The Company

by Robert Littell

  Ebby took the bait. “Why former?”

  “His former girlfriend crept into my bed late one night,” Jack said with disarming frankness. “He figures I should have sent her packing. I keep reminding him that she’s a terrific piece of ass and I’m a perfectly normal Homo erectus.”

  “I was angry, but I’m not any more,” Leo commented dryly. “I decided to leave the pretty girls to the men without imagination.” He offered a hand to Ebby. “Pleased to meet you.”

  For a second Ebby thought Jack was putting him on but the brooding darkness in Leo’s eyes and the frown-creases on his high forehead convinced him otherwise. Never comfortable with discussions of other people’s private lives, he quickly changed the subject. “Where are you fellows coming from? And how did you wind up here?”

  Leo said, “We’re both graduating from Yale at the end of the month.”

  Jack said with a laugh, “We wound up here because we said yes when our rowing coach offered us Green Cups down at Mory’s. Turns out he was head hunting for—” Jack was unsure whether you were supposed to pronounce the words “Central Intelligence Agency” out loud, so he simply waved his hand at the crowd.

  Leo asked, “How about you, Elliott?”

  “I went from Yale to OSS the last year of the war. I suppose you could say I’m reenlisting.”

  “Did you see action?” Jack wanted to know.

  “Some.”

  “Where?”

  “France, mostly. By the time I crossed the Rhine, Hitler had shot a bullet into his brain and the Germans had thrown in the sponge.”

  The young woman who had been serving drinks tapped a spoon against a glass and the two dozen young men—what Jack called the “Arrow-shirt-cum-starched-collar-crowd”—gravitated toward the folding chairs that had been set up in rows facing the floor-to-ceiling picture window with a view of the Empire State Building and downtown Manhattan. She stepped up to the glass lectern and tapped a long fingernail against the microphone to make sure it was working. “My name is Mildred Owen-Brack,” she began. Clearly used to dealing with men who weren’t used to dealing with women, she plowed on, “I’m going to walk you through the standard secrecy form which those of you who are alert will have discovered on your seats; those of you who are a bit slower will find you’re sitting on them.” There was a ripple of nervous laughter at Owen-Brack’s attempt to break the ice. “When you came into this room you entered what the sociologists call a closed culture. The form commits you to submit to the CIA for prior review everything and anything you may write for publication about the CIA while you’re serving and after you leave it. That includes articles, books of fact or fiction, screenplays, epic poems, opera librettos, Hallmark card verses, et cetera. It goes without saying but I will say it all the same: Only those who sign the agreement will remain in the room. Questions?”

  Owen-Brack surveyed the faces in front of her. The lone female amid all the male recruits, a particularly good-looking dark-haired young woman wearing a knee-length skirt and a torso-hugging jacket lifted a very manicured hand. “I’m Millicent Pearlstein from Cincinnati.” She cleared her throat in embarrassment when she realized there had been no reason to say where she came from. “Okay. You’re probably aware that your agreement imposes prior restraint on the First Amendment right of free speech, and as such it would stand a good chance of being thrown out by the courts.”

  Owen-Brack smiled sweetly. “You’re obviously a lawyer, but you’re missing the point,” she explained with exaggerated politeness. “We’re asking you to sign this form for your own safety. We’re a secret organization protecting our secrets from the occasional employee who might be tempted to describe his employment in print. If someone tried to do that, he—or she—would certainly rub us the wrong way and we’d have to seriously consider terminating the offender along with the contract. So we’re trying to make it legally uninviting for someone to rub us the wrong way. Hopefully the intriguing question of whether the Company’s absolute need to protect its secrets outweighs the First Amendment right of free speech will never be put to the test.”

  Ebby leaned over to Colby, who was sitting on the aisle next to him. “Who’s the man-eater?”

  “She’s the Company consigliere,” he whispered back. “The Wiz says she’s not someone whose feathers you want to ruffle.”

  Owen-Brack proceeded to read the two-paragraph contract aloud.Afterward she went around collecting the signed forms, stuffed them in a folder and took a seat in the back of the room.

  Frank Wisner strode up the lectern. “Welcome to the Pickle Factory,” he drawled, using the in-house jargon for the Company. “My name is Frank Wisner. I’m the deputy to Allen Dulles, who is the Deputy Director/ Operations—that’s DD-slash-O in Companyese. DD/O refers both to the man who runs the Clandestine Service as well as the service itself.” The Wiz wet his lips from a glass of punch. “The Truman Doctrine of 1947 promised that America would aid free peoples everywhere in the struggle against total-itarianism. The principal instrument of American foreign policy in this struggle is the Central Intelligence Agency. And the cutting edge of the CIA is the DD/O. So far we have a mixed record. We lost Czechoslovakia to the Communists but we saved France from economic collapse after the war, we saved Italy from an almost certain Communist victory in the elections and the Czech-style putsch that would have surely followed, we saved Greece from a Soviet-backed insurgency. Make no mistake about it—Western civilization is being attacked and a very thin line of patriots is manning the ramparts. We badly need to reinforce this line of patriots, which is why you’ve been invited here today. We’re looking for driven, imaginative men and women”—the Wiz acknowledged Millicent Pearlstein with a gallant nod—“who are aggressive in pursuit of their goals and not afraid of taking risks—who, like Alice in Wonderland, can plunge into the unknown without worrying about how they are going to get out again. The bottom line is: There aren’t any textbooks on spying, you have to invent it as you go along. I’ll give you a case in point. Ten days ago, one of our officers who’d been trying to recruit a woman for five months discovered that she religiously read the astrology column in her local newspaper. So the morning he made his pitch, he arranged for the section on Capricorns to say that a financial offer that day would change their lives and solve their money problems—don’t refuse it. The woman in question listened to the pitch and signed on the dotted line and is now reporting to us from a very sensitive embassy in a Communist country.”

  In the back of the room Wisner’s minder began tapping his wristwatch. At the lectern, Wisner nodded imperceptibly. “You people have no doubt read a lot of cloak-and-dagger novels. If the impression you have of the Central Intelligence Agency comes from them you’ll find you are seriously mistaken. The real world of espionage is less glamorous and more dangerous than those novels would lead you to believe. If you make it through our training program, you will spend your professional lives doing things you can’t talk about to anyone outside the office, and that includes wives and girlfriends. We’re looking for people who are comfortable living in the shadows and who can conduct imaginative operations that the US government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for if things go right or wrong. What you do won’t turn up in headlines on the front page—it won’t appear on any page—unless you foul up. You’ll be operating in the killing fields of the Cold War and you’ll be playing for keeps. If you aren’t completely comfortable with this, my advice to you is to seek employment with the Fuller Brush Company.”

  Wisner checked his own watch. “So much for the sermon from the Cloud Club. Owen-Brack will walk you though the nitty-gritty part of today’s get-together—where and when you are to report, what you are to bring with you, when you will start to draw salary, what you are to tell people if they ask you what you’re doing. She’ll also give you a backstop, which is to say a mailing address and a phone number where a secretary will say you are away from your desk and offer to take a message. In the months ahead you’re goi
ng to be away from your desk an awful lot.”

  The new recruits in the room laughed at this. At the lectern Wisner had a whispered conversation with Owen-Brack, after which he ducked out of the room one step behind his minder. Leaning toward the microphone, Owen-Brack said, “I’ll begin by saying that the Company singled you out—and went to the trouble and expense of ordering up background security checks—because we need street-smart people who can burgle a safe and drink tea without rattling the cup. Chances are you’re coming to us with only the second of these skills. We plan to teach you the first, along with the nuts and bolts of the espionage business, when you report for duty. For the record, you are S.M. Craw Management trainees from Sears, Roebuck. The first phase of your training—which will actually include a course in management in case you ever need to explain in detail what you were doing—will take place at the Craw offices behind the Hilton Inn off Route 95 in Springfield, Virginia, starting at 7:30 A.M. on the first Monday in July.”

  Pausing every now and then to hand out printed matter, Owen-Brack droned on for another twenty minutes. “That’s more or less it,” she finally said. She flashed another of her guileless smiles. “With any luck I’ll never see any of you again.”

  Jack lingered in the room after the others left. Owen-Brack was collecting her papers. “Forget something?” she inquired.

  “Name’s McAuliffe. John J. McAuliffe. Jack to my friends. I just thought what a crying shame to come all the way up to the Cloud Club and not take in the view. And the best way to take in the view is with a cup of Champagne in your fist—“

  Tilting her head, Owen-Brack sized up Jack. She took in the three-piece linen suit, the cowboy boots, the tinted glasses, the dark hair slicked back and parted in the middle. “What’s the J stand for?” she asked.

  “It doesn’t stand for anything. I only use it when I’m trying to impress people. My father wrote it in on the birth certificate because he thought it made you look important if you had a middle initial.”

  “I happen to be on the review board that examines the 201s—the personal files—of potential recruits. I remember yours, John J. McAuliffe. During your junior semester abroad you served as an intern in the American embassy in Moscow—“

  “My father knew someone in the State Department—he pulled strings,” Jack explained.

  “The ambassador sent you back to the states when it was discovered that you were using the diplomatic pouch to smuggle Finnish lobsters in from Helsinki.”

  “Your background checks are pretty thorough. I was afraid I’d wash out if that became known.”

  “I suppose there’s no harm in telling you—your college record is fairly mediocre. You were taken because of the incident. The Company wants people who are not afraid to bend the rules.”

  “That being the case, what about the cup of Champagne?” Jack turned on the charm. “The way I see it, men and women are accomplices in the great game of sex. You lean forward, the top of your blouse falls open, it’s a gesture you’ve practiced in front of a mirror, there is a glimpse of a breast, a nipple—you’d think something was wrong with me if I don’t notice.”

  Owen-Brack screwed up her lips. “You beautiful boys never get it right, and you won’t get it right until you lose your beauty. It’s not your beauty that seduces us but your voices, your words; we are seduced by your heads, not your hands.” She glanced impatiently at a tiny watch on her wrist. “Look, you need to know that Owen is my maiden name,” she informed him, “Brack is my married name.”

  “Hell, nobody’s perfect—I won’t hold your being married against you.”

  Owen-Brack didn’t think Jack was funny. “My husband worked for the Company—he was killed in a border skirmish you never read about in the New York Times. Stop me if I’m wrong but the view from the sixty-sixth floor, the drink in my fist—that’s not what you have in mind. You’re asking me if I’d be willing to sleep with you. The answer is: Yeah, I can see how I might enjoy that. If my husband were alive I’d be tempted to go ahead and cheat on him. Hell, he cheated enough on me. But his being dead changes the chemistry of the situation. I don’t need a one-night stand, I need a love affair. And that rules you out—you’re obviously not the love affair type. Byebye, John J. McAuliffe. And good luck to you. You’re going to need it.”

  “Spies,” the instructor was saying, his voice reduced to stifled gasps because his scarred vocal cords strained easily, “are perfectly sane human beings who become neurotically obsessed with trivia.” Robert Andrews, as he was listed on the S.M. Craw roster in the lobby, had captured the attention of the management trainees the moment he shuffled into the classroom eight weeks before. Only the bare bones of his illustrious OSS career were known. He had been parachuted into Germany in 1944 to contact the Abwehr clique planning to assassinate Hitler, and what was left of him after months of Gestapo interrogation was miraculously liberated from Buchenwald by Patton’s troops at the end of the war. Sometime between the two events the skin on the right side of his face had been branded with a series of small round welts and his left arm had been literally torn from its shoulder socket on some sort of medieval torture rack. Now the empty sleeve of his sports jacket, pinned neatly back, flapped gently against his rib cage as he paced in front of the trainees. “Spies,” he went on, “file away the details that may one day save their lives. Such as which side of any given street will be in the shadows cast by a rising moon. Such as under what atmospheric conditions a pistol shot sounds like an automobile backfiring.”

  Enthralled by the whine of a police siren that reached his good ear through the windows, Mr. Andrews ambled over to the sill and stared through his reflection at the traffic on Route 95. The sound appeared to transport him to another time and another place and only with a visible effort was he able to snap himself out of a fearful reverie. “We have tried to drum into your heads what the people who employ us are pleased to call the basics of tradecraft,” he said, turning back to his students. “Letter drops, cut-out agents, invisible writing techniques, microdots, miniature cameras, shaking a tail, planting bugs—you are all proficient in these matters. We have tried to teach you KGB tradecraft—how they send over handsome young men to seduce secretaries with access to secrets, how their handlers prefer to meet their agents in open areas as opposed to safe houses, how East Germans spies operating in the West employ the serial numbers on American ten-dollar bills to break out telephone numbers from lottery numbers broadcast over the local radio stations. But the truth is that these so-called basics will take you only so far. To go beyond, you have to invent yourself for each assignment; you have to become the person the enemy would never suspect you of being, which involves doing things the enemy would never suspect an intelligence officer of doing. I know of an agent who limped when he was assigned to follow someone—he calculated that nobody would suspect a lame man of working the street for an intelligence organization. I shall add that the agent was apprehended when the Abwehr man he was following noticed that he was favoring his right foot one day and his left the next. I was that agent. Which makes me uniquely qualified to pass on to you the ultimate message of tradecraft.” Here Mr. Andrews turned back toward the window to stare at his own image in the glass.

  “For the love of God,” the reflection said, “don’t make mistakes.”

  Several hours had been set aside after classes let out for meetings with representatives of the various Company departments who had come down from Cockroach Alley on the Reflecting Pool to recruit for their divisions. As usual the deputy head of the elite Soviet Russia Division, Felix Etz, was allowed to skim off the cream of the crop. To nobody’s surprise the first person he homed in on turned out to be Millicent Pearlstein, the lawyer from Cincinnati who had earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago in Russian language and literature before she went on to law school. She had done extremely well in Flaps and Seals as well as Picks and Locks, and had scored high marks in the Essentials of Recruitment and Advanced Ciphers and Co
mmunist Theory and Practice. Jack had a so-so record in the course work but he had aced a field exercise; on a training run to Norfolk he had used a phony State of West Virginia Operator’s license and a bogus letter with a forged signature of the Chief of Naval Ordinance to talk his way onto the USS John R. Pierce and into the destroyer’s Combat Information Center, and come away with top-secret training manuals for the ship’s surface and air radars. His gung-ho attitude, plus his knowledge of German and Spanish, caught Etz’s eye and he was offered a plum berth. Ebby, with his operational experience in OSS and his excellent grades in the refresher courses, was high on Etz’s list, too. When Leo’s interview came he practically talked his way into the Soviet Russia Division. It wasn’t his knowledge of Russian and Yiddish or his high grades that impressed Etz so much as his motivation; Leo had inherited the ardent and lucid anti-Communism of his parents, who had fled Russia one step ahead of the Bolsheviks after the 1917 revolution.

  In the early evening the management trainees drifted over to an Italian restaurant in downtown Springfield to celebrate the end of the grueling twelve-week Craw curriculum. “Looks as if I’m going to Germany,” Ebby was telling the others at his end of the long banquet table. He half-filled Millicent’s wine glass, and then his own, with Chianti. “Say, you’re not going to believe me when I tell you what attracted them to me.”

  “Fact that you’re at home in German might have had something to do with it,” Jack guessed.

  “Not everyone who speaks German winds up in Germany,” Ebby noted. “It was something else. When I was sixteen my grandfather died and my grandmother, who was a bit of an eccentric, decided to celebrate her new-found widowhood by taking me on a grand tour of Europe that included a night in a Parisian maison close and a week in King Zog’s Albania. We made it out of the country in the nick of time when Mussolini’s troops invaded—my grandmother used gold coins sewn into her girdle to get us two berths on a tramp steamer to Marseille. Turns out that some bright soul in the Company spotted Albania under the list of ‘countries visited’ on my personnel file and decided that that qualified me for Albanian ops, which are run out of Germany.”