Loose Lips

by Claire Berlinski

  I wasn’t alone. Dr. Deutch—John, if I may?—wherever you are, I know how you feel. I’d seen the pictures of him in the news, the haunted eyes, the shadows of shame darkening his face. His friends told the press he was destroyed, crushed, humiliated beyond words. His enemies said they always knew the man couldn’t be trusted. That hurts more than anything, the gloating of your enemies. How well I know, Dr. Deutch. How well I know.

  I turned in my computer as they’d told me to. I asked Janet how long it would take to investigate and adjudicate my case. She told me it could be months. Why months? I asked. Because we have to convene committees, interview your classmates, write reports. Over the summer, we take annual leave.

  Two days later, everyone received their assignments. Nathan was to go to Istanbul. Jade was slotted for Kinshasa. Mark was going to be wintering in Delhi. Nan was going to Peshawar. It hardly even gave me any pleasure to think that she would probably be dead within a week, either at the hands of Islamic terrorists or from secondhand smoke.

  Stan would go to Moscow—the Yankee Stadium of espionage. He was to begin his six-month Russian class immediately.

  I was told I would file papers about Canada until further notice.

  Canada was wedged between Luxembourg and a broom closet. No one knew where it was, and one woman I asked denied that there was such a place. I came in about twenty minutes late, but nobody seemed to notice. My new supervisor, Bob, nodded his head gently when I introduced myself, as if he wasn’t quite sure what I was doing there. He told me he would be glad to have another body around and that he was there to help me grow in my career. “Just hang out here for a few minutes,” he said. “We’re about to have a staff meeting.”

  I looked at the books on his wall. Canada: A Statistical Abstract. The Hidden Waterways of Northern Canada. Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! Requiem for a Divided Country. The Canadian Statesman Speaks. I remembered the marble cool of the Columbia University library, reading the Mahabharata, the calm of the Sanskrit syllables, and I remembered thinking that surely there was more than this to life. I thought about that night train to Marrakech, the scent of jasmine stirring the hot desert air. I wanted to die.

  Half a dozen Canada staffers assembled in his cramped office. Our supervisor addressed us. Our requirements, he said, had come straight from the cabinet. The secretary of agriculture was in a thoroughgoing lather. The White House was worried about a fresh Canadian parry in the salmon dispute.

  Bob was a middle-aged man with a sandy fringe of thinning hair and a slight paunch; he wore a cardigan over his oxford shirt in the manner of Mr. Rogers. The only other seated participant was the desk officer. She was a large woman, very large; when she nodded in agreement with the chief, her chin disappeared into folds of flesh. A wizened grandmother stood directly behind her. “Virginia’s our institutional memory,” Bob had told me when he introduced me to her. “She’s been here since forever.” Across from me was the Reports officer. Her face was hidden behind heavy black bangs. She was our Canadian regional specialist, an expert, Bob said, on all things Canadian. She offered a shy half-smile at the compliment. To my left was our Chief of Operations, a gnomelike man with a bushy red beard, pockmarked skin, and a nose that glowed with spider veins. I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it, but it seemed to me that he smelled of gin.

  “This is going to be an election issue,” the chief said. “There are a hundred thousand jobs at stake in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. We can’t afford to drop the ball here. Our customers need some solid reporting on this and they need it yesterday.” The CIA always called the people who read its intelligence reports its customers, as if it were trying to sell them a shoe shine or roof repairs. “Every man in Toronto has to be focused on this. We need at least three developmentals by Labor Day. Is everyone clear?”

  I nodded, and wondered if I would still have a job come Labor Day.

  Officially, we did not spy on Canada. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and the migratory patterns of the Pacific salmon had changed. Under international law, countries have the exclusive right to fish their own waters; international waters are open to all and sundry. But salmon are strange fish: Coho salmon are spawned in Canadian waters but migrate as adults to warmer American waters. American sockeye do the opposite. Thus the United States–Canada Pacific Salmon Conflict: Which are American fish? Which are Canuck fish? Fish don’t come stamped with their country of origin. So who has the right to harvest them? The United States and Canada split the difference in 1985 with a treaty that allowed American fishermen to harvest a certain number of Canadian coho; in exchange the Canadians were permitted to catch some of our sockeye. The quota system worked well enough until, for reasons not fully understood, American salmon, like American draft dodgers, decided they’d had it with swimming to Canada. Suddenly, the Americans had all the fish and Canadian fisherman found themselves confronting economic ruin. The Canadians wanted to renegotiate the treaty, but naturally we were hesitant. We were, after all, getting all the fish.

  Not long before I’d set up shop in my new cubicle, an enraged mob of Canadian fishermen had trapped the Alaskan ferry Malaspina in the port of Prince Rupert. A radio call went out over the Canadian airwaves. “Show these big boys that we’re not putting up with their crap!” the organizers urged. Hundreds of fishing boats joined the blockade. The Canadians burned an American flag for the cameras; the outraged passengers on the Malaspina condemned the Canadians as terrorists. For three days, the fishermen defied a Canadian court order to free the ship. After a personal plea from Canada’s fisheries minister, the Malaspina was released, but tensions remained high: The United States Senate approved a resolution allowing the use of force, if necessary, to protect Alaskan ferries. American and Canadian diplomats sequestered themselves in British Columbia, trying to damp the hostilities.

  “Selena,” Bob said to me after I’d been in the office for a day. “You know who Ted Stevens is?” The name sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

  “That’s Senator Ted Stevens,” he said, answering his own question. “From Alaska. Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.” He didn’t need to elaborate—the committee approved the CIA’s budget. If the good people of Alaska didn’t have something to show for their investment in the CIA, my supervisor’s expression intimated, there would be hell to pay. We needed to know the Canadian negotiators’ bottom line: If pressed to the limit, how many salmon would they let us harvest?

  I was told to study the case of RAINBOW, a twenty-nine-year-old conservation scientist acting as an adviser to the Canadian negotiating team. RAINBOW grew up in a small fishing village not far from the Fraser River, the great coho-salmon spawning grounds. His father and two older brothers were salmon fishermen. The decline in the coho-salmon catch had brought the family to the brink of bankruptcy. The case officer developing him, Lucius K. ROSENBLATT, was posing as some suit who worked for Chicken of the Sea. He had recently discovered that the RAINBOW family fishing boat was soon to be repossessed. RAINBOW was encouragingly indiscreet and had already provided clues to the Canadians’ negotiating strategy. ROSENBLATT had sent us grainy surveillance photos of our developmental, taken as he arrived at their lunch meetings. RAINBOW was thin and drawn; he had a young, pale, earnest face. He was wearing a bulky parka and a tattered knit cap with a tassel. He looked worn. That was encouraging. Happy people don’t commit treason.

  A week passed with no news, and then another. My supervisor found me one day at my cubicle with my head in my hands. He invited me to come to his office for a chat. I followed him. He had a kettle of water on his desk; he offered me a cup of chamomile tea.

  “How are you holding up here?” he asked.

  I didn’t know whether he knew about the investigation yet.

  “Fine, really well, this is a wonderful division. Great people.”

  He asked me to shut the door. “I know you’ve been having a little brouhaha with the security folks,” he said. “I wanted to talk
about that. See how you’re really doing.”

  “They told me I couldn’t discuss it with anyone.”

  “That’s okay. We don’t need to talk details.” Bob squeezed the teabag with his spoon and placed it on his saucer. “But I’d like to share an experience of my own.”

  He sipped his tea, and little tea beads gathered on his mustache.

  “When I came back from my third tour in Latin America, I walked into my office one morning and found the Feds waiting for me. Four of them. Complete surprise.”

  He paused and put his fingers together in a steeple.

  “Congress had gotten wind that an asset we’d used was a torturer. Nasty customer. Now the Feds were investigating the charge. It was me who’d recruited this fellow, three years before. These guys from the FBI barged into my office, three years later, and they were acting like I was the torturer. There was no presumption of innocence, no assumption that we were all working for the same side. Their arrogance was unbelievable. I said, ‘Am I under arrest?’ And they said ‘We don’t know yet.’ Worst moment of my life.

  “I’d done everything exactly by the books—I ran everything past Legal when I recruited this guy, I got all the right approvals, but suddenly I was in trouble, just out of the blue. My stomach was at my feet. And these guys, they didn’t even know how to read one of our cables—they didn’t know anything about how we do our jobs, but they were acting like I was a criminal. It was one of the worst experiences of my life.”

  “What happened?”

  “They investigated it for a year, and I was warehoused on the desk like you are now, and I couldn’t even tell my wife why. So I sure know what you must be going through.”

  I nodded my head slowly. I wasn’t sure what reply he was expecting.

  “I’d wake up every day and feel like a fish caught in the net. The worst part was just not knowing—not knowing what would happen, wondering if I was just some sort of political pawn. Not knowing is a terrible thing. In the end they couldn’t find anything to pin on me. But I learned that around here, someone is always watching, no matter what you do. You’ve always got to think about how it’s going to look, how it’s going to look to Security, to Congress, on the front page of The New York Times, how it’s going to look if you get caught, how it’s going to look if you don’t take the risk because you’re afraid of getting caught, but you don’t get the intelligence, either.”

  “What happened to you after the investigation?”

  “I learned the lesson, I guess. Everyone learns the lesson around here, sooner or later. A lot of us have been right where you are right now.”

  “How did you get through it?”

  “Jesus helped me. He was my best friend. He’ll help you, too.”

  He took another sip of tea and looked at me with kind, watery eyes.

  Every morning when the alarm went off, a wave of anger and anxiety would wash over me as I remembered that I was under investigation. At night I would stare at the ceiling while Stan made soft chuffing noises in his sleep. The thought of Janet reading my personal correspondence infuriated me. All of my sister’s letters to me were on the hard drive. There was a memo from my thesis adviser complaining that my analysis of Manjusri was derivative, my literature review inadequate, and my grasp of Pali superficial. The thought of Janet reading that bothered me more than if my computer had hidden my most secret sexual fantasies.

  I told Stan that it was driving me crazy, the thought of Janet and Nancy shutting the office door and reading that letter from my adviser out loud.

  “Yeah? Really? Geez, I guess that would be awful, I mean you did win the Crewdson thesis prize and all, in the end. That’s really unfair, that they might not realize how good your Pali got.” His voice got hard. “Selena, you get sent to Moscow, or Beijing, you will have hidden video cameras in every room of your apartment—including the bathroom. People who do not care about you, people who hate you with a passion, will watch everything you do. They’ll put a picture of you giving your boyfriend a blow job on their walls and they’ll whack off to it. That’s what this job is about. You’ll have no privacy whatsoever. If you can’t deal with that, you’re in the wrong job.”

  “But this is having my privacy invaded by my own side.”

  “Selena. Selena. If you’re a spy, privacy has to be about something else. It has to be about what’s in here—” He pointed to his head. “Because someone is going to be watching you for the rest of your life. Someone is going to be watching, whatever you do. Our side, their side—it doesn’t matter. You need to think about every single action, every expression on your face—not just what it is, but what it would look like to someone else. You need to assume that someone’s watching, even when you have no idea how.”

  July became August, with thunderstorms and polluted, stifling air. Each day was the same as the last: no news, long drives in to work with Stan, the traffic bumper to bumper as we crawled across the concrete overpasses and past strip malls, and endless files about fishing rights to review.

  Files, fish, filing, fish, filing, fishing, filing, filed.

  I ran into my classmates in the long halls; we said hello to each other politely. I could tell they were puzzled that I was working on Canada, but the bureaucracy works in mysterious ways, and no one was that surprised that I had a bum assignment: Someone had to get them. As far as I knew, the fact that I was under investigation was not yet public knowledge, although it would be, sooner or later.

  Lilia called one evening. “Hey, secret sister!” she said brightly. “Depose any democratically elected governments lately?”

  “Jesus, Lilia, not on the fucking phone!” I regretted my tone. She couldn’t possibly understand. I apologized. “I’m just under some stress at work.”

  “What’s going on? Can you tell me?”

  “I can’t talk about it. I really can’t.”

  Lilia was quiet on the other end, as if she were very far away and my words had taken a long time to reach her. At last she spoke, her voice subdued: “We’re getting a little worried about you. You sound like the Manchurian Candidate or something. Dad is planning an intervention.”

  “Lilia, please … please don’t ask me to talk about this. Please. Don’t worry. Everything is okay. I promise there’s nothing wrong.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Iris had landed on her feet. Within a week of being escorted off CIA property by armed guards, she’d found herself a new job as a marketing strategist for Coca-Cola in Europe. She was supposed to spend a year in Washington learning the bottling business, but eventually, they had promised, she’d be working in the Paris office. She’d found a new apartment in Georgetown. She’d left Brad. She wanted a clean break, she said, and a man who could tell her what he’d done all day at the office.

  Iris was partial to a serene tea salon in Georgetown run by a family of Asian immigrants. I joined her at Ching-Ching Cha on a sultry Sunday morning. The room had high ceilings and a skylight. Clay pots and canisters with Chinese lettering decorated the walls; ceiling fans gently stirred the air. The effect was intended, perhaps, to recall an opium den in colonial Burma, although nothing I had ever seen in Burma looked like this. The room felt cool and calm even in high summer. A grave Mongolian met us at the door with a low bow. He showed us to our table, reminding us to remove our shoes before stepping on the bamboo mats. Iris slipped off her gold lamé sandals to reveal her slender feet and immaculately polished toenails. I followed suit.

  The Mongolian returned and offered us hand-lettered menus. After considerable deliberation, we decided to share a pot of Dragon Phoenix Pearl, thus named, the menu explained, because its leaves rose from the hillsides like a dragon and the women who picked it resembled dancing phoenixes next to the dragon’s slender body.

  The waiter floated away. We were the only customers in the room.

  Iris chattered happily about her new job and her expense account. “All gold, baby,” she boasted. Brad was making a pest of himself, “calling, callin
g, calling, like he’s on fire and I’m 911.” Her sister was getting married. “We’re reckoning this is her first marriage. He’ll be about as useful to a woman as—” She broke off in mid-sentence, suddenly losing interest in her sister’s fiancé. “Let’s talk about you. Where are they sending you? You know yet?”

  I looked at the ground. “I’m on Canada for the moment,” I said, hoping that if I said Canada in a low enough voice, she’d think I’d said “any country other than Canada.” She heard perfectly, unfortunately.

  “Canada? You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “It’s only temporary. Security is trying to clear some things up.”

  “Uh-oh,” she said.

  Despite myself, I began to puddle up. I felt self-conscious when the waiter came back with our tea. “Allergies,” I said to him. “Ragweed.”

  The waiter nodded mutely.

  “I can’t tell you about it,” I said. “I would if I could.”

  “I know,” said Iris.

  “I would tell you—you know that.”

  “Of course you would, honey. But if you just want to talk to this old teapot while I sit here and file my nails, I doubt I’d hear a thing.”

  Iris still had her security clearances, I rationalized. I told the teapot everything. Iris sipped from her cup as I spoke, holding it in both hands. When I finished, she set it gently in its saucer. “Everyone talks to their family about problems at work,” she said. “Half the guys there use the fact that they’re Agency as a pickup line in bars. It’s not like you’re the only one. Why you?”

  “I got caught.”

  “But why were they trying to catch you?”

  “I guess someone said something about me.”

  Iris inhaled slowly and fixed me with an even gaze.

  “Maybe Jade,” I said. “She’s crazy enough to denounce herself.”