by Jim Hougan
What was he doing in New York? Dunphy asked himself. And the reply came back: What was he doing in Zürich? And then, in frustration: What was he doing anywhere?
The third folder contained Schidlof’s bank statements, canceled checks, and . . . pay dirt. On September 4, while in Zürich, the professor had written a check for two thousand pounds to someone named Margaritha Vogelei. Three days later, while visiting New York, he’d written a smaller check to an enterprise known as Gil Beckley Associates.
The name was familiar. Dunphy had seen it before, or heard it somewhere—on television, or in the movies. Beckley was an actor, or something. No. Not an actor. But . . .
Dunphy looked at the check. It was in the amount of five hundred pounds and had taken almost two months to clear from Schidlof’s account at the National Westminster, in London, to Beckley’s account at Citibank, New York. At the bottom of the check, on a line labeled Memo, was a notation in Schidlof’s handwriting: Retainer, it said—but not for what.
Then Dunphy remembered.
Handwriting. Beckley wasn’t an actor, but he’d been on television a lot. The guy was a graphologist—or as he liked to say, a “documents examiner.” He’d put in his time at the FBI, retired, and gone into private practice. He was an expert witness, and as Dunphy recalled, he had a keen sense of his own importance. Dunphy had seen him on an A&E show—Investigative Reports. He’d been hired to authenticate love letters purportedly written by J. Edgar Hoover to an agent named Purvis. As Dunphy recalled, Beckley had trashed the letters, calling them “clumsy forgeries.”
It was beginning to get interesting. Schidlof goes to Zürich and pays this Vogelei woman a couple of grand—for something. Then he flies to New York and shells out another five hundred pounds to retain a graphologist. After that, his phones are bugged—and then he’s dead. So what happened? Dunphy asked himself.
Well, duh . . . he found some documents in Zürich.
Okay . . . but why authenticate them in the States? Why not in London?
Because they’re American documents, Dunphy supposed, or the writer was. But who?
Dunphy sat back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. He was trying to remember when Curry had called, saying he needed a favor. Sometime in the fall. September. October. Something like that. He didn’t remember, really. But around the time that Schidlof had come back from New York.
There was a folder with copies of Schidlof’s Who’s Who entries, his lease and medical records—none of which were of interest to Dunphy. Finally, there was a slim folder that contained two cables. The first read:
FLASH
TEXT OF TELEGRAM 98LANGLEY 009100
PAGE 01
FROM SECURITY RESEARCH STAFF
OFFICE OF DIRECTOR/LANGLEY HQS
TO CIA/COS/LONDON
AMERICAN EMBASSY IMMEDIATE 1130
PRIORITY
TAGS: NONE
SUBJ: SCHIDLOF
REF: ANDROMEDA
1. TOP SECRET/ULTRA ENTIRE TEXT
2. UNILATERALLY CONTROLLED SOURCE REPORTS TELEPHONE CONTACT WITH UKCIT/SCHIDLOF LEO/SEPT 5. SUBSEQUENT F-2-F CONTACT NEW YORK SEPT 7–8.
3. SCHIDLOF CLAIMS TO BE RESIDENT OF LONDON.
4. SCHIDLOF IN POSSESSION OF ANDROMEDA-SENSITIVE MATERIALS.
5. WHO’S SCHIDLOF?
The reply came back from Jesse Curry the following afternoon. Stripped of its headers, it read:
VISA APPLICATION (AND WHO’S WHO ENTRIES) INDICATE LEON SCHIDLOF IS A JUNGIAN ANALYST AND KING’S COLLEGE DON. NO CRIMINAL RECORD. WHAT AM I LOOKING FOR?
There were no other cables, though there must have been other communications. If Matta hadn’t told him to do it, Curry wouldn’t have collected the information that he had, and he wouldn’t have tasked Dunphy to organize coverage of the professor’s phones. Which meant . . . what? Just that Matta was minimizing the paper trail—which was prudent. And so was the decision to use someone like Dunphy, working under nonofficial cover, as a cutout to someone like Tommy Davis. Matta could have requested coverage from MI5, but this way, deniability was absolute. In the event of unwanted publicity, it would appear that Schidlof had been bugged by an Irish criminal, who was in turn working for a man who didn’t exist.
The next-to-last folder sent a surge through his heart. It contained a small manila envelope with a circular tab on the flap. A length of very thin string was stapled to the envelope itself and wrapped around the tab, keeping the contents locked inside. Unwinding the string, Dunphy upended the envelope and a dozen microcassettes spilled out on the desk. Hel-lo!
He recognized the tapes. Each of them was numbered and dated in his own handwriting. Number one bore the notation, 9/14–9/19 a—which answered his earlier question: when was the coverage initiated? About a week after Schidlof returned to England from New York. In other words, almost immediately after Matta’s cable to Curry, asking Who’s Schidlof a?
Which was nice to know, but now he had a decision to make: he could ask the security guard to find him a tape recorder so that he could listen to the tapes, or he could continue to read from the files. The tapes were tempting. If nothing else, it would be interesting to hear Schidlof’s voice again. On the other hand, he didn’t have a lot of time to spend in the Special Registry, and he could cover more ground going through files than he could listening to tapes. Better, then, to read.
The last folder contained a packet of letters, folded in thirds and bundled together by a length of jute twine. Dunphy undid the knot and unfolded the first page. It was, he saw, a congratulatory note addressed to C. G. Jung, Küsnacht, Switzerland. Dated February 23, 1931, the page was written by hand in green ink on the letterhead of a New York law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell:
Dear Dr. Jung,
Please accept my profound thanks for your unrelenting efforts on behalf of my election to the Magdalene Society. From this moment forward, it will always be the beacon that guides my life. In our mutual pursuit of the New Jerusalem, I want you to know that I will always be your ally. (My brother, John, writes separately, but I have spoken with him, and his feelings are a mirror of my own.) With deep respect, and all my gratitude,
Allen
A postscript followed:
P. S. Clove sends her love (and, thanks to you, is thriving).
Allen? Allen who? Dunphy wondered. And then he remembered the cross-references in Schidlof’s file—not the one on the desk in front of him, but the one he’d seen in Langley. Dulles . . . Dunphy . . . Jung. And then what? Dunphy tried to recall. Optical Magick . . . or the 143rd. But Dulles, in any case. John’s brother. Allen.
Dunphy riffled the letters in his hands. This is what Schidlof bought from the Vogelei woman. It had to be. But who was she? he wondered, and immediately the answer came back: an antiquarian, a relative—someone who worked for Jung. It didn’t matter, really. The point was: these were the papers that Schidlof had tried to authenticate. These were the papers that had gotten him killed.
Feeling for the first time that he was beginning to get somewhere, Dunphy unfolded the second letter and continued to read. Like its predecessor, this letter was also on Sullivan & Cromwell stationery. Written almost two years after the first, it pretended to be a thank-you note for the hospitality that Jung had shown to Dulles and his wife the previous summer. Once the thank-you had been fulsomely expressed, however, Dulles got down to a more delicate business—expressing his worries about “our new Helmsman.”
His genius is, of course, deeply engraved on the literary record. Few men have written so well, and fewer still have had so profound an influence upon their contemporaries. Surely, the vision and courage that are everywhere apparent in his writing will serve him well as he exercises the terrible responsibilities of his new position.
And yet, while our Helmsmen have often been artists or men of letters (Bacon, Hugo, Debussy—no roll call could be more illustrious), I fear that we are on the brink of what the Chinese call “interesting times.” And in such times, an order such as our own mi
ght best be served by a quiet diplomat, someone capable of navigating safe passage amid the clashing ships of state. My feeling is that Ezra may be too outspoken—indeed, that he may be too flamboyant—to steer our small band safely toward the millennium.
Allen
Makes you wonder, Dunphy thought. Bacon, Hugo, and Debussy? Ezra? Were they talking about the man he thought they were talking about? There wasn’t any doubt, really. How many outspoken and “flamboyant” Ezras were writing in the 1930s—and how many of those were cross-references in the Andromeda file? Just one. E. Pound.
Which made Pound the Helmsman. But, of what? The Magdalene Society. But what’s that? And this business of the New Jerusalem . . .
Arranging the letters in chronological order, Dunphy saw that Dulles wrote to Jung on four or five occasions each year. For the most part, these letters were transparent in meaning, as when Dulles sought advice about his wife’s “nervous condition.” But there were mysteries, too, and not the least of them was the identity of someone whom Dulles repeatedly referred to as “our young man.” Of this person, few details could be gleaned beyond his youth and gender. But one such detail concerned a birthmark. In a letter from Biarritz, dated July 9,1936, Dulles wrote of
the great privilege I had in spending the afternoon with our young man. Down from Paris for the weekend, he joined us at our cabana on the beach. There, I saw the mark upon his chest—the “blazon” that you spoke of. The figure is so precise that Clove mistook it, at first, for a common tattoo—much to our young man’s delight.
Still other letters showed remarkable prescience on geopolitical matters, as in a missive dated July 12, 1937:
“I suspect it will prove easier, in the end,” Dulles wrote,
to restore Jerusalem to the Jews than to unite the fractious continent on which our hopes so much depend. And yet, both must be done, and shall be—if not in this century’s middle age, then by its end. There will be an Israel soon enough (though I sometimes wonder if any Jews will be left to people it), and a united Europe, too. And have no doubt about my meaning. By “a united Europe,” I mean a Europe that speaks with one voice, spends with one currency, and prays to one king. A continent with no internal borders.
How these events shall be brought to bear is another issue, and frankly, I fear that our Helmsman may have put his faith in a broken bowl. (What good has ever come from Rome—or from Berlin, for that matter?)
My feeling is that Europe’s borders must someday be dissolved by men with pens, rather than by soldiers riding tanks. So, too, with the Holy Land and its restoration to the Jews. But whichever way these ends are reached, rest assured, my friend, we will prevail.
He’s right, of course, Dunphy thought. Their “Helmsman” ’s faith was indeed misplaced. Embracing Mussolini at the expense of Roosevelt, Pound scored an own-goal against himself and the Society he headed.
Or maybe not. If you looked at it in a different way, you could make the case that, however unintentionally, Hitler’s genocidal war had paved the way for both Israel and the Common Market—since each was, to some extent, a reaction to the carnage that had gone before.
Dunphy glanced at the letter a second time and noticed something he’d glossed over on first reading. “Prays to one king . . .” Dunphy frowned. You don’t pray to kings. It was a thought that Dunphy felt sure was worth taking up, but the idea was soon forgotten as he came upon the shortest and most cryptic of the letters in the packet. Dated November 22, 1937, it read:
For God’s sake—now what?
Dunphy would have given a lot to know what that was all about, but in the absence of Jung’s reply, there was no way to make sense of it. The next letter, however, suggested that powerful events had been set in motion.
My dear Carl,
Your letter was a great consolation. I knew nothing of the institute in Küsnacht, nor of the donation that he’d made. Thank God it’s been preserved! Science may one day find a way to accomplish that which he no longer can.
And perhaps it was meant to be. After learning of the disaster in Spain, I turned to the Apocryphon for solace, and for the first time understood those fateful and mysterious lines:
His kingdom comes and goes,
Then comes again when,
wounded to the root,
He is the last, yet not the last,
emblazoned and alone.
These many lands will then be one
and he their king till, past,
he sires sons down all the days,
while deathly still and celibate.
That His kingdom “comes and goes” is a circumstance we have been living with for centuries. That it must come again, when he is “wounded to the root,” is cause for joy. Because, dear Carl, this is precisely what has happened to our young man, whose terrible injuries could not be more aptly described. Nor is this all. Wounded thus, and without siblings, it is as apparent as the blazon on his chest that he must be “the last” of his line.
But there my scrying ends. That he should be “the last, yet not the last” is a conundrum whose solution may not be known until, perhaps, the day when “these many lands (are) one.”
Nor is this the only conundrum. What are we to make of the promise that “he (shall be) their king till, past, he sires sons down all the days, while deathly still and celibate”? I can only hope that the meaning of this passage may one day be explained by the gift that he has made to the institute in Küsnacht. If so, then Science will prove to be the savior of Salvation—and our young man will indeed have been “the last, yet not the last.”
Reading the Apocryphon in this way, as a kind of Christian kabbalah, is a speculative exercise, of course. But if my reading of these lines is correct, then the young man in our care is himself the fulfillment of a prophecy and, as such, the last portent. Accordingly, he is the sine qua non of all our hopes. For that reason, then, no effort or expense should be spared to keep him safe until such a time as every other sign and omen has been manifested and evinced.
Then, and only then, can our young man, however old, be king. And if his kingdom lasts for but the smallest part of a minute, that will not matter. He will be “past,” as prophesied, and Science willing, father to an eternity of sons.
Dunphy rubbed his head, but he might as well have scratched it. What’s the Apocryphon, he wondered, and what did any of it actually mean? There was no way to know. The correspondence was filled with mysteries large and small, important and not. Reading them was like listening to one end of a telephone conversation. Some things were obvious. Some things were revealed. But everything else was left to surmise:
July 12, 1941
My dear Carl,
I am delighted to read that you have persuaded Mr. Pound that our young man may not be safe in Paris. None of us can predict what may happen in the next year, but prudence dictates that he, at least, should be placed at a safe remove from all hostilities. He is, after all, our raison d’être, and without him, we have nothing—neither hope nor purpose any longer.
As you suggest, Switzerland should be quite safe—and not only for our Gomelez. The Society’s assets will prove essential to our mission in the postwar environment, whatever else may come, and they, too, must be safeguarded. Given the magnitude of these assets, care needs to be taken that their removal from the combatant countries should not cause unnecessary dislocations or publicity. I would suggest, therefore, that these transfers should be placed in the hands of our contacts at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel. They will know how to liquidate the various equities, which can then be reinvested through Zürich and Vaduz. (I feel our goal should be preservation of capital, rather than growth.)
So “our young man” has a name, Dunphy thought. Gomelez. Who is he? Dunphy wondered, and then turned the thought aside. There was no way of knowing.
But one thing that was becoming clear was that Dulles and Jung were acceding to more and more important responsibilities in the secret society to which they belonged.
Viz.
May 19, 1942
My dear Carl,
By the time you read this letter, I will have taken up my confidential duties in Bern. I appreciate your offer to act as liaison between our Helmsman and myself, but fear that travel to and from Italy is out of the question for both of us.
I will, however, embrace your offer of a clandestine démarche to Herr Speer. Am I to understand that he is one of us? I am amazed. How is it that I’ve never met him?
Speer aside, I have the names of several good fellows whom I think we would do well to have aboard. Neither of these gentlemen will come as a surprise. We’ve discussed their bona fides on several occasions, and you have met both of them socially. I mean Dr. Vannevar Bush and young Angleton. Please consider this letter a formal submission of their names to membership in our society.
Dunphy sat back in his chair. It was one of those moments when a cigarette would have been more than a pleasure. Vannevar Bush and “young Angleton.” Could it be? he wondered. How many Angletons would Dulles have known? Probably one: James Jesus Angleton, who in the years after the war, headed the CIA’s counterintelligence staff. He was a legendary spook, up to his ears in everything from Israeli politics to the Warren Commission. Where was—what was—Angleton in ’42? Dunphy thought about it. Just a college kid, albeit a supremely well connected one . . . in, or on his way into, the OSS.
Dunphy was less familiar with Bush, but as he recalled, he’d been in charge of scientific research and weapons development for the United States throughout the Second World War.
Useful men to have on your side, Dunphy supposed, especially if you’re running a secret society. But . . . Speer? Albert Speer? Who was . . . what? Hitler’s architect, and . . . Minister of Armaments. A nice contact for someone like Dulles, running intel operations for the Allies out of Switzerland. But . . . was it possible that a Nazi like Speer would have anything in common—and, in particular, something secret in common—with the likes of Dulles and Jung?