The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  Doug says we were responsible for doing Patrice Lumumba in, Peter would report to Katherine, though it wasn’t literally the Agency’s finger on the trigger. And he would give her details of what went on in Katanga in 1960 and early ‘61. Doug says the Agency really did help Mafia hitmen try to nail Castro; the mob wants back into Havana. He won’t tell me yet whether John Kennedy’s assassination was arranged by Castro and the KGB or by Lyndon Johnson or by Cuban exiles pissed about the Bay of Pigs. Doug says this guy Rick Talbott that they call the Prince of Darkness went down to Chile in Seventy-three under Mafia cover to help ITT and the U.S. Navy help Pinochet’s people knock off Allende. Doug says they lie to our ambassador about things like that so that the ambassador can deny them with genuine indignation. Doug says we have a poison for assassination purposes made from the natural toxins of a certain subarctic shellfish; it leaves no chemical trace whatever. Doug says people like Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon and Kissinger don’t ordinarily order assassinations just like that: All they have to do is let it be known that the absence of that sonofabitch So-and-So would be good news. Even Joe Stalin didn’t always have to name names: It was enough to frown and suck on his pipe when a certain name was mentioned, and the guy was dead. Doug says even Frank Church’s committee won’t believe it at first when they hear about plots to make Castro’s beard fall off and to blow him away with an exploding cigar and to use a submarine sound-and-light show to fool the Cubans into thinking that the Second Coming has come, but it’s true. Doug says we’re using these humongous herbicides and defoliants in Vietnam to kill the rice crop and the VC’s jungle cover without telling our own men how toxic the stuff is to handle. Thousands of our soldiers are going to have long-term disorders and disabilities without knowing it’s Dioxin poisoning from Agent Orange. Doug says the Pentagon did the same thing with radiation exposure in the Nevada and Bikini bomb tests, even with long-term casualty estimates in hand. Some of it’s pure callousness, Doug says; some of it’s machismo on the command level. Doug says good old Dwight Eisenhower knew about the dangers of atomic-test fallout to the U.S. population and authorized the AEC to lie about it. Doug says that torture medicine is becoming as distinct a specialty as sports medicine. We’ve trained whole squads of counterrevolutionaries right next door on the York River, Doug says, without their ever knowing for sure they’re in the States. We also train goon squads and interrogation teams for various friendly dictators. Our Chesapeake Bay is a fucking moral cesspool, Kath.

  Even liberal Katherine got defensive: The Russians do all that too!

  Sure, said Peter; but they’re them. I’d kind of thought we were us. Doug says we’ve already sprayed San Francisco and New York City with test strains of respiratory bacilli in limited dosages and counted the results: how many extra old folks die of respiratory dysfunction; how many extra healthy people check in with upper-respiratory complaints. Doug says we’re testing all kinds of nasty things on our own war veterans in VA hospitals. Not even the doctors always know about it, much less the patients. Doug says we’re running a program called Color Hearing to see whether certain combinations of hypnotism and LSD and stuff can improve the perception of analysts interpreting spy-satellite photographs. They’re mostly volunteers. But Doug says we’re running another program called MK Ultra to test the effects of mind-altering drugs on thousands of people who don’t know they’re being doped. Our own people. A couple of the subjects have committed suicide already, and some others have blown their circuits altogether, and their families don’t know why. The idea is that an enemy who’s freaking out can’t fight. Interrogation Medicine is interested too, of course; they run their own drug-testing programs.

  Cried Kath Our whole freaking government is freaking out!

  Here and there, for sure. Doug says his Prince of Darkness pal can kill a man in public by standing behind him in a London bus-queue and touching his leg with the tip of a bumbershoot; the chap’ll never know what hit him unless he’s up on our R and D. Ricin, the stuff is called. Doug says the KGB’s ahead of us on nontraceable cardiac arrest, but we’ll catch up and go them two or three better. Doug says the Rumanian Wet Affairs people have a fountain-pen delivery system for their heart-attack juice, but our fellows find it awkward to empty a fountain pen inconspicuously into the other guy’s martini, especially since nobody but me uses a fountain pen these days. Doug says Wet Affairs means liquidation; I forget whether the joke is ours or the KGB’s. Termination With Extreme Prejudice is ours, Doug says.

  Shrieked Katherine, by then a patriot despite herself, I don’t believe all this shit Doug says!

  However, we came to know, it was true.

  Then Kath didn’t want to hear it. Neither after a while for God’s sake did Peter. But he could not not listen, any more than she; he could not ask not to hear more of what he didn’t want to hear as item after item, in considerable part owing to Douglas Townshend’s covert tips and leaks, was revealed—by the Post and the Times, by Senate investigators, by disaffected exAgency officers promptly denounced by their former employer—to be true, true, true. To be, even, understatement.

  Peter Sagamore’s stories got shorter. Also less frequent. They were not about our successful efforts to overthrow the legally elected Marxist government of Salvador Allende in Chile and establish the bloody generals in his place. We don’t even enjoy Sherlock Holmes in our house, reader, much less James Bond. Peter’s stories were not about Douglas Townshend’s very heavy interrogation, with the help of Frederick Mansfield Talbott and John Arthur Paisley, of the eminent KGB defector Yuri Nosenko, whom James Jesus Angleton, our counterintelligence chief, believed to be a Soviet plant. Doug said we never quite trust such defectors, because the consequences of being mistaken are so great. Nosenko told us that the KGB did not train Lee Harvey Oswald in Wet Affairs during Oswald’s stay in Russia, and Townshend, Talbott, and Paisley believed him, but Angleton remained convinced that the KGB had planted Nosenko to give us exactly that disinformation. We grilled Nosenko for years in isolation in our Wilmington, North Carolina, safe house before giving him a new identity and a house in the D.C. suburbs and a thirty-eight-thousand-dollar salary as low-level analyst for the Agency. Doug said he himself sailed down to that safe house one summer with the Talbott brothers on Franklin Key Talbott’s cutter Reprise and sailed back on Paisley’s sloop Brillig, but Peter Sagamore’s stories were not about that. Neither were they about Operation KITTY HAWK, the CIA’s Master Mole hunt conducted from 1972 to 1974 by the same quartet—Douglas Townshend, Frederick Mansfield Talbott, John Arthur Paisley, and James Jesus Angleton—each of whom was himself necessarily a suspect. Another high-ranking Soviet defector and sailing friend of Paisley’s, Doug said, the naval officer Nicolas Shadrin, was a double agent with the dangerous assignment of feeding the KGB disinformation provided him by one of the aforenamed quartet; but another member of that quartet was persuaded that the Master Mole was in fact supercoding that disinformation into genuine information, thereby reestablishing a communication link that National Security Agency decoders had broken not long before. Even the clever and knowledgeable spy novels of John le Carré are not enjoyed in our house, reader, and so Peter Sagamore’s ever-briefer literary utterances were programmatically not about that same ex-Captain Shadrin’s vanishing in 1975, Doug said, from a public square in Vienna in broad daylight and full view of our CIA station there, presumably disappeared by the Komitĕt Gosudarstvĕnnoi Bezopasnost’i.

  Operation KITTY HAWK was completed, but did it fly? Doug said that upon its completion in 1974, his colleague John Arthur Paisley was promoted to the post of deputy director of the Agency’s Office of Strategic Research; but it was the liberal (by Agency standards) William Colby, successor to the old-guardsman Richard Helms, who received the mole-hunter’s report, and later that same year Paisley retired, expressing his disillusionment at the revelations of Senator Church’s investigating committee. Colby awarded him a going-away medal, for distinguished service, and Douglas Townshend t
old Peter Sagamore that Paisley and a number of other officers were overtly retiring with such grumbles of disaffection in order to go on the covert consultant payroll, or to set themselves up for doubling or tripling, or—like Wilson and Terpil—to go into the lucrative roguing business for themselves. About the time Captain Shadrin disappeared in Vienna, Doug said, the Paisleys separated after more than twenty years of marriage; marital breakdowns, Doug said, like psychological breakdowns, occur with such heightened frequency among counterintelligence and clandestine-service officers as to be regarded as an occupational hazard. His own marriage had been at least in some measure another such casualty; the Paisleys’ would have borne the double burden of Maryann’s also having worked for the Agency (she had been, for example, a bookkeeper for the Nosenko interrogation team). Peter Sagamore’s stories were not about all that—but so possessed by these matters was his reluctant imagination, very little was left for his stories to be about.

  Porter Baldwin, Jr., amid groans and yechs from Katherine Shorter Sherritt, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from his southern Maryland district in 1974 on a flaming conservative platform that included the restoration of Christian prayer in the public schools, equal time in the curriculum for creation science as against Darwinian evolution, the reestablishment of antiabortion laws, an end to busing as a means to racial integration of our public schools, a hawkish defense of our wound-down war in Vietnam, and a denunciation of Senate critics of the CIA. Among his chief financial backers were Willy Sherritt and the Moral Majority. In 1976, though Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford, Rep. Baldwin was swept back into office despite his past connections with Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon, on a platform that now included all the previous planks plus repeal of the Freedom of Information Act and “unhobbling” the CIA’s dirty-tricks department. By Seventy-eight, said Katherine Sherritt, the hypocritical sumbitch will be nuking the gays. Baldwin’s backers, Douglas Townshend mildly reported to Peter Sagamore, had come to include a highly unofficial political action committee among the old guard in the Agency itself.

  Asked startled Peter Sagamore, who had become a hard man to startle, Money? The CIA is buying our own politicians? Doug couldn’t say. Big government agencies, like other big interests, maintain their public relations officers and unofficial lobbyists; they are certainly aware of their congressional friends and enemies, and no doubt rejoice in the victory of the former and the defeat of the latter. Human enough. Election “targeting,” after the manner of official Political Action Committees, would of course be impermissible on the part of the U.S. Navy or the Federal Reserve Board, for example. But using laundered money for smear campaigns, rigged elections, and associated dirty tricks abroad is the Agency’s daily business: An officer placed as Douglas Townshend had once been placed, with a group of like-minded colleagues, could budget and execute similar operations domestically, at least on the occasional congressional level, without their division chief’s knowing it, much less the director of the Agency. Just as the CIA’s budget itself is concealed in other government appropriations, many a covert enterprise can be hidden in that budget. One must hold onto the tragic view, the tragic view, Doug said, if one can find it.

  Doug says he’s resigning from the Agency, Peter Sagamore told Katherine Sherritt in 1976. Said Kate Thank God; no more Doug sayses. We had read together Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks’s 1974 exposé The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, Doug supplying us with approximations of the passages deleted by the Agency; also Philip Agee’s 1975 exposé Inside the Company: CIA Diary, which inspired Katherine to redouble efforts on behalf of her HOSCA organization. Is he really resigning, she wanted to know, or just going underground? Doug says it’s to celebrate the Bicentennial, Peter reported. He’ll get consulting fees like everybody else, and the Company’s paying him to write his memoirs for the archives, like everybody else. Doug says that that Franklin Key Talbott fellow has the job of editing all those memoirs, which nobody ever reads, while he’s secretly working on his own exposé. Doug says the Agency likes to maintain some connection even with its rogues, like that Edwin Wilson fellow, to keep tabs on them; but Doug says the rogues use that connection as part of their cover. The tragic view. Hey, Kate? I hate all this.

  She does too. It was better when you were just a writer.

  Yeah.

  I really like Doug Townshend, Peter. I wish we’d never met him.

  Yeah.

  Maybe now that he’s resigning, you can stop being his literary archive.

  Yeah.

  But the truth was that Doug Townshend had told Peter Sagamore that their confidences had reached the point where Peter’s curiosity and sense of plot must be weighed against the absolute candor of his relation with Katherine Sherritt. The matters of which he wanted to speak next came closer to home in two respects: They were transpiring partly in the Sagamore Flats safe house on Hoopers Island, and Doug’s report of them must not this time be shared with Katherine.

  Said Peter with relief That’s that, then, Doug. No deal. Hooray.

  Quite all right. It’s the choice every Agency officer has to make.

  Anyhow, said Peter, all this central intelligence has done nothing for my writing except constipate it.

  So far, said Douglas Townshend. And not quite so, either: That special not-aboutness is beginning to be there. Your last piece reminds me of Thomas Mann’s novella A Man and His Dog, which he published in Nineteen Eighteen and which is loudly not about the world war. The sound of two hands not clapping.

  My story, said P, is approximately one hundred twenty-seven times shorter.

  What I propose to tell you next gets us back to the Doomsday Factor.

  Nope.

  Quite all right.

  But Peter found himself not mentioning this conversation to Katherine, and so the infection touched us anyhow. We maintained our friendship with amiable Douglas Townshend, but it was clearly now a bit constrained. Early that summer, Doug had a mild heart attack; we visited him in Walter Reed Hospital, and Peter much wanted to ask him whether the Agency, maybe his legendary colleague the Prince of Darkness, could possibly have etc. But it seemed not cricket to ask, P having declined to listen, and so our bedside conversation was not about that.

  In the fall, Peter made his seasonal visit to Hoopersville—alone, as it happened, Katherine being off at an annual ASPS get-together in the Great Smokies—to pay his respects to the family. He took his mother out for their ritual drive around the place she’d spent her life in: the bridge to the mainland; the wildlife refuge, where tens of thousands of Canada geese were arriving for the winter; her daughter’s house; her other son’s house; the Sagamore Boat Yard, next door to the former family house. He wanted to see whether the dock was still there from which he had set himself adrift on the tide a quarter-century before. The new owners had replaced it with one more substantial, with a light at the cross-T and two improbably clean white wooden workboats moored alongside. As he returned along the chain-link fencing to his car, where his mother smiled absently and smoked her Winston cigarettes, another automobile left the newly resided house, drove down the new blacktop driveway that had once been paved with oystershells, and paused while the driver, a neatly dressed black woman, stepped out to unlock the gate. When she paused again on the outside to relock it, Peter saw that the nearside backseat passenger was Douglas Townshend, lighting a cigarette with unsteady hand. They were not ten feet from each other. Through the closed car window, Peter saw that Doug saw that Peter saw him; they looked into each other’s faces for some seconds while the driver returned to her place, but Doug’s studied impassivity was enough to check Peter’s reflex of greeting. Cigarette lit, Doug turned back to his companion, a weathered-looking fellow with gray billy-goat chin-whiskers but no mustache; the car drove off. There was no other sign of activity in Sagamore Flats, to which a large new garagelike structure and a helipad with windsock had been added since Peter’s last visit. The Venetian blinds were closed a
t a number of downstairs windows. Nora Sagamore said Your colored people have certainly come up in this world, and that’s a fact.

  Troubled by the degree of his complicity and equally of his curiosity, Peter told upset Katherine of the proposal he’d kept secret from her: to keep secrets from her. We talked; we talked more. In the period of that small bad faith, P’s literary production had quite ceased. Even our love-making had become less frequent. Whatever the psychodynamics might be between Less Is More at the writing desk and more more more in his tête-à-têtes with Townshend, the relation was undeniable. Both, Peter had come to feel, must be worked through to some Other Side.

  Katherine Sherritt, for her part, believed there to be an important distinction between secret information that she’s not to know the nature of but does know the fact of, and the secret that her friend even has such secret information. That latter sort of secrecy, she believed, would likely be corrosive; Peter’s experience of the past few months was demonstration enough. Need the former sort be? Let him get on with it. She would know it was going on, but wouldn’t ask questions. Said Peter Seems risky. You don’t have to tell me that, said Kate. But you’re hooked on this Doomsday Factor business, and we’re hooked on each other. Just don’t get recruited, okay?

  As happens after some mild estrangements, we felt more solid than before for that clearing of the air; we even decided in the new year to get Peter reanastomosed and us married and Kate pregnant, if we could, in that order. P represented himself to both Douglas Townshend and the muse: The former gravely regreeted him; even the latter seemed to loosen up a bit. In a mere three months, he wrote a six-page story which was received not only as something of a literary event but as a considerable literary object; it subsequently took honors in both major American collections of the year’s prize stories and has been much anthologized since. We read KUBARK by Franklin Key Talbott (sent down to us by Peter’s New York literary agent, who turned out to be Talbott’s too) and Decent Interval: An Insider s Account of Saigon s Indecent End, Told by the CIA’s Chief Strategy Analyst in Vietnam by Frank Snepp, whose royalties were denied him by a court ruling when the Agency sued in order to intimidate future authors of such exposes. KUBARK, which dealt mainly with our covert operations in South America’s Cono Sur, we found much the better written; it provoked less reaction from the Agency because its author’s most damning revelations had already been made public by Senator Church’s investigating committee by the time the book appeared. In keeping with our new understanding, however, we did not discuss these books together as we had discussed their predecessors.