Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  April 5, 1961

  I would like to apologize here, Kittredge, for my mode of transmission. You may ask why I simply didn’t pass it on to you care of Hugh. Please do communicate to him that no man with the possible exception of my father has had more influence on my life. Hugh possesses the most powerful and decisive mind I have ever encountered, and it is precisely for this reason that I do not wish him to be an intermediary between you and me. If, for his own good and sufficient reasons, he were to judge that you should not see these pages, he would destroy them. For that matter, even the thought that he might read this journal would inhibit the writing of it. After all, I have been hopelessly in love with you from the day we met at the Keep, eight years ago this summer. If I die in battle, extinguished by some errant shell that missed a more military mark, I will go out cherishing my love because it provides me with the moral wherewithal to face my death and fight for a cause that—considering the fell complexities of Alpha and Omega—is a cause I would say I believe in. Our fight against Communism does offer dignity and sanction to the lonely quarters of one’s soul. I suppose that I am in the proper occupation, therefore, and I do love you. Since I revere Hugh, yet am here admitting to unfocused designs on the security of his home, I now see myself as his Shade.

  Enough. I have said what did not, perhaps, need to be said. For the rest, let me keep this journal lively enough to satisfy some of your omnivorous curiosity on how things work.

  April 6, 1961

  Given the irregular nature of our much-enclaved Agency, it occurs to me that perhaps you do not know where Quarters Eye is located.

  We are a good stone’s throw away from the I-J-K-L, and have our own World War II shacks on Ohio Drive, a former Wave barracks that actually faces the Potomac. Needless to say, we require special ID and maintain our own communications center which neatly bypasses the rest of the Agency. It worked for Guatemala, goes the theory, and will again.

  Well, we may have moved our distance from the Reflecting Pool, but the drains continue to clog in the Washington swamplands, the old barracks floor creaks, and the poor ventilation reminds us of the old problem; shower as we do, and raid the exchequer for deodorants as we must, nonetheless we discover all over again that we are not odorless beasts. I mention this as the intimate cruelty that is put upon our work. Never have so many good people devoted to personal cleanliness and dedicated labor had to suffer such an awareness of close quarters. This may be the penance we were not prepared to pay. Every time I come back to work in Washington I am reminded of it. One term for our local bastion is Stale Quarters.

  At any rate, there’s not much to picture. Two floors of a large barracks. Upstairs is the Newsroom—Hunt’s and my bailiwick. Desks, posters, propaganda displays in various stages of development. Always the ubiquitous cubicles. One studio at the north end for draftsmen. We are comparatively good on light compared to the first floor where the War Room is located (and requires still another ID card—took forty-eight hours to clear me, even if Cal has an office adjoining). The War Room, of course, is where one wants to be. Enough communications systems and cable-snakes to compete with a film set; large maps and charts covered with acetate overlays, still virgin, for the most part, of grease pencils. One has entered a sanctum. I am reminded of a surgical theater. There is the same kind of palpable hush before the first incision.

  April 7, 1961

  Howard’s immediate boss in Quarters Eye is called Knight. In Uruguay, Howard used to speak of earlier days in Guatemala when Knight was working for him, so I happen to be in on the fact that the fellow’s real name is David Phillips. This sets up an embarrassment. One must pretend not to be aware. What compounds the irony is that it doesn’t really matter. It wouldn’t wreck a thing at Quarters Eye if we knew him as Dave Phillips. In Miami, cover may be another matter, but the general feeling up here is that we’re laying on a little too much hygiene. Hence, this journal will call him David Phillips. It’s how I think of him, and it is a perfect name for what he is, a tall man, reasonably built, a Texan with a pleasant face, not too strong, not too weak, and reasonably manly. He looks intelligent, yet not overly cultivated. Central Casting would take him for a CIA man, and, at the moment, he rules the propaganda roost here. Around 1958, he cut his CIA ties and opened a public relations office in Havana on the sound expectation Batista would lose. He anticipated that all the old publicity firms would then be persona non grata under Castro. What he didn’t count on, he now admits, is that Castro would move to the left so quickly that the Communist Party would not allow anyone but themselves to take care of publicity. Naturally, the Company also had Phillips doing a bit of contract work in Havana, so when he pulled up stakes and left for America, Tracy Barnes signed him on again, and with a promotion. Phillips is now a career man on the express elevator. While he and Howard get along ostensibly well, I would guess they relate like in-laws.

  Phillips has been pleasant enough to me, and I like him, although not that much. Perhaps it’s his air of corporate geniality. He could have worked the front office for General Motors, IBM, Boeing, General Foods, Time, Life, name it. I expect that he’s as ambitious as Howard.

  Moreover, he has a social vice that puts me off. Phillips is always telling stories. They are funny enough provided you put in a little work behind your laugh. While chuckling away at his tales, I feel not unlike a pastry tube being squeezed for a bit more whipped cream. One sample is sufficient: “I knew,” he begins in practiced fashion, “an American newsman in Beirut who once had the following experience on the road to Damascus. He was driving a Volkswagen when the young soldier on guard at the Syrian border proceeded to stop him. Why? On the charge that he was smuggling an automobile engine across in his rear trunk. To cut down on corruption, the Syrian government had plucked their loyal guards right off the farm, and this new lad in uniform had never before seen a vehicle with a rear-mounted motor. My friend, however, being an old hand, shrugged, turned around, drove one hundred yards down the road to the Lebanese guard post, and then backed up to Syrian customs again.

  “The guard went to the rear (which two minutes ago had been the front of the car), opened it, discovered it to be empty, and said, ‘You may enter my country.’ So my friend got his story by driving into Syria ass-backwards.”

  Do you know, Kittredge, how many anecdotes at just this level of exaggeration are forever being swapped back and forth around here? I realize that I’ve always avoided Agency men like Phillips where I could. Their brand of humor reminds me of the one drink before dinner that is taken by people who do not like alcohol but are following doctor’s orders.

  At any rate, we have a troika. Phillips tells his jokes, Howard whinnies, I chuck-chuck-chuckle, and our laughter, once it has lasted respectably long enough, stops like a slow-moving car with good brakes. I swear, there are more damn ways to lose your soul.

  April 9, 1961

  A report has come to the War Room regarding the cargo vessels we leased. They are to serve as troop transports and have arrived at Puerto de Cabezas in Nicaragua. By way of HALIFAX, I learn that they are gangrenous old tubs with rusty cranes and winches and are bound to cause a slowdown in loading supplies. Our people on the spot did not have a favorable reaction. “It gave me a cold feeling,” reported one of them to Cal.

  Let us hope this is not symbolic of the venture. I alternate between fever and chill. While the Brigade was most impressive in February, their numbers have since doubled. In consequence, half the troops have to be seriously undertrained. The Fifth and Sixth Battalions were created just a few days ago out of recruits who signed up in the last couple of weeks, and one can worry about the collective makeup of our personnel, since it is indubitably a middle-class army and has only fifty Negroes in the ranks. Which could prove a problem. More than half the population of Cuba is black. In addition, the Directorate of Intelligence tells us that only 25 percent of the Cuban population is opposed to Castro. Somehow, that causes less concern. It seems our pride here at Operations is
to pay no attention to what comes over the transom from the Directorate of Intelligence.

  All the same, I keep being bothered by that statistic; can only 25 percent of the Cuban population be opposed to Castro? If it is true, why won’t the man permit an open vote? I must say that I keep swinging back and forth in confidence. Chills when I think of Castro’s army. We estimate it at thirty thousand trained soldiers, and his militia could come to ten times that. Of course, our assumption is that the militia will fall away from him at a great rate. All wars in Cuba have been won by the smaller force. In other words, Cuba is a magical system. So I experience what I would term good fevers at the thought of the outcome. Combat, according to Cal, is the largest magic show of them all and always takes place “on that damned old darkling plain,” fraught with coincidence and intervention. Yes, I worry over the Brigade.

  April 10, 1961

  A report has just been forwarded to me from Zenith. My number-one Miami agent, the same Chevi Fuertes I worked with in Uruguay, keeps warning me about two gentlemen named Mario García Kohly and Rolando Masferrer. There is serious talk in Miami that their ultra-right-wing group is planning to assassinate the Cuban Revolutionary Council en masse, just so soon as that political body is flown into Cuba. To me it sounds more like a threat than an execution, but the element to give pause is that if I were Castro, Kohly’s underground in Cuba would be precisely the people I would not wish to arrest until they had fulfilled their mission against the Cuban Revolutionary Council. This is to assume that Kohly, like the others, has been penetrated by Castro.

  When I go with this concern to Cal, he shakes his head at me. “Do you ever read the newspapers?” he asks.

  It is right there for me in the first section of the Washington Post. Rolando Masferrer was indicted today by a Federal Grand Jury in Miami for conspiring to send a military expedition to Cuba. That is a violation of neutrality laws.

  “Well,” I say, “we don’t always mess up, do we?”

  “Not always,” says Cal.

  later, April 10, 1961

  Hunt, Phillips, and myself, at work in a conference room on the second floor, must sound like we are programming a computer to print poetry on demand. Come D-Day, our Swan Island shortwave transmitter is going to bombard Havana and the provinces of Cuba with enough transmissions to paralyze whatever section of the DGI is assigned to intercepting our messages to the underground. The transmissions, while nonsense, will have the ring of tradecraft. It is a neat concept. Our people in Cuba will ignore messages they do not understand on the assumption those words are being beamed to other groups. But the DGI will feel obliged to deal with each and every transmission. In preparation, as good conscientious wordsmiths, we fine-tune our output. “The jackal is loose in the sugarcane,” for example. We argue whether jackals are indigenous to Cuba, and whether they have a tropism for sugarcane. We do not want to send any message that will reveal an ignorance of Cuban natural history. We could certainly use one sophisticated Habanero right at our side. Instead, we call on the Caribbean Desk in the Directorate of Intelligence. Since they are excluded from the operation, we request no more than a rundown on flora and fauna and agricultural techniques in the eastern and western halves of Cuba. Then we’ll know if we can employ, “The owl hoots at midnight,” “The bobcat moves over the ridge,” “The swamps are draining,” “The papaya fields show smoke.” Or, best of all, “Wait for the eye of the Antilles.”

  April 11, 1961

  The cherry blossoms came out today on the Potomac. A faint reflection of that natural bounty is in our collective mood today at Quarters Eye, or do I make a case out of a few errant smiles?

  The Cuban Revolutionary Council, hereinafter known as the CRC, has by means of one or another subterfuge been brought up to New York to meet with their overlord, Frank Bender, a bald, cigar-smoking East European who speaks no Spanish. He has gotten them into one small meeting room at the Commodore long enough to announce that the invasion is very much in the works, and that if they wish to be flown to the beachhead, they must now agree to be sequestered in a hotel suite in New York for the next few days—security forbids any closer information. They will be able to make no phone calls. If any one of them does not wish to agree to this, he is free to leave and free to miss the invasion. Bender, an old hand at East European ironies, also gets across the notion that any CRC leader who did not wish to join such an agreement might find himself a security risk and be sequestered alone. Naturally they all agree to go into the communal lock-up. Hunt claims that these elaborate steps are necessary because of Manuel Ray, but I can think of Toto Barbaro, and am just as happy that none of them can now send out a message. It does occur to me that we must have used at least twenty people from Zenith to set up the various pretexts that brought these six highly individual Cuban gentlemen to New York. Well, we are good at that, and so should we be.

  Bender, who is now cloistered with this crew of esteemed prisoners, informs Hunt that they are importuning him already for advance news. “If we are to be captives,” they say, “can we at least have the compensation of acquiring some privileged knowledge?”

  In the meantime, to steer CRC publicity, Knight has hired a Madison Avenue public relations firm named Lem Jones Associates. Actually, he has rehired them. Lem Jones has already done work for the Frente. I can see by the expression on Phillips’ face that I am in for one of his stories.

  “I would say,” commences Phillips, “that Lem Jones earned his Frente money last September. Castro was slated to speak at the UN that month, and Lem and I decided to confront him with a couple of busloads of Cuban women. ‘Mothers from Miami.’ It was to be ‘a Caravan of Sorrow’ and would climax with a prayer session at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

  “En route, however, from Miami, our chartered Greyhound buses were seriously slowed. We had carefully selected four pregnant women, and now we discovered that they had to pee every ten miles. We came in late at Washington, D.C., and missed a press conference. Ditto, Philadelphia. The Caravan of Sorrow entered New York one full day late, but we did get news shots of the ladies praying in St. Patrick’s. It made the papers and the wire services. I would say Lem Jones has earned his reemployment.”

  April 12, 1961

  The tempo of real action is commencing. One can feel it in the War Room.

  I learn today that the loading of the supply ships at Puerto de Cabezas progressed even more slowly than anticipated. The winches kept fouling, and a huge hatch cover on one of the ships had rusted in place. Hours of effort were expended in prying it loose. The Brigade troops, however, full of high morale, threw themselves into manhandling the cargo. My imagination is sufficiently vivid to hear winches screaming and hoists wheezing from one end of the harbor to the other. So soon as they are loaded, off they go to anchor a few hundred yards away, their share of the Brigade already on board. Word comes back that the troops are sleeping in hammocks below deck and on tarpaulins over the hatch cover. The officers, still living in pup tents on shore, will celebrate a Mass tonight after receiving their full orientation on the invasion plan. Only then will they learn where they are going to land in Cuba.

  Our people in Puerto Cabezas also reported that Luís Somoza, President of Nicaragua, adjured the Brigade to: “Bring me a couple of hairs from Castro’s beard.” Our observer added: “Since Somoza is a plump and powdered dictator with pancake makeup, I’m afraid his expectation of hearty applause had to put up with a few snickers as well. One rugged Cuban yelled back, ‘The beard above or the beard below?’”

  It is also being bruited about at Quarters Eye that our rented freighters from the García Line are so old they will lend absolute authenticity to our claim that the invasion is financed by Cubans and run by Cubans. No self-respecting American would ever go near such tubs. Phillips comments: “Keeping this operation authentically Cuban may have been carried a little too far.”

  still April 12

  I keep alternating between two systems of perception. One part of me fastens on
every report from TRAX and Puerto de Cabezas. The other reminds me that the fate of the Brigade may yet be linked to my own. In a week or less, I will join them on the beachhead. That does not yet feel real. As a result, my anxiety lives in my body like a mild grippe and sensitizes each movement of my limbs.

  Now, it occurs to me that if I am on the beachhead, I can be captured, and if they conclude, as they will, that I am CIA, they could torture me. I could talk. (Could I? I do not possess the answer.) I realize that I may know too much. This produces a childish reaction—I am furious at everyone in the Agency who has told me too much. “It will be your fault, not mine,” I actually say to myself, and am appalled. The truth is that I have no basis in experience by which to measure these new ventures. So I am as wild in my thoughts as a man alone at a party to whom no one speaks.

  still April 12

  The large news today at Quarters Eye has been Kennedy’s statement at a packed press conference this morning. “Under no conditions,” he declares, “will there be an intervention in Cuba by the United States Armed Forces.”

  Naturally, these words are striking enough to be put up in type on the Newsroom billboard and downstairs in the War Room. Hunt is beaming. “A superb effort,” he concludes, “in misdirection.” We know the aircraft carrier Essex is waiting in Puerto Rico to rendezvous at the Bay of Pigs.

  Down in the War Room, however, Cal is much less pleased: “If Kennedy means what he says, we can get out the black drapes.”

  Cal is obviously counting on a full military follow-up by the U.S. That suggests Bissell and Dulles are of the same persuasion. The assumption has to be that Kennedy will never accept defeat. Arguments rotate around this. Does our President mean that he will not intervene under any circumstances, or is it a masterstroke, as Hunt hopes?

  In the War Room, I am more aware than ever of how prodigiously large is our map of the Bay of Pigs. I see it as a species of technological magic to pose against the bloody, twisted chicken necks in the mayombero’s soup.