It’s a peculiar way to run an investigation,” said Nick.
Swagger couldn’t think of an answer. His hip had been sewn up, a process that essentially involved tying two slabs of scar tissue together with hemp thread, the highest, strongest magnitude, with a needle that looked like a stainless-steel flagpole; he’d been loaded with antibiotics, and the State Department, with FBI intervention, had found space for him to return from Moscow, quite the worse for wear, aboard its weekly diplomatic flight. Complaints had been filed; FBI agents were not permitted to work undercover in Moscow, much less shoot up parks with well-known gangsters, leaving bodies all over the ground. If the new director hadn’t been so busy giving speeches and interviews, he might have objected and brought heat and smoke on Nick, not his favorite to begin with, but he missed the boat on this one, so for the time being, it went officially unremarked upon.
Now Swagger sat in his living room in Idaho, hip sore and swaddled in bandages, in the silence of his disapproving wife and daughter, while Nick upbraided him.
“It’s not the diplomatic embarrassment I care about. I’m too old to give a damn about that. But this technique you’ve come up with is pretty spectacular. You find a target. You run at it in full aggression, guns blazing, daring it to destroy you. It makes that attempt, and somehow, by luck, talent, whatever, you survive and proceed to learn what can be learned from the assassins whom you’ve just killed. Does it ever occur to you that you’re too old for this kind of shit, that sooner or later your luck is going to run out, and when that happens, it will be tragic, as well as a mess for all involved?”
“It never occurs to him!” Jen hollered from the kitchen. “He is self-destructive and stupid.”
Bob didn’t answer her either; he couldn’t. “I didn’t plan on the gunfight,” he explained to Nick. “That was their idea. It came, we dealt with it, and we prevailed. We were armed, we reacted faster than they expected. We won the fight to the action curve. Honey, can you get me some more coffee?”
“Get it yourself,” came the call from the kitchen.
“I’d say your wife is a little perturbed.”
“Can you get Nick more coffee?”
“He can get it himself too.”
“There you have it,” said Bob. “At any rate, I feel we made substantial progress. I feel I have cleared the brush away from any high-level Soviet involvement in this thing, and that any information that was in play in ’63 may have originated in the Soviet embassy in Mexico City, but it was available to other parties.”
“Meaning Agency.”
“They were the ones who were listening.”
“Now you want to focus on the Agency, 1963.”
“Yeah, I know, there’s not much left of that place at that time. It was so long ago. Everybody’s dead. Still, if people in the Agency knew Oswald took a shot at Walker, which they could have learned from their intercepts, that made certain things possible. They used the same model in 1993 in their operation against Archbishop Roberto-Lopez. Manipulate a patsy into place with a known rifle, engineer some sophisticated ballistic deceit, have the backup shooter make the kill shot that the patsy couldn’t be trusted to make, then betray the patsy. It was the same goddamn thing.”
“It’s a lot of could haves, might haves, possiblys, and maybes,” said Nick.
“There was nothing possibly or maybe about the bullet Lon Scott was about to put into me, and there was nothing possibly or maybe about the bullet you put into him in 1993. You tagged him before he tagged me, maybe by a second.”
True enough. Nick remembered the six-hundred-yard shot, the way the dust or debris vibrated into a puff when he put the bullet into the man and watched him slump back and disappear into his hide. Later, he remembered looking at him, crushed, so still, just wreckage. Great shot, somebody said. It wasn’t till later that Nick learned that Lon was wheelchair-bound, and though confined to the steel trap, had fought his way admirably to a righteous life, that is, until the end.
“The ops were similar, yes. But there’s something in Latin that means ‘Just because it came first, doesn’t mean it caused it.’ In other words, they could have planned 1993 on the model of what they thought happened in 1963 or what could have happened in 1963. Nothing that happened in 1993 proves anything about 1963.”
“It’s too goddamn provocative to be left alone. Agree with me on that. That’s the favor I’m asking. You’ve come this far. It’s worth a hard look, and people seem to be trying to kill me because I’m taking that hard look. And you remember the 1993 people even better than I do. One in particular.”
“I remember him,” said Nick, thinking of the frosty figure of a man called Hugh Meachum, who supposedly represented the “Buddings Institute of Foreign Policy” but clearly spoke for a larger, more secretive entity when he tried to convince Nick to testify against Bob.
“So. . are you going to help me?” asked Bob. “I know you’ve gone way out on a limb, but the fact that twice, high-priced, highly connected killers have tried for me, and that previously one of them killed James Aptapton, is evidence that we’re close to something.”
Nick shook his head.
“I know you’ve never really believed in this,” said Bob. “I’m not sure I do either. But I don’t know what to do except push ahead. Here’s one idea. The people who tried to take Stronski and me out were from an outfit called the Izmaylovskaya gang, known to be the most violent of the Russian mobs. They seem to be, by reputation, connected to an oligarch named Viktor Krulov, very powerful international presence, that sort of thing. Could we run a deep cyber-search of Krulov? See what connections he has to American businesses. My assumption is that whoever hired the Izzys had to do so under the auspices of Krulov. So if we get a shake-out on Krulov’s business affiliations in the U.S., we’ll know who was capable of making such an arrangement. There’s also one named Yeksovich. No, no, dammit, Ixovich. Weird name, huh? He owns some gun companies, and that might tie him to arms exports that might involve criminal activity and possibly the Izzies.”
“Yes, I will look into Krulov and Ixovich.”
“Okay, the next thing is Hugh Meachum.”
“He died in 1993.”
“Officially. That has to be looked at carefully.”
“I have. Unlike John Thomas Albright, whose life as Lon Scott was clumsily hidden, everything about Meachum’s death is perfect. All t’s crossed, all i’s dotted. I looked very carefully at the public documents, and they are complete,” said Nick.
“But he was a spy, one of the best. He would be good at that.”
“You can’t say that lack of evidence is evidence. Then it all goes crazy. That’s why all the conspiracy theories are bullshit. And I can show you his ashes.”
“Can his ashes be read for DNA?”
“No.”
“Aha!”
“Swagger, it proves nothing.”
“It was a joke.”
“He has three sons in the Washington area. They appear to be outstanding men, above reproach. I’m reluctant to engage them. Until we have something definite on Hugh Meachum, and we’re far from that, I have no plans to visit or otherwise agitate them. This is America; they are not responsible for anything their father may or may not have done.”
“Agreed,” said Swagger. “That would leave only other vets of Clandestine Services from the early sixties.”
“Most are dead. These are guys who lived hard. They fought the Cold War. And, it should be noted, won it. Paid a high price in alcoholism, divorce, breakdown, suicide, heart disease. Through the Retired CIA Officers Association, we have been able to locate only one, and he’s been institutionalized for over five years.”
“Agency records?”
“Hard to access unless you’ve got something to trade or hard data. You’ve done them favors, maybe you could get in contact.”
“I don’t know anyone there since Susan Okada died. And I hate to play that card.”
“I don’t blame you.”
“I have an idea, though.”
“You attack the CIA with an M-16. When you’re captured, you escape and recapture your capturers, and we interrogate them.”
“Exactly. That’s it. What could go wrong? No, no, it’s actually subtle.”
“This I gotta hear.”
Swagger flew to Washington a few days later. It was a wretched flight through lightning and cloud, not smooth, and as usual, his mind would not settle down. He tried to nap, couldn’t, got up and went to the bathroom, earning displeasure from the flight attendant because the seat-belts sign was lit.
He returned, sat back, glad he had gotten an aisle seat, and tried once again to relax, tried again not to look at his watch or disturb the person next to him, Lee Harvey Oswald.
Of course not. Just a slumbering American male, teacher, salesman, lawyer, father, uncle, brother, what have you. Mr. Ordinary. Sleeping through it all.
But his hair was slightly disheveled, maybe that was it, like Oswald’s, and the next thing Swagger knew, he was back on the run with Ozzie Rabbit, who, despite the fact that he is the object of a city-wide manhunt and has only a limited amount of time to escape, has risked everything to return to the one place the police will expect him at any second to retrieve his revolver.
Why didn’t he have it with him in the first place?
A gun makes a man comfortable. Swagger remembered his own recent adventures with the.38 Super in Dallas and Comrade Ixovich’s GSh-18 in Moscow. Not using them, having them. The weight, the reminding pull on the waistline, the density, the pressure of the hard metal against the flesh. If you knew someone was going to try to kill you, that pressure was what let you operate. You were armed. You could fight. It was the enabler of all those who, for whatever reason, knew they would travel in violence’s way.
Oswald knew that up front. He had to know that. Yet he didn’t carry his pistol with him, even though it was designed for that reason.
It was, after all, a midframed revolver with a snub-nosed barrel, built explicitly for undercover use, for concealment. It’s the gun you carry when you can’t carry a gun. His ability to hide it really wasn’t an issue. While the gun-a Smith amp; Wesson.38 Special of the model known as M amp;P, originally chambered in the less powerful British.38 S amp;W round, then rechambered for the more powerful Special, its barrel cut down for that “detective” look-is no derringer, it can be easily concealed. After all, that is its point. For example, he could (as he did later) have tucked it in his belt, under a shirt or sweater. Since nobody was looking for it, it would have been an easily sustained deceit. Or he could have taped it to the barrel or the forestock of the Mannlicher-Carcano and concealed it in the same paper sack that held the rifle. He could have taped it to his own ankle. He could have hidden it in a sock and secured the sock to the barrel. Lacking tape, he probably could have hidden it in the pocket of loose-fitting pants and kept his hand on it to keep its weight from distending the trousers, attracting attention. He could have carried it in a readily secured lunch pail or bag.
He knew he was going to shoot the president of the United States. He knew he was going to be the object of a big-time manhunt. He knew armed policemen would be hunting and ultimately confronting him. He probably dreamed of a glorious death in a blazing gun battle at the hands of law enforcement as the fitting climax to his heroic sacrifice. Yet he leaves his snub-nosed revolver at home.
This struck Bob as either the product of a mind too deranged and incoherent to have brought off the assassination in the first place or, at the least, a curiosity.
The fact that he didn’t bring it was superseded only by the astonishment that he went back, an immense risk, to retrieve it.
So here was a question: what happened that made the revolver so valuable after the assassination? Clearly, something happened. Clearly, Oswald’s circumstances changed, and his thinking and tactics changed.
Swagger listed the things that his subconscious had brought to his attention: three odd behaviors in a few minutes, from 12:20 to 1 p.m., November 22. First, from two abject failures, Oswald makes a great recovery and shoots on the president. Then he arms himself for a ninety-foot walk across an empty room. With the manhunt tightening around him, he passes up a bus out of town and takes an incredible risk to get home and arm himself again when he could have been armed all along.
“Excuse me,” said his seatmate. “I have to go to the john.”
“Sure,” said Bob, and radio contact with station KLHO was lost.
The house looked like a book, a slim volume packed into a shelf of larger, more intimidating tomes. The others were mansions set back from the brick sidewalks of Georgetown, under the place’s looming elms, but this humble dwelling was like a ragged paperback squished between the heavier works. It was a wood-frame, with white shingles and a mansard roof and a sidewalk around back, where perhaps someone once built a modest garden. The shutters were black, the door was red, the number sixteen stood out in brass next to it, and when he knocked, a man his own age answered.
He put out his hand. “Sergeant Swagger? Or do you prefer ‘mister’?” he asked. The man appeared unlikely to have been shot at and looked comfortable in a professorial way; he wore corduroys, a blue button-down shirt, wire-rimmed glasses. His hair was a softly tousled white, as if on some bird’s breast.
“Mr. Gardner, thank you. Bob is what I prefer.”
“Please, then, come in. Call me Harry. I’m very pleased about this. I love to talk about Dad.”
“That’s what”-Bob mentioned a name-“told me.”
The fellow named was an editor in the Washington bureau of Newsweek, to whom Bob had arranged an introduction via a mutual friend, because the editor’s first book was called The New Heroes: The CIA’s First Generation of Cold Warriors, a multi-biography of some Agency stars of the postwar years.
Gardner led Bob into a well-furnished if old-fashioned living room, revealing the house’s surprising depth, then to a study lined with books. He taught at Georgetown University Law School some blocks away.
“Please, sit down. Coffee, something stronger?”
“No, thank you.”
“I’ve been told you almost won the Vietnam War single-handedly.”
“No sir. My one accomplishment was to come back more or less intact. All the truly brave men died over there.”
“I’m sure you’re too modest. I heard the word ‘greatness’ whispered.”
“The whisper should have been ‘lucky old crank.’”
Harry laughed. “Very good answer. Anyway, Dad. You wanted to know about Dad. He was a hero in his way as well.”
“I understand. What put me on to your father were the several references to him in the New Heroes book. He was Boswell, the biographer. He put together fictitious lives that the Agency forgers documented-legends, I guess they’re called in the trade-and as these fictitious men, our people went out and penetrated or at least operated in dangerous areas.”
“Dad never lost a man. No agent who went underground as a Boswell construction was ever arrested or tortured or imprisoned. He brought ’em back alive. He was very, very proud of that.”
“Yes sir. As well he might be.”
“But I have to tell you, Bob, Dad was also discreet. Believe me, I should know, I tried to write his biography. I went through everything. All his papers, all his notes, all his diaries, all his unfinished novels. The man committed nothing to paper, and when I was growing up, in this house, mum was the word. He never brought work home with him, which is another way of saying he was almost never home because he stayed in Langley eighteen hours a day.”
“I see.”
“I don’t know if I can be of help to you. I just don’t know a lot. Maybe if you told me specifically what it is you’re after.”
“Yes sir,” said Bob. “There is a slight possibility, and I can offer you no proof, that somewhere in the world a man is living under a ‘biography’ that your father assembled for him. It still hasn’t been penetrated, as an example of your father’s genius.”
“Wouldn’t it be in the Agency work-name registry?”
“If he exists, he would have managed to remove it. He was a sly dog, this guy.”
“All right. Can you tell me his name?”
“You’ll scoff. According to all documents, he died in 1993.”
“Hugh Meachum! Yes, Hugh was capable of something like that. Hugh was the best. My father loved Hugh. Hugh was the ideal agent: bold, cunning, unbearably brave, but nothing like James Bond, whom Dad loathed. Hugh was smart and never showy. He didn’t need recognition or glory. The work was reward enough. He was like a priest, a Jesuit, I think. Intense, not macho, dryly witty. Many a time Hugh has sat in the chair you’re sitting in now, drinking my mother’s wicked vodka martinis, his beautiful wife, Peggy, over there, Dad and my mother here on the sofa, the four of them laughing like hyenas.”
“Hugh was quite a guy, no doubt.”
“Anyhow, he would be, what, eighty-five or so if still alive.”
“Eighty-two. Born in 1930.”
“Old-school spy. Raised in France, spoke Russian, French, and German flawlessly, Yale lit major, turned out to have the gift for the game.”
“That sounds like him.”
“I can’t tell you anything specific about Hugh. Neither Hugh nor Dad would talk about specifics. They were so disciplined, it couldn’t have happened or been committed to paper. They distrusted journalists, even if at one time Dad was a journalist.”
“It’s more a mind-set. By that I mean your father had a technique for building a legend. It may have varied case by case, but it had tendencies. It had patterns. It had technique. Possibly you would know that, or you could have discerned it or inferred it. So if you could talk about that subject, you might give me some road signs I’d be on the alert for as I continue with my inquiry.”
“I’m not going to ask you what for. If you’re vouched for by the right people and you fought hard for your country, then I’ll take you at face value.”
“I would tell you if I could. Thanks for not making me cook up a lie.”
“If it’s about the war, then I can tell you Hugh was against it, that I know. I heard him arguing quite explicitly with Dad. He’d been over there early; I’m guessing he was involved in the plotting against Diem, so Hugh was definitely a good guy.”
“See, I didn’t know that. Very interesting,” said Swagger, thinking, That’s one for the bastard. He may have killed Kennedy, but he tried to keep me alive. “Anyhow, as a result of my investigations, I’ve come upon some indicators that Hugh might be alive but underground for one reason or other.”
“Yes. A man like Hugh made a lot of enemies.”
“He can clear up some things if I can get him to talk.”
“If Hugh doesn’t want you to catch up with him, you won’t be catching up with him. He’s that clever. Maybe in his old age, he’d spill his secrets. And they’d be many and interesting. He does know a lot about Vietnam-he tried to stop it, failed, and then waged it hard as any man. Any man except possibly you. He had three tours in heavy danger. He was a wanted man. And the two of you-boy, I’d like to be a fly on the wall during that conversation!”
“I’m just an Arkansas farm boy. I wouldn’t say much.”
“Sure. Anyhow, Dad. How would Dad proceed in building a legend? That’s the issue, right?”
“Yes sir.”
“It depended on whose influence he was feeling most keenly. He was remarkably sympathetic, picking things up from the air, it seemed. A movie would stimulate him, and he’d draw on images from it. Something would happen in the news that would set him off, he’d learn a new name, it would buzz around in his head until he found a way to use it. A painting could do it, and he was an inveterate museumgoer. He was a stimulus junkie, needed provocation to work. Do you have a time frame?”
“I’m guessing-middle seventies, early eighties. Vietnam’s over and done, no one wants to think about it. China’s coming up.”
“Dad was not one they’d go to for something Chinese.”
“It could be American.”
“It could be. But again, not Dad’s forte. He was classic himself, old espionage. Ohio State, but he could hold his own with the snooty Ivies.”
“Russia, East-bloc countries, the Cold War. The old standbys.”
“The eternal enemy. Okay,” said Harry Gardner. “That would be Dad. Got it. One word: Nabokov.”
Bob blanked, and knew his eyes registered emptiness.
“Nabokov, the writer, the genius.”
“Well, sir,” said Bob, “one of my embarrassments is how poorly educated I am. I have tried to catch up, but a day doesn’t go by when I don’t humiliate myself by exposing my ignorance. I never heard of any Nabokov. I even had to look up Boswell to figure out what it meant.”
“Vladimir Nabokov. White Russian, born at the turn of the century. St. Petersburg. Lost it all in the Revolution, and the family fled to Paris, where all the White Russians went. Cambridge education. IQ 353 or something like that. Spoke English, French, and German as well as Russian, spoke ’em all brilliantly. Wrote intricate, troubling books, usually about intellectuals, with always an undercurrent of dark sexuality and violence. Probably regarded humans as another specimen to be mounted on a needle and studied. He was a butterfly collector too.”
“Your father was an admirer?”
“A devotee. As was Hugh. They’d rather sit in this room and argue Nabokov and smoke and drink and laugh than almost anything. So whether it was conscious or unconscious, I’m betting that any work product Dad turned out was touched by Nabokov’s influence. And what would that be?
“Nabokov loved all the candy corn of prose, puns, allusions, cross-linguistic wordplay, wit for wit’s sake. I’ll give you an example. You’ve heard of Lolita?”
“Old man, young girl. Dirty as hell, that’s all I know.”
“Believe me, it’s the cleanest dirty book ever written. But the bad guy is a TV writer named Clare Quilty, Q-U-I–L-T-Y, who ultimately steals Lolita from Humbert and uses her for his own purposes. Nabokov loves to play games with the names and at one point has Humbert muse in French something like ‘that he is there,’ and in French it’s qu’il t’y, that is, Q-U-apostrophe-I–L-space-T-apostrophe-Y. You see how it works? It’s a pun but in two languages, the phrase in French, the name in English.”
“So a Boswell work name would have a pun in two languages?”
“This is literature, not physics, so nothing is definite. It would be a hint, a shade, a ghost of a meaning subtly brushing against a word. If the name were a Russian name-this is a real simple example-Dad might have come up with Babochkin. That means ‘butterfly man,’ and Nabokov was known as a world-class butterfly collector. So anyone looking for a giveaway who happened to know that Dad, in his Nabokovian phase, was the author of the legend and spoke fluent Russian might look at a list of names, and immediately, Babochkin would stand out. It would be a dead giveaway. Of course, that’s the principle as enacted at a primitive level. If he were doing it for real, it would be much subtler and go through a batch of meanings and languages before it gave up its final meaning. It would bounce-bounce-bounce all over the place. And no one would ever get that last meaning because you’d have to know such a broad range of disciplines, languages, cultures. That was the sort of thing he liked to do.”
“I think I got it,” said Swagger.
“Would you like to see Dad’s office? I kept it the way he had it when he died. I think it’s a kind of portrait of the way his mind worked. You might enjoy it.”
“Great. That’d be very helpful.”
“Okay, come this way.” Harry took Swagger up a narrow, creaky back staircase, down a crooked hallway, and into a room off to one side, with a window staring at nothing except the vines on the house next door. Bob looked: this was the mind of Niles Gardner, creator of legends, who always brought ’em back alive.
“This is where Dad tried to write his novels,” Harry said. “I’m afraid it never worked out. He was a brilliant beginner, but whatever it is that brings the writer back to the chair week after week and month after month, Dad lacked. He didn’t have it in him to finish. By the time he was halfway through with anything, he’d changed so much intellectually that he no longer recognized the person who began the story and had no sympathy for him and the characters he’d created. A lot of geniuses never finish their novels, I guess.”
“It’s too bad,” Bob said. “He must have had a lot to say.”
The wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor shelves were crammed, spine out, with books, books, more books, arranged alphabetically. Many were foreign, and of the ones in English, Bob recognized no titles except some Hemingway and Faulkner. A couple of incongruities stood out. For example, there were four ceramic bluebirds on one of the shelves, papa, mama, and two babies. There was a surprisingly sentimental picture, or more of an illustration, of six green elms against a countryside. The oddest thing of all was on the desk, piled with pages of typescript. An old Underwood typewriter, battleship-gray and weirdly tall and complicated, stood in the center. On the desk were jars of paper clips, pens-and a pistol.
“I see what you’re looking at. Yes, for some reason, Dad glommed on to this old thing and wouldn’t let go of it.”
Harry picked it up carelessly by the barrel, and Bob recognized it as a C-96 Mauser, commonly called a “Broomhandle,” for it carried that shape in a grip that plunged almost at 90 degrees from the intricately machined receiver. The handle was freed up to be unique because it had no responsibilities for containing a magazine; the magazine was contained in a boxlike structure ahead of the trigger. The barrel was long, the whole thing oddly awkward and beautiful.
“I’m sure you know more about these things than I do,” said Harry, handing it over.
Bob pulled back the bolt latch on the receiver-it was so early in the evolution of semi-automatic technology that it didn’t have a slide-to expose the chamber, revealing the gun to be empty. “Mauser Broomhandle,” he said.
“Yes, exactly. Winston Churchill carried one in the cavalry charge at Omdurman in 1898, when it was the latest newfangled thing. I think Dad kept it around because it reminded him of classical espionage. You know, Europe in the thirties, Comintern, the Storm Petrels, the recruitment of the Cambridge Four, the Gestapo, Gauloises, POUM, the novels of Eric Ambler and Alan Furst, that sort of thing. That was when espionage was romantic, and he loved that part of it, as opposed to the cruel war he was engaged in fighting, where the stakes involved nuclear exchange and maybe global annihilation.”
Swagger looked at the old pistol, feeling its cavalryman’s solidity. Loading was problematic, especially on horseback: ten rounds held in stripper clips had to be indexed into grooves in the magazine, then forced down into the gun by a finger’s pressure. You wouldn’t want to do that with dervishes whacking at you. Swagger turned it this way and that, somewhat charmed by its ugly beauty or its beautiful ugliness. He noted the number nine cut into the wooden grip to signify its calibration.
“You won’t mention the gun to anybody, will you? Definitely illegal by current D.C. law.”
“Your secret is safe with me,” Swagger said.
“I have no objection if you want to stay here and go through the papers to your heart’s content. I will tell you that when Dad died in ’95, a team from the Agency came and went through everything. They took a few papers, that’s all, but they assured me that everything that remained was of a nonclassified nature.”
“That’s very kind of you, sir,” said Bob, “but for now I don’t think it’s necessary. Maybe when I have more information somewhere down the line and have something exact to look for, then I might come by again, if the invitation is still open.”
“Anytime. Anytime. As I say, talking about Dad is always fun for me. Those were great days, that was a great war he fought. We won that one, didn’t we?”
“So they say,” said Bob.
In his Washington hotel room that night, Bob didn’t need to sleep to get to the subject at hand. Old man Gardner had raised it himself. Pistols. His was an ancient thing, from the Jurassic of the semi-auto age two centuries earlier. Yet it meant something to the old guy, even if he wasn’t an operational type who might have used it in hot or cold blood, hopelessly obsolete or not.
Swagger opened his laptop, went online, and quickly acquired the basic info about the C-96 pistol, confirming what he knew with more details. He also learned the source of the nine on the grip, seeing that during World War I, the inscription was the Prussian way of informing the troops that this variation was a 9 mm instead of a Mauser 7.65 mm, like the earlier 96s. The thorough Germans even painted the nine red, and the pistols became known as “Red Nines,” even if old Gardner’s red had worn off. Then Swagger had a thought: Red Nine. Four bluebirds, Blue Four. Green trees, Green Six.
Bob wrestled with that. Radio codes, somehow? Map coordinates? Agent work names? A way to remember the number 946? Or, er, 649. Or 469.
He came up with exactly nothing except a headache and a feeling of stupidity. This wasn’t his game. He went back to his game.
When he tried to price the Red Nine on the GunsAmerica website, that vast repository of used firearms, he came across something else: a S amp;W M amp;P.38 of exactly the sort Lee Harvey had gone all the way home in the middle of a manhunt to carry. It rolled up the screen, and Bob fixed on it, recognizing the sweep and balance of the brilliant Smith design, which had lasted over a century, the odd orchestration of ovals and curves arranged in a stunningly aesthetic package that achieved, as had just a few other handguns, an accidental classicism.
How odd it was that Oswald had risked all to go back for a gun he could have brought with him. Try as he had, Bob hadn’t cracked that particular nut. Maybe Oswald was going to head to General Walker’s and take him out too, as his last beau geste to the world he was leaving behind. Maybe he thought, if trapped, he could administer his own coup de grace?
The only coup de grace he administered was to a poor man named J. D. Tippit, who, like Bob’s father, had done his duty and caught a slug for his trouble.
J. D. Tippit was the forgotten victim of that bloody day. A Dallas policeman, he was armed with a description of the assassin-it nailed Lee Harvey to a T-and ordered into Oak Cliff, closer to downtown, to patrol and scan. He spotted a man who matched perfectly. The fellow walked, perhaps too hastily, up Tenth Street in Oak Cliff. Tippit trailed the walker from his squad car, then halted and hailed him over. Their conversation is forever lost. At one point it seems that Oswald satisfied the inquiry, left the squad car, and began to depart. But Tippit had a second thought, called, and got out of his car. It does no good to wonder why, in that age of less politically correct policing, he didn’t brace the suspect more aggressively, at gunpoint, and put him in cuffs before sorting things out. He chose the courteous way and took three bullets as a consequence.
But what was odd wasn’t Tippit’s politeness, Swagger thought, with the silhouette of the stubby revolver before him on the screen, so much as the intensity of Oswald’s homicidal response. It is known that the man had a temper and was prone to and not afraid of interpersonal violence, as frequent arguments and fistfights attest, but at the same time he was a yakker, a talker, a debater. He may have had or believed he had the skills to talk his way out of anything. He may have thought he’d done so. When he was hailed a second time and saw the officer emerging from the car, he never deployed those skills. His whole personality was based on them, his sense of self. Yet he abandoned them and drew and fired.
A case can be made: he snapped. He was a fugitive on the edge of rational control, his mind wasn’t working properly, and he saw that he had to act or wake up on death row. In a panic, he did that. Swagger thought: I suppose that makes sense, at least as much sense as anything, even if it contradicts his basic character.
But what happened next is even more peculiar and out of character. Why did Oswald walk to the prone body and fire a last shot point-blank into the head? You might say execution-style, but that would be wrong. It wasn’t style, it was execution.
It seems to have attracted little attention, but it puzzled Swagger deeply. He might concede that a fleeing man in a panic with no impulse control and abject fear for his life would draw and shoot. Almost certainly, he would turn and walk away rapidly. He is killing to live.
That is not what happened. Instead of turning, Oswald deliberately closed the ten feet of distance between them, bent over the fallen man, and delivered the brain shot at such close range that he could see the face as he drove the bullet into the head, see the spew of blood and the fall across the body of that utter stillness that marks the dead from the living. Why? It makes no sense in terms of his situation, and it really makes no sense in terms of his politics and previous behavior.
He never hated JFK. He wasn’t a punisher, a psychopath, a coup de grace giver, a scalper, a Bushido warrior who took the skull knot of his fallen adversary. His killing never had that personal edge of contempt. Yet in this instance, he goes the extra effort to lean over and deliver the final expression of contempt with the brain shot at close range.
Why?
The next day was the first stop on what Swagger thought of as the Hugh-Lon Grand Tour. From Georgetown, he traveled to Hartford and went through birth records, finding out that indeed a Hugh Aubrey Meachum was born in 1930, to Mr. David Randolph Meachum and his wife, the former Rose Jackson Dunn, both of whom listed their address as American Embassy, Paris, France. He found Lon as well, born five years earlier to Jeffery Gerald Scott and his wife, the former Susan Marie Dunn, address Green Hills Ranch, Midland, Texas. Evidently, the Dunn sisters preferred that their beloved Hartford OB-GYN deliver their children in the comforting confines of Hartford Episcopalian Hospital.
On then to New Haven, mostly decayed old city but part of it medieval university, with real ivy on the towers and buildings clotted with elm and oak, the whole thing a delusion of propriety and yet oddly comforting. He didn’t bother with Yale itself. Who’d cooperate with a cranky geezer with a cowboy accent and boots, who looked like Clint Eastwood on a bad-hair day? It probably intimidated him a little too, maybe the only thing that ever had.
The public library was more accommodating; it had bound copies of the Yale Daily News that yielded information without attitude, and paging through the lost and forgotten record of elite success on the gloried fields of New Haven had a weird feel, as if he were on a different planet so far from the squalor of his own upbringing in the hills of Polk County, Arkansas. But Yale in the forties: what a glorious place it must have been, as half the faces later achieved, under the camouflage of more chin and less hair, national distinction of some form or other. Of the cousins, Lon Scott was by far the more outstanding, particularly as a fullback and linebacker for the Bulldogs. Many old photos showed that particular form of American male beauty, the square, symmetrical face, the strong nose and jaw, the ease of smile and warmth of eye. Confidence: it was born into this man as surely as his blond hair and the aquiline blade of his nose, broken once to great dramatic effect on some ball field somewhere. Swagger remembered Lon-then calling himself John Thomas Albright-stuffed in his hole on the ridge over Hard Bargain Valley in the desolate Ouachitas of 1993, head destroyed by the energy of Nick Memphis’s six-hundred-yard shot. It came to that? Yes, it did. So sad. Three touchdowns against Harvard, led the league in points scored (few field goals in those days except by the rare drop kick), to say nothing of his spring glories, where, for four years running, he won the Ivy rifle championships in standing and prone. It was too bad the war couldn’t have lasted a little longer, for Lon’s skills at riflery and football would have done the American forces good wherever he served.
There was much less of Hugh five years later. He’d been no macho jock dominating the back pages of the Daily, only a sub on the Bulldog basketball five. Besides the cage mediocrity (best game: eight points against Brown his senior year), he appeared in only one other notice, his election to the board of the Yale Review, though Bob couldn’t force himself to look that up and see Hugh’s undergraduate poetry. Hugh was smarter: he graduated with cum laude honors; Lon did not.
Back in Washington, Swagger had the entire fifties-sixties run of the National Rifle Association’s American Rifleman publication shipped to his hotel room off an Internet purchase. He spent nights going through the volumes, tracking Lon’s early run of brilliant victories in competitive shooting at the national level, even finding a picture of Lon standing with a trophy exactly where Bob stood with the same trophy twenty-five years or so later. Bob had no father to stand behind him, but Lon’s beamed proudly from behind his so-accomplished son, who, in just a few years, he would paralyze from the waist down.
By day, at the Library of Congress, Bob combed the gun magazines of the same fifties-sixties for Lon’s work as a writer, as an inveterate reloader and experimenter, as a rifle intellectual, if such a thing existed, and saw that he was as revered as Jack O’Connor, Elmer Keith, and the others of that golden age. Bob could find no mention of the paralyzing accident, or the supposed “death” in 1965, but after a several-year interval, the byline John Thomas Albright began to appear and did so steadily for the next twenty-five years.
That left one more stop: a visit to Warren, Virginia, near Roanoke, where Lon “died.” Swagger learned there only what he already knew: the death was a thin counterfeit, all the documents forged, all the newspaper accounts based on a funeral-parlor press release. The body, naturally, had been cremated, the ashes scattered.
Suddenly, there was no place left to go. No one was following him. Nobody was cyber-mining him. Nobody was trying to kill him. It seemed that when he had lost Hugh’s scent, Hugh had lost his, even if it wasn’t clear whether Hugh Meachum existed.
The Memoirs of a Case Officer
BY HUGH MEACHUM
“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style,” writes the great Russian novelist Nabokov. Well, we’ll see about that.
I am undisputedly a murderer, but my prose style has been abraded of its sparkle, if there was ever sparkle to begin with, by four decades of filing largely unread administrative reports, a few research papers, too many after-action reports. My daily vodka intake hardly helps matters, nor does the arbitrariness of my memory. Speak, memory, I command; it responds with vulgarity. The issue is whether my old and creaky imagination will be stimulated by recollection and at least propel my words to the level of readability, or whether this record will disintegrate into drivel and incoherence. That would be a shame. I have much to tell.
For though I’m a dismal writer, I’m a great murderer. I’ve never pulled a trigger, but I’ve sent hundreds, maybe thousands, to their deaths in that bureaucratic intelligence-agency way: I’ve planned and authorized assassinations, raids, and commando assaults, the necessary by-product of which is murder. I supervised Phoenix for a year in Vietnam and made a jaunty figure with a boonie hat and a Swedish submachine gun slung under my arm, even if I never fired the damned thing, which was annoyingly heavy. Phoenix probably killed at least fifteen thousand, including some who were actually guilty. I put together and managed from close at hand all manner of paramilitary black operations, involving every sin known to man. Then I went home and slept in a warm bed in a very nice home in Georgetown or Tan Son Nhut. You’re probably right to despise me. But you don’t know the half of it.
I am also the man who murdered John F. Kennedy, thirty-fifth president of the country in whose services I labored so bloodily. I did not pull the trigger, but I saw the opportunity, conceptualized it, found the necessary arcane talents to staff it, recruited those talents, handled logistics, egress, and fallback via safe routes and counter-narrative alibis, also, as it turned out, unnecessary. Moreover, I was in the room when the trigger was pulled. Then my shooter put his rifle away, and we left to be quickly absorbed in the public frenzy of grief and mourning. Nobody stopped us, nobody questioned us, nobody was interested in us. By four o’clock, we were back at the bar at the Adolphus.
It was, as you must know, a perfect crime. No six-or was it eight or ten? — seconds in American history has been more studied than those between which Alek, poor little mutt, fired the first shot (and missed) and my cousin fired the last shot (and hit). Yet in all the years and against all investigation and attempts to comprehend, in all the theories, in the three-thousand-odd books by clowns of various mispersuasion, no one has ever come close to penetrating our small, tight, highly professional conspiracy. Until now.
I sit on my veranda. I am eighty-three healthy years old and hope to be around for at least another twenty. Before me the meadow, the valley, the purple forests, the river. The land is mine as far as the eye can see, and it is well patrolled by security. In the large house behind me are servants, a Japanese porn-star mistress, a chef, a masseuse (and occasional mistress), a gym, nine bedrooms, a banquet room, an indoor pool, the most elaborate entertainment center on Earth, and an array of real-time communications devices by which I can administer my empire; in short, the products and perks of a vastly remunerative and productive life. I’m worth more than several small countries.
At long last, five decades later, there is a tremor in my world. A threat. A possibility. A chance of discovery and destruction, even vengeance. It has impelled me to sit out here in the warm sunlight with a yellow tablet of legal paper and a cupful of Bic ballpoints (though I’m a traditionalist, I’m not so goofy as to insist on a fountain pen) and tell the story in my own hand. At any moment in the next few days, a phone will ring and tell me if the threat has gotten larger or has gone away forever. But as I’m a man who generally finishes what he starts, I expect that no matter the outcome of the drama being played-again, at my insistence and according to my instructions-I will finish this manuscript. Assuming I haven’t been interrupted by a bullet, I will consign it to my safe. Maybe when I die, it will become known and shake the foundations of history. Maybe it will disappear, tossed into the furnace like Citizen Kane’s sled. That’s beyond my control and therefore beyond my care. I know only that now, for the first time, I will set it down. Speak, memory.
Though I am naturally reticent, resolutely shallow, and not one for self-analysis, I feel obligated to produce a few brisk paragraphs of pedigree record-straightening. I am Hugh Aubrey Meachum, of the Hartford Meachums. It’s old Yankee machinist and tinkerer stock, with branches in the hardscrabble farming that Connecticut offers. My forebears were known for a shrewd eye on the dollar and opportunities to make it; quiet, severe faces (men and women); good hair; and taciturnity, with a black streak of alcoholism and melancholy evincing itself a couple of times in each generation. Given that as my stock, I was more fully formed by three mentors, about the first two of whom I will say just a bit.
The first would be a man named Samuel Colt. I was wise enough to pick as a great-great-grandfather an otherwise odious tyrant named Cyrus Meachum, who did one intelligent thing in a legendarily grim life as a Hartford hardware-store owner. He believed in young Samuel Colt and his twirling new gizmo called the revolver, and invested in the sprout’s first Connecticut plant (the first of all, in New Jersey, had failed). It was an excellent career move, as all of us subsequent generations of Meachums have benefited from the colonel’s invention, in a never-ending supply of just enough moolah to let us do what we wanted instead of what we needed. We had the best of schools, the best of holidays, the pleasures of big houses on hills under towering elms and of hearing the peasantry call our fathers “sir.” We rode the genocide of the Indians, the elimination of the Moros, the whipping of the Hun, the destruction of the Nazis, and the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity sphere to financial independence, happily. A few of us died in each of those campaigns, and my father, a career diplomat who served in the State Department before the war-in Paris, where I was raised, 1931–1937, where I picked up the language easily and totally-and in an outfit much heralded and, like all intelligence agencies, almost wholly worthless, called the Office of Strategic Services, which was actually more Red than Moscow was in the thirties! Then back to State for a genteel gentleman’s career. Thank you, Colonel Colt, for underwriting it all.
Here I should insert a footnote about the language that I learned “easily and totally.” It was not French, though I speak French. It was Russian. My nanny, Natasha, was an exiled White, a duchess, no less. An exquisite and cultured lady, she moved in high White circles, and Paris before the war was the White Russian Moscow, with the largest population of exiles anywhere on Earth. They were brilliant if deluded people: immensely cultured, extravagantly cosmopolitan, charming and witty and bold to a fault, of extremely high native IQ, generously seeded with genius, indefatigable in battle and literature. After all, they produced not only the great Nabokov but Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky as well. I may have even, as a small child, attended a soiree where N. himself was present, though I have no memory of it. So Russian was my first language, with a bit of aristocratic frost to it; meanwhile, my parents were busy doing the Paris scene, all but ignoring me, for which I thank them. Natasha’s lessons were far more meaningful and lasting than anything they could have taught me. This will explain much of what is to come in the tale ahead.
My second mentor was a man named Cleanth Brooks, of Yale, where I majored in American literature with a view toward going to Paris and working with some Harvard boys on an enterprise they had started up that seemed damn keen to me, called the Paris Review. Dr. Brooks had his problems, about which I will remain discreet, but he was the founder and high priest of an early-fifties discipline called the New Criticism. It held, with Spartan rigor, that text was everything. It didn’t matter what you read about a fellow in Time or Life, or what movie star he’d married or whether his dad had beaten him or his first wife had belittled the size of his dinger, none of that mattered. He didn’t even matter. Only the text mattered, and it must be examined closely, under laboratory conditions, without regard to personality or psychology or voodoo-hoodoo or what have you. Only then would its message, its meaning, its place in the universe, if any, be teased out. I loved the discipline of it, the zeal of it, the sense of probity. I suppose I longed to apply it to life, and I suppose I did, in some fashion.
Enough of those old ghosts. My most powerful mentor was a famous man, a glamorous man, a brave man, a man who sent me on my way. I must address him at some length for you to have any grasp of what happened and why in 1963.
His name was Cord Meyer. He recruited me on my father’s recommendation, spook-to-spook as it were, from the University of Pennsylvania, where I was a graduate student in lit and alone insisted on the seriousness of a pornographer named V. Nabokov, to the Plans Division of the Central Intelligence Agency, where I was to toil and happily murder by proxy for forty years, every second of every day spent in the idea-or possibly delusion? — that I was helping my country against its enemies, that I was living up to the standards of dead Meachums the world’s battlefields over, that I was ensuring all those big words that made Hemingway cringe in the rain, such as “freedom” and “democracy.”
Cord was a toot and a half, believe me. I still have dreams and nightmares about him; I’ll never escape him. Perhaps you know the story: he was one of the most famous men the Agency ever produced, and, I would say, having known most of them, the best. He was thrice touched by fire when I went to work for him in 1961. He had first of all lost an eye as a marine officer in the Pacific. Cord never discussed it, but we are given to understand that he saw the hardest of hard combat, even the gory squalor of hand-to-hand with bayonet and entrenching tool against a desperate enemy. Cord was too diffident to wear an eye patch, knowing that it would make him too famous too young. He simply slipped a glass orb in the vacant socket, and only a man studying him would notice. It was the idea of the eye gone on Iwo or Entiwok or one of those god-awful, never-heard-of-again places that was far more powerful than a showy patch would have been.
His background after the war is probably pertinent. He emerged a pacifist, having seen too many bayonets crammed into the bellies of teenage boys who’d never gotten around to getting laid. He was attracted to the idea of one-world government, so that nations wouldn’t send fleets of boys with bayonets after one another on flyspecks in far oceans. He was active in the United Nations movement and labored sweatily in service to that dream. Somehow, around 1948, after three years of hard work, it dawned on him that the whole outfit had been infiltrated and taken over by Commies and that it would henceforth work exactly the opposite of its intended mission-that is, it had come to exist to enforce the hegemony of the red over the blue. Disillusioned, he made contact with Mr. Dulles, who, duly impressed, offered him a position.
He had a talent, a nose for it. Within five years he became head of Clandestine Services, in the Directorate of Plans, and if you don’t yet know, Clandestine was where it all happened, a hatchery for mayhem. Other outfits would call such a unit “Operations,” and it would acquire flashy nicknames like “The Ranch” or “The OK Corral,” and its operatives would be called “cowboys” or “gunslingers” or some such. It never looked as deadly as it was: a bayful of mild-looking Yalies (a few Princetonians and Brownies thrown in, the odd nonpedigreed genius with special skills) with narrow ties (never loosened), horn-rims or black-framed heavy plastics, Brooks Brothers dark gray or summer-tan suits, Barrie Ltd. pebbled brogues or loafers, as dull as the Episcopal ministry. On weekends, a lot of madras, rather lurid Bermudas (red was popular, I recall), old Jack Purcell tennis shoes, usually battered orange by clay courts, khakis, old blue button-downs, maybe an old tennis shirt. Little would one know that behind those bland eyes and smooth faces lurked minds that plotted the downfalls and upswings of tyrants, the murders of secret-police colonels, an invasion or two, and a coup or three.
Back to Cord, wizard of Clandestine. His second immersion in flame was not cool or enviable. It was awful. In 1958 he lost his second child, a nine-year-old son, who was fatally hit by a car in, of all places, the spiritual home of all us Yalies waging the Cold War, Georgetown. The loss of a child is something I cannot fathom. As emotion embarrasses me, I will not linger on it, nor try to conjure its effects on him. It cannot have inclined him to a merry view of the universe.
It was his third tragedy that made him famous, pitied, beloved, scorned, doubted, mistrusted, suspected, and yet somehow vivid. He was, in his way, a pre-George Smiley Smiley, in that his public cuckolding served allegorically for the earnestness with which he loved his country and the disdain with which it repaid him. The name of his disaster was Mary Pinchot Meyer.
I suppose she could be termed a transitional woman. She came too late to be called a beatnik and too early to be called a hippie. “Well-bred bohemian,” though it has no public cachet, is probably the most accurate term. It goes without saying that she was beautiful, that she had the social ease being well bred confers upon its progeny (why do I insist on “progeny” instead of “children”? fancy again!), that she had beautiful flashing legs, that most everybody fell in love with her, that she was witty, effervescent, charismatic, that she had a great mane of hair, tawny and thick, and that lipstick looked redder on her than on any woman in Washington. She must have been sexually precocious, she must have loved danger, she must have had in her the seedlings of feminism and a need to be a person outside the illustrious reign of her husband as warrior-king of the Cold War and smartest of the very smart people who coagulated in then-seedy, dumpy, but somehow glamorous-amid-the-rot Georgetown.
She left him in 1961, citing the usual suspect of that age, the catch-all “mental cruelty,” whatever that meant, and I suppose it means anything its attorneys want it to mean. Did she begin her famous affair before or after the divorce? Was Cord officially cuckolded, or did the two lovebirds have the courtesy to keep it legal until the papers were served? No one will ever know, and it’s doubtful that Cord ever told anyone. He never told me.
The two were Georgetowners before 1960. It is known that she was friendly with and passed time with his gorgeous if slightly vague wife. Moreover, they must have seen each other in the streets, perhaps at the grocery, perhaps at the various drunken lawn parties to which their set, our set, “the” set seemed to gravitate, all the bold young shapers of the future, all the technocrats of the fashionable agencies (and our agency was very fashionable, while the poor boobs of the FBI were not), and all the young, ambitious journos who would write books about us and end up richer and more powerful than any of us.
It is not known when Mary Pinchot Meyer began to sleep with John Fitzgerald Kennedy, before the November 1960 election or after; nor if they waited till the divorce was final. But have at it they did, and she is credited with at least thirty visits to the White House during his three years, at many odd times of day or night. It was such a terribly kept secret in the Washington of the era that it could hardly be called a secret at all, although perhaps she was most in the dark, for she may never have quite caught on to the fact that if he was sleeping with her, he was in the meantime trying to bed every vagina between Baltimore and Richmond, with the odd movie-star bang thrown in for good measure. Other rumors swelled in the wake of the two. She had some mysterious connection to the least interesting man of the period, Timothy Leary (Harvard, of course! agh!). So it was said that she brought LSD and marijuana into the White House and introduced the president to them, in hopes of somehow lessening his childish aggression. Apologies, I have no inside dope on this and mention Mary only because she was part of Cord’s glamour and because this was one more reason why Plans-not the Agency as a whole, as there is no Agency as a whole, only a loose confederation of tribes, some of whom get along and some of whom do not-was not a big Kennedy supporter.
Possibly I will address that later; let me just assure you that as far as I am concerned, sexual jealousy was not part of the equation-it would not be recognized under the New Criticism-and that I, little Hugh, latest of Cord’s Yale wonder boys, was not secretly in love with Mary. I always loved Cord, I never loved Mary (and let me hasten to add, I had NOTHING to do with her murder in 1964 or whenever it was); I did what I did for the dreariest of reasons-a policy dispute. Again, you’ll have to suffer my fancy for prose another few pages before I discuss that.
So I did not murder JFK to punish him for sleeping with Mary Pinchot Meyer, the former wife of my boss and mentor and a far better man, in all respects, than he was. Too bad; it would give a nice spin to what follows, would it not, if the assassin of Camelot turned out to be the noblest of them all, and the man he slew the rankest of dogs? It would turn popular history, where by default I am the most hated of all men on Earth, on its ear. The truth is, I never saw or met Mary; she was only a ghost, a whisper, a legend. As I said: I did it for the policy.
Let us pick a beginning spot. I know exactly when my subconscious announced its decision to me and my life turned on its axis. I also know that the subcon had been busy grinding away for months, trying to fit new intelligence, new insights, new relationships into a sort of coherent action plan that I felt I must engineer even before I conceptualized it. Something was wrong in the kingdom, and it would kill the kingdom if it was not stopped, and yet nobody had recognized it, no vocabulary existed by which the issue could be discussed, and when that vocabulary emerged, it would be too late, we’d be gone, we’d be doomed. If you believed, you had to act now; if you didn’t act now, you were letting people down, even if they had no framework by which they could comprehend your motives.
Beginning spot: a party in Georgetown, at Win Stoddard’s, the crummy west side of Wisconsin Avenue, he and his family in an old, decaying pile of bricks, painted yellow to scare the termites, with a garden straight out of a Tennessee Williams play, all thick and jungly and rancid with moisture and rot. Pathetic fallacy? Dangerously close, I agree, and will not mention the garden again.
It was mid- to late October, the year of our lord 1963, two and a half years into the Kennedy era, Camelot Anno Duo and all that, and what was happening was nothing much: a shop party. That is to say, the glamour Ivies of the Clandestine Services subgroup of the Directorate of Plans met to let their hair down (figure of speech; we wore neat trims in those days) and ease office competitions, grudges, cabal forming, and the like by applying copious quantities of gin or vodka (anthropological note: we did not favor brown drinks) as a lubrication to the competitive friction of the place, as well as a dash of fizz and some citrus wafer in each glass, the martini being entirely too uptown Mad. Ave/gray flannel for us crusaders. It was, I suppose, any staff party, any department party, any unit party, any entity party in any town in any state on Saturday night in America in 1963: cigarettes dangling insouciantly from lax mouths, points made stabbingly, everyone too loud, too close, too drunk, maybe some jazz playing on the hi-fi. (We were the last pre-rock generation.) You know how such things go, and that’s how they went: in the early hours, the high officials pay their obligatory visits. Even old man Dulles, though deposed after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, came by for a quick drink with his old boys; and there was an obligatory look-at-me appearance by his successor, Mc-Cone, if memory speaks the truth, and to have them both would have been a good nab for Win. Cord came with his youngest boy, Tommy, though I don’t think he stayed late and just glowered with tragic nobility while holding a glass of gin in one hand and absently running his other through the boy’s thick hair and smiling at the gifts of wit and insight his supplicants brought him. The almost legendary Frenchy Short came and went quickly with a beautiful Chinese girl in tow; an honorary drop-in had to be James Jesus Angleton, a friend of Cord’s, even if he was charged with catching theoretical doubles and could destroy any of us with a whisper of suspicion. It was probably better to suck up to him than to ignore him, though it was always a tough call. The dry stick Colby was there briefly, though he had bigger fish to fry that night. Des FitzGerald, who’d run the Bay of Pigs and was, rumor had it, engaged in replacing Fidel, came, got drunk, and left early by cab. Just powerful, secretly famous men behaving with mild sloppiness, no harm done, probably better for morale that way anyhow.
By 11 the big shots were gone; by 11:30 most of the wives, all of them luscious and creamy, tans not yet faded from their summers at Bethany, and since most lived in then-safe Georgetown, there were no difficulties about leaving. They had been upstairs anyway, my own dear Peggy among them, Smith girls mostly, as we were Yale boys mostly; they’d come down, give the sweet peck on the check, warn us not to drink too much, and remind us that we were due at early Mass or to serve communion or something ceremonial the next morning at St. Whatever or First Whatever. Memory speaks: I remember a sea of ragged, baggy tweed jackets, an ocean of blue or white button-downs, maybe a faded madras here or there, dimpled khakis, the more frayed the better, loafers or possibly those suede things that used to be called “dirty bucks.” The hair was short, the cheeks clean, the noses straight, the teeth white. We were square yet cool, brazen yet innocent, savage yet mild.
Win demanded the floor. “My brothers,” he cried, “I need an ethical finding.”
Laughter. We never discussed ethics; to discuss it was not necessary, as it was part of our heritage to know what was and was not allowed. (Hmm, yes, I would say that I would soon push that line a bit.) So that set the key, which was irony, accelerated by gin or vod, and the need to be funny if not coherent.
“Win, you gave up on ethics the night you stole Morison’s final in American Classics,” and again everyone laughed because the idea of Win stealing from Samuel Eliot Morison was quite amusing, partially because the old admiral was Harvard and Win hated Harvard.
“He never locked his windows, what can I say?” joked Win. “Anyhow.” He paused, refortified the gin surge to his system, took a puff on cigarette thirty-five or forty, and proceeded dramatically. “Anyhow, you know how Cord encourages us to dip into wire transcripts from the embassy teams?”
Everybody groaned. It was a testing ground for newbies, their patience and diligence, but Cord liked to see people seriously busy, and if you found, as the business often produced, an odd spare hour or half hour in the duty day, he encouraged you to wander down to Embassy Wire, pick up typescript of recent interceptions, and peruse. Did anything ever come of this? I don’t know. Not until tonight.
“So,” said Win, “I’m running through the pages from the Sov Mex City joint, and it’s the usual crap, low-grade, beneath action or contempt, mostly ‘how come we have to work so much overtime’ and ‘how come Boris got Paris when I was supposed to get Paris’ crap, they’re just like us, always whining, and I come across what seems to be some kind of interview with some kind of beatnik defector or something. An American, I mean, southern-fried variety, an ex-marine as far as I can figure out. I track down the actual tapes and run ’em on the reel-to-reel, and over the earphones I hear this guy, Lee Something Something, trying to talk his way into Russia. I should say back into Russia, because it seemed he’d already been there for two and a half years, and now and then he’d burst into bad Russian. Well, Igor and Ivan aren’t having any of it, even if he was a genuine United States Marine and everything, but he’s the asshole type, won’t take no for an answer, always looking for a fight or a chance to impress, and he claims, I kid you not, oh, you’ll get a kick out of this one, he claims he’s the guy who took that shot at General Walker!”
Lots of astonished laughter. Shooting General Walker was a much-approved action in our circle. It had taken place on April 10 of that year in Dallas. Someone had winged a bullet at the old beast as he sat at his desk, plotting the next week’s atrocities. It missed (typically, I was soon to learn), as the unknown shooter apparently had an uncertain trigger finger.
Major General Edwin Walker (Ret.) was a particular bete noire of Clandestine Services. He was an authentic war hero in both the war we thought of as The War and the thing called Korea. He had prospered, but as with so many of that warrior ilk, hubris destroyed him. His anti-communism became a zealotry, then a psychosis, and finally, a craziness. The commander of the huge 24th Infantry Divison in Germany- he and his men would face the red tanks pouring through the Fulda Gap if it ever came to that-he lost all perspective. He indoctrinated his men with John Birch Society pamphlets, he gave them voting instructions, he gave speeches in which he declared that all the postwar Democratic leaders, particularly Truman and Acheson, had been “pink,” as was, by inference, anyone who followed their steps in the Democratic Party of Treason.
It’s not that we were Democrats, although we probably were. Some of us-that would include young Hugh with the soft face and meek eyes and grown-up pipe-were even liberals. It’s not that we were in any way pro-com. But he did not meekly disappear into the night, as one would have hoped. When he resigned after refusing McNamara’s transfer, all this occurring after a newspaperman exposed his ugliness, he returned to America a kind of hero, like MacArthur, I suppose, though lacking the elegance and poise. He set himself up in his hometown as a speechifying one-man infantry division, riding his notoriety to the max, demanding action from Kennedy, denouncing Kennedy and his minions, supporting segregation, generally raising hell and crowding the administration into postures not sound in the long run. Did he seek power himself and imagine a career in politics? Possibly. At one point he threatened to unify his followers, of whom there were thousands, into a kind of political action force, and that sounded ominous. He was a troubling psychopath with clear fascist tendencies who did not like the Negro or any who supported the Negro’s quest for equality, who loathed “diplomacy” as a solution to Soviet expansion as opposed to “battle,” who would leap to his feet and start singing tearfully whene’er Old Glory was unfurled. He may have petered out when his gadfly act grew tiresome and reporters no longer bothered to cover his stem-winders, but all through the summer of ’63, particularly emboldened by the missed sniper’s shot, he seemed to be everywhere, hammering away, not so much a threat in a political or operational sense but more of a malign presence, clouding the policy debate, pushing Kennedy hard to the right even as Kennedy’s own instincts may have pushed him hard to the right already.
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.
He explained to them that his goal in life was to get to Castro’s Cuba, but the Cubans, sensibly, had declined. They had left him with a proviso that if he could get a visa from his good friends the Russians, they would allow him entrance on that document for a limited amount of time. Here he was, giving himself up to the maw of history in order to achieve the greatness he knew as his own and to claim his place in the socialist firmament.
It was a tough sell, particularly on the second day, by which time Boris and Igor presumably had been in contact with KGB Moscow, had seen synopsized accounts of LHO’s unspectacular two and a half years in Minsk and the no doubt unflattering comments on his personality and work ethic from so-called jealous people, and had reached the proper conclusion.
The reds are familiar with this oddity of the American system. It produces men who can move mountains, build industries, win global wars, and break the speed of sound. It can down MiGs over Korea at a six-to-one ratio. At the same time, perhaps inevitably, it produces a small number of malcontents, of ambitious dreamers who lack the skills or the diplomatic grace to achieve anything in life, and rather than face their own inadequacies, they blame some amorphous structure called “the system” and look for its opposite, where they believe they will shine. Then they spend their dream lives imagining themselves as secret agents, destined to bring down the larger apparatus and be rewarded by its opponents, whose conquest they have so wonderfully lubricated.
These odd birds know history superficially and never notice that the first thing a socialist totalitarian state does when it takes over is round up all the secret agents who have worked so hard in its interests, cart them to the Lubyanka by Black Maria at midnight, and plant a bullet behind their ears. Reds cannot tolerate traitors, even traitors who have aided their own cause. Ask the Poumistas of the Spanish revolution, who made that discovery while standing at the execution wall in Barcelona.
Oswald knew or cared for none of this. He was determined to be a traitor, though he had nothing of value to offer his new friends, failing completely to master the nuance that treason was a negotiation and that it takes two to trade, and had failed miserably at his first attempt. Little mongrel. How I loathed him that night, sitting in my study in Georgetown, listening to the midnight crickets and enjoying a splash of vodka.
Then came the key exchange, late on the second afternoon, after they’d already given him their negative decision and before calling in the goons to eject him from the property forcibly when he’d come back to protest.
I gathered that neither Boris nor Igor was there, and this new fellow-we’ll call him Ivan-was a little higher in the KGB tree. He seemed wiser, smoother, less awkward in dealing with the screwball American. Ivan tells him, “Mr. Oswald, it is our conclusion that you would not be happy in the Soviet Union a second time any more than the first. My own recommendation is that you could most appropriately serve the revolution from within your own borders, pursuing these activities you have mentioned, such as passing out leaflets for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and arguing passionately in private with American citizens on the merits of our system versus yours.”
LHO: Sir, do you know who you’re talking to? I am not some stupid pamphleteer, not by a long shot. I am a soldier of the revolution, I am a man of action.
KGB: Here, now, Mr. Oswald, please settle down, we do not need an incident.
LHO [crying]: No, you listen to me. On April 10, I was the sniper who took the shot at General Walker, fascist, traitor, bully, would-be tyrant, enemy of the left, of socialism, of Cuba, of the USSR. That was me in the dark, with my Eye-tie [?] Mannlicher-Carcano six-five. BANG, I had him dead center, I just didn’t see the window frame that deflected the shot. Me, I, me, I went to war for us and for you. I risked prison, the electric chair, I-
KGB: Mr. Oswald, please, get hold of yourself, there’s no need-
A few minutes later, he would pull a gun and begin to gesticulate wildly, then break down, sobbing on Mr. Big’s desk! It ended with him deposited in the Mexico City gutter. What did he expect? How deep could his self-knowledge have been? He had no awareness that the nakedness of his needs and the tragedy of his incompetence were the signals he broadcast the loudest; he had no idea of the ocean of space between the ideal image of the self he wished and pretended to be and the tragic, limited, feckless little twerp whom he forced the world to see up close and instantly. He was a mess.
The worse he was, the better for me. It took no genius to see the path by which he could be manipulated into anything, and such a ploy was easily within my capabilities. The plan formed perfectly, with no need of revision and only a little required preparation. It would be so simple-like giving candy to a baby.
To make certain of my own intentions, I applied the New Criticism to my plan, laboring intensely to occlude personality, opinion, immaterial knowledge, or rogue or random feeling from consideration and concentrate entirely on the text that was Oswald, understand its dynamics and dimensions without regard to outcome or hope or past indignities or whatever it was that formed the twisted creature he was. I must say, although this sounds egotistical, I felt somewhat like a great white hunter with many tusks in his lodge on the track of a titmouse. I was so overgunned for this safari, it seemed a little obscene, so I made a pledge to myself that though I would use Oswald, even as I loathed and despised him, I would make a tiny effort to see the humanity that lurked underneath, to understand what forces had so warped him, and try to reach somehow the soul in him, and touch it with a gesture that, in whatever larger context of manipulation and betrayal it arrived, had a whisper of authentic human feeling.
I had tasks to be done. First I had to conjure up a fantasy operation and code name so I could liberate black funds to pay for my instantly conceived Oswald-Walker operation, which involved selling Cord on a fiction. Sure, I had enough money from Uncle Colt and his co-uncles Winchester, Smith, Wesson, and Remington, to say nothing of the Du-Ponts, the five marques of General Motors, and the whole industrial cash box that sustained my portfolio, to pay the limited expenses this thing would cost on my own, but in case it ever came back to me, any investigator would go to finances on the first day and learn that I had spent a hundred grand of my own dough on a mystery project in November 1963. I could swindle the money from the Agency far more easily than I could swindle it from myself, and it would be protected in perpetuity by our Agency’s larger mandate to keep all things secret. (It has not been uncovered to this day, nearly fifty years after the fact!) Generations of case officers enjoyed this privilege, some corrupt and for their own benefit, some pure at heart and laboring in the hope that they were helping win the war. As for my pitch, it would not be difficult; I enjoyed high status in Clandestine Services, as the recent removal of Mr. Diem from both presidency of the Republic of South Vietnam and occupancy of Planet Earth was conspicuously viewed as a victory for our side and had found its origins in a classified report I authored entitled “U.S. Interests in RSV: An Assessment for the Future,” which made me a star in factions of the Agency far beyond my own. (More on this later.) Second, I had to secure the Oswald master file, as indicated on the transcript, an assignment any third-rate secret-agent-man pretender ought to be able to bring off.
For the record, I will summarize, with apologies to any of you reading this account who haven’t a taste for sober explication and prefer the rush of narrative; I cannot, however, let the narrative rush without satisfying myself that I have fulfilled the expositional requisites, if only for the one reader in a hundred who requires such a thing.
As for the fictional operation, I named it PEACOCK and sold it to Cord without a hitch, establishing a hundred-thousand-dollar budget out of the Bank of New York, shielded by accounting ploys so subtle that only a few men, none of whom worked for the government, were capable of penetrating them. PEACOCK, I claimed, was meant to look at the possibilities of identifying young Harvard-Yale-Princeton-Stanford-Brown-UChicago-and-other-elite graduates who had writing talent and seemed headed for the powerful Luce publications or the New York Times or the upstart Post properties that had just acquired Newsweek (Cord’s wife’s sister was married to a prominent Newsweek fellow, to show you how small and cozy the world was in those days), with an idea to nurse them in their careers with secret deposits of information, not money (they would be offended by money), so as to accelerate their climb and at the same time make them indebted to us, although they’d never know who “us” really was. PEACOCK was named for vanity, as I assumed such fools would be morally vain and easily manipulated. I would write Cord a monthly report on what scouts I had befriended in the thickets of academe and what I had offered them and what we could expect from them. It was wonderful, as it was entirely unsubstantiable. No actual journalist would know he was being manipulated by us and could never squeal, and no one could look at a particular piece and say, Yes, the tip came from us or No, it didn’t. That’s how the old Agency was: it worked on a trust I was only too happy to betray in search of a larger contribution.
As for acquiring the Oswald paperwork, again, not terribly difficult. I memorized the master file number as referred to on the transcript jacket, then went to Records at a particularly busy time-Monday, 1030, when all the girls were overworked with juniors who had been requested to pull files for this or that Invasion of Italy or Nuclear Detonation over Moscow scenario. The place was chaos and anguish, as I expected, the girls overtaxed and bitter because they were too smart for their jobs and too connected to be treated this way by Mrs. Reniger, head of files, in one of her perpetual menstrual flare-ups. The wheels were definitely off the cart, so I pulled Liz Jeffries aside. She was Peggy’s older sister’s daughter and my niece by marriage. I said, “Liz, Cord’s on a tear, I need this fast.”
“Oh, Hugh,” the wan beauty replied, distress making her more lovable than usual, “we are so behind.”
“Liz, it’s my tail on the line.”
She knew who had gotten her the job, with its glamour opportunity to marry a spy, a much better catch socially than a diplomat or a legislator, so she said, “Look, you know the system, just duck back there and pinch it; don’t let Reniger see you.”
“Thanks, sweetie,” I said, and gave the child-she was a few years younger than I, but she seemed from a different generation-a peck. It was a common enough thing, so no eyebrows were raised. I slipped back, sliding by a busty young thing in one of the aisles and being careful to make no “accidental” contact with her breasts so that she wouldn’t remember me, found the file, opened it-the files were controlled by a series of master locks that old bitch Reniger, an OSS London vet, opened each morning at 9 and closed each evening at 5-and slipped out the Oswald file and the one I had requested, hid Mr. O’s inside the covering one, and dropped my file request slip in the box for recording.
That night I made further contact with LHO. I will not bore readers with intricate accounts of one of the most overbiographized men in the world. The details are depressingly familiar. A chaotic childhood ensued upon the too-early death of the father; the strange, domineering, and slightly crazy mother, Marguerite, hauling the family all over America in hopes of finding a place to stay, marrying twice, wrecking both marriages, hauling Lee and the other two boys from school to school, state to state, poverty to prosperity and back to poverty in a single year sometimes. No wonder he was so screwed up: he was always the new kid.
In New York, his growing malfunction was spotted by an alert social worker who wrote perhaps the most penetrating prose ever-little did she know three thousand authors would eventually come into competition with her, yet never best her-and alone in the world seemed to worry about where this sad bean would end up. She was underwhelmed by the narcissist Marguerite as mom and the incoherent wandering as lifestyle, and thought the boy had it in him to do great harm if not put into some kind of treatment quickly. In the whole mad circus that was the life of Lee Harvey Oswald-and I am speaking as his recruiter, his betrayer, and indirectly his murderer-this brave lady alone did a job we can take pride in as Americans. Too bad for LHO and JFK nobody listened; Marguerite snatched him away from the do-gooders and hauled him back to Texas or was it New Orleans before anything official could be done.
Influenced by his older brother, little Lee, like many a small man who dreams of toughness, joined the Marine Corps immediately out of high school (from which he did not graduate). Like everything he attempted, it came to nothing. The marine years were wholly undistinguished, and anyone who trusted him to guide an airplane to its landing strip-his official job-must have had rocks in his head. I saw that the marines didn’t let him do much of that sort of thing, as they always had him on noncrucial duty. Somehow he managed to shoot himself in the arm. What a dimwit!
It was in the service where he first proclaimed himself a Communist, to the irritation of all around him in his various postings. You wonder why some fellow PFCs didn’t beat the hell out of him and spare the world the tragedy that ensued. It’s one of the few times the United States Marine Corps has failed in its duties. It won the Battle of Iwo Jima, but it lost the Battle of Lee Oswald! And once he was out, his first move-another hastily considered crusade-was to defect to the Soviet Union. Our first notice of him came via the State Department after he’d gotten into Russia on a student visa and refused to leave. Sensibly, the Russians didn’t want him either-nobody ever wanted him! — and for a while State and KGB fought to see who would inherit him as a consolation prize. He spent two and a half years in the Soviet Union, mostly in an electronics plant in Minsk, mastering the intricacies of cheesy transistor-radio assembly. He met and married a young woman who seemed quite attractive in the photo; I wondered in my study that night if the poor gal knew what a damaged package she’d hooked up with.
He burned out in Russia and managed to talk his way back into the United States. I am well aware that some in the conspiracy community-“conspiracy community,” God, what an appalling concept! It was both loud and wrong for half a century! — have maintained that the CIA’s fingerprints are all over this strange sojourn. Good God! The only fingerprints on it were mine, and I knew paper didn’t record fingerprints, so I was safe. What I saw was what real life produces, as opposed to the dark master planning of the spy conspiracy believers: the shaggy, shapeless, pilotless, planless bumble of luck, circumstance, and opportunity, as this weasel of a man tried to get two giant bureaucracies to pay him the slightest bit of attention. Agh, you could feel their lack of enthusiasm in the slow grind of their cogwheels as, eventually, while the long dreary months passed, this nobody was allowed to reclaim citizenship in a country he loudly despised.
From that point on, we got a new narrator, a much beleaguered FBI agent named James Hotsy, who inherited Lee-I will call him Alek from now on, for that is his Russian nickname, and Marina and I both called him that-when the fellow came back to the United States from Russia. He was known to the Bureau as a “suspicious person,” given his well-documented love affair with the reds. Poor Hotsy, of the Dallas field office, overworked and underloved, had Alek added to his immense caseload, and it was my privilege to read his reports in photocopy, because at that low level of security, the two agencies happily shared data. Hotsy’s picture of him more or less confirmed mine, although the hostility he received after Alek’s return added a particularly unpleasant new pathology, the chronic whine. Hotsy could find nothing he’d done that was illegal, only in poor taste, which should be a crime, I’ve always believed, but who listens to me on these matters? Hotsy’s intensity picked up when he discovered that Alek had been to Mexico City in late September and visited the Cuban interest section and the Soviet embassy, and soon he was interviewing Marina, her friend (but never Alek’s) Ruth Paine, and anyone else who had knowledge of or insight into Alek. Again, he could come up with nothing substantial, because Oswald himself was not substantial. He was, as they say in Texas, all hat and no cattle. Nobody had any need for him, not even Marina, for Mrs. Paine passed on to Special Agent Hotsy the bad news that Marina frequently displayed bruises on her arms or swelling around the eye. Alek was up to his tricks again.
I do not have one here before me, as I sit in the sunlight on the veranda, scribbling and merrily riding the vodka express to the amazement of the servants, watching the slow progress of shadow across the far meadow, awaiting a call on my satellite phone that will inform me whether my current threat is finished or has grown more complicated, but I do know that at that time I had a photo of Alek.
That face was soon to be burned into the consciousness of the world. I expect it will never be forgotten. At the time, who could know, who could anticipate? What I saw was American working-class sui generis, remarkable in its unremarkablity. It was an old shot taken by a newspaper when our self-proclaimed Communist hero (Ma, call the papers!) returned from Russia to proclaim the glories of Marxism but the folly of communism (only a Trot could appreciate the nuances; it’s unlikely Alek did). The camera reveals truths, things that Alek did not know about himself and would not learn. The thickness of his nose, his most prominent facial landmark, revealed or at least represented his pugnacity. He had a thickness to him in many respects, both physically and mentally, a kind of fixation on a goal or object from which he could not be stirred. His eyes were beady and small and squinty, and any Hollywood casting director would see him as a Villain No. 2, a minion who administered the beatings or the knifings but had no grasp of Mr. Big’s vision and simply took it on trust. He had a small mouth that gave him an unattractive piscean quality, his face somehow “pointed” as it reached its end point in the surly orifice surrounded by thin lips. His receding hairline and overbroad forehead seemed to suggest the same motif, and all of these features together created a typology, as amplified by the perpetual shroud or grimace of annoyance he wore. He looked exactly as he was: surly, obstreperous, self-indulgent, charmless. You knew he would be tricky to deal with, to command; he would be a resenter, a creep (a wife beater!), a natural traitor, an obdurate whiner, a too-quick-to-measure quitter. I don’t know if he was a little monster because he looked like a little monster or he looked like a little monster and so he became one. I doubt if any of his three thousand chroniclers do either.
In any event, I stared at that picture, committing its nuances to memory. Sometimes a man in life can look so unlike his photo, you can hardly believe one is the record of the other. I sensed with Alek this would not be a problem and that when I saw him first in the flesh, I would recognize him right away. I can remember lying in bed, listening to Peggy’s even breathing, to the night rush of wind, and knowing that my boys were down the hall as secure as possible with futures fixed before them, and thinking of little Alek, pawn and creep, lynchpin and sucker, upon whom the weight of my plan would pivot, and I hoped he was up to it.
That was when I realized, that very night, he wasn’t.
It turned on shooting.
Alek was a “trained marine marksman”-whatever that meant, and I suspect, in those dreary peacetime years, not much-yet he had missed a target, according to news reports, who sat at a desk forty feet away, with a rifle that had a telescopic sight! Good God, even I could have made that shot! I realized that shooting wasn’t just shooting. He had done his rifle work in the marines with that old warhorse, the M1 Garand rifle, a heavy, steady, accurate semi-automatic that had served from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli with distinction. He could not have had a Garand rifle at his disposal in Texas for his try at the general. He’d called his gun “An Eye-Tie [?] Mannlicher-Carcano six-five,” a circumlocution so baffling that our poor typist had no idea that “Eye-tie” was argot for “Italian.” If it was Italian, it was probably some piece of surplus junk with a squishy trigger and a vino-swilling peasant’s intrinsic precision, which is to say none at all, and that would be his weapon of choice, and ours too, as it was linked to him by paperwork, witnesses, and circumstance, for the job I had in mind. Then there was the larger issue of incompetence. He had failed at everything he’d ever tried, and this meant part of him expected failure, and the expectation became the father of the event. Could I trust him? Could I risk my whole career and good name, to say nothing of a long stay in a Texas penitentiary, on this idiot? It had to be clean, smooth, crisp, efficient, professional, not a bumbling, staggering mass of twitches and mistakes.
I don’t think I slept a bit that night, or the next either, and I began to doubt the wisdom of a course that depended on first-class work by an idiot.
That’s how Lon came into it, and because of Lon’s presence, it made a whole universe of other possibilities real and unleashed my imagination in ways that astonished even me.