Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  Since that Saturday meeting, I have been kept busy through the weekend and now into Monday riding herd on two Junior Officer Trainees who work with me at checking every possible route out of Bahía Parva, a harbor west of Havana where the Omsk docked on September 9 and immediately proceeded to unload in the middle of the night. We have been checking every road that is wide enough to transport a missile over a distance of one hundred miles out from Bahía Parva. That is not as impossible a study as you would think; the road, after all, has to be able to accommodate a truck trailer some eighty feet long going through tight corners in the villages and around hairpin turns in the mountains.

  Needless to say, most of the thoroughfares out of Bahía Parva sooner or later prove unfeasible, but we do come up with one likely route, and Harvey actually has an agent occupying a house on a street in the town of San Rosario, through which the delivery will presumably pass. Rest assured, radio messages are being delivered to our agent. He has to be one of our more important people in the area since he is already in possession of a burst transmitter.

  From letter to Kittredge, September 14, 1962:

  . . . It is coming to climax sooner than expected. Our agent in San Rosario radioed back on the night of September 12 that a trailer truck towed a large missile past his house. Says he was able to estimate the length closely because he has already measured the frontage of the villa across from him. The missile is twenty-three meters in length. That has to be a medium-range nuclear torch.

  Harvey has instructed our fellow to pack a suitcase. We are going to get this agent out of Cuba.

  I will keep you posted . . ..

  From Kittredge to me on September 16, 1962:

  I pray devoutly that the Fat Man is wrong. A great bag of bile is playing on a fife. All this means to Harvey, should he be correct, is that he is on his way to becoming Chief of the Soviet Russia Division, but I see Christopher in my arms as the great bombs go off. Castro is a monster. How dare he let the Russians feed him missiles? Or, worse, did he ask for them himself?

  From Kittredge to me on September 17, 1962:

  I’ve calmed down. I realize one’s job has to be followed through, hour by hour, task by task. Do keep me up, please, on exactly what is happening. I would ask Hugh (who is particularly quiet these couple of days) but even though the world may be approaching its end, I do not dare to violate the secret of our correspondence.

  From my letter to Kittredge, September 18, 1962:

  Sherman Kent of the Board of National Estimate has told McCone that there has been no Soviet installation of missiles. McCone disagrees. He is banking on Harvey’s estimate. Harvey, as you predicted, is in his element. McCone said to Harvey, “You had better be right,” and Harvey said he was. Here I come, sings Harvey in the bathroom, Soviet Russia Division, here I come.

  From Kittredge’s letter to me, September 20, 1962:

  Although Sherman Kent is no fool and has good people working for him, Hugh, of course, disagrees with the Board. He rates the personnel over at the Directorate of Intelligence as much too soft. I know he is thinking of the round-shouldered, clammy-palmed, clerical look of so many of their ex-professors. The root of it, Hugh thinks, is that many of them were Stalin-worshippers during the war without quite realizing it, and still see the Soviet Union as a crippled giant needful of peace to bind the wounds. “They don’t understand,” opines Hugh, “that Marxism is a faith for which people are willing to die. Reason always collapses before the inner readiness of others to give up their lives to a vision. I am ready to die for Christ, and these intoxicated warriors of Communism are willing to die for the mystical bonds of materialism. Irrationality is the only great engine in history.”

  Harry, I see the Company as one huge Alpha and Omega with the D of I as the more rational component, and Operations, obviously, as the faith. I am, on ninety-nine out of a hundred occasions, happy to live with you and Hugh in the phratry of Operations, but, oh, God, I am praying tonight that Sherman Kent is right and Wild Bill Harvey is wrong.

  Incidentally, I ought to tell you what I know about McCone since you might be having close dealings with him soon. He is not, by superficial measure, a nice man. On the day he took over from Allen, he happened to take notice of the Great White Case Officer’s bulletproof limousine. “Oh, yes,” Allen told him, “it’s nifty. One can immerse oneself in a paper, and never have to wonder if some espontáneo down the road can take a potshot through your window.”

  Well, that night, just as McCone was leaving in his un-armor-clad Mercedes-Benz limousine, he gave an order. He wanted to depart from Langley on the next evening in his own duplicate bulletproof limo, whereupon twenty frantic slaveys went to extraordinary lengths through the night to get General Motors to make one ready, and, yes, fly it in on a cargo plane—how fortunate that we have an accordion valise for a budget! They were even soldering the last connections onto the dashboard when McCone came down with his attaché case, strolled over to the new vehicle, got in, and had the chauffeur drive him off without saying thank you to a soul. Duty is its own blessing and needs no reward. I fear people like that. Hugh laughs and says, “When it comes to our real work, McCone can’t distinguish between his sphincter and his epiglottis, so he does his best to keep us at arm’s length. That is exactly where Helms and I want him.”

  It’s true. McCone does put a moat around himself. He has, for instance, sealed off the door between his Deputy’s office and his own. He doesn’t want the Deputy able to pop in on him. Marshall Carter has to come through the anteroom like the common folk. Carter, who has his own sense of humor, attached a fake but most lifelike-looking hand to the sealed-off frame of the interoffice entry as if his arm had been cut off at the wrist when the last slam was heard. Of course, McCone is so standoffish that Carter need never fear a surprise visit from his boss.

  I tell you this as a form of escape from the heavy concerns you have loosed in me. Perhaps it is a small warning as well. If you have dealings with McCone, do not expect your ego to come out unscathed.

  From my letter to Kittredge, September 25, 1962:

  . . . Well, I’ve been on the job through the weekend again. Last Thursday, September 20, our Cuban agent completed his odyssey from San Rosario to Opa-Locka. Kittredge, I can hardly believe it. He is an accountant. That profession seems to breed half the unsung heroes of the Cuban resistance! At any rate, he proved to be a tall, well-built fellow with a large nose, strong black mustache, and a high-pitched nervous laugh. I would have had to dream up Alpha and Omega all by myself to account for Señor Enrique Fogata.

  Harvey came down to JM/WAVE for the interrogation (wanted to take a look at our prize before we shipped him over to the D of I), and of course I was there to serve as Wild Bill’s personal translator.

  Our Spanish-speaking interrogator started off by scourging Fogata (per Harvey’s instructions) with the news that many an exile has come over full of tales about missiles in empty fields, empty stadiums, and empty swimming pools. All the stories have been disproved.

  Fogata replied, “I know what I see.” (Lo que veo, conozco.)

  “That is just what we are going to find out,” the interrogator told him, and presented Enrique with drawings of a great variety of missiles from every major arsenal of the world. All the pictures, however, were the same size. Your only way to choose was by the shape of the profile.

  Fogata seemed in no trouble, however. The object he had seen was clearly imprinted on his mind. Without hesitation, he pointed to a Soviet medium-range ballistic missile.

  “What length was it?”

  “Twenty-three meters.”

  Enrique was flown up to Washington that evening. It took more than a day before the Directorate of Intelligence would communicate back to Harvey, and then their comment was that they did not buy our agent’s story. They are arguing that the object he saw was probably twenty-three feet long, rather than twenty-three meters and he had confused the measure and was still confusing it. (I think they assumed we ha
d told him the correct length.) As I wrote to you over a week ago, intelligence derives from whose will is stamped upon which facts. McCone—thank you for the warning—is going along quietly with Harvey, but there is whole unhappiness between Intelligence and Operations. At present, this is where matters stand.

  I don’t wish to worry you, but I did have the following conversation with Harvey.

  “When the facts come out,” he said, “we will have to lay an air strike on Cuba.”

  “What if the Russians escalate?”

  “They won’t,” said Harvey. “They’re only shipping missiles because they think we won’t do anything. They’re trying to show the world that they can stand on tiptoe right on our window ledge. I say, knock them off.”

  Kittredge, half the Pentagon feels exactly the way Bill Harvey does.

  As for me, I am beginning to wake up in the middle of the night with a great weight on my chest. This may be the first time that I do not wish I was standing in John F. Kennedy’s shoes.

  19

  THE DISPUTE OVER ENRIQUE FOGATA’S POWERS OF PERCEPTION ENDED WITH a victory for Bill Harvey. On October 14, the walls of the Directorate of Intelligence were breached. Intelligence had to concede to Harvey that the photographs brought back that morning showed excavations for the installation of an intercontinental ballistic site outside a Cuban town named San Cristóbal. Since McCone was taking a belated honeymoon in Italy with his new Catholic wife, and was located in a small Italian village, Harvey had to employ open-speak on the phone; his syntax was reminiscent of how we used to translate Latin at St. Matthew’s. “Sir,” said Harvey, “that which you, and you alone, said would happen, did.” McCone remarked that he was coming home forthwith.

  There had, of course, been intimations of such crisis already. On October 10, Senator Keating of New York announced the presence of nuclear missiles in Cuba (which made it evident that we had our own leaks in the basement at Langley), and in the confidence that this information was bona fide, the House Republican Caucus spoke of Cuba as “their biggest Republican asset,” a reference to the congressional elections in November. Clare Boothe Luce wrote an editorial for the October issue of Life equal to a clarion call: “What is now at stake is the question not only of American prestige, but of American survival,” and I thought of that delicately boned blond lady whom I had met one night at the Stable after my return to Washington from the Farm, Mrs. Luce a beauty in the style of my own mother (although somewhat more of a beauty since Mrs. Luce seemed to give off a silvery light), and I pondered the exaltation she must feel at having the means to call the world to war.

  After October 14, Washington began to remind me of a ship with an unstanchable leak; one could measure the spread of seepage from first light to evening dark. People congregated on the phone all week. To work in the capital was to become aware all over again that Washington was a hierarchy of secrets and one could find one’s relation to History by the number of confidants who would give you access to their collection. Rumors rolled across the city in the rhythm of a powerful surf. In the White House, in the Executive Office Building, and at State, office lights were burning all night long. People drove by the White House at one in the morning to look at the office lights. Rosen was on the phone with me five times a day to present his latest find; if I did not wish to verify or deny it, nonetheless I had to. I owed Rosen too many markers to be able to refuse him now that he was calling them in. I had time to think that if we were all obliterated in a nuclear holocaust, Rosen would not want to go out into that atomized empyrean holding onto unpaid debts.

  When I went on errands to the Pentagon, the high officers I passed in the corridors had the look of wild moose in the Maine woods. That the approach of war brought on tumescence was verified forever for me. I was walking by men who did not know whether they would be heroes in a week; or dead; or, for that matter, promoted; their collective anxiety was on fire. So many of these officers had spent their lives getting ready for a great moment—it was as if one lived as a vestal virgin who would be allowed to copulate just once, but in a high temple: The act had better be transcendent, or one had chosen the wrong life. This epiphanic vision of my military brethren gave me less acute pleasure after I recognized that it applied to me as well; if we went to war with Cuba, I felt obliged to get into combat too. I wanted to be in battle when the bomb fell. If flesh and psyche were obliterated at one stroke of a nuclear moment, perhaps my soul would not be so scattered if the death were honorable. Could anyone claim that was less than faith?

  I was back in Florida by the 21st of October, and next evening President Kennedy announced to the nation that offensive missile bases large enough for intercontinental weapons had been installed in Cuba by Soviet technicians. The Soviet Union had lied to the United States, the President said. Therefore, a naval and air quarantine of Cuba would now be imposed to halt all further shipments of Soviet military equipment. If missiles were launched by Cuba, the U.S. was prepared to retaliate against this “clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace.”

  I listened in the company of Dix Butler. The bars were filled in Little Havana and Cuban exiles were dancing in the streets. I was enraged. All of my country might yet be destroyed, everyone I knew maimed or dead, but the exiles were happy because they had a chance to get back to Cuba; I remember thinking that they were an unbelievably selfish and self-centered tribe, still furious at the loss of the wealth they might have been amassing in Cuba, although now they were making money in Miami; middle-class Cubans, I decided, had a prodigiously large sense of the rights due to themselves, and little sense at all of the rights due to others. They would gamble all of my great nation against Fidel Castro’s beard. This set of thoughts blazed their way through me so quickly that they were soon gone and I was dancing in the street with Cuban men and women, drunken Hubbard, who usually didn’t dance and might have lost a girl because of that; now he could move to Cuban rhythms—for an hour, the pelvis of Herrick Hubbard escaped its bonds.

  Afterward, Butler and I dived into a bar, had a few drinks, and made a pledge. “I,” he said, “am tired of sending men out. I never know when they won’t come back. Hubbard, in an emergency like this, we can count on Bill Harvey. He’ll let us go out with the boatmen.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I want to dig my feet into Cuban soil.” I was very drunk.

  “Yes,” he said, “when the war starts, some of us have to be there to meet our troops.”

  We clasped hands on the profound value of this.

  In the morning I awoke to great fear. I was bound to a compact built on booze. A little later, following the raw instincts of a hangover, I went to my postal box and found a long letter from Kittredge. I read it standing in the post office at Coconut Grove, and it seemed as if she were sending it to me from the other side of the world.

  October 22, 1962, 11:00 P.M.

  Dearest Harry,

  These days, which may be the most momentous we will know, have put a new kind of strain on one’s control. To listen to my friends reacting to news which I, three days closer to the source, know is now obsolete, has given a glimpse of why people go mad and shout to the rooftops.

  You see, Hugh and I have been installed in a most peculiar association with the brothers K. I have indicated some of this to you, but as time goes on, the friendship has taken on more importance, and, then, I haven’t told you all.

  Jack became fascinated some months ago with a Soviet official, obviously KGB, about whom you wrote to me while you were in Uruguay. It is the same Boris Masarov, and he works out of the Russian Embassy here, although loosely attached. Apparently, Khrushchev is wild about whatever special quality it is that Masarov possesses—perhaps it is the sad, ironic Russian wisdom that Khrushchev apparently lacks. In any event, the Soviet Premier reached down through the ranks to pluck this man up to the very top; Masarov was sent over to America as Khrushchev’s personal liaison to the Kennedy brothers. I have noticed that Jack likes playing a couple of poss
ibilities at once. In relation to the Soviets, this means a representative to embody the hard line, and another for the soft; depending on events, the President can move toward a freeze or a thaw in relations. Khrushchev also plays with two hands, but has added another element, a wild card.

  Masarov seems to be in Washington to initiate conversations with Bobby—these, presumably, to be passed on to Jack; the talks, apparently, range far and wide. For instance, I know from Hugh that one of Masarov’s main functions is to leaven relations between Khrushchev and the brothers K. The Premier, apparently, is a man who likes to converse with his hands on people. He may send you to Siberia next week, but in the interim, let’s keep it on a warm and personal level. So, for instance, Bobby and Boris were in close touch during the last Berlin crisis, and it was Masarov who was told by Bobby that the United States would certainly fight if the Soviets didn’t remove their tanks from the Brandenburg Gate. Do you know, Masarov passed it on to Khrushchev and within twenty-four hours the tanks were gone. In turn, Masarov tells Bobby that in Khrushchev’s opinion, America is still run by Rockefellers, J. P. Morgans, and Wall Street, but he is beginning to see that his old ideas about the Kennedys have to be changed.

  So much for the love affair. My husband says not to be carried away by it for one moment; Hugh has been familiar with Masarov’s dossier for years and says he is one of the most talented and brilliant KGB men that the Soviets have. That sad and winning charm conceals a faculty considerably more executive.

  Perhaps there is a principle agreed upon here by both Khrushchev and the Kennedys: If your brightest people are usually not where they ought to be in the ordered establishment, then pluck them up and use them for special ventures. I think persons so anointed are chosen because they can speak their own mind, or listen incomparably well. I do a little of the first and a great deal of the second.