by Jim Hougan
For the first time, he knew for a certainty that he wasn’t going back to England for the Agency.
In a daze, he took the elevator down to the Personnel Management Office, where he sat for an hour in a lime-green waiting room, leafing through a worn copy of The Economist. Finally, a small gray woman in a print dress appeared and told him that B-209 would be his office “for now.”
Dunphy knew headquarters as well as anyone, but . . . “Where’s that?”
“I’m not sure,” she said, genuinely puzzled. “You’ll have to ask security.”
In fact, B-209 was in the basement of the North Building, on a wide corridor between two loading docks. The corridor doubled as a sort of storage area for new computer equipment, office supplies, and (as Dunphy soon realized) Agency fuckups and paramilitaries attachéd to the International Activities Division (IAD).
Forklifts rumbled down the corridor from one dock to another, slamming into each other and the walls. Because of the noise, people spoke louder here than elsewhere at headquarters, and there was a certain amount of “manly horseplay” (which is to say, juvenile clowning around) ongoing at all times. Indeed, it seemed to Dunphy as if a cloud of testosterone hung in the corridor like will-o’-the-wisp on a back road in Maine. It would have been impossible to think in such a place—if there had been anything to think about. But there was nothing. He was on hold.
His office was a buff-colored cubicle with tremulous partitions that served as sliding walls. It was furnished with a beige swivel chair, a hat rack, and an off-white bookcase. An empty filing cabinet sat in the corner next to a brand-new burn basket. There was a telephone on the floor and a copy of Roget’s Thesaurus, but there was no carpeting, and even more to the point: there was no desk.
Dunphy picked up the phone to call housekeeping, but it didn’t have a dial tone. Furious, he stormed out of the cubicle (you couldn’t call it a room, really) and headed toward personnel—only to lose himself in a maze of corridors. After suffering the humiliation of having to ask directions in his own headquarters, he arrived at personnel only to see his rage wilt before the sympathetic shrugs of the small gray lady in the print dress. “Be patient,” she said. “They’re sorting things out.”
Dunphy commandeered a telephone and told the switchboard to connect him with his section chief, Fred Crisman, in the Directorate of Plans. If anyone could tell him what was going on, Fred could; Dunphy had been reporting to him through Jesse Curry for nearly a year.
“Sorry, guy,” said a voice at the other end. “You missed him. Fred’s been TDY in East Africa since last week.”
Dunphy tried other numbers, but the people he wanted were all unavailable: in conference, away from their desks, traveling, in meetings all afternoon. Housekeeping said they’d “check into the problem,” as if his job were a hotel, and promised to get back to him in a few minutes. “How ya gonna do that?” Dunphy asked. “I just told ya: the phone doesn’t work!”
Adrift and smoldering, he embarked on what eventually became a routine, meandering from his “office” to personnel, from personnel to the cafeteria, from the cafeteria to the gym. He jumped rope, lifted weights, and boxed every other day. A week went by. Two. Three. He was getting into shape, but he felt like a technocrat’s version of the Flying Dutchman, wandering anonymously through the broad halls of a clandestine bureaucracy. In the afternoons, he visited the Agency’s library where newspapers from every country in the world were available. Settling into the same easy chair each day, Dunphy scanned the British press in vain for news of Professor Schidlof. After the first wave of headlines, reports of the investigation had disappeared, leading Dunphy to suspect that Her Majesty’s government had issued a D-notice, killing the story. His stomach floated and churned, acid with anger and anxiety. Eventually, the other shoe had to drop. But when? And where? And on whose head?
Dunphy was tired of the hotel at Tysons Corner. He missed his apartment in Chelsea and the habits that, taken together, added up to a Life. He missed Clementine most of all, but there was nothing that he could say to her, really. Except, “I’m on the lam. I’ll be in touch. G’bye.” It wasn’t much of a basis for a relationship. And the idea that he might never get back to England, much less to Clementine, appalled him.
As, in fact, did the postwar CIA. The Agency was adrift in the aftermath of the Cold War, demoralized by the enemy’s surrender, its mission obsolete, its raison d’être obscure. For years, it had gotten by without “a symmetrical enemy,” making do with the likes of Noriega and Hussein, some cataract-encrusted terrorists, and Colombian pistoleros on the run. Now, Congress was stirring. There was talk about downsizing the intelligence community and “reallocating precious resources.” Among the most expensive of those resources were agents under nonofficial cover, or NOCs, like Dunphy. Gradually, they were being withdrawn from the field and replaced by spooks from the Pentagon’s Defense Human Intelligence Services. For the first time in its existence, the CIA’s budget was seriously threatened—and Langley was an unhappy place to be.
If there was an inner sanctum to the malaise that permeated headquarters, it was the cafeteria. This was an elephant’s graveyard of burnt-out cases, drunks, neurotics and loose cannons, whistle-blowers, and “damaged goods” that (for one reason or another) the Agency couldn’t or wouldn’t fire.
There were a score of such “disposal cases” hanging out at any given time. Most had no responsibilities at all, while a few, like Roscoe White, were simply underemployed.
White’s case was a classic. A Princeton graduate with a master’s degree in oriental languages (he was fluent in Mandarin Chinese and Korean), he’d joined the Agency in 1975. Posted to Seoul under military cover, he’d been grabbed inside the DMZ on what must have been his first mission. For nearly a year thereafter, he suffered a succession of brutal interrogations and mock executions until, in the end, his captors wearied of the routine. White was transferred to a prison farm in the far north, and seemingly forgotten. Finally, in 1991, as a sort of Cold War afterthought, he was taken to the DMZ and released without ceremony at the very spot where he’d been arrested more than fifteen years earlier. The gesture, or joke, or whatever it was, nearly unhinged him. He’d stood there, up to his ankles in mud, rooted to the place where his life had disappeared, spellbound with the thought (or the hope) that the past sixteen years had been a hallucination. Eventually, he was grabbed by an ROK soldier in camouflage fatigues and dragged to safety.
On returning to America, he found that he’d been declared legally dead ten years earlier.
White’s own retirement was only three years away. Until then, he served as liaison officer between the Directorate of Operations and the Coordinator of Information and Privacy. In practice, this meant that it was his job to parcel out Freedom of Information requests to “reference analysts” in the Directorate of Operations—a task that seldom consumed more than an hour of his time each day, leaving him free to read in the cafeteria until it was time to go home.
It was a terrible waste of talent, but there was nothing to be done about it. After meticulous preparation at the best schools, White had missed almost the entirety of his working life. Now he sat in the cafeteria with a distracted smile, reading Marlowe’s Tragicall History of Dr. Faustus.
Dunphy was fascinated by him.
“I tried to catch up on things,” White explained one day, “but there was just too much missing. I mean—Glasnost, the Wall, AIDS, and the Internet. It was like that Billy Joel song except—none of it meant anything to me. All I’d heard were whispers. But Teflon and Saran Wrap, Krazy Glue and compact discs . . . Jesus H. Christ, now that stuff was something. Anyway, I realized after a while that reading the back issues of Time wasn’t going to be enough. I could memorize every stat for every player who’d ever been with the Orioles, but I hadn’t seen them play. I mean, who the hell is Cal Ripken, and whatever happened to Juan Pizarro? Anyway,” White said, gesturing at the book that he was holding, “I find it less . . . stressful t
o read history, the classics—books that are timeless. You know what I mean?”
Dunphy nodded. Because there were so many lacunas in White’s life, even the most casual conversations could turn into adventures. Dunphy liked him a lot, and so, when Roscoe White asked him if he was “looking for a place,” Dunphy didn’t hesitate.
“Yeah. You know of one?”
“Well,” Roscoe said, “if you don’t mind sharing, I’ve got a farmhouse and five acres on Belleview Place. The rent’s not bad. You interested?”
“Yeah,” Dunphy replied, “but—I gotta tell ya, I may not be around too long.”
“Why’s that?”
“I’ve got a girlfriend in London, and—don’t tell anyone—but I’m not all that crazy about my job. Also, I’m not the neatest person, y’know?”
Roscoe chuckled. “That’s why I have a cleaning lady. Once a week—couldn’t do it without her.”
“In that case . . . you make wake-up calls?”
Chapter 8
Dunphy’s new assignment came down a few weeks after he’d moved in with Roscoe White, and it did not make him happy. While it was probably impossible for him to return to London, there was no obvious reason why the same operation couldn’t be run from another city, and just as successfully. Geneva, for instance, or—better yet—Paris. He’d borrowed a typewriter and written memo after memo on the subject, but there was never any response. Finally, he received a terse directive ordering him to report to a three-day training course for information review officers, or IROs.
One look around, and Dunphy knew that his future was dim. With the exception of himself, all of the IROs were in their sixties and working part-time. They were “pensioned annuitants,” retired case officers who welcomed the chance to supplement their monthly checks by putting in a couple of hours a day at headquarters. It didn’t matter that the work was meaningless. It was, as they said (over and over again), “great to be back in the saddle.”
For his part, Dunphy was ready to dismount. The only thing that kept him from doing so was the mystery of his own misfortune. For whatever reason, the Agency was trying to make him quit, and he didn’t have a clue as to why. All he could be sure of was that, if he left the Agency now, he’d never know the truth.
And so he gritted his teeth, and stayed, and listened to the overweight IRO instructor explain the workings of the Freedom of Information Act as it applied to the CIA. The law was “a pain in the ass,” the instructor said, because it gave the average guy in the street—“loyal or not”—the right to request government files on any subject that interested him. In practice, this meant that when a request was received (and the Agency got more than a dozen a day), a liaison officer (such as Roscoe White) would assign it to one of the IROs. The IRO would search the Central Registry in B building to locate the relevant files. These files would then be copied, and the IRO would begin to read them, using a felt-tipped pen to censor data that were statutorily exempted from release: information, for example, that might compromise intelligence sources or methods. Finally, the redacted copies would be sent to the Coordinator of Information’s office, where a reference analyst would make a final review. Only then would anything be released to the requester.
Not that the Agency was interested in releasing much. As the instructor said, “What you have to remember is that this is the Central Intelligence Agency—and not the Central Information Agency.” And, indeed, the distinction was manifest in the way FOIA requests were handled. While the law required the Agency to respond to each request within ten days of its receipt, there was no way to legislate how long it might take to locate, review, and release so much as a single file. That would depend upon how many resources the CIA allocated to its FOIA staff.
And here the instructor grinned. “Unfortunately,” he said, “we don’t have a lot of resources—so I guess you could say we’re permanently swamped.”
“How big is the backlog?” Dunphy asked.
“The last time I looked,” the instructor said, “we had about twenty-four thousand requests on hold.”
“So a new request—”
“—would begin to generate material in about nine years. As I said, it’s the Central Intelligence a Agency.”
Chapter 9
It was Roscoe who gave him the idea.
They were sitting at the bar in O’Toole’s, a grungy Irish dive in the McLean Shopping Center not far from the CIA’s headquarters (and therefore a gathering place for spooks), when Roscoe asked him—with a sly grin—about the FOIA request that he’d assigned to Dunphy that same afternoon.
“Which one?” Dunphy asked, not really paying attention. He was scrutinizing a photograph that hung on the wall with other memorabilia, all of it in need of a good dusting. There was a faded banner of the IRA’s, a dartboard with Saddam Hussein’s picture on it, some postcards from Havana (signed Frank & Ruth a), and a Japanese ceremonial sword with what looked like dried blood on it. Some yellowing newspaper headlines (JFK SENDS ADVISERS TO VIETNAM a) had been glued to the wall beside signed and framed photographs of George Bush, William Colby, and Richard Helms.
But the picture that held Dunphy’s interest was a snapshot of three men standing in a jungle clearing, laughing. On the ground in front of them was the head of an Asian man who looked as if he’d been decapitated. In fact, he’d been buried standing, and though his eyes were glazed, you could see that he was still alive. A typed caption was stapled to the picture: MAC/SOG, it read. 12-25-66—Laos. Merry Xmas!
“The one about root canals,” Roscoe said.
Dunphy shook his head, still staring at the photo.
“You don’t remember?” Roscoe asked.
Hearing his friend’s incredulity, Dunphy turned to him. “What?”
“I was asking you about the FOIA request I sent—about the root-canal procedures on Naval cadets at Annapolis, 1979 to the present.”
“Oh, yeah,” Dunphy replied. “I got that this afternoon. Now, why the fuck would the Agency have anything like that?” he asked. “I mean, what’s on this guy’s mind?”
Roscoe shrugged. “Actually . . . I can probably tell you exactly what’s on his mind. He’s one of our most frequent requesters.”
“Okay,” Dunphy said. “So hit me with it.”
“Mind control. Mr. McWillie is obsessed with it. A lot of people are.”
Dunphy cocked his head to the left and raised his eyebrows, “Maybe I missed something, but—I thought we were talking about dentistry.”
“Well, yes—in a sense, we are. The guy’s asking for dental records, but he doesn’t have to tell us why. He doesn’t have to tell us what he suspects. But after a while, when you’ve processed as many requests as I have, you get to know where people are coming from. And judging from the kinds of things that Mr. McWillie has asked for in the past, I’d say that he thinks that we’re installing miniaturized radio receivers—”
Dunphy almost spewed his beer. “In people’s molars?!”
“Yeah.” Roscoe nodded.
“Why, fahchrissake?”
“I don’t know. Subliminal messages. Stuff like that. Who knows what Lewis McWillie suspects? I mean, he’s obviously a schizophrenic. Did you happen to catch the return address on his letter?”
“No,” Dunphy said. “I didn’t really look at it.”
“Well, unless he’s moved, the address is ’86 Impala, Lot A, Fort Ward Park, Alexandria.”
Dunphy rolled his eyes. “I gotta get out of this job. This is the stupidest fucking job I’ve ever had.”
“Maybe,” Roscoe said. “Then again, maybe not.”
“Trust me. I’m pretty clear about this.” He paused. “You know why I joined the Agency?”
Roscoe nodded. “Patriotism.”
Dunphy chuckled. “No, Roscoe. It wasn’t patriotism. ‘Patriotism’ didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Then . . . what?”
“I joined the Agency because, until then, I’d wanted to be an historian. And wha
t I found out was—what I learned in college was—it’s no longer possible to be an historian.”
Roscoe gave him a puzzled look. “Why do you say that?”
“Because historians collect facts and read documents. They do empirical research and analyze the information they’ve collected. Then they publish their findings. They call it the scientific method, and it’s something you can’t do in a university anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Because the structuralists—or the post astructuralists—or the postcolonialists a—or whatever they’re calling themselves this week—take the position that reality is inaccessible, facts are fungible, and knowledge is impossible. Which reduces history to fiction and textual analysis. Which leaves us with . . .”
“What?” Roscoe asked.
“Gender studies. Cultural studies. What I think of as the fuzzies. a”
Roscoe caught the bartender’s eye and, with his forefinger, drew a circle in the air above their glasses. “So . . . you joined the CIA because you thought gender studies are fuzzy? That’s what you’re telling me?”
“Well, that was a big part of it. I realized I’d never get a job teaching, not at a good university anyway—the poststructuralists are running the show just about everywhere. And the other thing was—I was a modern-military-history guy—I went to grad school at Wisconsin—and one of the things that became apparent was the fact that a lot of the stuff that should have been available . . . wasn’t.”
“What are you talking about?” Roscoe asked.
“Information. The data weren’t available.”
“Why not?”
“Because they were classified. And as a baby historian, I didn’t have a need to know. None of us did. And that pissed me off because . . . well, it’s like we’re living in a cryptocracy instead of a democracy.”