The Witness Tree

by Brendan Howley

  “That’s very kind of you, Mr. Carlson, I’m sure,” she said primly, adjusting her teetering hat with a hand freed by the guard’s kindness. “It’s accounting. Very hard on the eyes, but I see your colleague is replacing the bulb over there.”

  Mr. Carlson made a disapproving face. “’Bout time and all, Miz Dulles. Which floor, please?”

  “Mine, Mr. Carlson.”

  “Moving up in the world, Miz Dulles, getting a floor all to your lonesome.”

  Eleanor kept the chat going back and forth with the talkative commissionaire until the elevator arrived. Carlson would have given her flowers if he’d had them, she thought to herself as the elevator door closed. She quickly punched the button for the ground floor and stepped into a Chinese delegation bound for a meeting upstairs.

  She walked carefully out the front doors, willing herself to disappear into the mid-morning strollers on the sidewalk. Across the street she could see a face in a cab window. The book bag chafed at her shoulder; Eleanor shrugged it back to a more comfortable spot.

  Her spectacles were slipping down her nose and she realized to her embarrassment that her forehead was tracked with perspiration. As she waved to Misha in the cab, one of the pilfered microfilm tins slipped down, threatening to fall out from under her hat. For one long, delicious moment she felt like a woman who’d had one champagne too many.

  LIV

  TEL AVIV

  SEPTEMBER 1947

  They met away from downtown, in a boarded-up plumbing supply store donated by a wealthy benefactor, the dusty metal shelving still there for cover; telephone technicians were inspecting Ben-Gurion’s house for microphones and wiretaps. Shiloah and Lifton smoked as they read through the neatly stacked piles of smudgy microfilm images, blown up on glossy paper, all of which Lifton’s people had sorted into orange crates. Amongst themselves they called the cache of Safehaven documents “the fruit market.”

  Working around the clock, they’d sorted the documents into subfiles that they’d delivered to the abandoned shop through the busy kitchen of the restaurant next door, wrapped in painter’s drop cloths. “We had to send to Athens for more photographic paper,” Sol Lifton said, grizzled with fatigue and nicotine. “That took two days. We didn’t have enough in the whole city to print all this.”

  He and two Agency colleagues had segregated the files into a dozen stacks. Lifton had pinned a long sheet of blank newsprint on the wall, filling that in short order with notes: their road map through the maze of paper. “What we have here is an archive of financial intelligence reports from all over the U.S. government,” he said as he lettered his chart, “at home and abroad. Quite a proposition. I must say, Reuven, this was a masterstroke, to ‘organize’ the entire investigation index.”

  Ben-Gurion entered without knocking and took in the secret sweatshop. “It’s a bargain at that, Reuven,” he said. “The Cabinet has agreed to proceed.” Ben-Gurion read at random a foreign exchange document from a Dutch bank. “Very imaginative, but such a scheme requires many banks, many intermediaries. How did the Nazis think they could keep these transactions secret?”

  Lifton was a cautious man but sure of his ground, another one Shiloah had unearthed on his travels, in the days when Lifton was working nights auditing hotels for an English accountancy firm. “The secret’s held because so many people are implicated,” he began. “Look at the names of the businesses involved, the banks, the law firms—one falls, they all fall,” he said, interlacing his fingertips. “Sure, it’s an open secret that the war meant nothing for some big businesses, but try to assemble a criminal prosecution against such men. No. These are the fingerprints of American business all over the Nazi finance system.”

  Ben-Gurion sat down at the table near the balcony double doors. He put down the sheaf of photographic paper and lowered his head into his hands, scratching at his mane of white hair. “What we could do is raise evidence to demand a bankers’ trial on the American side. It’d be true, but would the reaction in America influence the vote?” He rubbed his eyes, tired. “I’m running out of ideas.”

  “Our enemies will say we are in league with the Ruhr capitalists and anti-Soviet, David,” Shiloah countered, “because we’re shifting the blame that’s rightfully on German shoulders. And our friends will say we let the Nazis off lightly because we’re criticizing the Americans. No, we must be very, very careful. We make this move, we never get it back.”

  “Could sell the whole thing to the Russians and retire,” Lifton joked, straight-faced. “That’d put paid to the Nuremberg trials, bang, like that.”

  “From your mouth to God’s ear,” Ben-Gurion replied. “Or we could eliminate the middleman and bribe the English authorities here direct,” he muttered. “Look, what about carefully tipping the American Congress? We have friends there who know there’s more to the story than what’s in the newspapers.”

  “Take forever,” Shiloah said. “No, I think we burn someone who can help us now.” He held up a photostat of a Swiss lawyer’s letters of instruction from a New York law firm. “Our goal is to win this vote, no? Then we do what we have to, David. One of Sol’s assistants found this.”

  Holding the photostat up to the light, Ben-Gurion considered the lawyer’s letter, following the formal business German with the back of his fingertip. “I think I follow. This letter instructs certain account transfers, am I right?”

  “Correct, chief. The beauty of the letter,” Lifton said, “is that it tells us which amounts, from which bank to which bank. We can track a secret transaction, clear as day, from New York to the Nazi accounts in Zürich.”

  “And how the hell did the Americans get this?” Ben-Gurion was fascinated. “This is good, very good. Tell me it’s not a forgery.”

  Lifton shook his head no. “Don’t worry, chief. My boys found a dozen or so other letters like it, and half of them are identical instructions, for identical accounts.” He reached for a carbon copy Shiloah was holding. “Here’s a wiretap of a conversation between Zürich and one of the corresponding banks. The middlemen lost some business, they got annoyed. That’s what we think, from other correspondence. Straight-out jealousy, a leak to the competition’s enemy.”

  Ben-Gurion nodded. “Not a tactic strange to us, my friends,” he muttered. “Then why haven’t the Americans prosecuted their own people for this kind of thing?” he wondered. “Surely that’s enough to send a man to prison.”

  “Send you and me to prison, David, if we were caught, but not those people. That’s the point.”

  Ben-Gurion grunted assent. He was reading Lifton’s abstract again, his glasses halfway down the bridge of his nose. “Why did you mention the Russians a moment ago, Sol?”

  “We could use the votes they might swing our way, but they’re too few.”

  “Careful, David: once Stalin is in, it’s hell to get him out again,” Shiloah reasoned. “He’s not voting for us because he loves us: he wants to send in the Red Army if Palestine becomes a war zone. That’s his play.”

  Ben-Gurion put down Lifton’s abstract and thrust his hands into his trouser pockets. “We should blackmail the Pope,” he said slowly, “if what this file on the Vatican investments says is true.”

  They all thought about that for a moment, and then Lifton broke the silence with an uncharacteristically loud laugh and then they all laughed. “It’s true, all right, chief,” Sol agreed, “but we can’t take on the Vatican. Behind the Pope are forty million American Catholics. The Pope already stands against a Jewish Jerusalem.”

  Shiloah eyed Lifton’s list. “What’s the biggest swing bloc of votes, gentlemen? It’s right there on Sol’s list—the Catholic countries of Europe and South America.” He tapped the wall chart with his index finger. “If we break the Vatican’s hold on that bloc, we’re up a dozen, maybe even fifteen votes.” He turned to face Ben-Gurion across the table where the abstracts lay amid the ashtrays and teacups. “Fifteen votes. That’s enough for a win.”

  The other two looked a
t him. “And how are we going to do that?” Lifton demanded, his voice half an octave higher in disbelief. “You can’t be serious, Reuven. Blackmailing a Pope?”

  “Not the Pope in Rome, Sol. Another pope, an American one. There,” he said, pointing at the corporate officers on another piece of letterhead. He held the shiny photo of the document high, flexing it slightly, sarcastically. “Let’s start at the top, shall we? We’re going to build a case around that letter of instruction. We’ll need a file that’ll give the pope of Wall Street a heart attack when he opens the first page.”

  LV

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  OCTOBER 1947

  To use Donovan’s phrase, they were building the beast, now dubbed the Central Intelligence Agency. The workmen and floor polishers were knocking the newly acquired offices into shape; the phones had arrived that afternoon, a crate of them spilling straw in the corner of Allen’s office. Wisner had torn them open, impatient to test the lines. He and Allen had been talking for a good hour, canteen coffee cups on the desk and a fifth of Scotch alongside Allen’s pipe accoutrements. A girl in a cloth coat and hat, ready for home, had brought them a tray of cold cuts and departed. A wanderer looked in, dark-faced and quick, asking for someone who knew “Ed at the FBI,” shrugged at Allen’s apology, and left.

  “Who’s that?” Wisner asked around a mouthful of pumpernickel and salami.

  “One of Carmel’s finds. Personally knows half of Bulgaria, apparently.”

  “Oh. So the report’s coming along?”

  “I’m hiding the meaning rather well. When you’re writing for Congress,” Allen advised, “it’s the art of it, actually.”

  Allen looked over, awaiting Frank’s reply, but Wisner was busy staring, his face a study in irritation, at the gray cadaver of Jim Angleton, who’d appeared silently. “I wish he wouldn’t do that,” Wisner complained to Allen. “Makes me jumpy.”

  “Jim never knocks, do you, Jim?” Allen asked. “So what’s the latest from Gallup?”

  “Dewey’s ahead by eight percent and climbing. Could be a landslide, my man says.”

  “I’d like to think we had a future either way,” Wisner fretted.

  “Give it a rest, Frank, we’re home and dry. I’ve just finished cheering Jim Kronthal up, don’t you start.”

  “About the polygraphs, Allen,” Angleton breathed. “We need to resolve this before we go much further. I want to polygraph the entire intake, all two hundred of us.”

  Allen stopped reboring his pipe. “No,” he ordered. “Flat-out no. We’re having an immaculate conception here, and I don’t want Hoover or the military people involved. No.”

  “Everyone gets a free pass?” Angleton asked, eyes huge behind his thick lenses. “Even the ones with suspect contacts, ones might be a risk?”

  “Everyone. You can’t flutter nine out of ten, Jim, and alienate them in favor of the one you don’t. No: everyone’s in or everyone’s out. And they’re in. End of argument.”

  “First off, there’s no reason to believe—” Wisner interposed.

  Angleton cut across him: “There’s every reason to believe the Soviets would plant somebody in the first intake. Every reason. I’ll want a memo to cover that, Allen.”

  “Jim, you worry too much, really you do,” Allen chuckled. “You’d think it was the end of the world, counterintelligence-wise.”

  Angleton’s sepulchral face remained inscrutable. “It’s a mistake, Allen. I promise you.”

  “Jim, the day we both make a mistake about the same thing is the day I’ll hang up my deerstalker, all right? Let’s move on. We’re talking about moving money for the Ukrainians, any ideas?”

  “I’ll get back to you, yes,” Angleton replied, and faded out again, silently as he’d come.

  “Let’s have a lunch tomorrow, sort things out,” Allen called after him. “He’ll call. He always does,” he said to Wisner, who’d been watching.

  “He gives me the willies, sliding in and out of here,” Wisner observed, “the ghost of Ichabod Crane.”

  “An operatic personality,” Allen offered. “Cut him some slack: he’s the best counterintelligence mind we’ve got.”

  Wisner rolled his eyes. “Jim was born five hundred years too late: he should’ve run the Spanish Inquisition. Hell, if we don’t trust these guys, our very own, the guys we start with, who can we trust?”

  “Don’t give him ideas,” Allen said, chuckling again, as Carmel Offie’s laughter wheezed down the hall.

  “That’s it, won’t get a lick of work done now,” Wisner said, rolling his eyes again. A fresh gale of laughter, deeper. Kronthal, Allen recognized, he and Offie back from a liquid lunch somewhere divey—Offie loved slumming.

  A desultory three-way gossip session followed. Wisner, who found Offie a little too queer for his taste, struck up a long phone conversation as the others traded scuttlebutt about the European stations. So it was that Frank Wisner saw her first: the other three parleyed near Allen’s window, but Frank was on the phone, closest to the door. He looked up, snapping his fingers to silence the others.

  “Hello, Eleanor,” Allen said quietly. “How long have you been here?”

  “Long enough. Hello, Carmel. James.” Eleanor entered and nodded at Wisner, who’d pointedly put his hand over the phone then retracted it, speaking into the handpiece quite fast: “I can hear you, yes. One moment, I’ll call back. Yes. Not now.”

  “Long enough?” Allen asked.

  “Long enough. Can we speak?” Eleanor inclined her head down the hall.

  “Yes. Let’s go,” said Allen, his face dark. “Excuse me, gentlemen.”

  “Nice to see you all,” Eleanor offered as she stepped out ahead of Allen.

  Offie’s instinct was, as ever, to smooth: “You too, Eleanor. The tiles are done in the washroom, Allen. The boardroom’s got no carpets yet. To your left.”

  As Allen muttered, “I know where it is,” Eleanor glanced back. It’s true, she thought—they’re all in awe of him.

  Allen stared straight ahead, simmering. “How the devil did you get in?”

  “I told them who I was—no false name, no code words.” Eleanor poked him with an elbow, but Allen gave no notice. “Besides, I’m a colonel and a State Department political adviser—never mind my woman’s wiles. These things still count for something, even with your gatekeepers.”

  “Soon fix that. Why have you come?” His fingers dived into his pockets; change tinkled.

  They’d reached the boardroom, slick with fresh paint and new furniture mottled with packing dust. Neither took a chair. “My, Allen, questions, questions,” Eleanor chided. “Not: How are you, Ellie? How is Sophie? What news from Vienna? No: why have I come? You look harried.”

  “It’s a busy time around here.”

  “Then perhaps you should take a break,” Eleanor suggested coolly. “Take the family somewhere. Look at you, pale as a pigeon. You haven’t seen sunlight in weeks.”

  “What’s brought you here, Eleanor? Out with it.” Allen pulled at his ear, wary.

  “You’re the man with your finger on the secret pulse. Don’t tell me I know something you don’t? That’d be something to tell the boys back at the office.” Eleanor considered him: Whatever I had of him, I’ve lost him, I’ve lost him.

  “What’s the point here, Ellie?”

  “You stay. You get to stay.”

  “Stay? What on earth do you mean?”

  “That’s the first part.”

  “First part of what?” Allen stared: she had his attention now.

  “Listen. You’ll learn something.”

  “I’m listening.”

  The anger shimmered off him and for a moment Eleanor thought she’d lose her nerve. She bit the inside of her cheek and took a breath. “The second part is that the UN will vote to partition Palestine.”

  Allen laughed in disbelief. “Hate to burst your balloon, Madame Secretary of State, but word is the Zionists stand a dozen votes short.”

 
“I’m sure they do. But I’m right.”

  “You’re off your socialist rocker. Wisner just got off the phone with Foster. Foster says it’s touch and go. The Zionists lost the straw vote yesterday by twelve votes.”

  “You get to stay. And the vote passes. I’m going now.”

  He was more puzzled than angry now, the control back, the smoother, malleable Allen working up his charm. “Wait, you can’t leave it at that. What are you telling me?”

  “I’m keeping it in the family, Allen.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Gunter Neimann.”

  “I still don’t understand,” Allen repeated. “Who’s he?” He’d sprung his hands against his hips, echo of the boy’s pose before a tantrum.

  “I guess you can’t remember everyone in your line of work, can you?” Eleanor murmured. For a moment she pitied him. “It’s a secret. You love secrets? Well, I love you. I love you, Allen. I don’t like you much, but I do love you.”

  “What? What’s wrong?”

  “I say I love you, you say what’s wrong. Why can’t anyone in this family speak their heart?”

  Eleanor left him there. She took the back stairs down, her big handbag jostling against her side, shield against whatever fresh vitriol Allen and his sergeants brewed amongst themselves in their new rooms. A thought came to Eleanor as she caught her breath, felt her throat relax: The opposite of love isn’t hate—it’s power. She had seen that equation just then, there in the sharpness in Allen’s eyes as he calculated all he might lose.

  LVI

  NEW YORK

  NOVEMBER 22, 1947

  Along, silent elevator ride up to the boardroom. Neither said a word as the car clanked past the lower floors. This is how a hanging feels, Misha thought. And I volunteered for this. The dossier under his arm seemed to weigh many pounds; it might fall through the floor and burn into the bowels of Rockefeller Center if he loosened his grip.

  “Done this before?” Misha said at last, as they watched the elevator’s indicator arm sweep upwards.