Marco Polo, If You Can

by William F. Buckley

  Rufus told the President that on the basis of extensive discussions with the Director of the CIA and the military, he had arrived at certain recommendations which, he felt, warranted presidential attention.

  For three months, said Rufus, Operation Tango (thus had the enterprise been dubbed, when J. Edgar Hoover—J. Edgar Hoover!—had pointed out that it takes two to tango, and if we don’t take minutes of National Security Council meetings, they won’t get minutes of the National Security Council) has maintained the credibility of the Soviet mole by making certain to include in the minutes of every meeting of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council one or more pieces of information which are accurate, but which Soviet knowledge of hurts us only marginally. These tidbits have been put together on a random basis after careful consultation with relevant specialists, in most cases—in every case, excepting the Joint Chiefs and the two Directors—people who don’t know what we’re up to.

  “But we’re stretching it a little thin now. We run the risk of giving them frothy material, on the basis of which they might guess we’ve caught on to them.”

  The President interrupted. “I take it”—he looked at Hoover—“that we haven’t actually got the mole?”

  The FBI chief bit his lips and shook his head. He knew better than to proffer excuses. But suddenly he thought better of maintaining complete silence. “Remember, Mr. President, we can stop it overnight by merely overhauling the whole minutes distribution system. But the decision was made last September that we wanted to exploit this whole business, and that means keeping the leak open.”

  “Doesn’t mean you can’t find the goddam mole.”

  Hoover said nothing.

  The President turned again to Rufus, who acted on the signal to proceed.

  “I’ve studied the alternatives, and am here to make a recommendation. It’s that we give out everything we’ve gotten from the U-2.”

  The President was genuinely startled, but said nothing.

  Rufus laid it out as follows.

  On the one hand, the U-2 had collected material of such importance as to redirect the entire U.S. strategic effort—away from bombers, toward missiles. “The U-2,” said Rufus—but here he paused. He felt it appropriate that the Director of Central Intelligence, the agency responsible for the enterprise, should make the summary. He turned to him. “Allen?”

  “Well, Mr. President, you know what it’s done. We have a composite picture of military Russia, complete to airfields, atomic production sites, power plants, oil storage depots, submarine yards, arsenals, railroads, missile factories, launch sites, radar installations, industrial complexes, antiaircraft defenses. The U-2 has collected information with speed, accuracy, and dependability that could only be equaled by the acquisition of technical documents directly from Soviet offices and laboratories.”

  “It is proposed we give all this up?” the President said, turning to Rufus.

  Rufus explained that very recent experiences of U-2S flying out of Turkey and Pakistan, north toward missile center Tyura Tam, indicated that Soviet SAM capability was coming dangerously close to achieving the 75,000-foot altitude necessary to knock down the U-2S, and that under the circumstances their days were definitely numbered.

  “The idea, Mr. President, would be to ride the hell out of the U-2S for the next three or four months, giving us a comprehensive picture of what’s going on. The integrated results of these flights can plausibly occupy a considerable part of the agenda of any NSC meeting—and constitute the bulk of the minutes. The Soviet Union is therefore learning that we know things about the Soviet Union which they of course already know. And the thrust of the NSC conversations can be that if at the coming summit meeting they throw the U-2 at you, you can say you went that route only because the Russians refused to cooperate on your open skies inspection proposal.”

  Ike smiled. He had always been proud of his proposal, made in 1955, that the two superpowers extend to each other the right to use freely the airspace over their territory in order to guard against surprises, and therefore mitigate the possibility of accidental war. He brought his fingers to his mouth, in the characteristic pose. “But so we go ahead and pass this on—where’s the zinger? What’s Operation Tango going to end up doing for our team?”

  “Mr. President, I do have something in mind. But it isn’t fully worked out. The timing is very important. And we can proceed only after we have fingered the Soviet agents operating here. Mr. Hoover is advancing on that with great thoroughness, and Tango has its own teams working in Europe, and we have some very good information. But the integration of the entire thing, with your permission, I’d rather put together later.”

  Ike let out a trace of a smile. He had heard the phrase “with your permission” a half-dozen times during the Second World War. It was Rufus’s way of saying, “You can fire me if you want to or, for all I know, you can have me shot, but you’re not going to get from me at this moment what I don’t want to tell you.”

  The President spoke. “Very well. Now, on the matter of the U-2, I take it”—he looked about the table: the pipe-smoking imperturbable aristocrat in charge of intelligence; the ruddy, beefy, headstrong chief of American domestic security; the elegant Wall Street lawyer with the quick mind and decisive manner, now in Defense; the seasoned professional officer, whom Ike always preferred to see in uniform, but hardly ever did anymore—“I assume that on the matter of the fairly imminent obsolescence of the U-2, you are all in agreement?”

  The Secretary of Defense spoke. “Perhaps this qualification should be made, sir. The Soviets are developing the technology to bring down the U-2. Correct. But it will take them anywhere from one to three years before they deploy that technology to keep any U-2 out of the Soviet Union. They’re working on a prototype SAM, with infrared pursuit capability. But to surround Russia with these SAMs would be one hell of an effort. They’d begin by concentrating them around targets they want especially to protect from view. But the U-2 will still be useful until we get the satellite revved up: and then, of course, we can fly back, right over the SAMs—four hundred miles above them. Speaking for the DOD, Rufus’s plan is okay by me.”

  The rest, by gesture, concurred.

  “Is that all?” the President turned to Rufus.

  “Not quite. I’d like to suggest that at the next NSC meeting you announce that you want to put in a lot of time with Secretary of State Herter on the Berlin question, and with State Department specialists, that you’ll meet with them on an ad hoc basis in the Oval Office. The objective is to slow down the number of NSC Executive meetings, to maybe one every two weeks or so.”

  “Suits me.” He looked about him. No one spoke. Simultaneously he depressed a button under the lip of the table, and rose. By the time he was on his feet, his appointments secretary had opened the door for him. The others stood and the President said, “Good afternoon, gentlemen. Nice thinking, Rufus.”

  CHAPTER 12

  It was Valentine’s Day, and Michael reproached himself that he had not written to Amanda. He would write her tomorrow—tonight there was too much work to do, and he and Blackford had already had a long day. Perhaps he would spin Amanda a yarn about how St. Valentine’s Day really originated not in Italy, as everyone thought, but in the Holy Roman Empire, in the northeasternmost part of which—Berlin—Michael was now situated, and here they were very strict on the point that St. Valentine’s authentic birthday, given the Gregorian calendar change, should be celebrated not on the fourteenth of February, but the twenty-first. Oh well, worth trying.

  He and Blackford, having dined at thirty different restaurants (they carried credentials from Temple Fielding, and were ostensibly collecting data for Fielding’s annual guide to Europe), were full-circle back at the Alpach, on Uhlandstrasse, where they had eaten their first dinner out together in Berlin, back in November. They cooked for themselves on odd nights, went out the balance of the time, and made it a point not to become fixtures at any single restaurant. It
meant a lot of exploration, and they did a great deal of walking, otherwise using mostly public transportation. At the smoky, dimly lit, chanteuse-dominated Alpach, two girls had approached them and one of them, who looked startlingly like Marlene Dietrich in the Blue Angel, made all the requisite gestures to Blackford (“I can’t understand why women gravitate to you, when I am the alternative,” Michael had once commented). Blackford told the girls that, unhappily, he and his companion were waiting for their wives, and could not risk being compromised. Marlene Dietrich fluttered her eyelashes, puffed on her cigarette holder, slunk her tightly sheathed torso this way and that, and said that her girl friend and she were very much taken by the two young Americans, and perhaps they might care to visit them during the afternoon? She passed Blackford a card. He glanced at it: “Fräulein Nina Deutsch, Caterer. 24-hour service. Tel: 75-85-77. Address: 1161 Fasanenstrasse.” Blackford pocketed the card and winked at her as, followed by a buxom blonde dressed like a Tyrolean doll, she slithered away. Michael sighed, “All work and no play.”

  Blackford looked up at him. “Here’s the card,” he slipped it to him. “Go on over after we line up the portfolios tonight if you want to. Want me to set it up?”

  Michael’s dark face very nearly blushed. But he took the card. “I don’t know. Anyway, I wouldn’t want to trouble you. My English combined with her German is probably enough to establish a connection.”

  “You’d better insulate that connection.”

  Michael smiled, and emptied his stein of beer.

  Two hours later Blackford yawned, slid the carefully annotated index cards to one side of the table, went to the refrigerator and brought out a bottle of white wine. He opened it, moved to the sitting room and slouched down on the sofa. “Wine?”

  “Sure,” said Michael. It occurred to Blackford that in the four years he had known Michael, he hadn’t once declined any suggestion. Blackford was tempted one day to say to him casually, “Suicide?” But the intensely lovable companion, with whom he had, after three months of constant companionship, what felt like an imperishable bond, would instantly have recognized the sarcasm. When you get a person of such thorough amiability, thought Blackford, you shouldn’t tinker with the finished product; you might mutilate it. They had maintained the code, and Blackford still didn’t know what the gentle Michael had done during his preceding travels for the Agency. He could not imagine Michael engaging in the kind of skulduggery that would hurt anyone.

  The following morning, between eleven and twelve, could prove critical. True, twice before Reynard had summoned them, and twice before they had been disappointed. But Reynard, in that morning’s telephone conversation, had seemed genuinely excited. “I think I’ve got her, Sebastian, I think I’ve got her.”

  Shortly after eleven the next morning Blackford would go to a designated address: an abandoned garage on Mittelstrasse—to which garage Blackford had the key. Reynard would be there waiting for him. Fifteen minutes later, Michael would arrive. From the loft of the old garage they would have a clear view of No. 48 Mittelstrasse. Reynard, without specifying, wanted them to see what he anticipated would take place in front of that building sometime between noon and two o’clock.

  “God, I hope the trail is hot this time,” Blackford said, staring at the ceiling. Michael poured himself a glass of wine and smiled. “I do too, Black. But you know, it hasn’t all been dull.”

  “Goddammit, Michael, you’re the most patient son of a bitch in the history of the world. If you were Sisyphus, you’d have accepted that rock with a shit-eating grin.”

  Michael—of course—smiled. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m just—I guess—just happy. I’m working on the right team. I’m sitting a couple of miles from where Hitler finally blasted his own brains out. After initiating policies that, among other things, reminded my pop that he was half Jewish and therefore not quite human, and certainly not to be trusted to head a labor union. So I’m spending my life as a professional.”

  “What do you mean ‘professional’?”

  “A professional soldier. Working against … well, I guess I’d call them Hitler’s successors—why not?—though in fact the Commies antedated Hitler. What the hell, five months ago you were designing buildings and subways. That must have been more fun than trailing innocent Germans around Berlin. But you choose to do this, right?”

  Blackford said nothing. Over the years he had found that Sally had, however obliquely, intimidated him: so much so that he thought it, well, a little … vainglorious to suggest he was devoting his life to an idealistic project. Not because—his blood raced as he thought of it—not that he thought he was engaged in anything less. It was just that, oh well, anti-Communist activity is something other people, not quite PLU (as his mother in London would say), do; vaguely unpleasant, like making sausages. People Like Us occasionally use, not create, sausages. And you don’t invite your butcher to tell you pantingly what he had to go through to make you those sausages. But he felt he had to say something.

  “I know, I know, Michael. I’m not saying you’re patient to engage in this particular profession, I’m saying you’re patient about going so long without results. We engineers are spoiled that way. The first day we lay the first brick, the second day the second, the third day the third, the fourth day the fourth, and before too long we have a bridge, or a subway—”

  “Or a monument to FDR.”

  Blackford smiled.

  “But it’s the same thing, isn’t it, Blacky? Only we’re constructing by a process of elimination. Just think of all the bricks we now know aren’t the right bricks.”

  “Yeah. Unless the right brick put one over on us.”

  It was midnight, and suddenly Blackford felt one of those late night accesses of energy that from time to time galvanized him, routing torpor, fatigue.

  “Michael?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s have a look at that card.”

  “What card?”

  “Marlene Dietrich’s.”

  Michael rose, went to the dining room where his jacket hung, and returned.

  Blackford studied it. “Whaddayasay?” His voice was a salacious imitation of Clark Gable’s.

  Michael’s face brightened. He took a deep draft of the wine. “Why not? Who knows, we might make an important discovery.”

  Blackford went to the telephone. “Right. Besides, we have to report all opportunities for tourists to Temple Fielding. And anyway, our instructions were to effect deep penetration, right?”

  “Right!” Michael, now standing, walked over to the bathroom. Blackford could hear the electric razor. “Hurry up with that call, Black.”

  A woman’s voice answered the telephone. Blackford rattled away in German. While talking, he reached for his own tie and, by minor contortions of the neck and ear, managed to slip it on while still in conversation. “Ja ja, zehn Minuten.”

  Michael said anxiously, “Okay?”

  “Fräulein Deutsch is occupied.” Michael’s face fell. “But two of her associates are available and are equally skilled caterers. I said we were very experienced gourmets, and required the very best. She said the very best was what we would get.” Michael’s face brightened.

  Blackford walked over to the map. He knew the street—he knew every street in Berlin. He looked at the number, and at the three-dimensional image of the building. “Looks like a boardinghouse. Pretty fancy address, though. Ah well.”

  In the taxi their conversation grew lighthearted, and then lightheaded, and by the time they arrived, they were both laughing loudly.

  Blackford looked up at the building; all the shades were drawn. It was four stories high. He rang the bell. A disembodied voice answered, “Who is it?” Blackford gave the name he had used over the telephone. “We have an appointment.”

  The door opened and an unsmiling, trim elderly woman dressed in the uniform of a practical nurse bade them follow her.

  In the reception room the barman was active, pouring champagne a
nd whiskey. Seated behind a circular desk was a madam of adamant amiability, smoking a cigarette, a glass of champagne in front of her. Romantic music issued at considerable volume from an amplifier that seemed to be located across the wide room, overstuffed with couches and ottomans, on several of which there was muted conversation, with now and again a vaulting peal of laughter. There were two men at one corner. At another, a couple. On the larger couch, two girls and two men, a bottle of champagne on the coffee table in front of them. The girls’ skirts were short, and the cut of their dresses accentuated their figures. But they’d have passed more or less unnoticed in church.

  Michael left the arrangements in Blackford’s hands, and in due course the two were led through a door, down a corridor decorated by fancily framed and lit pictures of the copulative ingenuities of mysterious India. The same “nurse” who had opened the front door now knocked on the door of a room designated as 12. A sultry voice said, “Come in.” Blackford motioned to Michael, who smiled boyishly and started to head inside, stopping only for a moment to say, “Rendezvous?”

  “Back at the house. Let’s for the first time in three months do something out of sync with each other, okay?”

  Michael smiled, straightened his tie, and the “nurse,” announcing that Fräulein Naki awaited him, closed the door behind him. Leading Blackford still farther down the hall to the door marked 17, she knocked and told him that Fräulein Adele bade him join her. He walked through the door, which shut behind him. Sitting on a couch, a cooler of champagne in front of her, was a woman of very full bosom and shapely legs, platinum-blond hair combed straight, obscuring half of one of two beautiful hazel eyes. She looked at Blackford with her eyes wide open, her lips parting just enough to exhibit the succulent white teeth. With her right hand she stroked the glass on the adjacent desk, and maneuvered her body so that a plump and upright breast worked its way outside the folds of her nightgown.