The Company

by Robert Littell

  Bernice brightened. “You’re not just saying that to cheer me up?”

  “No, honest to God, really, I think it’s a possibility.”

  Bernice swayed away from Eugene and shook her head and laughed and then swayed back toward him, as if she were high on milkshake. “What I’m going to do now is tell you something I never told a living soul. I talk about permanent revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat and exploitation and alienation and all that gobbledygook, but deep down I don’t really understand it.”

  “What is communism for you, Bernice?”

  She thought about this. “For me,” she finally said, “communism is resistance to indifference. It’s caring about people more than you care about yourself.”

  Eugene leaned over and kissed her on the mouth. “You are one hell of a comrade in arms, Bernice.”

  “You, also, Eugene, baby.”

  The DCI’s six-thirty pour was running late. Several of the Company’s senior people, Leo Kritzky among them, had been held up at the old State, War and Navy Building next to the White House, waiting for Vice President Richard Nixon to turn up for a briefing on the situation in Hungary. Allen Dulles himself had been closeted with a team of Company psychiatrists, trying to figure out what to do about Frank Wisner. The Wiz’s erratic behavior had set tongues wagging. The failure of the Hungarian uprising had obviously hit him hard. At first the old DD/O hands attributed his violent mood swings to stress and exhaustion; they hoped that, with time, his spirits would pick up. Dick Helms, Wisner’s chief of operations, had been covering for his boss; gradually the Clandestine Service officers began bypassing Wisner and bringing their problems and projects to him. Helms, a patient bureaucrat who instinctively mistrusted risky operations, drew the appropriate conclusions from the Hungarian debacle and closed down “rollback.” The émigré paramilitary units in Germany were disbanded, secret arms caches were scrapped. Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were put on short leashes; the days when they would broadcast lessons on how to fabricate Molotov cocktails and incite the “captive nations” to riot were over. Under Helms, the Central Intelligence Agency hunkered down and concentrated on the tedious business of collecting and interpreting intelligence on its principal adversary, the Soviet Union.

  Dulles, shuffling into the DCI’s private dining room in his bedroom slippers, turned up for the pour twenty minutes past the appointed hour.

  “Look at his feet,” Elizabet whispered to Ebby as the Director worked the room, chatting up the officers nibbling on canapés and drinking Champagne.

  “He has gout,” Ebby told her. “He wears slippers around the office because his feet swell.”

  “Gout is an upper-class Englishman’s disease,” Elizabet said with a straight face. She moistened her lips on the Champagne in her glass. “Your Mr. Dulles is an American. He can’t possibly have gout.”

  “I’m sure he’ll be relieved to hear that,” Ebby told her.

  Dulles made his way over to Ebby and offered a hand. “Lot of water’s flowed under the bridge since we met in the Alibi Club.”

  “Wasn’t water flowing under the bridge, Director,” Ebby replied. “It was blood. I don’t believe you know Elizabet Németh?”

  The Director eyed Ebby for a moment, trying to decipher his observation. Turning to the slim woman at his side, he immediately brightened. Dulles was known to have an eye for the ladies; office scuttlebutt had it that he consoled his wife every time he started a new affair by sending her off to Cartier’s for a fresh ration of jewelry. “I have read all about your heroism, young lady,” he declared in his booming voice, turning on the charm, sandwiching her hand between both of his, showing no inclination to let go of it. “If you worked for the Agency we’d be giving you one of our medals today as well as Ebbitt here.”

  “Elliott was serving American interests and earned his medal,” she said. She slipped her hand free. “I was serving Hungarian interests,” she murmured. A parody of a smile appeared on her lips. “Someday, perhaps, a free and democratic Hungary will remember its dead sons and daughters.”

  “I’m sure it will,” Dulles agreed enthusiastically.

  The low rumble of conversation gave way to a strained silence. Looking past the Director, Ebby saw that the Wiz had appeared at the door. As he strode across the carpet to snatch a glass of Champagne from the table, his eyes flitted wildly around the room. Draining his drink in one long gulp, he grabbed a second glass and then ambled over, with a sailor’s rolling gait, to the Director and Ebby.

  “Well, now, Frank, what’s the word from inside the beltway?” Dulles asked.

  “In recognition of my contributions to world socialism,” the Wiz announced, rolling his Rs, hardening the Gs in a good imitation of a Russian speaking English, “the Kremlin has promoted me to colonel general in its KGB.” He raised his glass to salute the DCI. “Comrade Director,” he plunged ahead, “you and your staff have performed in the highest tradition of socialist surrealism. Marx, Engels, the nomenklatura that rules in their name, are proud of you. The phantom of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin will pin on you the Order of Aleksandr Nevsky. The ghost of Yosef Vissarionovich Stalin proclaims you a Hero of the Soviet Union. Without encouragement from the Company, the misguided peasants and workers of the Hungarian Banana Republic would never have risen up against their fraternal brothers in the Red Army. If you and your comrades had not pulled rug out from under them, who knows? they might have succeeded in their anti-socialist folie.”

  Dulles looked around anxiously. “You’ve had too much to drink, Frank,” he said under his breath.

  “Bull’s-eye,” Wisner agreed. “Alcohol’s the problem. Soon as I dry out things will fall into perspective. The twenty thousand dead Hungarians, the two hundred thousand who fled the country—that was only our opening bid. We’ll up the ante. We’ll send more people off to die for us.” He chewed on his lower lip, then punched Ebby lightly on the shoulder. “You fucked up, chum. You didn’t stop them. What went wrong?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Sure I’ll tell you. What went wrong is nobody, me included, had thought it through—“

  The Champagne glass slipped out of the Wiz’s hand and clattered to the floor without breaking. He kicked it under a table with the side of his shoe. “Out of sight, out of mind,” Wisner said. His jaw continued to work but no words emerged. He used his forefinger like a rapier, thrusting and circling as he drove home points that existed in his head. Around the dining room people looked away in embarrassment.

  Several of the Barons managed to steer the Wiz into a corner and Dulles hurried through the ceremony. The citation was brief and to the point: E. Winstrom Ebbitt II was being given the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, the Agency’s second-highest award, for courage far above and far beyond the call of duty; he had performed in the highest tradition of the clandestine service and, in so doing, had brought honor on the country and on the Company. Dulles offered some tongue-in-cheek remarks about where Ebbitt could wear the award; since CIA medals were, by nature, secret, they were known as jock-strap decorations. Glasses around the room were raised in tribute. Ebby was asked to say a few words. He took a step forward and stood there for a moment, gazing down at the medal in the palm of his hand. Images blinded him—the rag doll of a figure ground into the gutter by a Russian tank, the twelve bodies twisting slowly from branches above it. Breathing hard, he looked up.

  “Remember Hungary, please.” He caught Elizabet’s eye. She wiped away a tear with the back of her fist and nodded imperceptibly. “For God’s sake, remember where we went wrong so we don’t go wrong in the same way again.”

  Waiting for an elevator in the corridor afterward, Ebby looked pale as death. When the elevator arrived, Leo stepped into it with Elizabet and him and, turning to face the doors, punched the lobby button. The elevator whirred downward. Leo glanced sideways at Ebby.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” he said. “You okay?”

  Ebby shook his head. “
I’m not okay. I have the bends. From coming up too fast.”

  Leo didn’t understand. “Coming up from where?”

  Ebby remembered the wild-eyed priest guarding the door when he and Arpád and Elizabet emerged from the tunnel into the Kilian Barracks. “Coming up from Gehenna,” he told Leo.

  PART THREE

  VICIOUS CIRCLES

  There was something very queer about the water,

  [Alice] thought, as every now and then the oars

  got fast in it, and would hardly come out again.

  Snapshot: an amateur photograph, taken at sea from the bridge of an American destroyer, shows sailors scrambling down cargo netting to rescue a man in a drenched khaki uniform from a half-inflated rubber raft. As the image is fuzzy and the figure is bearded, the Pentagon didn’t raise objections to the publication of the photograph in the late April 1961 edition of Time magazine as long as the person rescued wasn’t identified as an American national.

  1

  WASHINGTON, DC, FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 1960

  IF YOU PUT IT INTO ONE OF YOUR BOOKS,” DICK BISSELL RAGED TO E. Howard Hunt, a full-time CIA political action officer and occasional writer of espionage potboilers, “nobody would believe it.” Bissell, a tall, lean, active-volcano of a man who had replaced the ailing Wiz as Deputy Director for Operations, loped back and forth along the rut he’d worn in the government-issue carpeting, his hands clasped behind his back, his shoulders stooped and bent into the autumn cat’s-paw ruffling through the open windows of the corner room. Hunt, a dapper man who had been assigned to kick ass down in Miami until the 700-odd anti-Castro splinter groups came up with what, on paper at least, could credibly pass for a government in exile, kept his head bobbing in eager agreement. “Someone who shall remain nameless,” Bissell continued, “came up with the harebrained scheme of flooding Cuba with rumors of a Second Coming. The idea was for one of our subs to surface off the Cuban coast and light up the night sky with fireworks to establish that the Second Coming was at hand, at which point the Cuban Catholics would identify Castro as the Antichrist and send him packing.”

  “Elimination by illumination,” Hunt quipped.

  Shaking his head in disgust, Bissell said, “The God-awful part is that this happens to be one of the better schemes that made it as far as my in-box.”

  The intercom on Bissell’s desk squawked. The DD/O lunged for the button as if it were an alarm clock that needed to be turned off before it woke anyone. “He’s here,” a woman’s high-pitched voice could be heard bleating. “If you want to see him I’m afraid you’ll have to go down to the lobby and rescue him.”

  Bissell, in shirtsleeves and suspenders, discovered the Sorcerer in the room behind the reception desk where the uniformed security guards played pinochle; cards, obviously discarded in haste, were scattered across the table. Two of the guards, holding drawn and cocked automatics with both hands, had the intruder pinned to the wall while the third guard, working up from the ankles, frisked him. When the guard reached the shapeless sports jacket, he gingerly unbuttoned it and reached in to extract Torriti’s pearl-handled revolver from the sweat-stained holster under his armpit. The Sorcerer, a smudge of a smile plastered on his bloated face, puffed away on a fat Havana as he kept track of the proceedings through his beady eyes.

  “You must be Harvey Torriti,” Bissell said.

  “You got to be Dick Bissell,” the Sorcerer replied.

  “He stormed through the lobby like gangbusters,” one of the guards blurted, preparing a retreat in case the intruder turned out to be someone important. “When we went and asked him for Company ID, he waved a wrinkled piece of paper in our faces and headed for the elevator.”

  “We could tell he was carrying,” another guard insisted, “from the way his shoulder sagged.”

  Bissell glanced at the wrinkled piece of paper in question. It was a deciphered copy of the Operational Immediate, addressed to Alice Reader (the Sorcerer’s in-house cryptonym), summoning Harvey Torriti back to Washington from Berlin Station.

  “In addition to which, he don’t look like no one named Alice,” the third guard put in.

  “Okay. Nobody’s going to second-guess you for going by the book,” Bissell assured the guards. “I’ll vouch for Alice, here,” he added, a laugh tucked away in the spaces between his words.

  He crossed the room and held out a hand to the Sorcerer. Soft sweaty fingers give it a perfunctory shake. Torriti retrieved his revolver and started to follow Bissell. At the door he pirouetted back with the nimbleness of a ballet dancer, sending the hem of his jacket swirling around his hips. “You need to demote these clowns to janitors,” he told Bissell. Leaning down, he hiked one leg of his trousers and, in a blur of a swipe, came up with the snub-nosed .38 Detective Special taped to an ankle. “They missed this fucker,” he announced gleefully. He smiled into the livid faces of the three guards. “No shit, if looks could kill I’d be dead meat now.”

  “You really shouldn’t have baited them the way you did,” Bissell said once they were safely past the gawking secretaries and back in his office.

  Torriti, rolls of body fat spilling out of a chair, one arm draped over its high wooden back, the other caressing the cigar, wanted to get the relationship with the DD/O off on the right track. “Don’t appreciate being hassled,” he announced.

  “Asking you for a laminated identity card doesn’t come under the category of hassling, Harvey,” Bissell suggested mildly.

  “They weren’t asking. They were ordering. Besides which I long ago lost any goddamn ID I might have had. Didn’t need any in Berlin. Everybody knew me.”

  “I can see everybody here is going to know you, too.” Bissell nodded toward a sideboard filled with bottles of alcohol. “Can I offer you some firewater?”

  Peering through the cigar smoke, the Sorcerer studied the sideboard. The DD/O’s stash of whiskey seemed to have Gaelic brand names and boasted of having been aged in barrels for sixteen years; he supposed that they’d been bottled and put on the market as a last resort when the family-owned breweries faced bankruptcy. For Torriti, it was one thing to be a consenting alcoholic, another to actually drink this upper-class piss. Good whiskey burned your throat. Period. “Today’s Friday,” he finally said. “It’s a religious thing. Fridays, I go on the wagon.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since I noticed the labels on your whiskey. Your booze’s too ritzy for my tastes.”

  The Sorcerer eyed the DD/O across the desk, determined to get a rise out of him. He was familiar with Bissell’s pedigree—Yale by way of Groton, an economist by training, an academic at heart, an officer and a gentleman by lineage, a risk-runner by instinct. It was the risk-runner who had attracted Dulles’s attention when the Director (bypassing the Wiz’s chief of operations, Dick Helms) shopped around for someone to replace Frank Wisner, who had been diagnosed as a manic-depressive and was said to have retreated to his farm on the eastern shore of Maryland, where he spent his waking hours staring off into space.

  Bissell absently tortured a paperclip out of shape between his long fingers. “Your reputation precedes you, Harvey.”

  “And I race after the son of a bitch trying my goddamnedest to live up to it.”

  “Sounds like the tail wagging the dog,” Bissell remarked. He stuck an end of the paperclip between his lips and gnawed on it. “I’m running a new project, Harvey. That’s why I brought you in. I want to offer you a piece of the action. It’s big. Very big. I’ll give you three guesses.”

  The Sorcerer was having second thoughts about Bissell’s fancy Gaelic whiskeys but he didn’t know the DD/O well enough to admit it. “Cuba, Cuba and Cuba.”

  Bissell nodded happily. “Khrushchev recently boasted to the world that the Monroe Doctrine has died a natural death. I’m going to prove him wrong. President Eisenhower has authorized me to develop a covert action capability against the Castro regime. We’re going to base it on the Guatemala model but the scale will be larger—we’re going to s
pread rumors of multiple landings and uprisings and frighten Castro out of Cuba the way we frightened Arbenz out of Guatemala. The plan calls for the creation of a government-in-exile, an intensive propaganda offensive, cultivating resistance groups inside Cuba and training a paramilitary force outside of Cuba for an eventual guerrilla action. The whole package goes under the code name JMARC.”

  The Sorcerer puffed on his cigar. “Where do I fit in?”

  The DD/O slipped around to the front of the desk and unconsciously lowered his voice. “I brought you back in order to put another arrow in our quiver, Harvey. I want you to set up a general capability within the Company for disabling foreign leaders. We’re going to call this capability ‘executive action.’ The in-house cryptonym for executive action will be ZR/RIFLE. ZR/RIFLE’s first order of business will be to assassinate Fidel Castro. If you succeed it will make the military option superfluous, or at the very least, simpler.”

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t already tried to kill Castro.”

  Bissell began patrolling the rut in the carpet. “The people who up to now have been in charge of that particular show tend to move their lips when they read. If I told you about some of the plots—“

  “Tell me, if only so I won’t make the same mistakes.”

  “We had an asset in a hotel ready to dust Fidel’s shoes with thallium salts to make his beard fall out, but he never put them out to be shined. We contaminated a box of his favorite Cohiba cigars with botulism toxin and smuggled it in to another asset who was being paid to deliver it to him. Our man took the money and ditched the cigars and disappeared. The Technical Service elves toyed with the idea of fouling the ventilating system of Castro’s broadcasting studio with LSD so his speech would slur and he’d ramble on during one of his marathon orations to the Cuban people. There were other schemes that never got off the drawing boards—dusting Castro’s wet suit with fungus spores that would give him chronic skin disease, filling his underwater breathing apparatus with tuberculosis bacilli, planting an exotic seashell on the ocean floor where Castro liked to skin-dive that would explode when he opened it.”