by Joan Didion
She had been looking across the tent.
The steel band had stopped playing.
The woman had seemed, the consular officer reported, “very interested in some of our Salvadoran friends.”
“Neat idea, by the way, the steel band,” the consular officer had added, “but next year it might be appropriate to tell them, ‘Rule Britannia’ isn’t ours.”
It was at the point when the steel band struck up “Rule Britannia” that the woman had put the passport in her bag, closed the bag, and walked out of the tent and across the lawn and out the gate.
“You were about to explain something,” the consular officer had said as she started to walk away.
“Forget it,” she had said without turning back.
That was the reason for ordering the background.
The background that was ordered to get a line on who she was and what she was doing there.
The background that threw up the glitch.
The background that turned up flat.
No history.
The passport bearing the name Elise Meyer showed that it had been issued on June 30 1984 at the United States Passport Agency in Miami, but the United States Passport Agency in Miami reported no record of having issued a passport in the name Elise Meyer.
That was the glitch.
11
The young FBI agent who had flown down from the Miami office had opened the initial interview by mentioning the glitch.
She had looked puzzled.
The discrepancy, the anomaly, whatever she wanted to call it.
He was certain that she could clear this immediately.
He was sure that she would have a simple explanation for the glitch.
The anomaly.
The discrepancy.
She had offered no explanation at all.
She had merely shrugged. “At my age I don’t actually find discrepancies too surprising,” she had said. “You must be what? Twenty-six, twenty-seven?”
He was twenty-five.
He had decided to try another tack.
“Assuming for the moment that someone provided you with apparently inauthentic documentation,” he began.
“You’re assuming that,” she said. “Naturally. Because you haven’t had a whole lot of experience with the way things work. You still think things work the way they’re supposed to work. I’m assuming something more along the lines of business as usual.”
“Excuse me?”
“I guess you must work in an office where nobody ever makes a mistake,” she said. “I guess where you work nobody ever hits the wrong key because they’re in a rush to go on break.”
“I don’t see your point.”
“You don’t think it’s possible that some low-level GS-whatever in the passport office accidentally deleted my record?”
This was in fact a distinct possibility, but he chose to ignore it. “Apparently inauthentic documentation is sometimes provided for the purpose of placing the carrier in a position where they can be blackmailed into doing something they wouldn’t otherwise do.”
“Is that something you learned at Quantico?”
He ignored this. “In other words,” he repeated, “someone could have placed you in such a position.” He paused for emphasis. “Someone could be using you.”
“For what,” she said.
“If there were a plot,” the agent said.
“That’s your invention. This whole plot business. Your movie. Not anybody else’s.”
The agent paused. She had agreed to the interview. She had not been uncooperative. Because she had not been uncooperative he let this pass, but what she had said was not entirely accurate. The plot to assassinate Alex Brokaw was not his invention at all. There were various theories around the embassy and also in Miami about whose invention it was, the most popular of which was that Alex Brokaw himself had engineered the report in an effort to derail a certain two-track approach then favored at State, but the existence of a plot, once it was mentioned by what the cable traffic called “a previously reliable source,” had to be accepted at face value. Documentable steps had to be taken. The record at State had to duly show the formation of a crisis management team on the Caribbean desk. The paperwork had to duly show that wall maps had been requisitioned, with colored pins to indicate known players. The concertina perimeter around the embassy overflow office structures had to be duly reinforced. On the record. All AM/EMBASSY dependents and nonessential personnel had to be duly encouraged to take home leave. In triplicate. All American citizens with access to AM/EMBASSY personnel and uncleared backgrounds had to be interviewed.
Duly.
Including this one.
This one had access to AM/EMBASSY personnel by virtue of being on the island.
This one had thrown a glitch.
Something about this one’s use of the phrase “your movie” bothered him but he let that go too.
“If there were a plot,” he repeated, “someone could be using you.”
“Those are your words.”
In the silence that followed the young man had clicked his ballpoint pen on the table. There were other things about this one that bothered him, but it was important to keep what bothered him out of this picture. It was possible they might be experiencing a syntactical problem, a misunderstanding that could be cleared up by restatement. “Why not put it in your own words,” he said finally.
She fished a loose cigarette from her pocket and then, when he made the error of interpreting this as an encouraging sign, replaced the cigarette in her pocket, ignoring the match he was still fumbling to strike.
“There could be a game in there somewhere,” she had said then. “And I could be in there somewhere.”
“In the plot.”
“In the game.”
The agent said nothing.
“In whatever you want to call it,” she said then. “It’s your movie.”
“Let’s approach this from another angle,” he said after a silence. “You came here from San José. Costa Rica. Yet no record exists showing you ever entered Costa Rica. So let’s start there.”
“You want to know how I got into Costa Rica.” Her voice had again suggested cooperation.
“Exactly.”
“You don’t even need a passport to enter Costa Rica. An American citizen can enter Costa Rica on a tourist card. From a travel agency.”
“But you didn’t.”
There had been another silence.
“I’m going to say something,” she said then. “You’re going to get it or you won’t. I haven’t been here long, but I’ve been here long enough to notice a lot of Americans here. I notice them on the street, I notice them at the hotel, I notice them all over. I don’t know if they have their own passports. I don’t know whose passports they have. I don’t know whose passport I have. All I know is, they aren’t on vacation.”
Again she took the loose cigarette from her pocket and again she put it back.
“So I’d suggest you just think for a while about what they’re doing here,” she had said then. “And I bet you could pretty much figure how I got into Costa Rica.”
Subject “Elise Meyer” acknowledges entering country in possession of apparently inauthentic documentation but provides no further information concerning either the source of said documentation or her purpose in entering said country, the agent’s preliminary report read. Recommendation: continued surveillance and investigation until such time as identity of subject can be verified, as well as subject’s purpose in entering said country.
This initial interview took place on July 10 1984.
A second interview, during which subject and interrogator reiterated their respective points, took place on July 11 1984.
Elena McMahon moved from the Intercon to the Surf rider on July 12.
It was August 14 when Treat Morrison flew down from Washington on the American that landed at ten a.m. and, when he stopped by the Intercon to leave his bag, happened to see
her sitting by herself in the Intercon coffee shop.
Sitting by herself at the round table set for eight.
Wearing the white dress.
Eating the chocolate parfait and bacon.
When he got to the embassy later that day he learned from Alex Brokaw’s DCM that the woman he had seen in the Intercon coffee shop had arrived on the island on July 2 on an apparently falsified American passport issued in the name Elise Meyer. At his request the DCM had arranged to have him briefed on the progress of the continuing FBI investigation meant to ascertain who Elise Meyer was and what she was doing there. Later it occurred to him that there would have been at that time in that embassy certain people who already knew who Elise Meyer was and what she was doing there, but it did not occur to him then.
Three
1
I should understand Treat Morrison.
I studied him, I worked him up.
I researched him, I interviewed him, I listened to him, watched him.
I came to recognize his way of speaking, came to know how to read the withheld phrasing, the fast dying fall or diminuendo that would render key words barely audible, the sudden rise and overemphasis on the insignificant part of the sentence (“… and by the way”), the rush or explosion of syllables jammed together (“… and the hell it is …”), the raising of the entirely rhetorical question (“… and … should I have regrets?”), the thoughtful acting out of the entirely rhetorical answer (head tilted up, a gaze into the middle distance, then “I … don’t think … so”), the unconvincingly brisk reiteration: “… and I have no regrets.”
No regrets.
Treat Morrison had no regrets.
Quite early in the course of these dealings with Treat Morrison I came to regard him as fundamentally dishonest. Not dishonest in the sense that he “lied,” or deliberately misrepresented events as he himself construed them (he did not, he never did, he was scrupulous to a fault about reporting exactly what he believed to be true), but dishonest in the more radical sense, dishonest in that he remained incapable of seeing the thing straight. At the outset I viewed this as an idiosyncrasy or a defect of character, in either case singular, peculiar to the individual, a personal eccentricity. I came only later to see that what I viewed as personal was deep in the grain of who he was and where he came from.
Let me give you a paragraph from my notes.
Not interview notes, not raw notes, but early draft notes, notes lacking words and clauses and marked with CH for “check” and TK for “to come,” meaning I didn’t have it then but planned to get it, notes worked up in the attempt to get something on paper that might open a way to a lead:
Treat Austin Morrison was born in San Francisco at a time, 1930, when San Francisco was still remote, isolated, separated physically from the rest of the United States by the ranges of mountains that closed off when the heavy snows came, separated emotionally by the implacable presence of the Pacific, by the ???TK and by the ???TK and by the fogs that blew in from the Farallons every afternoon at four or five. His father held a minor city sinecure, jury commissioner in the municipal court
There this particular note toward a lead skids to an abrupt stop. Scratched in pencil after the typed words “municipal court” is a comma, then one further penciled clause:
a job he owed to his wife’s well-placed relatives in the Irish wards (??CH “wards”) south of Market Street.
More false starts:
The son of a parochial school teacher and a minor city official in San Francisco, Treat Austin Morrison enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley when it was still offering a free college education to any qualified California high school graduate who could scrape up the $27.50 (??CH) registration fee plus whatever little he or she could live on. The man who would later become America’s man-on-the-spot in the world’s hottest spots, ambassador-at-large with a top-secret portfolio, earned part of his college costs by parking cars at the elite Hotel Claremont in Oakland, the rest by
Treat Austin Morrison may have been Saturday’s hero on the football field (XXX BETTER LINE TK), the University of California’s own All-PAC 8 (??CH) quarterback, but Saturday night would find him back in the kitchen at the exclusive Phi Gamma Delta house, where he paid for his room and board by hashing, washing dishes and waiting table for the affluent party animals who called themselves his fraternity brothers and from whom he borrowed the textbooks he could not afford to buy. The discipline developed in those years stands him in good stead as
T.A.M. was raised an only child
T.A.M., the only son and during most of his formative years the only living child of a
T.A.M., the only son and after his older sister’s suicide the only living child
There are pages of such draft notes, a thick sheaf of them, most of them uncharacteristically (for me) focused on the subject’s early deprivations and childhood pluck (uncharacteristically for me because it has not been my actual experience that the child is father to the man), all of them aborted. I see now that there was a clear common thread in these failed starts, that I was trying to deal with something about Treat Morrison that continued to elude me: this was a man who was at the time I interviewed him living and working at the heart of the American political establishment. This was a man who could pick up the telephone and affect the Dow, reach the foreign minister of any one of a dozen NATO countries, the Oval Office itself. This was a man generally perceived as a mover, a shaker, a can-do guy, someone who appeared to thrive on negotiation, on dealing, on calculation and calibration and adjustment, the very stuff that defines a successful social operator. Yet this remained someone who projected nothing so much as an extreme, even resistant loneliness, an isolation so impenetrable as to seem to demand analysis, examination, a reason why.
Treat Morrison himself appeared to have no interest in examining what I am distressed to notice I was choosing to call “his formative years.”
I would not hear from him about early deprivations or childhood pluck, nor would I get from him even the slightest clue that the traditional actors in the family drama (or, in the vocabulary into which I appear to have been sinking, the formative dynamic) had been in his case other than casual acquaintances.
“As far as I know she was regarded as an excellent teacher,” he said about his mother. “Very well thought of, very esteemed by the sisters who ran the school.” He paused, as if weighing this for fairness. “Of course she was a Catholic,” he said then.
Since this afterthought was the most specific and least remote information he had so far seemed inclined to convey, I decided to pursue it. “Then you were raised a Catholic,” I began, tentatively, expecting, if not revelation, at least confirmation or correction.
What I got was zero.
What I got was Treat Morrison waiting, at bay, his fingers tented.
“Or were you,” I said.
He said nothing.
“Raised a Catholic,” I said.
He aligned a square crystal paperweight with the edge of his desk blotter.
“Not to say that I entirely disagreed with many of the pertinent precepts,” he said then, “but as far as the whole religious business went, it just wasn’t an area that particularly interested me.”
“He was very well liked around the courthouse,” he said about his father. “As far as I know.”
“It was something that happened,” he said about the death of his sister at age nineteen. “I was twelve, thirteen years old when it happened, there were the seven years between us, seven years at that age could be a lifetime, to all intents and purposes Mary Katherine was someone I barely knew.”
“For all anyone knows it was an accident,” he said when I tried to follow up on this subject. “She was watching the seals, the surf came up and took her, Mary Katherine never had any coordination, she was always in the emergency room, if she wasn’t breaking her ankle she was dropping a bicycle on her leg or knocking herself out with a tetherball or every other damn thing.”
<
br /> “I guess I didn’t see any useful reason to dwell on that,” he said when I suggested that very few people who get accidentally taken by the surf while watching the seals happen to have mailed goodbye notes to (although not to their mother or father or brother) three former teachers at Lowell High School and a former boyfriend who had recently left to go through OCS at Fort Lewis, MISSION TEEN A HOMEFRONT CASUALTY, the headline read in the San Francisco Chronicle the morning after the letters began to surface. I had found it on microfiche, LOWELL GRAD WROTE FINAL DEAR JOHN. “There you see the goddamn media again,” Treat Morrison said about this. “Goddamn media was meddling even then in something they couldn’t possibly begin to understand.”
“Which would have been what.” I recall trying for an offhand delivery. “What was it exactly that the media didn’t begin to understand.”
Treat Morrison said nothing for a moment. “A lot of people get some big mystical kick out of chewing over things that happened forty, forty-five years ago,” he said then. “Little sad stories about being misunderstood by their mother or getting snubbed at school or whatever. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this, I’m not saying it’s self-indulgent or self-pitying or any other damn thing, I’m just saying I can’t afford it. So I don’t do it.”
I find in my notes and taped interviews only two instances in which Treat Morrison volunteered anything about his background that could be construed as personal. The first such instance is buried deep in a taped discussion of what a two-state solution would mean to Israel. Three-quarters of the way through a sixty-minute tape, at 44:19 to be exact, Treat Morrison falls silent. When he resumes talking it is not about two-state versus one-state for Israel but about having once had some pictures framed for his mother. It seemed that his mother had broken a hip and been forced to move from her house in the Mission district to a Mercy convalescent home in Woodside. It seemed that he had stopped to see her on his way to a meeting in Saigon. It seemed that she had kept mentioning these pictures, snapshots of him and his sister at a place they used to go on the Russian River. “She’d had them stuck in a mirror, she wanted them at the new place, I thought I’d get them put in a frame, you know those frames that take four or five little pictures. So fine. But when I go to pick it up, the clerk has written on the package ‘kids playing by stream.’ ”