Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  Your own Sherlock Halifax

  POST SCRIPTUM: How fares Mongoose?

  16

  MARILYN MONROE MURDERED! I DECIDED EVERY MAN WAS ENTITLED TO one insane thesis. In any event, I was not eager to get back to my father about Mongoose. For months, I had been sending letters to Kittredge whose first line produced some variant of “I know I have not had much to say about our progress lately, but then there has not been a great deal to report.” Then, I made as much as I could of our small raids.

  Nearly every night, one or more of our boats in Miami or the Keys would slip out to a rendezvous on the Cuban coast; there were weeks when as many as twenty craft took that hazardous round trip. Expanding on my father’s concept of mother ships, Harvey had acquired several yachts capable of carrying good-sized launches for the landing parties. We even had two Navy patrol craft, the Rex and the Leda, serving as our flagships. Each time I encountered them at a dock or in a marina, they had taken on new hues. A once peacock-green deck and aquamarine hull would now be a tawny-pink superstructure with a white hull. Harvey was determined to keep our fleet looking like pleasure craft rather than gunboats; the artillery—40mm naval cannon, .50-caliber machine guns and recoilless .57-caliber rifles—was kept below, and both flagships carried a knock-down crane on the fantail that could, when assembled, lower and raise our 120-horsepower inboard fiberglass boats for the short, quick run to shore. Harvey registered these men-of-war out of Nicaragua, and had them owned by paper corporations attached by more pieces of paper to ship companies owned by Somoza. The docking fees for the boats were picked up by Oceanic Mangrove, a company that operated out of a desk at Zenith. “I can play the shell game with a 180-foot ship,” Harvey liked to say. The salaries of the Cuban crew came out of a canning company in Key West. I kept looking to satisfy Kittredge’s passion for details, but letters to her had begun to weigh on my nerves. I kept contemplating the size of the disaster should Harlot discover our correspondence. That would be horrendous unless he chose to divorce her (and I could marry her), but what if some Agency man other than Hugh came across our correspondence? In that case, Kittredge and I could continue writing to one another from maximum security cells. While the danger itself must have appealed to her, I took on the calculated risk of these letters as but one more burden on Harry Hubbard’s mule-packing soul and kept pushing myself to tell her more. There was always more.

  Harvey, to keep control, had built each network into a separate cluster of cells, and since he liked to keep each cell apart, we ended with custom espionage shops which often performed but one function. We had, for instance, a group of four accountants in the Ministry of Finance in Havana whose labors were elegant: They had succeeded in embezzling enough government funds to finance a good part of our operation in Cuba. I had images of Castro searching his desk for a particular paper in a mountain of office debris and never finding the document he needed because one of his personal secretaries had already passed it on to us. Cuba would rear up in my dreams as a compost heap; I had to wonder how the country could function at all; then I would decide that in its chaos was its strength. Cuba lived with so much disarray that whatever we added merely became part of the heap. It was the only answer to how Castro’s DGI could function at all when our intelligence, so closely guarded, could not control most of JM/WAVE’s Cubans. Sometimes, after a successful sortie, our exiles, on returning to Miami, would call an unauthorized press conference to boast of their exploits, and would follow that up by taking a processional down SW 8th Street in Little Havana. Adoring Cuban women would lay palm leaves on their path. Harvey, in a rage, would cut off these raiders’ salaries, but after a month or so, he would be obliged to take them back. We could hardly let JM/WAVE Cubans hook up with the wilder exiles. Even so, we often lost our best boatmen. After all, we discouraged publicity, they craved it. Good publicity, they told me, was equal to camburos maduros. If “ripe bananas” comes out to the literal meaning, “hot pussy” is the working American equivalent.

  I would have liked to write to Kittredge about Roselli, who was particularly active all spring and summer, but he kept embarking on ventures that came to nothing. The pills we gave him would reach his final contact and go no further. “Conditions are not appropriate,” we would hear. I could be sympathetic to the honest fear endured by any waiter who would have to work each night with the anxiety that Fidel might or might not drop into the restaurant around midnight. Doubtless, such agents ended by flushing the pills away. ANCHOVY a.k.a. CAVIAR was going nowhere.

  Sometimes I would write to her about the ongoing war between Lansdale and Harvey, but it, too, was predictable. Harvey had nothing but epithets for Lansdale: “All-American-boy-genius,” “peanut head,” “Li’l Abner,” and “whacko” were standouts. Lansdale, in turn, had his complaints. “It is impossible,” he would inform me, “to get anything working with Bill Harvey. If I ask for a full estimate on some serious undertaking, I count myself lucky if I get back a one-sentence memo. If I tell him that I want more, he will answer, ‘I don’t intend, General, to go into mouth-gagging detail on every last wrinkle of this endeavor.’ Once, I reached across the desk, looked Harvey in the eye, and, swear to this, nearly grabbed him—and I am not a physical man. ‘Bill Harvey, get one thing straight,’ I told him, ‘I am not the enemy.’ It did no good. No good at all. Care to hear his response? He lifted one of his overstuffed legs, rolled to the side and broke wind right in my presence.”

  “Broke wind?” I interrupted, as if this were a matter to be confirmed.

  “Yes. Farted. An atrocious-smelling production. No Shakespearean villain could have given me a clearer sense of odium. What an awful person Bill Harvey has to be! He reached down to his ankle, unstrapped his sheath knife, and proceeded to clean his nails. He is intolerable.”

  I nodded from time to time as Lansdale was speaking to indicate that I was indeed listening. I did not reply. I did not know how to say a word without betraying Harvey, or myself, or sounding unsympathetic to Lansdale. I also realized by now that I was not supposed to answer. If I had commenced my work in liaison on the assumption that I was a connective principle, a conjunction, so to speak, I had by now decided that I was but a semicolon, installed to keep the elements in some kind of extended relation, well apart.

  17

  Wednesday, September 6, 1962

  Dear Kittredge,

  Were you in Maine for the latter part of August? I took my two weeks through Labor Day, the most I’ve had since the spring of ’60 when I climbed Katahdin in the last of the May snows. This year I made the mistake of spending my time (free room and board) with my mother in Southampton, and almost got married. ( Joke, darling, an absolute joke.) In truth, I don’t know who was after me most, the single girls to whom my mother had sung my praises, or her younger married friends, but I was ready to throttle the lady responsible for my existence since I do not think there is anyone in Southampton who does not know by now that I am an Agency hand. It was revolting, or would have been if the sexual emoluments had not been so attendant on the knowledge. God, we in the Agency are bum-rated all over the world as evil and sinister manipulators of downtrodden nations, etc., etc., but don’t those summer lasses make a beeline for a man just because he is not totally unpresentable and, haven’t you heard, is, yes, so bad, a CIA man. I realized in two fast weeks that I did not need to worry about the interest and principal on my own funds anymore. My mother is richer than she will admit and, no matter what, is bound to drop some capital on my head; besides, I have at least ten good years in which to marry one or another medium-bracket heiress. I could have gotten betrothed to some real mazuma in these couple of weeks if I had had any inclinations in such direction, yet discovered to my surprise that I despise most rich people. They—I have, in my innocence, just come to learn—are narcissistic beyond measure. Me and my money seems to be the sum of their inner relations. Alpha and Omega, take your pick! Worse! Wealthy narcissists lack that which other narcissists provide, a bit of charm. What an
irony! I am defending the West in order to protect the Wall Street–garnered gains of these Southampton splendidos. I may need a refresher course in the evils of Bolshevism mit materialism. Encore, je blague.

  The truth is that I enjoyed my vacation, am delighted to be back, and am warmed up to tell you about a pitched battle in early August between Harvey and Lansdale that was waged entirely with memos. In fact, I thought about it more than once during vacation, for it was bizarre in its origins, and classic in the outcome.

  Picture one more meeting of the Special Group, Augmented. It is a large enough gathering on this occasion to include myself again. Needless to say, some true bureaucratic bottoms are in the room—General Maxwell Taylor, General Lemnitzer, Robert McNamara.

  I am once again a flunky outrider. I sit with my two legal attaché cases behind my principal, William King Harvey (who is representing McCone), and the meeting, again bereft of Bobby Kennedy, drones on over Mongoose. The principals, relieved of Bobby’s whip-it-up intensity, are only present in formal fashion. (The main passion on this August afternoon is not to fall asleep.) We have been through too many reports concerning progress gained here and progress ongoing there, with not a damn thing to tell us whether the middle or end of Mongoose is anywhere in sight.

  Harvey, for example, offers a synopsis of one of our sabotage jobs that worked nicely. Earlier in the month, a Cuban freighter called the SS Streatham Hill, en route to the Soviet Union with a cargo of 800,000 bags of Cuban sugar, was obliged to put into San Juan, Puerto Rico, for repairs. Harvey said in his low voice, “I don’t know why the Cubans can’t keep their engine bearings free of sand,” an in-line SGA joke—yet, given the somnolence of the late afternoon, only a few smiles were cracked. During the enforced layover, some of our Puerto Rican contract agents succeeded in impregnating the cargo with a nonpoisonous substance called bitrex, “suitably named,” said Harvey, “because it converts a sweet taste to a bitter one. The Russians will receive 800,000 bags of unusable sugar.”

  Lansdale made the mistake of asking, “How did our people succeed in infiltrating bitrex into each of those 800,000 bags?”

  “The bags are not to be taken literally as the packaging modality,” said Harvey most patiently, “but as a unit of quantity. The sugar is carried loose in the hold compartments. Figure on about 10,000 tons of sugar impregnated with bitrex.”

  Robert McNamara, who had been silent until now, started to speak. It was obvious he had been listening to neither man. McNamara is a most solemn potentate from the ramparts of Defense, but as I receive it, the Washington establishment’s verdict—at least as it gets down to me—is that he, of all Cabinet officers, is the most brilliant and purposive. All the bureaucratic virtues surround his name. I suppose that has to be true, but at SGA meetings he is a bore. Maybe he was distracted that day. He was certainly ruminating aloud in bureaucratese, and had succeeded in leading us to the land of border somnolence. I snapped alert in the middle, however. Awash on his lusterless recapitulation of our Mongoose endeavors, I thought I heard him propose the elimination of Fidel Castro! Then, I could hardly decide from what he said next whether he had or hadn’t: “While not in the least in favor of projecting this alternative option into Mongoose capability-potential, I can see, nonetheless, a viable skew in the end-result, which, speaking strictly from a theoretical point of view, might present us with a major shift in the regnant Cuban political situation. On the other hand, techniques for subterranean expression of the alternative just cited may be insufficiently developed . . .”

  Kittredge, I remember telling myself, “He can’t possibly be saying what I think he is,” and everyone else, of course, is agog. What did he mean? Is he going on about assassination? No one responded.

  The meeting ended on schedule. Everyone left. I was certain that McNamara’s speech was not going to reach the minutes. A few days later, however, on August 13, a memo came in from Lansdale summarizing the “emergent directives” at the last discussion in Special Group, Augmented. Lansdale listed: economic sabotage, paramilitary action, intelligence activities, and political activities. To this last, he added, “liquidation of leaders.”

  Since Lansdale had also sent the memo to SGA people at State, Defense, and the USIA, Harvey was apoplectic. “Just let his memo leak out, and some congressional committee will start delving into who is developing executive-action capability. That’s when Bill Harvey will be requested to put his ass in a paper-shredder.”

  Harvey fired off a memo to Helms: “I have called General Lansdale’s office and pointed out the inadvisability and stupidity of putting this kind of comment in writing in such a document.”

  You may be certain, Kittredge, that Helms passed it on to McCone who queried Lansdale. As I heard it back via Harvey, Lansdale answered, “Well, sir, I had my considerable doubts as to the utility of the suggestion, but I was trying to be comprehensive. In contingency planning, you do want to cover the waterfront.”

  It sounds exactly like Lansdale. McCone has now told Harvey that McNamara’s remarks were inappropriate. “Why, if I ever got myself involved,” McCone said, “in something like this, I might end up getting excommunicated.” As a recent Catholic convert, he does think of such things.

  Ergo, McCone has moved in on Lansdale. The wings are clipped. Instead of proceeding to “Phase Two: the inspiring of revolt,” McCone proposes that Lansdale “seek a split between Castro and the old-line Communists. This is sensible action and attainable.”

  I do not know if Lansdale is aware of how much he has lost.

  It is good to be writing to you. Perhaps this year we can share a Christmas punch.

  Love,

  Harry

  18

  FROM A LETTER TO KITTREDGE ON SEPTEMBER 12, 1962:

  . . . This is news of a dispute I called to Hugh’s attention. Since he may not have kept you abreast, I will confide that an ominous event is on the horizon. Last Saturday, September 8, Harvey called me up to Washington. I went with no inner grace, since one of the small punishments King Bill visits on me for serving as Hugh’s conduit is to keep me at work over a weekend. Be certain, if he shows up on a Saturday or even a Sunday at his office in Miami or in Washington, I will get called in.

  This time, however, the job is important. A photograph from the Directorate of Intelligence has been smuggled over to Task Force W’s basement in Langley; that is a high order of contraband. A contest of wills between Operations and Intelligence may soon commence.

  Indeed, I am coming to learn that Intelligence is not a well-chosen collection of secret facts, but a designed product; the form is derived from whose will is stamped upon the facts: Harvey says the Soviets are exporting medium-range nuclear missiles to Cuba, and the Directorate of Intelligence is arguing that they are not. Since medium-range missiles can reach from Havana to New York, Washington, or Chicago, these are no small peas we contend over. U-2 overflights do reveal missile launching pads in the area west of Havana, but the Directorate of Intelligence insists that the sites in question can handle no more than ground-to-air antiaircraft missiles. Apparently, there was an understanding reached in Vienna between Kennedy and Khrushchev that Castro can deploy defensive weapons such as SAM missiles, which only have a range of twenty-five miles. This, of course, in no way permits medium-range nuclear-strike powers.

  Well, what I call the Saturday photograph was slipped over to Harvey on Friday night. It was taken of the Soviet freighter Omsk out at sea one hundred miles from Havana. The ship’s hatches are covered with their tarpaulins, so all one can determine on superficial reading of the evidence is that this type of freighter may be equipped with very large hatches in order to load lumber, but the Russians are not shipping timber to Fidel, not with all those Cuban forests thick as revolutionary beards, no, something other than gross lots of wood has to be in the hold. One of Harvey’s camera experts, after scrutinizing the photograph, determines through the shadow thrown by the hull of the Omsk that the ship is riding very high in the water so i
ts hold has to be filled with large objects of low density. “Medium-range missiles,” growls Harvey, “fulfill that category.”

  I have never seen Wild Bill so happy. He already knows that Oatsie Porringer, with whom I worked for years at Montevideo Station is one of my contacts at the Directorate of Intelligence, so he asks me to rout Oatsie out on this Saturday. Porringer is the only example I can name of a good case officer who has switched over from Operations to Intelligence. Now, according to his own evaluation, he is making a name for himself in “a rat-shit corner of technology.” Porringer, it seems, has become our expert in cratology, the science of calculating by its size and shape what a crate or carton is likely to be holding.

  Well, Porringer and I don’t like each other all that much, and I don’t get along with his wife, so I haven’t spent one social evening with them since we’ve both come back to the States, indeed, two quick lunches in the Company cafeteria has been the scope of our communitas, and both repasts were unpleasant. Porringer, bitter at the lack of recognition his stint in Uruguay received, is envious of my assignments. I know he thinks I do not deserve them.

  So soon as he hears, however, that it is Harvey who wants him to come over, he is wholly cordial to the idea. He has been wanting to meet the legend for many a year, and they get along on this Saturday fairly well. It is unorthodox for Harvey to receive him, but I know my boss by now. His instinct tells him that we are dealing with medium-range missiles, so he is going to need his personal cratologist for the next few weeks. Therefore, he gives an audience to Porringer, and the Omsk’s cargo is narrowed down to missiles, plastic toys, toilet paper, wicker furniture, or any of five other lightweight cargoes. Only medium-range intercontinental missiles, however, require hatches as large as the Omsk can provide.