The Coldest Warrior Read online

  “I’m fine.”

  The director pointed to his predecessor on the canvas, a drawn, unsmiling face that was a generous likeness of the pipe-smoking patrician they both knew. “Four months on the job. A record of sorts. His portrait was finished after he left.”

  Gabriel was familiar with the circumstances of James Schlesinger’s departure, its shocking suddenness coming in the midst of the Watergate scandal, which contributed to the apprehension between the two men.

  The director pointed to the fifth man in the gallery, a Navy admiral in uniform. “Incompetent outsider. He didn’t understand the Agency or the intelligence business. He lasted fourteen months.”

  They discussed the failed tenure, and neither Gabriel nor the director knew what the admiral was doing now. The director was philosophical. “Having lost his seat of power, he was taken by the storm tide that sweeps the fallen into obscurity. His sudden fall was dressed up and packaged to the world as a resignation, but it wasn’t. If you haven’t prepared yourself for the inevitable downfall, as he hadn’t, it is painful and demeaning to become an ordinary citizen stripped of the things we become accustomed to—chauffeurs, security, access to power, and the private jets. Even the most resilient ego is crushed.”

  Gabriel had known the director for as long as they’d both been in the Agency, their acquaintance surviving years of little contact when one of them was stationed overseas, but most recently they had served together in South Vietnam. Their families had gotten to know each other in the close quarters of the embassy compound, protected from the brutal war by Marine guards. Their children shared the embassy swimming pool in the American enclave, while the two men were helicoptered to landing zones near the front lines. They were both outraged by the war’s conduct. Young American lives were lost defending remote outposts that were promptly abandoned when the battle was over. They had spent a night together on a mortar-blasted hillock in the Central Highlands, waiting for muzzle flashes to announce the Viet Cong’s attack beyond the booby-trapped perimeter, and in the hours together Gabriel had come to understand the director’s disdain for Washington’s politicians.

  Gabriel watched the director gaze at his predecessors’ portraits. Usually a study in equanimity, the director was preoccupied. His eyes came off the oil paintings.

  “Why was Wilson given LSD?” the director asked.

  Gabriel knew they had come to the purpose of the meeting.

  The director wrote two names on a slip of paper. “We know Herb Weisenthal and Roger Ainsley. Their names were on the invitation she brought to the hearing, and we can assume they were the ones redacted on the documents given to the family. How could originals have been destroyed? It’s mind-boggling.” He pointed at the slip of paper. “Weisenthal retired two years ago. Ainsley is gone too, and no one misses him. This episode is a disgrace, and half the disgrace is our record keeping. I looked at what we gave the family. The memos don’t provide a coherent or credible account of how Wilson died. They seem pieced together to justify a conclusion. They are a jumble of conflicting statements, possibly corrupted, almost certainly incomplete. How is that possible?”

  The director’s voice, always patient, had acquired an angry vibrato. “Potomac Fever rages everywhere in this town, but it breeds most virulently on the floor of the Senate. They are political cowards who take up the popular outrage regardless of the facts, regardless of their convictions. I can’t find myself in another hearing confronted by a senator looking to embarrass the Agency.”

  The director replaced the cover of his Montblanc fountain pen and pushed the note across the table. “I need to know what happened. I need the facts before I’m called back to the Senate and asked things about Wilson that I can’t defend or explain.”

  The director put his pen in his jacket pocket. “I was summoned to the White House today. They’re nervous about Wilson. They think our secrets will be aired in Congress. They don’t trust us. They’re going around us, running their own show. It’s a shit storm. You’re the errand boy who set up the account at Riggs Bank to receive Saudi money, and now the White House tells us to wire funds to numbered accounts, putting oil money to work against Communist insurgencies in Africa—keeping us out of the loop.”

  The director leaned forward. His fist clenched. “The president is a lean-witted nincompoop, and he has surrounded himself with awful men, terrible men—vainglorious liars and bullies. It’s not clear to me that this Agency can survive a full-term presidency.”

  Gabriel thought the director looked infinitely tired.

  “The Wilson incident embarrasses all of us. He did work for us. I knew that when I perjured myself, but the White House demanded I hide the fact.”

  Gabriel felt the director’s contempt. Blood ran cold in the man’s veins, but Gabriel knew that a request to lie under oath deeply offended the man’s patrician sense of honor and duty.

  “What the hell is going on in Washington?” the director snapped in uncharacteristic frustration. He rose, opened the drawn curtain, and looked out over the Virginia countryside to Washington, D.C.’s distant glow. “They’ve got an election coming up, and they want to put our scandals behind them—illegal mail openings, our clumsy efforts to assassinate heads of state, all the terrible family jewels. Horror stories.”

  The director looked at Gabriel. “The spy business used to be a most satisfying job and at the same time the most fun thing a man could do. That’s what got you and me here. Important work. Gentlemen’s work.”

  He sighed. “My job is to protect the Agency and to give our people a reason to believe in their work at a time when the press harangues us. We are losing good men.” He turned to Gabriel again. “I understand we’re losing you. When were you going to tell me?”

  Gabriel took an envelope from his suit jacket. “I would have done it sooner.” He held out the envelope. “My resignation.” Gabriel couldn’t read the director’s reaction.

  The director took the envelope and put it in his pocket. He studied Gabriel. “Wilson was your colleague. A friend too, I understand.”

  “I knew him and his wife.” Gabriel didn’t feel a need to explain his history with the dead man.

  “You’ve taken a job with a consulting company.”

  Gabriel had known that once he started his job search in the tight-knit intelligence community, word would eventually get back to the director.

  “Big salary. Cashing in on your experience,” the director continued. “Well, good for you. A daughter in middle school. College is ridiculously expensive, if you aim high, and I’m sure you’re encouraging her to try New Haven now that they’re taking women. And how is Claire? Still practicing medicine?”

  “She’s fine. She’s on vacation with Sara. I’m a bachelor for the week.”

  “I have no illusions about the hardships of the job. Long hours. Lost vacations. Missed piano recitals. Home life neglected. It puts a strain on a marriage. You can’t make up for those absences.”

  “No, you can’t.”

  “You sound angry, Jack.”

  “I need to move on.”

  “Yes, yes. But I need to know what we’re facing. How bad is it? He was your friend. We owe his family an answer. I need you to stay on.”

  Gabriel resented the director’s presumption he would agree to stay, usurping his decision.

  “Two months, that’s all. Then, God bless you, go off and make a million dollars.” The director’s bluster was gone, replaced by a grievance. “There is more to Wilson’s death. I need to know if the men responsible are still inside. If they are, they need to go.”

  THE TWO OLD acquaintances left Headquarters’ Building together and walked under a sheltering night sky. The director had forgone the private parking spot reserved for the DCI, and in the new egalitarian spirit of his tenure, he used the large employee lot. The two men stopped at the director’s six-year-old Buick Skylark. He eschewed a chauffeured limousine and drove himself to work.

  Gabriel sensed urgency in the man
who, for all their time together, remained remote and distant.

  “I have an obligation to the oath I took—we both took—to serve the Constitution. Loyalty, probity, decency, honor. These things matter, and they are scarce in this town.” The director’s eyes came off the Headquarters’ Building, and he smiled at Gabriel. “Almost as scarce as a winning baseball team.

  “I don’t want to sound alarmist, but there are people, powerful people, in this town who want to destroy the Agency, and they aren’t in the Soviet embassy.”

  The director pointed to the dark tree line and beyond, an imaginary compass point. “Eight miles in that direction is President Lincoln’s cottage. He sought refuge there in the dark months of the Civil War, hoping to clear his head of the noise in the White House. It was there that he wrote the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation. It’s a small stucco home with a few rooms and a porch. No one knows it’s there, but I visit from time to time.”

  He paused. “Lincoln made the journey there in the summer heat. Confederate troops were massing to the west, waiting to attack Washington. It was early in the war, and the nation was split. Imagine what he must have seen on his way to the cottage—wagons loaded with wounded Union soldiers, gravediggers opening the earth for the dead, escaped slaves in tent towns. Think of the harrowing burden Lincoln bore and what was on his mind. The stakes were high then. Principles mattered to Lincoln.” The director looked at Gabriel. “They should matter to us.”

  The two men stood quietly in the empty parking lot, close together, but distant too—two men joined by fresh memories of old dangers.

  “How long have we known each other?”

  “It’s been a good run.”

  The director laughed. “Four months Schlesinger lasted. The admiral fourteen. I’ve been in the job almost three years. I should declare victory and quit.” He paused. “Who would believe that a twenty-two-year-old suicide could be our undoing. I need your help.”

  Gabriel nodded but said nothing.

  “Two months. Then make some money. Live the rest of your life. Put all this in the novel you’ve never had the time to write.”

  Gabriel felt the director’s hand on his shoulder, and he knew they were coming to the end of the conversation.

  “You get to the bottom of this. I would rather the damnable truth from you than convenient lies from the White House. You will liaise with them but work for me on this.”

  The director opened his car’s door. “Only me. And Coffin and Mueller. Keep them informed.”

  Gabriel was puzzled by the director’s request that he involve two men who distrusted each other, and for a moment he felt the conscious maneuvering of a conspiring mind. He stepped forward, as if closing the distance might provide insight into the director’s thinking, but he saw only the man’s deeply creased brow and dark eyes.

  “The FBI is not to know, and the Office of Security is not to know. The White House will get what we tell them. Interview those involved. Collect information. Then I’ll decide what to do. Everything by the books.”

  LATER, GABRIEL LAY on his bed in his town house in Georgetown, alone. His wife and daughter would return in a few days, so without deciding whether to accept the director’s request, and thus incur his wife’s anger, he could spend a few days on the Wilson case. He made a mental list of men who’d been in senior positions in the Agency in 1953, including men still in the Agency, most prominently Coffin and Mueller. They had both been there at the Agency’s birth and experienced the heady successes in Guatemala, Iran, and Berlin, which had given the Agency its early braggadocio. Hope had stirred, but then faded in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs and Hungarian disasters, and it fell victim to the illusion that America’s Brahmins, who sniffed the heady dreamstuff of empire, could forge a world order sitting at their desks in Washington. Cold War failures had long ago divided the House of Dulles.

  Gabriel doubted Coffin and Mueller were involved, but he knew investigations failed when conclusions were corrupted by presumptions and wishful thinking.

  The next day, Gabriel walked into his Headquarters’ office and wrote down his list, adding names and questions. He had known some personally, others only by reputation, and a few names were new to him. Their OSS biographies were legendary, as were their efforts to shape the Agency’s Cold War mission. Men of stature from the Ivy League, who’d left lucrative careers in law for government service. All were gone from the Agency, and when Gabriel checked with Human Resources, gone from life, too. Dulles, pushed out by President Johnson, a victim of influenza complicated by pneumonia, dead in 1969. Frank Wisner had died four years before that, his notorious drinking helping him to an early grave. Gone too were Sheffield Edwards, General Counsel in 1953, who’d quietly passed away the month before.

  Everyone who might clearly have known something had retired or died, so Gabriel adjusted his focus to the living. There were the two names that had become known through the happenstance of the Deep Creek Lake invitation, and there was Phillip Treacher, gone from the Agency for years, but he’d been there in 1953, and the three of them—Gabriel, Treacher, and Wilson—had once enjoyed an occasional drink together. Wives were sometimes part of it. Gabriel knew where he could find Treacher.

  The pleasant woman in Records Administration didn’t ask Gabriel why he wanted the home addresses where pension checks were sent to Herb Weisenthal and Roger Ainsley, but he knew it was a request she wouldn’t forget, so he felt compelled to offer the plausible story. He said he’d been tasked to write a confidential history of the Agency’s experiments in human behavior modification. Really? she’d said skeptically, living up to her reputation.

  Dora Plummer had a storied career in the OSS in France during the Nazi occupation, earning commendations for her liaison with an SS colonel that provided the Allies critical intelligence on Germany’s Normandy defenses, and she had used her good looks after the war in Vienna to charm secrets from an NKVD officer. When she joined the CIA after its formation, she was refused overseas assignments in a male-dominated Agency that kept women in back-office jobs. She endured her move from being one of the guys to being one of the girls with dignity, and Gabriel had never heard her complain about the Agency’s unequal treatment of women, but neither did she conform her opinions to a particular correctness, and her great memory and superior organizational skills protected her from men intimidated by her intelligence.

  He sat across from Dora Plummer, now in her fifties, but with the luminous smile that had seduced an SS colonel. She looked at Gabriel as if looking into his mind, testing what he requested against what she thought he wanted.

  “Of course, Jack, I remember them. Weisenthal left in 1973. July, I think. He arranged a great purging of his files that summer. He had no need for the files and no space left, or so he said, and I’m sure it was true enough. Ainsley was the errand boy in Plans who brought in boxes of memos, reports, and diaries dealing with human behavior modification. There were too many for me to personally go through, but I peeked in a few to organize them better. Ainsley wasn’t sloppy, but he was idiosyncratic. That would be the kind way to describe his cataloging. We processed them as directed.” Dora gazed at Gabriel. “What are you really after, Jack? No one comes in here with a straight story, only the story that will get them the answer they want. It’s about Wilson, isn’t it?” She laughed, then pulled a green folio from the bookcase behind her desk and wrote down home addresses and telephone numbers. She ripped the page from her pad and handed it to Gabriel. “This is what you want.”

  Gabriel took his first soundings of Weisenthal and Ainsley by phone that night, like a telephone solicitor, planning the call for the hour he knew they would be home. He made the calls from his home study. Gabriel didn’t get past Weisenthal’s wife, who asked for Gabriel’s name, and when she conveyed it to her husband, he was suddenly not available.

  Gabriel had more luck with Ainsley, a bachelor, who answered the phone. Ainsley was on the short list of men who’d worked under Weisen
thal in the Technical Services Staff. He now lived in Watergate East on the banks of the Potomac in downtown Washington. Ainsley was talkative, and Gabriel recognized the slur of drink in his speech. Old grudges came up without provocation, and Gabriel listened to a long monologue on a minor grievance about being sidelined to the Chemical Branch after his Agency mentor, Bill Donovan, was eased out for carrying a loaded pistol to meetings. “One of a kind,” Ainsley said. “They made him a Knight of Malta for his work with the Vatican during the war.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Jesus Christ, Jack. They all were. Dulles, McCone, Coffin, Mueller. The new guy running the shop is the only one who declined.”

  Gabriel had started the conversation by sharing a personal fact to encourage Ainsley to open up, and Ainsley took the bait. “Go ahead, Jack, resign. Get out. Don’t fuss with old bones. Things happened. A lot of shit went down. Korea, the Soviet blockade of Berlin. Names? You want names? I think I’ve said enough.”

  “You haven’t said anything.”

  “It’s enough. Let it go.”

  “What happened in that hotel room?”

  “He went through the window.”

  “How?”

  “Easy to go through a window if you’re a determined suicide. All very natural.”

  “Suicide isn’t natural.”

  “Dei opus est scriptor,” Ainsley said. “God’s work.”

  Gabriel sensed the end of their conversation in Ainsley’s curt response, but he wasn’t done with the man. He got Ainsley to agree to meet in person, and after some hesitation, Ainsley suggested the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge’s coffee shop across the street from the sprawling Watergate complex.

  “Come alone.”

  4

  Potomac Boat Club

  An indignant sense of self-righteousness swept over Phillip Treacher. Perhaps it was less complicated than he was making it, and the surprising resurrection of the Wilson case was simply today’s headline, soon to be eclipsed by tomorrow’s. Treacher was at a small balcony table at the Potomac Boat Club, watching dawn peak over the tree line and burn mist from the dark river. After his early-morning row, he relaxed with coffee and contemplated the bizarre turn of events.