“I used to see him around town with his women,” Owens said, a little bitterness creeping into his voice. “They were nothing more than a part of his mob scene, he used to tell me. Mostly they were the wives and mistresses of the foreign diplomats assigned to the missions in town. He got a lot of gossip that way, but it was tough on his marriage.”
Owens was a puritan. He had married his high school sweetheart and had never strayed, not once, though he admitted he had been tempted plenty. In this day and age he was a refreshing anachronism, and McGarvey found that he had a lot of respect and admiration for the man.
“Of course he made his mistakes. Rarely, but the construction of missile bases in Cuba escaped his people until six hours after the first photos were brought in from our U-2 overflights. The first conclusive photos. Yarnell was in a rage for months afterward. He drove his people mercilessly. We had a pretty high attrition rate there for a while because of it. But Yarnell wanted only the best around him. He wasn’t going to let something like that happen again.”
“Then the president was assassinated,” McGarvey said softly.
Owens looked up at him, his lips compressed. He nodded. “The bastards killed Jack Kennedy. I’ll never forget that day, not as long as I live. None of us will. We all thought it was the end of Yarnell, he took it so badly. He blamed himself.”
The remark was startling. “How so?”
“He was convinced that it was Castro’s people who arranged it. Something about the Mafia being paid off by Cuban Intelligence to do it. Twenty-five million dollars. For six months he tried to prove it. He should have known, he should have forseen it, he kept saying. But it never happened for him, and following so closely on the heels of the missile thing, he figured he was done on the Latin American desk. Said he wanted no part of it any longer. He wanted to work on something else, something more civilized, anything that did not involve spics. He started drinking, too, and he moved out. Took an apartment in town and left his wife to herself. She finally went back to Mexico City for a couple of years, but even her home had been ruined for her. She felt like an outcast, so she came back to the States, put the child in a boarding school, and moved to New York.”
Something very large dropped into place for McGarvey, who had been listening to Owens’s narrative and picking up an extra beat between the lines. Owens knew and was disturbed by Evita Perez Yarnell, yet he was in love with his own wife. There was only one other possibility for his depth of knowledge and obvious emotional attachment.
“Darby Yarnell was your protégé.”
“Wasn’t so terribly difficult to guess, was it?” Owens said sadly.
“Did you tell him that you were disappointed in the way he was treating his wife?”
“Not my place.”
“He was turning out badly …”
Owens flared. “Just listen here, his product always had been, and at that point still was, without reproach. The very best. The way I figured it, if his home life wasn’t going exactly the way it could have, or even should have, who was I, or anyone else for that matter, to say anything? I wasn’t a preacher, and we weren’t running a Sunday school down there. This is the big, grown-up world in which nuclear missiles are aimed at you from ninety miles away, and where presidents get shot down. This is a crazy, goddamned world, McGarvey. If a man isn’t exactly as devoted to his wife as he’s supposed to be, then we know that he’s just like everyone else—not perfect.”
“But it hurt,” McGarvey suggested gently.
“He was so goddamned good it was a crying shame. A lot of us looked up to that kid.”
Including your wife, McGarvey wanted to say, but he could not. It would have been too cruel, true or not. He had a strong suspicion, though, that Yarnell was a man who never left anything to chance.
They walked on for a time in silence. Clouds continued to build out to sea, and the surf continued to rise. A salt mist drifted on the air so that a hundred yards down the beach it seemed as if the fog was coming in. The air smelled wonderful though. It brought McGarvey back again to the Hamptons with Kathleen and Elizabeth. It struck him as odd that he had not known a single soul who had escaped at least one such emotional disaster in their lives. Even his sister’s marriage was rocky at times. Christ, where were the devoted people? Where was sincerity and openness? Perhaps Owens was the only one in the world who had had a good marriage. But then it had ended tragically with her death long before his.
“We were doing a lot of building in those days. The intelligence directorate, for instance, consisted of only half a dozen departments. But within the next few years that number was doubled: operations, strategic research, the U.S. Information Bureau, the Intelligence Requirements Service, central reference, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, imagery analysis, the National Photographic Interpretation Center. The list went on and on. Every day it seemed as if we were being asked to provide another type of product to a host of new customers.”
“You were busy.”
“Yes,” Owens said dryly. “Too busy to give a damn about another man’s problems.” He looked over at McGarvey. “I had my own bad luck there for a year or so, too. I was working twelve and eighteen hours a day. Some nights I wouldn’t even go home. My marriage nearly went on the rocks. It was never quite the same afterward.”
McGarvey didn’t want to hear it. Not that. “Did Yarnell get off the Latin American desk?”
Owens blinked. “Right into operations the first part of ’64. Worked for the deputy director until he started up the new Missions and Programs section. Pulled half a dozen of our very best people right out of the field, put them in a think-tank environment, and told them they were to come up with a world-wide missions and programs plan that was based on their direct experience.” Owens grinned at the memory. “All hell broke loose there for a bit. Yarnell had apparently emasculated our foreign intelligence operation. But in the end the seventh floor recognized the wisdom of his action and gave him the gold star. An A for effort.”
“Funny they didn’t give him operations.”
“He was offered the assistant deputy directorship, but he turned it down from what I heard.”
“He had something else in mind?”
“Oh yes, and so did I, though I didn’t know it at the time.”
“Within operations?”
“Foreign intelligence,” Owens said. “He sent himself out to help replace the people he had pulled in. He said he needed the field experience. So long away from Mexico, it was time for him to put his hand back in. None of us was getting any younger, and he was always worried that time was passing him by much faster than it was for other people. In a way I suppose it was. He seemed always to be living his life on half a dozen different levels all at the same time, and all at breakneck speed. He was like a flame in pure oxygen, someone said. A lot of people in the Company thought he’d burn himself out one day soon. In the meantime, though, he was the brightest star in the sky.”
“Where did they send him?”
“Why, Moscow, of course. Right into the heart of the lion’s den.”
McGarvey wasn’t surprised. Of course he had known some of this already from the background Trotter and Day had given him. But it was the timing that he found so fascinating now.
“That was in what year?”
“The summer of 1965.”
“They sent him out as chief of the Moscow station?”
“Assistant chief of station,” Owens said. “He was very good, the best, but he was still pretty young. Besides, there is something you have to understand about Darby Yarnell. He never gave a damn about titles. He was more interested in getting the product, analyzing it, and then satisfying our customers with it. ‘The end results are what counts,’ he used to say. ‘We’re in the business to provide enough information that our political leaders can make the very best of choices for us, Darrel,’ he would say. It was his pet philosophy.”
“Who was chief of station during his tenure, then?”
They reached the house, but before they went in, Owens took a cigarette from McGarvey and they sat on the porch steps, smoking and looking into the wind at a cold sea filled with white horses. McGarvey, of course, had seen Yarnell in a different light than Owens. If Yarnell had been a Soviet agent he might have known about the missile bases on Cuba, and only when they had been discovered by another section within the agency did he “discover” them himself. To throw suspicion off himself, he drove his people hard, probably causing the best of his field men to quit in disgust, while secretly rewarding the inept operatives. Yarnell’s little stunt of pulling some of the Company’s best field men into head up a missions and planning department was nothing short of brilliant. He had emasculated our foreign intelligence service, evidently just as it was about to make some major discovery harmful to the Soviets. And pulling Owens with him out to Moscow was a stroke of genius. With his mentor running the operation, Yarnell would have had a totally free hand to do whatever he wanted. It made McGarvey sick to think how Yarnell had used Owens, and even sicker to think how wide open our embassy had to have been in those days.
But then, he thought, it was the nature of the business.
18
“Why did the Russians kick him out of Moscow?” McGarvey asked. “Seems to me he would have charmed them just as well as he had the Mexicans, unless the Russians were sore at him for his successes against CESTA.”
They’d gone inside where Owens had straightened out the kitchen and opened them each another beer before they settled back in the living room. The fire had died down a bit so the room wasn’t as hot as it had been before. The dog had not moved from its spot on the rug. McGarvey wondered if it was dead.
“He killed a man,” Owens said holding his beer bottle in both hands. His cheeks were rosy from the wind and chill air outside.
“In Moscow?” McGarvey asked, startled.
“In Moscow. He was one of ours. Darby just gunned him down. It wasn’t very pretty.”
“So the Russians kicked him out.”
Owens nodded. “I left a few months later.”
“In disgrace?”
“What?”
“I mean because of what Yarnell had done. You were his mentor, his chief of station.”
Owens laughed. “I don’t think you understand, McGarvey. Killing the kid was the culmination of a first-rate operation. Darby went home a hero and so did I. The only reason I stuck around was to pick up the few loose ends. And let me tell you, there were damned few of those. Darby ran a tight ship.”
McGarvey was amazed. He didn’t quite know what to say. “Yarnell was in his element.”
“You can say that again. He hadn’t been there thirty days when I arrived, and already he had developed half a dozen stringers, was having dinner and weekends on a regular basis with a couple of generals and a deputy on the Presidium staff, and he and our ambassador were on a first-name basis.”
“You would have been disappointed with anything less,” McGarvey suggested mildly.
“But it never ceased to amaze me. Remember, I’d been reading Darby’s field reports from Mexico all along, but this was the very first time I had ever been in the field with him. It’s one thing to read about it, it’s an entirely different matter to actually see it.”
McGarvey lit them both another cigarette. Owens seemed grateful for it. He started off in another direction.
“Those twenty-eight months we were together went by quicker than any two years plus I’ve spent, before or since. I was chief of station, but it was as if I were in school, at the feet of a master. Our product was brilliant. Beyond compare, that’s how they described our dailies in Langley. And I got most of the credit.”
True to form, Yarnell took a nice apartment near Moscow University, in a section of the city called Lenin Hills, though how he managed to get approval from the Soviet authorities to move up there was beyond most of the embassy staff. (To McGarvey’s question at this point as to why no one had become suspicious of Yarnell, Owens not only couldn’t provide an answer, he had no idea what McGarvey had implied.) There were a lot of comings and goings from his apartment at all hours of the day and night. Russians are great ones for having very late dinners, and then staying up half the night drinking spiced vodka and eating snacks and listening to music or poetry or dancing, or just talking. This was Yarnell’s sort of life, exactly, because he was a highly social animal. He was in his glory. Living life to the hilt.
Then came Operation Hellgate, which right from the beginning everyone realized was a horse of an entirely different stripe. This time Yarnell seemed somehow vicious. Mean. It was as if he were trying to get back at someone for something very terrible.
The business was something new, something disturbing, according to Owens. “Up to this point, Darby Yarnell had been the sort of a man who was able to clearly see both sides of any issue no matter its emotional content. He was a man who understood the little foibles and failings we’re all loaded with. But this time, McGarvey, it was different.”
In those days any major operation had to be first outlined in some detail and then sent to Langley for approval. Of course Yarnell’s projects always went through without a hitch.
“With Operation Hellgate, I sent him back to Washington to present his side of the issue in person,” Owens said.
“You were against it?”
Owens nodded.
“But in your estimation it was important.”
Owens looked up. “It was that—” He stopped a moment, apparently at a loss for the correct word. “It was that indecent.”
McGarvey was surprised at the choice. “He got his approval from Langley, I take it.”
“He was back within the week. And yes, he was given the green light. It was the only time I ever disagreed with him about a project. But I was overruled.” Owens shook his head sadly at the memory. “We talked about the operation, at least we did at first, until it actually got underway. Then we were very busy. He said that he agreed with me that it was a bad business, but that we hadn’t made the choice. It wasn’t either of us who was the traitor. But since it was staring us in the face—‘An opportunity of tarnished gold,’ he called it—we would be remiss in our duty if we didn’t go ahead. It was the basis on which, I suppose, Langley went along with him.”
Classified communications were taken care of by the air force and the National Security Agency, which loaned the embassy the operators and technicians and the cryptographic equipment. This was before the days when satellite communications were common. All long line, then. Classified information was sent via encrypted teletype to Washington. The Russians could and did intercept our encrypted messages all day long, but with the equipment we were using then, the codes were literally impossible to break. (It still held true today.) The days of the one-time cipher pad for anything other than confidential material were all but gone. An electronically-produced, totally random signal was mixed with the text, producing a signal that had no rhythm or meter, hidden or otherwise. Only a receiver in perfect synchronization with the transmitter could possibly reproduce the clear text. The system was called KW-26.
The equipment was foolproof, but its operators and technicians were not; they were only human after all. “Yarnell fingered one of the technicians, Staff Sergeant Barry Innes, as being on the KGB’s payroll. To this day I don’t know how he got his information, but the proof was there.”
Yarnell prepared several dummy messages out to Langley that consisted of information of potentially great interest to the Soviet Union’s delegation to the UN in New York. Within days of the transmission of the messages—transmissions done only during the time when Innes was on duty—the information was showing up on the Security Council in New York.
“We had a traitor in the embassy. A kid in the air force, clea
n shaven, wife and a small child living somewhere in California. I wanted to arrest him, send him home. He was young enough, I figured, he might have gotten out of prison with time enough left for some sort of a life.”
Innes, along with the other air force operators and technicians, as well as the marine guards, had quarters within the embassy itself. The rule was that single men and women resided automatically in the embassy—that is, military people, of course, not civilians—while married personnel had a choice. If they brought their spouses with them to Moscow, the assignment was for three years and they lived in town. If they came alone, leaving their mates at home, or if they were unmarried, Moscow was a remote assignment for only eighteen months, and they lived in the embassy. Innes came alone.
Within three months of his arrival, Yarnell had him cold, Owens said.
It was around Christmas that Yarnell proposed Hellgate, and he got back to Moscow a day before the twenty-fifth, leaving his wife all alone back in the States. By then, of course, she wasn’t quite as big an issue as she had been earlier. Too many other much greater things were happening in Moscow and elsewhere around the world for them to worry about someone’s wife, who, after all, was living a life of relative splendor and luxury at home. Who could feel sorry for a poor little rich girl?
“So you had your traitor cold,” McGarvey said. “Why wasn’t he arrested and sent home for trial? Operation Hellgate was a success.”
“You don’t understand,” Owens said. “Just proving that the kid was a traitor wasn’t what Darby had proposed. Not at all. Operation Hellgate was a hell of a lot more than that.”
Without Honor Page 18