Memorial Bridge

by James Carroll

  The vice chief broke in, "The Charlie Hill case hardly justifies what you've proposed. You don't rearrange the flight plan of an entire squadron because of one enemy ack-ack gun. You take the gun out and maintain course."

  "As you know, General, the Hill case was not the only one. There were twenty-seven separate cases developed by CID inside the Air Technical Service Command alone."

  "But how many brought to court-martial?"

  "My point exactly. It was precisely the knowledge that he would almost certainly not be court-martialed, even if accused, that stimulated every officer who abused his trust in that command to do so."

  "You did not conduct those investigations, Mr. Gillen. You weren't even here. Where were you during the war anyway?"

  "My name is Dillon. I was in Washington throughout the war. It is correct to say I did not conduct those investigations, but it has been my responsibility to acquaint myself with the records of those who did. For your information, those records are in the files of seven different Defense Department agencies. Yet taken together they absolutely established that graft in the amount of millions of dollars had corrupted the procurement system even before the war ended. And then after the war, with the project of military surplus disposal, the problem worsened. Tens of millions of dollars of simple theft and bribery are at issue now. Dozens of separate cases involving everything from the illegal consignment of surplus GI clothing to unlicensed profiteers, up to and including the covert shipment of twenty-two decommissioned fighter bombers to the Irgun resistance in Palestine, in violation of the Neutrality Act."

  "The air force did not do that."

  "It is the air force's job to see that such things don't happen. And if they do, to bring those responsible to justice. Yet to date, almost all charges have been brought against enlisted men and NCOs. In the cases I'm referring to, the variously constituted courts-martial have so far convicted four supply clerks, thirteen mechanics and repairmen, an armorer, a wire technician and two parachute riggers."

  Dillon paused to allow the weight of the litany to accumulate, then he found the eyes of the silver-haired vice chief of staff. "The problem toward the end of the war and immediately afterward was not one enemy ack-ack gun, General, but a massive moral sabotage from within, the effect of which continues in the widespread assumption that the air force does not seriously enforce either its own regulations or the law. That assumption, left unchecked, will cripple the entire air force. It must be clear to every man in this service, no matter what his rank or position, that air force justice is efficient and absolute, and that what it is blind to here is what rank insignia a man wears on his shoulder. That is why I propose setting OSI outside the chain of command, and it is why I propose that OSI agents, in conducting investigations, will wear civilian clothes and will not be required to identify themselves by military rank."

  "What the hell!" Macauley snapped. "Why not just have a civilian agency then?"

  Dillon did not answer. He glanced toward Crocker, whose face showed nothing.

  General Eason sat two chairs away from Crocker, also in the front row. Four stars gleamed on his epaulets. Speaking for the first time, he said quietly, "Perhaps there is another explanation for why so few officers have been charged in these investigations. Perhaps it is nothing like what you call 'moral sabotage.'"

  "Sir?"

  "The obvious other explanation, Mr. Dillon, is that our officers for the most part are what they purport to be, men of honor."

  "General, we are talking about an officer corps, during the time in question, of tens of thousands of men."

  "Is it unthinkable to you that—?"

  "I'm a Catholic, General." Dillon slapped the wooden pointer down onto the lip of the easel. "I've been taught to believe in original sin. And I'm a lawyer. I've been taught to believe we all need the limits of the rule of law. General Hill's name is known to all of you because he is the only general officer to have been court-martialed, but I am morally certain, given the quantity of misappropriated supplies and arms, that Hill is not the only general officer to have reaped personal financial gain from the improper discharge of his duty. We will never know for certain because, owing to the chain of command and the dispersal of investigative responsibility, generals are not accountable to anyone but other generals who apparently think criminal behavior by their peers is best punished by a snub at the Officers' Club, if that. In the air force right now—this is as good a summary of my conclusions as any—there is less a rule of law than a rule of privilege."

  Having said that, and seeing the subtle jolt backward of their heads, Dillon realized why Crocker had brought in an outsider to do this. His job was to drop his bombs on them and leave. With a sudden fresh rush of authority, Dillon pointed at the wall behind them. "Those paintings back there, gentlemen, are glimpses of the past, if you will permit my saying so. A civilian like me cannot look at such scenes without feeling a kind of awe. They feature the heroic action of individuals, pilots like yourselves, men who made the difference for our country between victory and defeat. But that is not all those pictures feature, as no one knows better than you. You who organized air raids involving hundreds of warplanes flying at night over contested territory know the absolute requirement in the modern era for the submission of the individual will to group effort. You've told your men again and again, reining in fighter-jocks and daredevils, that the time for individual heroism is over. The principles you have already so effectively applied to operations I only want to apply to security." Dillon swung his arm toward the polarcentric map of the world. "That's the future, and you created it. In conflict with the USSR one thing will count far more than individual action, no matter how heroic, and you know what it is: clear, effective organization responsive to the will of proper authority.

  "At the risk of offending you with the obvious, I am telling you that the opposite of such organization is confusion. It is not that there are large numbers of criminals in the air force, or in the officer corps, but that there are human beings who in a situation of confusion will make bad choices. That is what General Hill did. Those of you who know him personally could surely attest that he would not have compromised himself had he known in advance that an aggressive, unintimidated OSI was going to investigate his activity and bring charges against him if his activity proved improper. The confusion of authority among the CID and provost marshal and the IG and JAG, all subject to local commanders in the chain of command, created an opening in enforcement that General Hill knew he could exploit. An OSI, by its very existence, would close that opening, and otherwise honest men would have a good reason for staying honest."

  The assistant chief of staff, intelligence, stood up at his place in the last row. A tall man with a neatly trimmed mustache and a hair part sharp enough to focus a camera on, he reminded Dillon of Colonel Cheever, the OSS officer who had challenged him in Crocker's office nearly five years before. Cheever's aristocratic air had impressed Dillon because it was so clearly uncultivated, and he recognized a like sense of self-assurance in this officer.

  "But you are claiming authority beyond the merely criminal." He indicated the diagram on the easel. "I see the word 'intelligence.'"

  "Counter intelligence, General. OSI would be to the air force what the FBI is to domestic intelligence."

  "But there it is, 'intelligence.'"

  This was a turf boundary Dillon knew better than to cross. "Air intelligence would not be affected by OSI. Your operation is to the air force what CIA is to worldwide espionage activity. The distinction is not original with me, sir, but is implied by the National Security Act."

  "Nonsense. Counterintelligence belongs with intelligence, and wheth er the civilian sector accepts that or not is of no importance to us. Counterintelligence in the military is a function of intelligence." The general's skin, even the skin showing in the part of his hair, had turned bright red.

  "To the extent that is true, it shouldn't be. It is an entirely separate discipline. Experience sugge
sts that when the two functions are melded, counterintelligence always suffers. I must tell you quite frankly"—Dillon stared fiercely at the officer, knowing full well that his statement was armed—"that, after a thorough evaluation of air force security systems, including the carryover CIC, the vulnerability of this service to Soviet penetration terrifies me." Before the intelligence chief could respond, Dillon swung toward General Macauley. "And nowhere is that more true than in the Strategic Air Command."

  Macauley slowly took his cigar out of his mouth, studied it for a moment as if reading the tiny words on the paper band, then said calmly, "You don't know what you're talking about."

  "No one has clear responsibility in your command for security, General, presumably because you reserve it to yourself. Yet one of your wings, the 509th, has been assigned the atomic mission. Surely you know enough to assume that a Soviet espionage operation is already under way at your present headquarters at Andrews, as well as at Offutt in Nebraska, to which you're moving, and certainly at Roswell, New Mexico, where the 509th is stationed. In the last six months, since the appropriations bill authorized the full establishment of SAC, the number of personnel in your command has increased fourteenfold, everyone from bomber pilots to clerk-typists. I suppose you know all of the pilots and navigators personally."

  "I handpicked them."

  "And the clerk-typists?"

  The general did not answer.

  "The secretaries who will be handling correspondence between the Pentagon and Omaha, and between Omaha and your proposed network of—how many bases?"

  "Twenty-seven."

  "The signal corpsmen, General? The aircraft mechanics, the crews who see to the maintenance of the atomic bombs in your charge? Did you handpick them?"

  Macauley tongued his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other.

  "Do I need to tell you, General, what Soviet agents—saboteurs included—could do to this country from the inside of your command?"

  Macauley withdrew his cigar to study it again. "I have to admit, young man, the Soviets do worry me. But what really worries me"—General Macauley looked around at his peers, his wide eyes announcing a punch line—"is the navy."

  The men laughed, but falsely.

  Macauley mugged, "Can you imagine a plane with an A-bomb in its belly missing the wire, trying to land on a flattop?"

  The generals laughed, but still weakly.

  That the image of a bomb-laden airplane crashing on a ship seemed horrible to Dillon, instead of amusing, marked him as an outsider more surely than anything he had said.

  Of course, the joke was only a way to put Dillon in his place, and once that was done the men fell smugly silent.

  Macauley said soberly, "I'll take care of security in SAC, don't you worry, Mr. Dillon."

  "By yourself, General, you simply can't. Your base at Roswell, because of its proximity to Los Alamos, falls under the jurisdiction not only of your G-2, but of the army and of the Atomic Energy Commission. Do you think that they will ever coordinate security with you under the present setup? The same thing applies now to the globe." Dillon pointed to the map. "You know better than I what the North Pole frontier means for airplanes. But I know what it means for organization. Security in Omaha and in New Mexico requires absolute coordination and control from Washington."

  "I'll have that."

  "With all due respect, General, you will not. Your security people, no matter who they are, will not have the clearances they would need to know what the whole picture of attempted Soviet penetration looks like. Do you think the FBI will be coordinating counterintelligence with your security officer in Omaha? I promise you it will not be. And unless it can deal with an air force organization with integrity, which boils down—as in the Bureau and in the new CIA—to a single director with total control over all aspects of operation, those crucial resources will be permanently unavailable to you. And you will have, on your own, no way of knowing which of your clerks or maintenance crewmen takes his orders not from Moscow but just from the Soviet embassy here on Sixteenth Street or from the Soviet UN delegation in New York or the consulate offices in San Francisco or Amtorg, the Soviet trade organization in Manhattan. The FBI may well know, General, because those are bases we have covered, but we won't trust that kind of information with you or with anybody in the Pentagon because, however well your airplanes operate, your security systems leak all over the place. And when I return to the Bureau next week I am going to make sure they understand that about this place. It won't matter how heroic your pilots are. In the next war, the way things are run here, they will have been defeated even before their planes leave the ground."

  A colonel in the back spoke up. "Not everybody agrees that there are Commies behind every bush. What are you saying, first the State Department, now the Pentagon?"

  "Alger Hiss is not the issue," Dillon said firmly. "Not even Oppenheimer is. Congress may be hysterical about cell group meetings in the thirties, but that is not what I'm talking about, not 'pinkos' or 'fellow travelers' or people who gave money to the Scottsboro Boys. The threat is from deep-cover NKVD agents who operate freely all over this country. The last thing they would do is attend a left-wing rally or sign a petition or balk at taking a loyalty oath. If you don't think the Soviets have an elaborate, professional espionage network in place in this country, you are not paying attention. And if you think the air force can protect itself from those agents using a set of narrowly conceived, competing systems it inherited from the army, you are doing the work of the enemy."

  At last Dillon saw that these heroes of the world conflict to whom he had felt inferior—that they, not he, were the provincials. He had lived his entire life in two cities, yet he was the one who understood the real meaning of events in Czechoslovakia. He saw the void behind their great chests full of commendations and awards, and he realized that every ribbon they had won had narrowed them. They were getting ready to fight the last war all over again, and the one thing they didn't want was news that the next war would be different, that it had already begun.

  Dillon expected the generals to be angry at him, but it was wariness, not anger, that he sensed in General Eason's voice then. The smooth, white-haired senior commander said quietly, "If you sense some uneasiness in our reaction, Mr. Dillon, I think it's because, as a group of men charged with defending the American way of life, we are very sensitive to proposals that smack of what, given our experience, can only seem like a Gestapo. The OSI you're talking about would range freely and have total unchecked powers over all aspects of the air force mission."

  "The OSI, as I propose it, would be totally accountable to you, General."

  "I would appoint its director? He would serve at my pleasure?"

  Dillon glanced at Randall Crocker, whose mask of neutrality was still firmly in place. Had he settled into the oblivion of a pseudo-objectivity? But the meaning of Crocker's impassivity was clear: Dillon was on his own. He brought his eyes quickly back to the chief of staff. "The director would be appointed by and serve at the pleasure of the commander in chief. That is to say, of the President."

  General Eason quite pointedly did not react to Dillon's assertion, and it was evident that he had intended his remarks to be conclusive. No one behind him spoke.

  A terminating silence ensued—the OSI was a Gestapo—and that would have been it, but Dillon raised a hand, like a pupil. "If I may add ... I have come to my conclusions by looking at air force cases and problems again and again, until finally a single abstract idea arose from all the different details. And that is what I presented here, not a Gestapo, not even a police force, but an investigative agency the purpose of which would be to answer your questions."

  Dillon's words were simply bouncing off the wall of their stolid common refusal. He was blathering on now because he did not know how to end it. His voice trailed off weakly as feelings of anger and disappointment burned in his throat. He had felt so confident for a moment there, as if his arguments were swaying them. But he w
as the one swaying, swaying back and forth—the taste in his throat turned foul—like an animal on the stockyards killing line.

  When he looked at Crocker, Dillon's feelings curdled into shame. He had let his mentor down.

  Crocker was staring at him over the knuckles of his folded fists. When at last he spoke it was the meager phrase "Thank you, Mr. Dillon," uttered with an exquisite detachment. A bored judge at the end of a meaningless civil trial.

  Torts, Dillon thought; from the same root as "torture." He took a seat on the side of the room, apart from the others.

  Crocker pushed himself up out of his chair and, without his cane, crossed with a lurch to the podium, which he clutched. He pivoted around to face his audience.

  The generals and colonels softened nothing in their expressions as they awaited their dismissal.

  Crocker said, "I want to test my impression, gentlemen. Am I correct in sensing that everyone in this room thinks the Office of Special Investigations as outlined here is a bad idea? If I'm wrong, please indicate."

  No one spoke.

  Crocker nodded. "Well then, I want you to hear from me what I intend to recommend to the President when I see him on this matter later today. First, I will recommend that he issue an executive order establishing the Air Force Office of Special Investigations immediately to supersede and replace AF CIC and CID. I will inform the President, of course, that you oppose my recommendation." Crocker paused. His concentration faltered as he thought of the old barn on his place in Maine. He had tried years before to demolish it, using the time-honored method of hooking a tractor and chain to one post and hauling away, expecting the other posts and the roof to collapse in a heap. When he had gunned the tractor across a dozen yards of field, then looked behind, he was shocked to see the entire stalwart barn intact and dragging along behind him. That's who these bastards were.

  "And second, I will recommend to the President that he appoint as founding director of OSI Mr. Sean Dillon, from whom we just heard." Crocker swung toward Dillon. "Providing, Mr. Dillon, you would accept the appointment."