”
“There always are,” Hoover shrugged.
“Adams said he thinks the psychological profiling for Christie is,” Tolson continued, hesitating momentarily, “incomplete.”
Hoover, the older man by some five years sighed, suddenly grey and worn despite his artificially boot-blacked head of only belatedly thinning hair.
“What the fuck does that mean, Clyde?”
“Agent Adams thinks that Christie may have been,” he halted, distaste quirking his pale lips, “systematically falsifying Bureau records throughout his career,” he shook his head, “and doing pretty much the same damned thing before that, when he was in the Army in the Second War as part of the Department of Defense’s Central Office of Procurement Control.”
Now J. Edgar Hoover raised a severely trimmed eyebrow.
Tolson continued: “Adams wants to bring in specialists, people from Stanford to forensically examine specimen historic files and records compiled during Christie’s time as Assistant, and then Special Agent on the West Coast between April 1957 and December 1963…”
“How long will that take?”
“Months, maybe,” Tolson admitted apologetically.
The two men stared at each other.
There was a rogue CIA operative on the loose in DC; a man clearly on some kind of wrecking ball mission. Operation Maelstrom was out in the open and it was only a matter of time before Special Council – in reality the previous Congress’s ‘Prosecutor’ – Judge Earl Burger, sought to re-convene the grand Jury at which both Hoover and Tolson had systematically perjured themselves last year, and the whole, ghastly Warwick Hotel disaster came back to haunt the Bureau.
And now they were facing the possibility that Dwight Christie may have been doctoring the Bureau’s most secret files, perhaps for many years…
It raised the nightmare possibility that whole tranches of records might just be flimflam, and if that became known outside the Bureau hundreds, or more likely, thousands of convictions would suddenly become suspect.
The old man realised he was hyper-ventilating, feeling dizzy. He forced himself to take several long, slow breaths.
They had to get a handle on this; and fast!
Not for the first time the irony of the situation pressed upon both Hoover and Tolson. Whereas, in the past they could always rely on Eisenhower, or even JFK in some things, and LBJ to protect them and their people from meaningful public and judicial scrutiny, he had no faith whatsoever that Nixon or the Chief Executive’s incompetent California frat buddies filling most of the key posts in the White House, would lift so much as a finger to deflect the heat this time around. And, if that was not bad enough, the Piotrowska woman had disappeared, and nobody had figured out where that fucking Remington 700, M24 .30-06 sniper rifle fitted into the picture.
Hoover tried to take stock.
That the President and all his men were out of town, still half-paralysed by the Operation maelstrom shit storm raging in and around Capitol Hill was just another cruel accident of fate. Even the wiser DC-insiders were still too shocked to have noticed the storm generated by the initial Washington Post revelations had probably peaked. Or that, already, the attention was sliding off message to zero-in on the resignations and the sackings at the White House. Within hours of US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s resignation, ‘sources close to the Administration’ had retaliated, disseminating details of the eminent academic’s womanising and ‘wild partying’, and put about a rumour that ‘the Doctor’ had been about to be sacked, anyway. Nobody cared about the US Ambassador to the United Nations (Designate) stepping down; and everybody had known Ron Ziegler was expendable, likely to be the first sacrificial offering to Earl Burger’s investigation.
No, the thing that was still rumbling, like a low-intensity earthquake that just went on for ever and ever, it was the Good Captain, Ambassador Walter Brenckmann, jumping ship just at the moment the storm generated by The Washington Post’s muck-raking was breaking around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue!
That was not going to go away any time soon and if anybody was stupid enough to try to retaliate against the Brenckmann family, they were inviting a full-scale war with the Betancourt clan. Nobody in DC needed that right now!
In fact, nothing worried the veteran Director of the FBI as much as the thought that one of the President’s men might get caught having a pop at…the Good Captain.
Hopefully, when the President got back from California things would have settled down again; and perhaps, he might try having a confidential word with the Commander-in-Chief about the best way to play…things.
If there had been anybody close to the President with his head in gear, who was capable of stepping back from the car wreck and looking at what else was coming down the road, somebody ought to have reminded Nixon that a GOP-dominated Hill, was not about to impeach the man who was the Party’s last best shield against picking up the tab for Ike’s carelessness – vis-a-vis Operation Maelstrom’s parent project, Operation Chaos - back in the late 1950s. The political reality was that nobody was going to give a shit that JFK and LBJ had played along with Operation Maelstrom; the guy who had set the hares running in 1959 was Eisenhower, and full disclosure had happened on Richard Nixon’s watch. Right now, the GOP on the Hill was in damage limitation mode; it was high time the Administration caught up!
Maybe, Hoover would tell the President the lay of the land.
Somebody ought to tell him he was playing this thing all wrong.
Paper-thin lies that Operation Maelstrom had had its roots in the Eisenhower-JFK years and had only been revived as a wartime ‘exigency’ to cope with the wars in the Midwest, were being pumped out by every Nixon staffer, spokesperson and every mealy-mouthed apologist left in the Capital. And as for the House of Representatives, presently nearly wholly-owned by the GOP, the silence had been positively, and very sensibly, deafening!
No, even if the President did not know it yet, he could ride this one out. His pol
l ratings were going to take a ten-point hit but that still left him odds-on to walk back into the White House in November 1968. Richard Nixon might think he had a headache but the Bureau and the Central Intelligence Agencies ‘problems’ were likely, very soon to become the real focus of the inevitable witch hunt. Especially, when somebody in the Administration got his finger out of his arse, and realised that the only logical thing to do was to blame it all on the guys who had been in charge of US intelligence and internal security in the Eisenhower-Kennedy years.
Hoover had it all worked out.
Richard Nixon was not going to turn on his best boy, Richard Helms. Helms had only got to be Director of Central Intelligence last autumn. No, the CIA’s fall guys would be his predecessor, John McCone – people said he was a sick man on the way out – and the man JFK had sacked after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Allen Dulles, the true architect of what later became Operation Maelstrom, and the man who had entrusted its execution to his faithful lieutenant, James Jesus Angleton.
Problematically, Hoover had no real feel for whether Nixon had the balls, knowing or suspecting he, and he assumed, Angleton both had to have ‘the dirt’ on him, would go for the ‘nuclear option’ and try to throw him and the Bureau under the bus. Or worse, simply allow Earl Burger and the army of investigators yet to be appointed – and there would be a lot more of them than before – to condemn his reputation and the whole FBI to a lingering death by a thousand cuts. He was trapped. There was no guarantee that if he resigned, which was unthinkable, the President would give him a free pass.
He suspected that while he still controlled the Bureau, he still had a weakened, brittle bulwark against evil; but the moment he put that shield down, or his grip on it faltered, the wolves would surely tear out his throat.
So, the big question was, does the President have the guts to sack me?
The problem with that shithead Christie and the CIA’s mislaid assassins were, in the scale of things, if not manageable then peripheral to the tsunami of grief coming down the road towards him, Tolson and the shared love of their lives, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“That woman,” Hoover said, his voice distracted. “Constantis, Zabriski, something like that…”
“What are you thinking, Chief?”
“How about it we send her out to San Francisco to do her profiling thing with Christie?”
“She’s CIA…”
“Didn’t she walk away from one of their programs – one of the ones the college boys at Langley didn’t want to admit existed, even in those days - back in the fifties before she got to head up the psycho profiling task force?”
Clyde Tolson nodded, deciding not to correct his friend, whose memory, like his own, was not all it had once been. Professor Constantis, as she then was, might have thought she was working for the Bureau on that mind-bending program at the time. She was a clever lady; she would have figured out who she was actually working for; that was why she had invested so much energy working with the Bureau after she had had her little professional tantrum…
It seemed like ancient history now but before the Cuban Missiles War Professor Caroline Constantis had been on the Bureau’s payroll as Associate Deputy Director of the Criminal Profiling Office of the FBI in Illinois, a part-time consultancy role which she combined with her teaching and research work with the Medical School of the University of Chicago. She had signed on the dotted line, taken the oath; if it came to it, the Bureau still owned a little bit of her.
“Yes. I recollect that she cited ethical concerns, Chief.”
Hoover grunted an unkind snort of laughter.
Tolson, not knowing where this was going injected a cautionary note into the exchange.
“The work she did getting inside Edwin Mertz’s head for the President would not have been possible but for the Bureau ensuring that she had had unrestricted access to the mad SOB for all those years…”
“True, very true. She’s in DC, now, right?”
Clyde Tolson nodded.
“Do we know where?” His friend asked him.
“Yeah. The Secret Service usually has eyes on her when she’s in DC; they’re kind of stretched at the moment. We took up the detail, as a favour to the White House.”
Hoover’s eyes narrowed.
“Do you think she’d run her eye over former Special Agent Christie for us?”
“I don’t know, Chief. What’s your thinking on this one?”
No other man in America could have asked that questions and actually expected a frank answer. Especially, as it was the second time that he had asked it.
“I,” Hoover replied, thoughtfully, “need to stay focused on the Administration, Clyde. Like we agreed, you and I can’t be everywhere, fighting every fire with this Operation Maelstrom shit coming at us from all directions. But Christie’s testimony has got our people in Texas and California running every which way. If it turns out he’s been yanking our chain, we need to know about it before those parasites on Capitol Hill do. The Company’s in the firing line at the moment; we don’t want that to change.”
Clyde Tolson fought of a sinking feeling.
“There is one problem,” he confessed. “She’s also got Air Force security on her case, Chief.”
“Okay, okay,” Hoover was on his feet. “We’ll have to do something about that. We both need to be in the office. We’ve got some calls to make!”
Chapter 41
Friday 10th February 1967
USS United States, San Francisco Bay
Whoever had decided that the one-time First-Class Dining Compartment of the former luxury transatlantic liner ought to be employed as the General Assembly Room, deserved to be keel-hauled.
In that, if not a lot else, Lord Thomas Carlyle Harding-Grayson, Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the majority of the delegates and dignitaries crammed into the already stickily humid space, was relatively confident that there would be universal agreement.
Apparently, a small electrical fire somewhere in the bowels of the great ship had ‘killed’ the air conditioning plant serving the amidships compartments of the vessel.
As the day progressed, most of those present began to think that keel-hauling was far too good a fate for whoever was responsible for configuring the totally inadequate, and in every way, unsuitable General Assembly Room much in the fashion of a large, and particularly unconvivial speakeasy!
What might have been dining tables had been turned towards the forward end of the compartment, where officials sat on a slightly raised stage. Microphones with cables snaking to all parts were laboriously transferred from one table to another when each nation got its say, and Marine Corps troopers stood at every hatchway, serving as guards and assistant tellers whenever there was a vote.
On the first afternoon it had been agreed - although, by no means unanimously – that each member of the pre-Cuban Missiles War Security Council would address the General Assembly. No speech was to take more than twenty minutes; a stricture already breached by the representative of the Republic of China (the People’s Republic had not been invited to the conference), the United States (with its newly designated Ambassador, George Bush, clearly reading from the script his predecessor had prepared), and by Maurice Schumann, who had been flown to California by the RAF only as an afterthought, when it was determined by the Free French political caucus in Oxford, that it was inappropriate for the Anglo-French position to be ‘jointly presented’.
The purpose of the opening ‘declarations’ had been to re-affirm the purpose of the United Nations and to outline the main issues facing the re-dedicated organisation. Instead, thus far, there had been three wildly divergent, logic-defying proclamations denying that World War Three had happened and that they needed to deal with the World not as it was now but as it had been on Saturday 27th October 1962.
Tom Harding-Grayson, unlike the three previous speakers – each addressing the gathering from their seat
s among their delegations, practically unseen, had risen to his feet and surveyed his surroundings. Having in younger days, rather envied fellows who could casually wander a stage, with a microphone in hand in a club, strutting their stuff, crooning to their heart’s content, he had – just to see what happened – lifted the microphone the technicians had planted on the United Kingdom’s table, tapped it and raised it to his lips.
“I do hope everybody can hear and see me?”
This drew a subdued response.
“Jolly good. In that case I shall begin. I shall not exceed my allotted time; frankly, I take the view that in a forum such as this we owe each other all due courtesy and civility. In short, if we act towards each other without respect, what example does that broadcast around the globe?”
Members seated at the nearby US table shook their heads.
“It is the position of the United Kingdom that in its functions and established practices that the United Nations should resume unchanged. However,” he went on, ignoring the mutterings from certain quarters, “that it should not be located on the territory of its most powerful and dominant member. Like other nations the United Kingdom wishes to bring certain matters to the attention of the General Assembly; and hereby gives notice that it is not content to go forward supporting the former constitution of the Security Council. The World has moved on since 1945 and the five permanent members of the pre-October 1962 council – the victors of the Second War – do not reflect the geopolitical realities on the ground. The United Kingdom’s ally, France, is presently a country divided and clearly, no country so divided can speak with one voice. Therefore, it is my Government’s recommendation that until such time as the war in France is over, France should not speak or vote in the forum of the Security Council.”
Maurice Schumann stared fixedly to his front while other members of his delegation fulminated. He remained in his chair; that was the deal, the only realistic way his country could hope – in the long-term - to remain at the top table of international affairs. Schumann was older than most of his staffers, of a generation who, in the 1940s, had trusted to the British and the Americans to liberate his country and in the end, after four interminably, long years of humiliation and anguish, they had been true to their word. So, like his counterpart and the de facto leader of the Free French, General Alain de Boissieu, he had had no alternative but to accept this new, hopefully temporary, fait accompli. Their British allies, to whom they owed so much in blood and treasure, had had to have something to bring to the table. Given that there was no realistic prospect of the Security Council sitting at this gathering, Schumann and de Boissieu had agreed the ‘negotiating tactic’, and hoped above hope, that they were not going to be sold down the river.