The Third Bullet - Страница 39

I particularly loathed him. He made anti-communism, to which I had devoted my life, stupid, coarse, loud, ignorant, rabble-rousing, and suspect to the intelligentsia, a particularly fickle audience with fear of fighting deeply ingrained. He would be one more reason for them to withdraw from duty and strength; a brute, a bully, a screamer, a sprayer of saliva. No one with an IQ over 100 seemed to care for him.

There was a deeper issue. It was pure policy, and here I apply the New Criticism and speak no more of the general’s manifold unpleasantries and vulgarities. Stripped of all psycho-historical-stylistic nuances, his sense of anti-communism was inimical to mine, that is, ours. He was macho and wanted to dominate by daring and, if it came, winning a military confrontation. That millions would die in such a conflagration meant nothing to him. His was the iron fist in the iron-glove approach, as it worshipped domination, destruction, and enslavement as the highest, purest form of triumph.

Our gestalt was far different. We feared the big war, the full-theater nuclear exchange, the dark piles of rubble, corpses, and poison air that such a crusade would unleash. We felt that to defeat communism, we had to co-opt the soft left and offer sensible alternatives to the billions of people who yearned for freedom from colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. We fought surrogate wars, culture wars, if you will. We funded socialist parties all over Europe, we sponsored fashionably lefty lit mags like Encounter to woo the intelligentsia to our more reasonable approach, we promoted American jazz and expressionism as a way of winning the hearts and minds of the world population to our gentler persuasions. If we had to resort to force, it would not be the 24th Division’s five thousand Patton tanks taking on the T-54s in a new, more tragic Kursk on the plains before the Fulda Gap, and not another iteration of Fat Man and Little Boy providing instant genocide to half the world. It would be a coup here, a labor union strike there, at most an assassin’s bullets. We were influencers, nudgers, political engineers, reluctant snipers. We were not soldiers.

“So what’s the problem, Win?” somebody shouted.

“Okay,” said Win, “here’s the problem. Do I A) snitch this guy out to the Dallas police, or B)”-Win let it build, master comedian-“buy him a new box of ammo?”

The place exploded in laughter, as well you might imagine. No one laughed harder than quiet Hugh, leaning against the sofa, nursing a gin and tonic, tamping his pipe, joining heartily in the merriment.

I was aware that I had the answer to Win’s dilemma. I would buy Lee Something Something a new box of ammo.

It was all different in those days. The building was new and smelled of paint and fresh spackle and putty. It had yet to acquire the dinge that old bureaucratic sites acquire, the grease spots where generations of sleepy clerks have rested their heads, the scuff marks on the linoleum, the bathrooms leaky and stinky and stained with God knows what, all the caulking having begun to rot, the light uncertain and sure to go bad when most needed. No, the new campus smelled delicious, seemed in synchronization with the spirit of Camelot, and also symbolized the official putting of the Bay of Pigs, our last scandal, behind us. It was all beige with muted carpeting, and we had definitely entered the miracle age of the fluorescent lighting system, so it was always illuminated in the stark light of scientific truth, which was oddly comforting.

You looked out windows still dustless and smearless and saw green trees everywhere, as the Virginia countryside, cascades of leaf, seemed boundless and lush. In memory, at least, it never rained a lot in Camelot. From some high north-oriented windows, you could see a flash of the broad Potomac, and on a sunny day, as I remember most were, that plate of liquid turned blue itself off the sky overhead. Trees, walks, freshness, ripeness everywhere, cheer and high morale, pep and vim and vigor, hope and audacity, the perfect background for my treachery in the most heinous yet most successful intelligence operation in history, the Earth’s or any other planet’s.

I had to get that transcript and learn who Lee Something Something was. It was not hard to do. A few days into the next work week, I sent Win Stoddard some kind of meaningless though TOP SECRET/EYES ONLY file with a cover note requesting his input on the proposed project. I cannot remember what it was, and I knew that even with the melodramatic stampings on it, Win would routinely stuff it in his desk drawer for a few days before he got around to considering it. I waited a day, then, timing it perfectly, managed to intercept Win on his way to the elevator at 5:04 on a Wednesday afternoon. I could tell by the speed of his gait-I’m not a spy for nothing, you know! — that he was in a hurry.

“Win, say, sorry to trouble you, that report I sent, did you have a chance to look at it?”

“Not yet, Hugh, sorry. This, that, the other thing.”

“I kind of need to get it circulated. Could I have it back and ship it on to the next boy on the list? If Cord calls a meeting on it, I’ll brief you.”

“Sure, Hugh. First thing tomorrow.”

“Damn, I’d like to get it to one of Wisener’s people tonight.”

“Okay, look, I’m in a rush.” He smiled, reached into his pocket, and pulled out his ring of keys. “Here, the little one, it’ll open the drawer right away. Help yourself. You can give me the keys back tomorrow. I’ve got drinks with a senator at the Army-Navy Club, and I’m already behind.”

“Good man,” I said, and I exchanged with him the one secret I will not violate in this account, the Skull and Bones handshake.

As I said, easy, too easy. Security then was a twenty-two-cent hardware lock on a file drawer made of tin-can alloy. No computers, no magnetic striped cards, no monitoring video cameras, nothing in the beige hallways suggesting war or aggression or intelligence, just a fairly messy if broad office that could have housed an insurance company or a newspaper or a driver’s license agency. It had no spy-movie-cliche clubbiness and never did. This was way before the age of computers, and we had not gotten electric typewriters in; everything was on paper, paper was the fuel that we fed into the flames of the Cold War.

Win, being a senior staffer, had a cubicle with three walls of privacy, which made my task somewhat easier, not that it wasn’t easy to begin with. Only a few staffers lounged about, none of them paying much attention to a familiar figure such as mine, and I opened his drawer and found my report and removed it, then pivoted slightly, opened two more drawers, and found what I was looking for in the second one, TOP SECRET/EYES ONLY meaninglessly stamped askew over the title PHONE TRANSCRIPTS/MEX CITY/SOV EMB and a ref to master file RP/K-4556-113M. I slipped this document behind my own legal document, locked everything up, and went back to my desk. I eased it into my briefcase for study at home, but not before seeing for the first time the name that would become so indelible to the lens of history in such a short time. And thus I met LEE HARVEY OSWALD.

My first encounter with him that night, after Peggy and I had enjoyed an old-fashioned and put the boys to bed and she retreated to her boudoir and I to my study, was not compelling. It was, in fact, repellent. I read through the interview transcripts recorded September 27 and 28, 1963, at the Soviet embassy, rm. 305G, at 1130 the first day and 1315 the next.

KGB: And why do you wish a visa?

LHO: Why, sir, I renounce capitalism and wish to raise my family in a society that values the teachings of Marx and the struggles of the workingman.

KGB: But you spent 21/2 years with us, Mr. Oswald, and you seemed at a certain point to have your fill of the teachings of Marx and the struggles of the workingman.

LHO: Sir, that was not my fault. I was undone by jealous people who hated me for my intelligence, for marrying the most beautiful woman, for the heroic will they sensed within me, as the great Lenin and Stalin were envied and hated by petty rivals!

I recognized almost everything I despised in a man. He was arrogant, which, combined with his manifest stupidity, made him particularly appalling. He was pugnacious, bellicose, yet quick to retreat and start sucking up aggressively. To watch the crude ploys of his personality over the play of the interview with Boris and Igor (in Agency argot, all Russian operatives, even if their names were known, as these were, went by the noms de guerre of Boris and Igor) was somewhat dispiriting. He’d throw himself at one until he ran into resistance, and then he’d throw himself at the other. On and on it went. They didn’t have to play Mutt and Jeff with him, only Mutt and Mutt.

From what I gathered-not having seen our files on him or the FBI’s-he was some kind of epic failure, having bungled every job ever handed to him, having offended every boss who ever hired him, having betrayed every friend who ever reached out to him. He had that classic ineffective personality, all front and bluster backed by nothing of substance, bravado for show, cowardice for content, a braggart and a phony, and I guessed that all he claimed for accomplishments would turn out to be lies, as they did. Throw in some other defects: an inability to concentrate, an exaggerated sense of grievance, an IQ that would be classified “dull normal,” no outstanding compensatory talent, and the little man’s classic resentment of all things in the universe larger than himself. He would be both a bully and a coward, a liar and a cheat, without charm or charisma, prone to true belief in nonsensical goals; in all, a human wreck waiting to happen. That would be my department.