The Coldest Warrior Read online

  The chairman looked up from the document. “It’s important to have this on the public record, sir. The incident sounds like an episode from a cheap paperback spy novel—but it wasn’t. It happened to an American citizen.”

  The chairman continued to read. “Following Dr. Wilson’s death, the CIA expedited an effort to ensure that the family receive death benefits, but the family was never told he’d been given LSD, and they were never told the circumstances of his death. The Agency went to considerable effort to prevent his death from being connected to the Agency, and even today, I suspect, we don’t have the full story.”

  The chairman pushed the document aside and continued extemporaneously, his voice thick with righteous disbelief. “We have the CIA’s involvement administering the LSD, the cover-up, then the DCI’s letter reprimanding Mr. Redacted for authorizing the use of LSD on an unwitting basis without proximate medical safeguards. With all this, you would have us believe that Mr. Wilson was an employee of the Army? Everything was planned and undertaken by the CIA, but you would have us believe he was not a CIA employee, and the CIA’s hands are clean.”

  “Facts are credible because they are facts.”

  The chairman pondered the answer. “Why was he given LSD? No one seems to have answered that question. I would like to know the answer to the question. His widow and children would like to know. They deserve to know. It is the right and decent thing.” The chairman leaned back in his chair, signaling the end of his questions. “Sir, is there anything you’d like to add before we recess?”

  The director cleared his throat and leaned into his microphone. He spoke in a penitent tone. “I was shocked to learn the circumstances of Dr. Wilson’s suicide from the Rockefeller Commission Report. As you know, the president met with the family and offered his personal apology. I made a point of meeting the family and extended the Agency’s help answering questions about the tragedy. I want you to know that was one of my most difficult assignments as head of the Agency. Thank you.”

  Gabriel was surprised by the director’s depth of feeling and his personal tone. Gabriel had seen hints of the man’s moral footing, but he had never heard him air it publicly. Here was another side of the man he hadn’t seen, even when he thought he knew him. A phrase came to Gabriel: The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past. He wrote the Faulkner quote in the margin of his newspaper but crossed out “dead” and wrote “over.” The past wasn’t over. The long arm of time had reached back and shaken the hearing room.

  Gabriel watched his boss stand at the witness table, a courteous gentleman wrapped inside a master of politics. The past was forgotten until it unexpectedly rose from its unhallowed crypt and called attention to itself. A dead man in his grave had come to life. Look at me. Look at me. Ask me what happened.

  Gabriel turned to Coffin, who was gathering his briefcase to make space for Mueller, who had stood to leave. Gabriel saw their hostility in a flash—Coffin resenting the need to accommodate a man he disliked, and Mueller, equally abrupt, impatient to pass. It happened in a moment. The shoulder lowered to move the attaché case, a leg moving too quickly, contact, which was hardly a blow, but the two men looked at each other with instant distrust. And then it was over. Mueller passed through to the aisle, and the moment was lost except to Gabriel, the witness, who knew of the long-standing rancor between two men equal in rank but different in worldview. Coffin, the deep-thinking, hard-drinking, longtime head of Counterintelligence, who held on to a dark vision of threat, and Mueller, the casual, teetotaler strategist who preferred transparency to obfuscation. They approached espionage from opposite ends of a telescope. Coffin looked through the telescope’s viewing end into the eye of the observer, seeking to look into the mind, and Mueller was the eye looking out to the world.

  “Staying?” Coffin asked Gabriel, and then nodded at Gabriel’s scribbled quote. “Don’t go there.”

  “I want to hear her testify. I knew the family.”

  “I heard the son before you arrived. I don’t need to hear the wife.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Well-spoken, which you’d expect from an academic, but angry. He makes it very personal to him, and he’s not satisfied with the answers. We’ll keep an eye on him.”

  Coffin pulled out his notes. “Here are a few things. The subject was taboo in the house for a long time. Innocent questions about the father set off the mother. She’d fly into a rage and burst into tears. Screamed at the kids: ‘You’re never going to know what happened in that hotel room!’”

  Coffin arched his eyebrow. “Let’s hope she’s right.”

  i i i

  THE HEARING RECONVENED after a short recess. Seats vacated by those who’d come to watch the director of Central Intelligence were quickly filled by a curious public eager to hear from the silent widow. The chairman brought down his gavel, and when the crowd didn’t settle, he struck twice more. His stentorian voice boomed, “Ladies and gentlemen . . .”

  Seats were taken, loud conversations ended in clipped whispers, and suddenly the room was quiet.

  “Thank you. I am sure the silence has nothing to do with the power of my authority and everything to do with your interest in our next witness. Mrs. Wilson, will you come forward?”

  Maggie Wilson rose from her seat in the third row. Sunlight poured through the room’s tall windows and illuminated the woman in a natural spotlight. A hush fell. She wore a floral-pattern dress that hung loosely on her thin frame, and a silk scarf blossomed from her open neck like a colorful bouquet. She was tall even in flats, and she held a small purse in tightly clasped hands. She didn’t smile except to apologize to the two big men who had taken the aisle seats during the recess and rose to let her pass.

  She folded herself into the wood chair at the witness table. Her posture was straight and correct, and she wore her dignity defiantly. She ignored the photographers seated at the base of the dais, whose cameras burst with brilliant flashes, and looked to the senators.

  Gabriel saw that Maggie had aged, made frail by illness, and her hair was the unnatural brown of a wig.

  “Thank you for coming, Mrs. Wilson. We appreciate the effort you made to be here.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for accommodating my treatments. I have a statement I would like to read.” She was nervous, but her voice was firm. “My husband was recruited to the Army’s facility at Fort Detrick by his PhD thesis advisor at the University of Wisconsin. Charlie was honored to be part of the new program, but he said he couldn’t tell me anything about it, except that it was top secret. That’s all I knew. He was excited but nervous, and the war in the Pacific was at a turning point.” Mrs. Wilson looked up from her written statement. “Just as we speculated about the atom bomb project at Los Alamos, we wives at Fort Detrick knew that our husbands must be working on germ warfare.”

  She adjusted her reading glasses. “I knew very little about Charlie’s work at Fort Detrick. I knew he was a biochemist, that he needed to wear a mask, but he never discussed his work. As I’ve told my children, there were hints. I could tell when he came home with a joyless expression that it meant all the monkeys had died and the experiment had been a success. When a colleague died, Charlie said it was from pneumonia, but the gossip among the wives was that he had been exposed to anthrax.

  “My husband’s work changed when World War II ended and the Cold War began. He was promoted to Acting Head, Special Operations, in 1951, and he traveled more. He was in Paris, Berlin, London, and the Caribbean.”

  “Did he talk to you about his trips?” the Republican senator from Idaho interrupted.

  “No. When I left him at the airport, he said he’d be home in a few days. That was all I knew. I didn’t know where he went or what he did. Before he got out of the car, he gave me his wedding ring. I gave it back when I picked him up on his return. He explained that when he traveled, nothing could link him to his real life.”

  “How did you know where he went?” the Republican senator asked.

/>   “After he died, I found his passport and there were disembarkation stamps and dates of travel. At the time I didn’t know anything, and as you can imagine, I have had to reconstruct my marriage.”

  She cleared her throat, then continued in a firm voice.

  “He drove himself to the off-site retreat the week before he died. I knew nothing about what happened there, but I know he came home visibly upset. That retreat was always a painful mystery, but two days ago, while I was in his study, preparing for my testimony, this page fell out of the family Bible.” She held up a typescript page yellow with age. “It’s the invitation to the retreat. It’s titled ‘Deep Creek Rendezvous.’”

  Gabriel lurched forward, as did others in the job, trying to catch a glimpse.

  “It doesn’t describe why they were meeting or what they were to discuss, but it says they were all to have cover stories in case locals asked why they were there. They were told to say they were editors and screenwriters. It calls the hunter’s cabin a cozy place with a stone fireplace and a comfortable atmosphere. You can just picture seven men enjoying a boys’ weekend away from their wives.”

  “Was that document provided by the CIA?” the chairman asked.

  “No. As I said, I found it in our Bible, where my husband must have placed it. I don’t know why he kept it—or hid it. I can only wonder, as you must, what meaning it holds. I recognized several names of his Fort Detrick colleagues among the attendees, but there are two other names I don’t recognize.”

  Maggie’s face was brightly lit by television cameras recording the moment, and the room buzzed.

  The chairman conferred with an aide and then spoke to a Republican senator. He leaned into his microphone. “We’d like a copy of the invitation.” The chairman dispatched an aide and resumed his questioning. “What was his mood when he came back from Deep Creek Rendezvous?”

  “His mood?” She paused. “I remember the moment he walked in the house. He’d been gone three days. He was very quiet, very depressed, and totally unlike himself. I said it was a shame that the adults in the family didn’t communicate anymore. He said only that the meetings hadn’t gone well. People had laughed at him. He was concerned about a terrible mistake he’d made, but he wouldn’t tell me what that mistake was. There was no way to reason with him. Of course, I had no idea his was not a normal depression. It wasn’t a normal kind of concern. It was, as I think back, the most unreal weekend.”

  “Unreal?” the chairman interrupted.

  “Unreal. Surreal. It was gray and rainy, a bit like today, which kept us in the house, and that didn’t help his mood. Sunday night Charlie and I just needed to get out of the house, so we took the children to a movie theater downtown where a new film about the life of Martin Luther had opened. It was an odd choice to end a tense weekend. In the climactic scene Luther stands up against the corrupted Church and nails his theses to the cathedral door.”

  Mrs. Wilson paused. “It was a serious movie—not a good one to see if you’re depressed, but it was his choice. The next morning, he seemed better, and he said he’d made up his mind. He was going to resign. But then he came home from work Monday night and said he’d talked it over with his supervisor, and he’d changed his mind. He’d been told he was doing a good job and everything was fine. His mood was better that night. The next morning, he went to work but returned at noon with a man I hadn’t met before, Mr. Ainsley. Charlie said he had consented to psychiatric care in Washington. He was escorted home because he said they were afraid he would harm me and the children. I was shocked. I had to sit down at the kitchen table. I didn’t understand what was happening.

  “I insisted that I drive with them to Washington. The children were at school at the time. When we got to the city we stopped at a building near the mall, one of those temporary buildings built during the war. Later, I learned it was a CIA office. I left him there with Mr. Ainsley. That was the last time I saw my husband.

  “He called me that afternoon. We chatted about the children, and he talked about Elder Lightfoot’s choir singing spirituals on Channel 5, which he liked very much, but he said nothing about his treatment or where he was staying. We agreed to speak at a particular time each night—nine o’clock was our agreed time. He was always the one to call me. Wednesday night he called and said he would be home for Thanksgiving. Then I got a call Thursday morning and he said there had been a change of plans and he wouldn’t be coming home after all.

  “The last time I spoke to him was Thanksgiving night at nine p.m. It was a fine conversation. Everything was I’ll see you tomorrow. It was not goodbye. He didn’t call to say goodbye.”

  MAGGIE WILSON STOOD when she finished her testimony. Her two adult children joined her on her way out of the hearing room. The small family was surrounded by newspaper reporters and broadcast journalists, who thrust forward microphones, hoping to capture a sound bite for the evening news. This continued to be a sensational story—the Army scientist, unknowingly given LSD, who fell to his death.

  Gabriel saw Maggie Wilson’s jeopardy when the mobbing press blocked her path down the aisle. Gabriel was at her side quickly. He shielded her from the reporters’ shouted questions, pushing away intrusive microphones and television cameras. Any idea why he was given LSD? Whose names are on the invitation? Will you sue? Was it suicide? His hand rose to protect her, but in doing so, he became the face of the family, and questions were thrown at him. Gabriel ignored the CBS News correspondent whose cameraman blocked the aisle, and he led Maggie around only to find himself confronted by a balding journalist, pen in hand, who barked manically, “Hunter Thompson. Rolling Stone. What’s your goddamn name?”

  Gabriel ignored the reporters’ questions and raised his palm to hide his face from the clicking cameras. His shoulder cleaved an opening in the crowded aisle, and he politely took Maggie in tow, but when reporters pressed in, he turned brusquely.

  “This way,” he said. Gabriel headed for the private exit behind the dais used by senators and congressional staff. The Capitol Hill policeman accepted Gabriel’s CIA badge and then denied access to the press. Angry reporters yelled questions past the diligent policeman, but then the door closed and a quiet settled in.

  They found themselves alone in a hallway. Cold fluorescent light masked Maggie Wilson’s startled flush, but not her grim expression.

  “It’s been a while, Maggie,” Gabriel said. He knew exactly how long—Christmas Day at the county jail in 1966. He had been good friends with the Wilsons, but in July 1953, he’d already been posted to Berlin and would remain overseas for long periods. He’d tried to stay close after Wilson’s death, but his frequent absences and Maggie’s need to move on and raise her family had strained their acquaintance. He knew that she carried her grief alone, raising her children under the stigma of her husband’s death. She had never been someone who admitted she needed help, nor was it in her nature to seek it. On holiday visits, Gabriel had seen her take a drink or two at night to help her cope. Her slide into alcoholism came over thirteen years, but when it finally surfaced, it was horrifying. Her kids were away at college, and she was living alone in a home with ghosts. Gabriel was the one who got the call from the sheriff’s office. She had been arrested on Christmas Eve for driving while intoxicated and had spent the night in jail.

  “I didn’t know any of this,” Gabriel said. “I should have asked more questions.”

  Maggie Wilson was unmoved. She looked at Gabriel without sympathy. She listened but showed no emotion. Unforgiving coldness came over her face. “It’s a little late for an apology, Jack.”

  She turned to her daughter, who hugged her, and the two women remained in a tearful embrace. Antony Wilson stared at Gabriel.

  “We’ll get to the bottom of this,” Gabriel said calmly, hearing himself parrot the director’s empty assurances.

  3

  CIA Headquarters Building

  Langley, Virginia

  The call to the director’s seventh-floor office came late in th
e day. The DCI’s long-serving secretary, who’d been with him before he became Saigon Chief of Station and rejoined him on his return to Washington, waited for Gabriel at the door to the director’s private conference room. Gabriel knew her name and was familiar with her startlingly blue eyes behind black-frame glasses, but he knew nothing else about this woman who served the nation’s top spy.

  “He’ll be right in,” she said.

  Gabriel had visited the inner sanctum of the DCI’s adjacent office once, but he was more familiar with the small conference room. Curtains were drawn, and there was no sense of day or night. The air conditioning was off, which added to the sense of claustrophobia.

  Framed oil paintings of former directors of Central Intelligence formed a gallery of grim, unsmiling men. Fixed expressions, sealed lips, and opaque eyes imbued the faces with the look of men carrying the heavy burden of their work. The seven portraits reminded Gabriel of Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Inno-cent X in Rome’s Doria Pamphilj Gallery, showing him as a shrewd but aging man. Gabriel had known them all, respected one.

  “They want me to sit for mine,” the director said.

  The DCI had come in quietly, surprising Gabriel. He was a lean man in his fifties, impeccably dressed in a well-cut pinstripe suit, and he had the focus of a man starting his day, not ending it. The two men were physically different—Gabriel taller, grayer, more tired—but they shared the conceit that they were privileged to work in the Agency. A brace of flags stood at one end of the room.

  “I asked if that meant I was being fired,” the director added, smiling. “No, no, they said. It takes time to find a suitable artist, and the process of sitting for a portrait is unreliable because crises tear up my schedule with the poor painter.” The director loosened his tie. “Should I have Betty turn on the air-conditioning? I got to like the heat in Saigon, and I haven’t gotten used to our need to live in a climate-controlled world.”