The Shadow Cabinet

by W. T. Tyler

  The story in the DIA summary lifted the secrecy from a subject only a very few were privy to. The shortage of legitimate military and industrial targets in the Soviet Union when compared with the size of the U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal had long been an embarrassment to those few officials who were aware of the Pentagon’s bookkeeping problem. There were simply too few legitimate targets for an arsenal that was multiplying like kudzu grass.

  The dilemma had been best expressed a few months earlier by an Air Force general, a member of the Strategic Target Planning Staff whose responsibility was to identify military and industrial targets in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe for U.S. strategic nuclear warheads. His remarks, to Leyton Fischer’s astonishment, were inserted at the bottom of the second paragraph.

  “Goddammit,” he’d told a recently assigned STPS staff member who’d expressed amazement at the imbalance of targets and nuclear warheads. “Do you think any U.S. postmaster in his right mind would open up five hundred more post offices in Arkansas tomorrow just because Congress gave him this big new budget to spend and it was the congressman from Arkansas that did it? Hell, no; he’d turn back the money. But you put a little political heat on him, like the kind of heat we’ve got, and by God he’d find them right quick—put a post office right up beside every gas pump, cow pasture, and bass pond in Arkansas if he had to. That’s all we’re doing, in a manner of speaking, with those warheads—just delivering the U.S. mail.”

  If only a few senior officials were aware of the problem, even fewer were sensitive to it. Like every other national security issue of existential importance—whether the Soviet Union had in fact achieved strategic parity, whether the Soviet SS-18 and SS-19 ICBMs were as accurate as those handful who understood their own logarithmic proof claimed, whether the Soviet civil defense effort was a primitive Muscovy reflex or a sinister Politburo calculation, whether the MX missile was a counterforce weapon or a first-strike killer—the dilemma was hidden behind a veil of secrecy so impenetrable that only a few were aware of it. In addition, the U.S. SIOP, or nuclear targeting plan, was couched in technical jargon so opaque that the physical nature of a given Soviet or East European target was further concealed from recognition. Like obscurantist high priests or existential theologians, the technicians seemed intent upon bamboozling not only others but themselves.

  The DIA daily intelligence summary had lifted the cloak of concealment from the sixteen most recently selected targets. The Pevek “Soviet Naval Stores Resupply Facility—SN-16” was in fact the antiquated Pevek herring works, a ramshackle wooden structure with a tin roof, employing thirty-five civilian workers. The other targets recently added to the U.S. SIOP included a milk factory in Uzbekistan, an NCO rest and recuperation center nearby, and two truck deicing sheds in the Siberian Arctic—all of them now fresh new dots on that canvas of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe reaching from the NATO frontier to the Bering Sea, dotted in with hues of varying megatonnage, like a pointillist’s finished painting, and which, one day touched with fire, would strip-mine the Soviet Union from Minsk to Sakhalin.

  But that wasn’t all Leyton Fischer found. Even more alarming was an article on the second page, announcing the triumph of the new U.S. strategic doctrine implicit in a November National Security Decision Directive signed just recently at the White House. Was the latter aware of its import? The anonymous author seemed to be. DETERRENCE OFFICIALLY BURIED! the banner announced. The article that followed explained the new strategy, based not upon the intellectually bankrupt deterrence deadlock, whose sophistries had long since been exhausted, but on unequivocal U.S. superiority. Once the U.S. nuclear edge was reclaimed, the strategic arsenals that had formerly been the inert guardians of national survival would be converted into instruments of political power—“leverage,” in the White House lexicon. The passive U.S. Minuteman missiles—“fixed like some clumsy woolly mammoth in the heroic but futile reactive mode of a bygone ice age”—would be replaced by the MX missile, the centerpiece of the new strategy, a foraging first-strike killer. Soviet adventurism would be a lonely swimmer in the uncertain seas inhabited by this cruising great white shark—predatory, unpredictable, and ruthlessly malevolent, like the D-5 submarine-launched missile soon to follow.

  Leyton Fischer read on, hypnotized by the analysis, dumbfounded by the details cribbed from internal DOD memoranda, staff studies, and closely held options papers for the Secretary, which he’d heard rumors of but never examined. The second-page essay made crystal clear what had long been denied by the Pentagon and others in their speeches and congressional testimony: the new strategic game plan was only the old containment policy, now brought up to date on a scale impossible to imagine—the conversion of nuclear and conventional superiority into effective political power, coercive if need be. Was it true? It seemed difficult to deny. The language was bizarre.

  On the third page was an article describing a series of Soviet missile test failures for the Mod-4 ten-warhead SS-18 and SS-19 ICBMs, supplying details long suppressed by DIA’s special-watch group. By then, Leyton Fischer had guessed who was responsible for the articles.

  A fourth-page feature was more mundane. Entitled MISSILE MAKERS PENETRATE PENTAGON, it listed the names of senior planners and strategists recruited by the Pentagon from the defense and aerospace industries since the last election, particularly those who’d played the most aggressive role in drawing up the new $1.6 trillion Pentagon budget. Their previous associations were news to no one. What was incredible were the verbatim phone conversations cited in the article, obtained from either FBI phone taps or NSA intercepts, describing their attempts at sabotaging the comprehensive test ban treaty and SALT II. Three conversations described tactics for removing certain individuals from the Geneva test ban talks and the SALT II delegation. In one conversation, a hawkish Senate aide and a senior ACDA official had described leaking sensitive intelligence reports in an attempt to derail the congressional prospects for SALT II, an effort made moot by Afghanistan in any case.

  The aide was Les Fine.

  In a corner of the back page was a small box, bordered in black, like an obituary, entitled BRIMSTONE CHRISTIANS JOIN BEGIN’S NEW IRGUN IN BURYING ARMS CONTROL. Les Fine was again mentioned as the Likud’s agent in Washington strategy sessions.

  Leyton Fischer was puzzled. Brimstone Christains he could understand, but he’d never heard the phrase “New Irgun.” What did the author mean—that Les Fine was an ideological agent or simply a Zionist fellow traveler of Menachem Begin’s fanatical right wing?

  Still incredulous, he’d turned back to the front page, when the door opened and Les Fine stood there, holding the DIA summary, barely able to speak, his eyes glowing, like Iago’s Moor.

  “There’s a madman—a madman at work—” His lips were white. He still held out the DIA daily summary in his small white waxen hand. “He has phone taps—intercepts. Blood libel—”

  Blood libel? Hardly possible, Fischer thought, convinced he knew who was responsible for the morning edition of the DIA summary.

  The man was Nick Straus, and his intentions were not to shock the higher echelons but to educate them. Straus had also known that many of those details would be leaked.

  In the DIA daily summary suite, the old civil servant sat propped like a cadaver in front of his staff, minus Nick Straus. On the desk in front of him was a mock-up of the daily intelligence brief as he’d prepared it the previous day. Next to it, its headlines as obscenely lurid as when he’d first seen them that morning, was the tabloid copy as it had been delivered to the basement printing press the evening before. There was no resemblance between the two. There was also no doubt as to who had made the substitution, who had inserted his own copy for theirs, who was responsible for the entire treasonous edition. He was the first man to arrive each morning, the last to depart each night, whispering away down the corridor on his rubber-soled shoes as if no one were there at all. He had remained behind to deliver the DIA copy to the printer the previous night, had re
mained to edit the galleys, and had even lingered to oversee the first press run.

  “Did anyone actually see him preparing the copy?” asked the old chief. On the glass-topped desk in front of him was an apothecary’s glazed bottle of colorless liquid, from which he was daubing with a cotton swab the eczematous ooze on the backs of his hands. In the last hour, it had freshened to the brightness of a second-degree burn.

  “No, sir.”

  “Deliver it?”

  “No, sir.”

  Across the way, Nick Straus was returning to his secretary’s desk with the morning telegrams from the message center. He’d spent a restless night, dreading the morning confrontation, but now, distracted by the sudden vacuum around him, he felt an easing of his qualms. He hadn’t been invited to the meeting taking place in the director’s office, but knew its purpose. The phones had been ringing without interruption for two hours, the old man had twice left the office at a trot, summoned on high, and no one had dared look in his direction. The CIA, the State Department, the National Security Council, and a handful of Senate staffers had called to ask for extra copies of the morning edition containing information so sensitively classified that none of them had ever seen it before, but no copies were available. All remaining copies had been confiscated and attempts were under way to reclaim and shred those already distributed. Futile efforts had been made to locate the night-duty supervisor at the basement printing shop, but his shift was over. A D.C. taxi driver in his spare time, he’d already taken to the streets and was en route to Dulles with two fares.

  In all this, Nick Straus continued to be ignored. Despite the slamming doors, the jangling phones, the whispered conferences, and the scurrying figures, no one even glanced in his direction. He was mystified. Was it that he was no longer clothed or that he no longer existed? No, he was there, clothed as usual—flesh and spirit both. Was it then that they felt themselves naked? Were they embarrassed for themselves rather than him, or humiliated on his account, sparing him the mortification of acknowledging through eye contact what they knew he felt? Or was it that they pitied him?

  Only after silent reflection did he understand what had happened. They were sparing themselves. It was self-discovery they were avoiding in averting their eyes, ignoring him because they had been betrayed and were ashamed, not because their emperors had no clothes but because they all had no clothes, ten thousand Pentagon faithful scurrying about in this frantic state of infantile nudity because for a few precious hours someone had stolen their secrets. But new clothes were on the way, the error would be undone, and by noon they would all be decently clad again.

  They were like middle-aged patrons fleeing a raid on a promiscuous massage parlor or a homosexual Turkish bath, he decided. The Pentagon a massage parlor? No, that wasn’t it. Yet the thought remained. It was true. The drapes are pulled down, the shades flung up, the windows and doors flung open to passing view, and this is what you discover—intelligent, loyal, decent, middle-aged men doing these wicked, disgraceful, obscene things. They should be ashamed. A farmer in Kansas would be ashamed, a druggist in Oregon, an assemblyman in New York, a cotton broker in Memphis—they would all be ashamed.

  In his small cubicle he sadly called Ida and said he would be home early. He told her to go to the hairdresser’s and get a nice permanent. They were going out to dinner.

  “Sometimes you make my hair curl as it is,” she said. “I don’t need a permanent. Tell me now.”

  “I have decided to live a more productive life. Today is the beginning. Man and conscience are joined. Nick is Straus.”

  He began to clean out his drawers. Thirty minutes later, two Pentagon security officials appeared in the suite. The old civil servant conferred with them in a whisper and then joined Nick Straus alone in his office. As he sat down slowly in the chair opposite Nick’s desk, Nick knew the man’s accusatory brief was fully prepared: he looked the more guilty.

  “I take it you’ve seen the morning summary,” he inquired with bland deception, scratching the backs of his hands. Nick detected the odor of formaldehyde. He knew the subject would be approached in painfully oblique fashion, as with the secretary who’d burned up the automatic coffeemaker, just as he knew the denouement would be tortuously melodramatic for the benefit of those outside. He meant to dry up the old reprobate’s fustian juices before they reached operatic pitch.

  “Yes, I did,” Nick said modestly. “As a matter of fact, I wrote it myself.” The old jaw dropped like a cormorant’s. “That’s right, I wrote it, wrote it all, every word.”

  The old man sagged forward, but Nick suspected he was gathering himself for another swoop. “Wrote it all?” he whispered with staggering slowness.

  “Every word. The material upon which it’s based is all in the special-watch safe—”

  “In the safe?” His breath seemed to have stopped, his metabolism shocked into some ancient, Galápagos-tortoise pace, another time dimension entirely.

  “I meant to include among the newest SIOP targets the army button factory on the Dnieper, but I thought I’d made my point—”

  “Button factory!” The words left a faint fog of saliva on the air. It was all the old man could do to lift his trembling hand toward Nick Straus. “You’re under arrest,” he whispered. He tried to arise, seemed about to slip to his knees, but then grasped the doorknob to keep from falling. “He’s under arrest,” he gasped, riding the swinging door backward, out of the room. “He’s under arrest.…”

  Nick was taken by the two agents to an office in Pentagon security. Forms were filled out, his plastic identification badge was taken from him, and he was escorted upstairs to Leyton Fischer’s suite, where two senior DIA officers and the DIA deputy counsel were waiting.

  After an hour of questioning, Nick was released and asked to return in two days with his attorney.

  By then the contents of the DIA morning summary were being hastily reproduced by Xerox machines in intelligence offices all over Washington in advance of the DIA recall. In the Intelligence and Research watch center on the seventh floor at State, the original copies had been confiscated, but too late—Xeroxed duplicates were already circulating in the offices of the Soviet and Eastern European analysts, many of whom had long been suspicious of the Pentagon’s nuclear targeting policy. Across the building on another corridor, in policy and plans, State’s own think tank, foreign service officers and administration appointees were gathered around the office’s single copy, anxiously trying to unravel the Pentagon and White House conceptual puzzle that had left them in the dark for ten months. The same curiosity brought office routine to a temporary halt in a few rooms at the CIA, NSA, and the National Security Council. A little after eleven o’clock, a Top Secret précis of the DIA morning brief was left behind in the White House press room by the acting press spokesman, prepared to deal with any questions that might arise—they would stonewall it, they’d decided—but the memo was quickly recovered. No questions were asked.

  At a meeting at the same hour in the Executive Office Building, an NSC staffman was meeting with a congressional legislative assistant. He’d arrived out of breath, five minutes late, just returned from studying a copy of the DIA document.

  “Some GS-16 over at DIA popped his fuse this morning,” he began by way of apology, “flipped his lid and blew a whole list of nuclear warhead targets. A lot of other sensitive stuff too.”

  “Who was he?”

  “I dunno; some crazy from the DIA daily summary staff—went ape, they say. Paranoid, been under a psychiatrist’s care. Used to work at CIA, probably had a few grudges.”

  “Any possibility of getting a copy?”

  “A guy from the New York Times asked me the same thing. No, not unless you’ve got a Top Secret clearance, that or a friend who does. What’s on your mind this morning?”

  “I was wondering how the El Salvador military package is shaping up. The congressman would like to see something he could support.”

  “Yeah, well, we cleane
d it up a little. The claymore mines are still in, but we’ve taken out the white phosphorus grenades, a few antipersonnel weapons—the baddies. So I think now it’s a package we can all get behind, a real bipartisan Christmas tree, you know what I mean?”

  6.

  Haven Wilson had drafted a few pages of preliminary recommendations concerning the Center’s reorganization, including the names of those scholars or associates who should be replaced. It was this list that gave him the most difficulty. He had reluctantly concluded that Dr. Foster should go, so should Dr. Pauline Rankin, so should Dr. Dobler and his two associates at the thalamus laboratory, so should Dr. Coswell, the disarmament scholar who’d left a briefcase containing sensitive documents on the Metro. Included among them was the only draft of the sole study he’d written in eleven months.

  Wilson had reviewed his recommendations with Ed Donlon one afternoon during lunch and Donlon, over a third martini, had agreed. He told Wilson that the Center’s collection of scholars reminded him of a House of David baseball team he’d seen play at Princeton during his senior year, all bearded, like Hebrew prophets—“a collection of foul balls, freaks, and fungoes,” Donlon had told him, “not good enough for the minors and not ready to get a shave and go to work someplace, like the rest of us, so that’s all they were, a traveling circus, like the Center over there.”

  Donlon had spent the remainder of lunch trying to recall the names of the Princeton baseball team that year, who the captain was, who were the football lettermen on that team, who’d scored the winning touchdown in the Yale Bowl that November at New Haven, and whether he was now a Chicago insurance executive or a Red Bank lawyer. Donlon told him the names of the Princeton single-wing backfield that year with mystical reverence, leaning drunkenly over the table, eyes lit by the mythical recollections of those burnished, innocent autumn afternoons.