“Dr. Wilson,” Gabriel began, “worked in a restricted zone in a building complex at Fort Detrick that housed chemical, biological, pathological, and bacteriological laboratories. Aerosolized anthrax was tested on rhesus monkeys in a sealed cloud chamber. Effective toxicity levels were determined by measuring how many monkeys died and how quickly. Anthrax was weaponized using bomblets as a delivery system, but tests of lethal delivery were also made with anthrax-contaminated combs, toothbrushes, feathers, and fleas.”
Gabriel pointed at the memo, which the three men opposite occasionally consulted, but otherwise they listened.
“Wilson participated in Operation Harness in 1949 off the coast of Antigua. Anthrax, brucellosis, and tularemia were released into the air over several thousand animals that were held in cages floating on barges off shore. Most of the animals died. In September 1950, Wilson participated in Operation Greenhouse, a Navy-sponsored simulation of germ warfare in San Francisco Bay. Serratia marcescens, a harmless bacterium physiologically similar to anthrax, was released over the bay to measure the rate of dispersion on an urban population. A similar test was done in the New York subway system when a lightbulb filled with contaminated material was dropped on the tracks.”
Gabriel slid a photograph across the table. It showed a hospital room crowded with sick children. “This was among the documents that I found. I don’t know how they got this or who took it. It’s captioned ‘Pingrang, 1952.’ Bacterial weapons were deployed on the Korean Peninsula that year, and classified documents show that germ warfare was organized under the rubric ‘psychological warfare’—a few cases of plague and anthrax to strike fear in the general population. Railroad stations, public buildings, and schools were targeted. There were hundreds of reported deaths from sudden, acute respiratory failure.”
Gabriel waited for the director to look up from the photograph before he continued. “In mid-1952, Wilson was promoted to deputy chief, Special Operations, and his new administrative duties gave him greater visibility into all Special Operations projects. He joined the Artichoke Committee, a joint Army–CIA group that reviewed extreme interrogation techniques, some that used behavior-altering drugs. Artichoke interrogations were done in teams of three, and they were performed on subjects in the basement of the CIA’s Berlin Headquarters—Soviet double agents and ex-Nazis who’d become security risks. Interrogations used sodium amytal, sodium pentothal, and LSD in conjunction with waterboarding and electric shock. Artichoke interrogations explored whether a drugged individual could be made to overcome moral scruples. They hoped to find a way for the prisoner to assassinate a target and then wipe out the man’s memory of the murder with hypnosis and electric shock.”
“Where is this going?” the director interrupted. “You’re straying.”
“This goes to the question of motive,” Gabriel said. “Weisenthal recruited Wilson to the Artichoke Committee in 1952. He was a key part of the committee’s work. Wilson was brought into the CIA the same year—a fact withheld from the subcommittee.”
Gabriel hadn’t intended to raise the director’s perjury, but the words had come out, and he saw the director’s eyebrow raise. Gabriel looked at one man, then the other two, judging their complicity. He continued in a respectful voice. “We know he worked with Weisenthal, and we know Phillip Treacher was there, too. I know others were involved, and I believe they’re still in the Agency. We know what Wilson did, where he traveled, and I know from my conversations with him that summer that he was disturbed by his work and by what he saw in Berlin. Connect the dots. Harsh interrogations. Anthrax. Korea. Wilson’s doubts.
“If Wilson knew we used anthrax in Korea, it would have been a state secret. We had signed the Geneva Protocol, which banned biological weapons in armed conflict. If in the process of doing his work he is given LSD and becomes unstable . . .” Gabriel paused. “We have a motive.”
“You’re speculating,” Coffin said.
“That’s what we do. We take a hypothesis and test it. We now know from forensic analysis of Wilson’s remains that he was dropped—thrown—from the window. We know the means, and, gentlemen, let me suggest, we have the motive. We need only the murderers.”
Gabriel looked at the quiet faces across the table, senior men with long careers in the Agency. He tried to look into their minds to judge who was surprised and who had already known.
“Good work,” the director said abruptly. “It’s what I wanted.” He took his original of the memo and Coffin’s carbon copy and ran them through the shredder.
The director cleaned his glasses, rubbing the lenses with his yellow silk tie. His eyes were tired from the late hour and the burden of the job. He replaced his glasses and leaned toward Gabriel. “I think you’ve done enough.”
Gabriel heard an order.
“Look,” the director said, “you’ve done what I asked you to do. I am grateful, but we’re not the FBI. We collect intelligence. It’s the FBI’s job to investigate criminal activity and prosecute wrongdoing. I can’t put the Agency at risk. You can’t let your friendship with Wilson corrupt our work.” The director paused. “Are there copies?”
“No. No copies. Is this the White House speaking?”
“Does it matter? Our world has changed. So many shapes of crimes confront us, and everywhere right and wrong change places. I’ll handle it from here.”
Gabriel had considered this moment, prepared for it, and he’d come to terms with the possibility that there was a limit to their tolerance for truth. He was not prepared for what happened next.
The director pushed an envelope across the table.
“It’s your letter of resignation. You gave it to me before you agreed to stay on. I rejected it then. It’s time to accept it.”
Gabriel looked at Coffin and Mueller, and their flat affect proved them complicit with the decision.
“You’re firing me?”
“It’s best you leave the Agency. It’s what you wanted.”
“It’s not finished.”
“It’s finished for you,” Mueller said. “Let it go.”
“We need just one man to speak up, and the whole rotten cover-up will unravel. We’ll know who authorized it.” Gabriel looked at the three grim faces. “Weisenthal is ready to talk.”
The director brought his eyes back to Gabriel and considered his claim. “I asked you to stay on, and I’m grateful that you did.” His hand swept across the portrait gallery of his predecessors. “They were all fired. I’ll be gone too one day. I’ve studied each of their departures. You know what I learned? It’s better to choose the timing of your leaving than to be forced out. So, let me repeat what I said. I accept your resignation. James and George will see you out of the building. I’ll handle it from here.”
The director stood, Coffin and Mueller followed, and Gabriel rose slowly. He didn’t take the director’s offered handshake. At the door he felt no obligation to hold back. Dismay. Disappointment. Anger. His voice had a prosecutor’s indignant conviction.
“Once they drugged him, they put themselves in a corner. They destabilized him, and they made him angry. He wanted to quit. We couldn’t exile him or put him in prison.”
Gabriel looked at the three men. “That was the story of the Agency then. We could do whatever we wanted because we were fighting the Soviet Union. The Western notion of conscience is that you live your choices and you can’t hide behind an institution. You take responsibility for yourself. Wilson went into the office that Monday and said, ‘I’m quitting.’ Instead he was taken to the Hotel Harrington. We killed one of our own.”
GABRIEL ENTERED HIS small office to retrieve his raincoat and hat. He paused at the threshold and looked back. The sum of his work lay in his locked file cabinet and combination safe. It was no longer his to worry about.
“One minute,” he said to Coffin and Mueller, who chatted with his secretary, just out of view.
Gabriel took his Yale diploma off the wall and removed the cardboard backing. From the waste
basket, he took the carbon paper he’d used to type his memo and he folded the carbons behind the onion skin, replacing the backing.
“All set,” he said to Coffin, raincoat over one arm, diploma in hand. Nothing else was his to take. He leaned toward his secretary, and he could tell by her concerned eyes that she knew he was leaving the Agency.
“You’ll be fine,” he said. “Everything stays except this.” He tapped the diploma. “It will hang in my office at home.”
“I WON’T NEED this,” Gabriel said to the guard at the lobby’s security desk, handing over his badge. He allowed himself to be patted down.
He turned to his colleagues while the guard’s hands felt the seams of his cuffs and the inside of his raincoat. He had made the final crossing of the lobby with its huge CIA shield set into the polished stone floor. A vigilant eagle perched on a crimson field decorated with radiating compass points. Every day he’d come and gone through the lobby without considering its reaching height, but now on his final passage, he looked back. The biblical quote chiseled into the sheer wall of Vermont marble came to him with numbing irony. And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.
“It’s something to aspire to,” Gabriel said dryly to Mueller.
The security guard, whom Gabriel had greeted in a friendly manner each evening, and had comforted when his son was killed in Vietnam, was respectful in his duties but less thorough than he should have been.
“Hope to see you again, Mr. Gabriel.”
GABRIEL AGREED TO attend a small farewell gathering to honor his long, loyal service. A private room in the Army and Navy Club was taken a few days later. Glenlivet flowed generously among the dozen intelligence officers who’d come to toast Gabriel. Beneath the boasts and casual banter there were gripes about low morale, the new rules, and the Agency’s shabby treatment in the press. The many indignities formed a defensive bond among the hard-drinking old guard. Stories were told, exaggerations called out, and the small private room filled with the camaraderie of men who shared a secret life. Everyone felt the changing times—and they lamented the closing of Harvey’s, where they’d always drunk recklessly.
Coffin struck his glass to start the speeches, and he went first. He was not known for his wit, and he didn’t surprise the men in the room, all of the same generation who shared the same jokes, the same fears, the same Cold War outlook. Everyone knew that James Coffin possessed an understanding of the Soviet Union’s intelligence operations that was superior to anyone else’s in Washington or London. He understood the nature of threat.
Coffin went on too long, and his ad hominem remarks were more warning than toast. A sermon of sorts. “Ends don’t justify the means,” he said, repeating what they’d all heard him say before, “but they’re all we have.” It was a dark speech.
George Mueller spoke next. He said very little, but unlike most of the officers present, he was stone sober. He cleared his throat and raised his glass of water. He spoke with the calculated bonhomie of a man reasoning with a drunken friend. “Don’t hold it against him that he’s leaving us to cash in on his Agency years. He’s smarter than all of us.”
“What’s the best thing you can say about Jack?” someone interrupted.
“The best thing?” Mueller smiled. “He’s a sanctimonious, self-righteous son of a bitch.”
Gabriel felt the heat of attention in the laughter, and he twice waved off a request to speak, but at the third goading chorus he reluctantly stepped up to the bar. He smiled wearily at the boozy crowd, wearing their attention uneasily, and nodded at Dora Plummer, who held her own among the hard-drinking men. Gabriel gave a brief speech that without it being his intention became a grim warning about the White House’s prediction that détente was a new era. “The only new thing,” he said, “is our naiveté.” He had their ears. He chastised Washington politics for corrupting the Agency’s noble mission, and he warned that vengeance rose from the rubble of the house of justice.
i i i
IT WAS GABRIEL’S party, so he stayed to the end. When he went for his raincoat, Mueller went for his as well. He looked at Gabriel formally, standoffishly, and he wore his sobriety comfortably. Their eyes met, but neither said anything for a long moment. Mueller held his umbrella in one hand and offered advice in a caring voice, “You’re out in the cold now, Jack. Be careful.” Mueller left the restaurant and went into the night, a tall man in his mackintosh.
When Gabriel was ready to leave, Coffin accompanied him. Rain had begun early and been steady for hours, and the bleak day had become a dark, brooding night.
The two colleagues walked along the sidewalk, shoulders hunched against the drizzle. Neither had an umbrella, yet they endured the weather till they reached Coffin’s black Mercedes. Water fell on their hats, but neither wanted to accept the end of the evening. Two souls joined by secrets, giving up the past for some unknown future. Once outside, Gabriel would become a stranger to everyone who’d come to see him off. The two men chatted, not because they had anything to say but because they were reluctant to separate.
“Morale is low. His new rules to make us a modern Agency are changing our world for the worse,” Coffin said. “Good men like you, Jack, are leaving us. We came here to make a difference in the battle against Godless Communism and to fight enemies who bide their time waiting for an opportunity to strike. And you were right when you said détente is a fog of false optimism. The good men who would come here to work, like we did, now go to Wall Street, or management consulting, or the State Department.”
Coffin spoke the rival Agency’s name with disdain. His voice had a noticeable English affectation that he had acquired in London during the war years. Nor had he given up his bespoke English suits, or his black Homburg, which shaded his face and kept off the rain. Gabriel had always found Coffin a quirky man, a dangerous man, but his ability to hold forth fluently in five languages always charmed.
“Perhaps we’d think better of Wilson if he’d left behind a few words about his doubts,” Coffin said. “We made a hero of Nathan Hale, and he was a lousy spy. He arrived at his rendezvous in Manhattan late and the British quickly found his secret writing in his shoe. We’d call him incompetent today, but he was well-spoken—and it’s his words that inspire us—even if he was a lousy spy. One life to give, or lose, depending on what you want to believe. We look for our heroes in the most unlikely places.”
Gabriel thought Coffin looked infinitely tired and sad. He saw him glance behind to see if they were alone.
Coffin smiled at Gabriel. “The Wilson case is over. You are wise to move on. Wise not to attempt the impossible.”
Coffin again looked to make sure they were alone. “There is something you shouldn’t have, but if you found it accidentally, it would be yours.”
An envelope fell to the sidewalk. Gabriel stooped and put the envelope in his pocket. The light drizzle had gotten heavier, and it brought the meeting to a quick end.
GABRIEL WAS SEATED in his Volvo when he opened the envelope. It was a copy of the director’s letter recommending Gabriel for the Distinguished Intelligence Medal.
Self-righteous indignation came over him, which, even days later, when he had reflected on the moment, irritated him. The gentle push out the door, the good words said like a eulogy to a dead man, and now the medal. Perhaps it was nothing more complicated than his desire to know who pushed Wilson out the window, and certainly that was part of it, but as he reflected, another answer came to him. It was a simple case of pique. He was being pandered to by men who wanted him to stop.
Gabriel crumpled the letter in his hand.
19
Bartholdi Fountain
That is where Jack Gabriel should have left it, but he didn’t. Once pique had taken him in her angry embrace, he couldn’t ignore Weisenthal’s request that they talk again. It was that simple. Curiosity and irritation struck him when he was reading the morning newspaper, or while he tended his flower beds. The feeling came to him suddenly, without warn
ing, on the toilet, or when he concentrated on stubborn chickweed among his dianthus. He looked up suddenly, angry.
It was for this reason that he also took Coffin’s call late one night and agreed to meet the head of Counterintelligence away from Langley. “The Botanical Gardens,” Coffin had said. “I believe you know the place.”
Claire had answered the phone and presented it to him with a skeptical expression. “He says you know him, but he won’t give his name.”
Gabriel was in his backyard garden struggling with a stubborn, deeply rooted dandelion when he remembered the querulous conversation from the night before. He was kneeling on the hard-packed soil, trowel in hand, feeling the rain begin. This was now his morning routine. He got up early in the predawn darkness, as he had done every morning during his career, and when the hour to leave for the office approached, disquiet settled in. He felt a flatness to his day, an emptiness after Claire left for work and Sara ran for the school bus. He pondered what it meant to be fired. Yes, his resignation had been accepted, but he’d been escorted out of the building.
Gabriel tugged at the root, loosening the soil with his trowel. I have what you want, Coffin had said on the phone. Afterward, Claire’s questions. What does he want? “To talk.” Talk about what? “Business.” She had gazed at him disbelievingly. You’re out of work.
Gabriel took the uprooted dandelion and tossed it on the compost pile. He got great satisfaction from the simple tasks of gardening, and the work put his mind at ease. He enjoyed ridding the beds of choking weeks. All around him there was delicate flowering beauty. What’s up? The question echoed in his mind, as did Coffin’s response. I’d prefer not to talk on the phone.
Gabriel stood and brushed earth from his pants. At the kitchen door he kicked off his work shoes and glanced at the wall clock. One hour before he was to meet Coffin.
Gabriel sat at the kitchen table and took the index card from his wallet. Black lines scored Dulles, Wisner, Edwards, and Ainsley, which left Treacher, Coffin, Mueller, and Weisenthal. He looked at the card for the first time in weeks. First the call from Weisenthal and now from Coffin. He added another name at the bottom in careful block letters: the director’s. It was wrong to leave him off even if he had been stationed in Berlin in 1953. Denials and cover-ups flowed from Wilson’s death, and the director’s mission to protect the Agency was reason enough for him to be complicit in the crime.
The Coldest Warrior Page 15