“The time frame would seem to suggest that the Russians were the ones who were tipped off, as opposed to the Germans.”
All heads turned toward the speaker, a relative newcomer to Berlin Base, E. Winstrom Ebbitt II. A big, broad-shouldered New York attorney who had seen action with the OSS during the last months of the war, Ebby, as his friends called him, had recently signed on with the Company and had been posted to Berlin to run émigré agents into the “denied areas” of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. He had spent the entire night in the base’s radio shack, waiting for two of his “Joes” who had parachuted into Poland to come on the air. Curious to hear about the aborted defection, he’d drifted into the Sorcerer’s office when he learned there would be an early morning wake. “My guess is the Russians probably brought their Germans in at the last moment,” Ebby added, “because they don’t trust them any more than we trust our Germans.”
The Sorcerer fixed a malevolent eye on the young man with long wavy hair and fancy wide suspenders sitting atop one of the office safes and toying with a red thermite canister. “Elementary deduction, my dear Watson,” Torriti said mockingly. “Careful that doohickey doesn’t blow up in your puss. By the way, did you get ahold of the lambs you sent to the slaughter?”
“Afraid I haven’t, Harvey. They missed the time slot. There’s another one tomorrow night.”
“Like I said, it’s the goddamn Goths who are winning the goddamn war.” Torriti turned his attention back to Miss Sipp.
“Item number four: Gehlen’s night duty officer at Pullach rang us on the red phone to say that one of their agents in the Soviet zone who is good at Augenerkundung”—the Night Owl raised her eyes and translated for the benefit of those in the room who didn’t speak German—“that means ‘eye spying’; the Augenerkundung had just spotted wagons filled with Volkspolizei throwing up roadblocks across the approaches to the Soviet air base at Eberswalde. Minutes later—just about the time the defector was supposed to present his warm body at your safe house, Mr. Torriti—the Augenerkundung spotted a convoy of Tatra limousines pulling on to the runway from a little used entrance in the chainlink fence. Sandwiched in the middle of the convoy was a brown military ambulance. Dozens of civilians—KGB heavies, judging by the cut of their trousers, so said the Watcher—spilled out of the Tatras. Two stretchers with bodies strapped onto them were taken out of the ambulance and carried up a ramp into the plane parked, with its engines revving, at the end of the runway.” Miss Sipp looked up and said with a bright smile, “That means Vishnevsky and his wife were still alive at this point. I mean”—her smile faded, her voice faltered—“if they were deceased they wouldn’t have needed to strap them onto stretchers, would they have?”
“That still leaves the kid unaccounted for,” noted Jack.
“If you’d let me finish,” the Night Owl said huffily, “I’ll give you the kid, too.” She turned back toward the Sorcerer and recrossed her legs; this time the gesture provoked a flicker of interest from his restless eyes. “A boy—the Watcher estimated he was somewhere between ten and fifteen years of age; he said it was difficult to tell because of all the clothing the child was wearing—was pulled from one of the Tatras and, accompanied by two heavies, one holding him under each armpit, led up the ramp onto the plane. The boy was sobbing and crying out ‘papa’ in Russian, which led Gehlen’s duty officer to conclude that the two people strapped onto the stretchers must have been Russians.”
The Sorcerer palm came down on his desk in admiration. “Fucking Gehlen gives good value for the bucks we provide. Just think of it, he had a Watcher close enough to hear the boy call out for his papa. Probably has one of the fucking Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung storm troopers on his payroll. We fucking pay through the nose, how come we don’t get Watchers of this quality?”
“Gehlen was supposed to have planted one of his Fremde Heere Ost agents in Stalin’s inner circle during the war,” remarked the Berlin Base archivist, a former Yale librarian named Rosemarie Kitchen.
“Lot of good it did him,” quipped Ebby, which got a titter around the room.
“I don’t fucking see what there is to laugh about,” Torriti exploded. His eyes, suddenly blazing, were fixed on Ebby. “The frigging Russians were tipped off—the KGB pricks know when and where and who. Vishnevsky’s got a rendezvous with a bullet fired at point blank range into the nape of his neck, and that bothers me, okay? It bothers me that he counted on me to get him out and I didn’t do it. It bothers me that I almost didn’t get myself and Jack and the two Silwans out neither. All of which means we’re being jerked off by a fucking mole. How come almost all the agents we drop into Czechoslovakia or Rumania wind up in front of firing squads? How come the émigrés we slip into Poland don’t radio back to say they’re having a nice vacation, PS regards to Uncle Harvey? How come the fucking KGB seems to know what we’re doing before we know what we’re doing?”
Torriti breathed deeply through his nostrils; to the people crowded into the room it came across like a bugle call to action. “Okay, here’s what we do. For starters I want the names of everyone, from fucking Bedell Smith on down, in Washington and in Berlin Base, who knew we were going to pull out a defector who claimed he could identify a Soviet mole in MI6. I want the names of the secretaries who typed the fucking messages, I want the names of the code clerks who enciphered or deciphered them, I want the names of the housekeepers who burned the fucking typewriter ribbons.”
Miss Sipp, scrawling shorthand across the lined pages of the night order book, looked up, her eyes watery with fatigue. “What kind of priority should I put on this, Mr. Torriti? It’s seven hours earlier in DC. They’re fast asleep there.”
“Ticket it Flash,” snapped the Sorcerer. “Wake the fuckers up.”
Holding fort at table number 41, seated facing a large mirror on the back wall so that he could keep track of the other customers in La Niçoise, his watering hole on Wisconsin Avenue in upper Georgetown, Mother polished off the Harper bourbon and, catching the waiter’s eye, signaled that he was ready to switch to double martinis. Adrian, no slouch when it came to lunchtime lubricants, clinked glasses with him when the first ones were set on the table. “Those were the d-d-days,” he told the visiting fireman from London, a junior minister who had just gotten the Company to foot the bill for turning Malta into an Albania ops staging base. “We all used to climb up to the roof of the Rose Garden, whiskeys in our p-p-paws, to watch the German doodlebugs coming in. Christ, if one of them had come down in Ryder Street it would have wiped out half our spooks.”
“From a distance the V-1s sounded like sewing machines,” Angleton recalled. “There was a moment of utter silence before they started down. Then came the explosion. If it landed close enough you’d feel the building quake.”
“It was the silence I detested most,” Adrian said emotionally. “To this day I can’t stand utter silence. Which I suppose is why I talk so damn much.”
“All that before my time, I’m afraid,” the visiting fireman muttered. “Rough war, was it?” He pushed back a very starched cuff and glanced quickly at a very expensive watch that kept track of the phase of the moon. Leaning toward Adrian, he inquired, “Oughtn’t we to order?”
Adrian ignored the question. “Nights were b-b-best,” he prattled on. “Remember how our searchlights would stab at the sky stalking the Hun bombers? When they locked onto one it looked like a giant bloody moth pinned in the beam.”
“I say, isn’t that your Mr. Hoover who’s just come in? Who’s the chap with him?”
Adrian peered over the top of his National Health spectacles. “Search me.”
Angleton studied the newcomer in the mirror. “It’s Senator Kefauver,” he said. He raised three fingers for another round of drinks. “I had a bachelor flat at Craven Hill near Paddington,” he reminded Adrian. “Hardly ever went there. Spent most nights on a cot in my cubbyhole.”
“He was nose to the grindstone even then,” Adrian told the visiting fireman. “Couldn
’t pry him away. Poke your head in any hour day or night, he’d be puzzling over those bloody file cards of his, trying to solve the riddle.”
“Know what they say about all work and no play,” the visiting fireman observed brightly.
Adrian cocked his head. “Quite frankly, I don’t,” he said. “What do they say?”
“Well, I’m actually not quite sure myself—something about Jack turning into a dull chap. Some such thing.”
“Jack who?” Mother asked with a bewildered frown.
“Did I say Jack?” the fireman inquired with a flustered half-smile. “Oh dear, I suppose any Jack will do.”
“Christ, Jimbo, I thought I’d split my trousers when you asked him who Jack was,” Adrian said after the visiting fireman, his cuff worn from glancing at his wristwatch, was put out of his misery and allowed to head to Foggy Bottom for an important four o’clock meeting.
They were sampling a Calvados that the sommelier had laid in especially for Angleton. After a moment Mother excused himself and darted from the restaurant to call his secretary from the tailor’s shop next door; he didn’t want to risk talking on one of the restaurant’s phones for fear it might have been tapped by the Russians. On his way back to the table he was waylaid by Monsieur Andrieux, the Washington station chief for the French SDECE, who sprang to his feet and pumped Mother’s hand as he funneled secrets into his ear. It was several minutes before Angleton could pry his fingers free and make his way to table 41. Sliding onto the chair, holding up the Calvados glass for a refill, he murmured to Adrian, “French’ve been treating me like a big wheel ever since they pinned a Légion d’Honneur on my chest.”
“Frogs are a race apart,” Adrian crabbed as he jammed the back of his hand against his mouth to stifle a belch. “Heard one of their senior spooks vet an op we were proposing to run against the French Communists—he allowed as how it would probably work in practice but he doubted it would work in theory. Sorry about my junior minister, Jimbo. They say he’s very good at what he does. Not sure what he does, actually. Someone had to give him grub. Now that he’s gone we can talk shop. Any news from Berlin?”
Mother studied his friend across the table. “You’re not going to like it.”
“Try me.”
“Amicitia nostra dissoluta est. ‘Our friendship is dissolved.’ I am on to you and your KGB friends!”
The Brit, who knew a joke when he heard one, chortled with pleasure as he identified the quotation. “Nero’s telegram to Seneca when he decided time had come for his tutor to commit hari-kari. Christ, Jimbo, only surprised I was able to p-p-pull the wool over your eyes this long. Seriously, what happened to your Russian coming across in Berlin?”
“The Sorcerer woke me up late last night with a cable marked Flash—been going back and forth with him since. Vishnevsky never showed up. The KGB did. Things turned nasty. Torriti hung around longer than he should have—had to shoot one of the Germans and hit a Russian over the head to get himself out of a tight corner. Vishnevsky and his wife, drugged probably, were hauled back to Moscow to face the music. Kid, too.”
“Christ, what went wrong?”
“You tell me.”
“What about Vishnevsky’s serials? What about the mole in MI6?”
For answer, one of Mother’s nicotine-stained fingers went round and round the rim of the snifter until a melancholy moan emerged from the glass.
After a moment Adrian said thoughtfully, “Hard cheese, this. I’d better p-p-pass Vishnevsky’s serials on to C—there’s not enough to dine out on but he can work up an appetite. Do I have it right, Jimbo? The Russian chaps debriefed someone from MI6 in Stockholm last summer, in Zurich the winter before. There were two blown operations that could finger him—one involved an agent, the other a microphone in The Hague—“
“I haven’t unsealed your lips,” Angleton reminded his friend.
“He’ll take my guts for garters if he gets wind I knew and didn’t tell him.”
“He won’t hear it from me.”
“What’s to be gained waiting?”
“If Vishnevsky wasn’t feeding us drivel, if there is a mole in MI6, it could be anybody, up to and including C himself.”
“I would have thought C was above and beyond.” The Brit shrugged. “I hope to Christ you know what you’re doing.”
A waiter brought over a silver salver with their bill folded on it . Adrian reached for the check but Angleton was quicker. “Queen got the last one,” he said. “Let me get this.”
Angleton’s luncheon partner, Harold Adrian Russell Philby—Kim to his colleagues in MI6, Adrian to a handful of old Ryder Street pals like Angleton—managed a faint smiled. “First Malta. Now lunch. Seems as if we’re fated to live off Yankee largess.”
Jack McAuliffe had taken Ebby slumming to a posh cabaret called Die Pfeffermühle—The Peppermill—off the Kurfürstendamm, West Berlin’s main drag sizzling with neon. The joint was crawling with diplomats and spies and businessmen from the four powers that occupied Berlin. On the small stage a transvestite, wearing what the Germans called a Fahne, a cheap gaudy dress, rattled off one-liners and then laughed at them so hard his stomach rippled. “For God’s sake, don’t laugh at anti-Soviet jokes,” the comic warned, wagging a finger at an imaginary companion. “You’ll get three years in jail.” Raising his voice half an octave, he mimicked the friend’s reply. “That’s better than three years in one of those new high-rise apartments in Friedrichsmain.” Some upper-class Brits drinking at a corner table roared at a joke one of them had told. The comedian, thinking the laughter was for him, curtsied in their direction.
At a small table near the toilets Jack scraped the foam off a mug with his forefinger, angled back his head and, his Adam’s apple bobbing, drained off the beer in one long swig. Wiping his lips with the back of his hand, he carefully set the empty mug down next to the two others he’d already knocked back. “Jesus H. Christ, Ebby, you’re coming down too hard on him,” he told his friend. “The Sorcerer’s like a wild dog you come across in the field. You need to stand dead still and let him sniff your trousers, your shoes, before he’ll start to accept you.”
“It’s the drinking that rubs me the wrong way,” Ebby said. “I don’t see how a drunk can run Berlin Base.”
“The booze is his pain killer. He hurts, Ebby. He was in Bucharest at the end of the war—he served under the Wiz when Wisner ran the OSS station there. He saw the Soviet boxcars hauling off Rumanians who had sided with Germany to Siberian prison camps. He heard the cries of the prisoners, he helped bury the ones who killed themselves rather than board the trains. It marked him for life. For him the battle against Communism is a personal crusade—it’s the forces of good versus the forces of evil. Right now evil’s got the upper hand and it’s killing him.”
“So he drinks.”
“Yeah. He drinks. But that doesn’t stop him from performing on a very high level. The alcohol feeds his genius. If the KGB ever cornered me on an East Berlin rooftop, Harvey’s the man I’d want next to me.”
The two exchanged knowing looks; Ebby had heard scuttlebutt about the close call on the roof after the aborted defection.
On the other side of the room a middle-aged Russian attaché wearing a double-breasted suit jacket with enormous lapels staggered drunkenly to his feet and began belting out, in Russian, a popular song called “Moscow Nights.” At the bar two American foreign service officers, both recent graduates of Yale, pushed themselves off their stools and started singing Kipling’s original words to what later became the Yale Whiffenpoof song.
We have done with Hope and Honor,
we are lost to Love and Truth…
Jack leaped to his feet and sang along with them.
We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung…
Ebby, who had done his undergraduate work at Yale before going on to Columbia Law, stood up and joined them.
And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth,
God help us, for w
e knew the worst too young!
Half a dozen American civilians sitting around a large table in a corner turned to listen. Several added their voices to the chorus.
Our shame is clean repentance
for the crime that brought the sentence,
Our pride it is to know no spur of pride.
As they neared the end of the song others around the cabaret joined in. The transvestite comic, furious, stalked off the stage.
And the Curse of Reuben holds us
till an alien turf enfolds us
And we die, and none can tell Them where we died.
By now Americans all over the cabaret were on their feet, waving mugs over their heads as they bellowed out the refrain. The Russian and East European diplomats looked on in amused bewilderment.
GENTLEMEN-RANKERS OUT ON THE SPREE,
DAMNED FROM HERE TO ETERNITY,
GOD HA’ MERCI ON SUCH AS WE,
BAA! YAH! BAH!
“We’re all mad here, Ebby.” Jack had to holler to be heard over the riotous applause. “I’m mad. You’re mad. Question is: How the hell did I end up in this madhouse?”
“From what you told me back at the Cloud Club,” Ebby shouted, “your big mistake was saying yes when the coach offered you and your rowing pal that Green Cup down at Mory’s.”
PART ONE
PRIMING THE GUN
The Company Page 6