(1964) The Man (73 page)

Yet when those stupid Southern-born secretaries made their jokes, Edna was resentful of them, too, and felt superior because she was not so prejudiced as they. She would never stoop so low, she thought then, as to believe that Negroes, because of their color, made so by God’s choosing, were more criminal, more shiftless, more smelly than whites. Whenever she was thus intellectually reinforced, she had easier days with Dilman, treated him with more deference and regarded him with more respect, as if to make up for her fluctuating emotional prejudices and those of her friends. Yet she never wanted to defer too much to Dilman, because tolerance was a form of feeling superior, too. Then she tried to treat Dilman as she would George or Tim Flannery or any other white man. But then she couldn’t, not truly, because since he was black, his presence in the Oval Office meant threatening danger to him, to the country, to herself, and his inferiority made things a mess, and no matter what, she was sure he smelled different. Damnation. And then she blamed George. He was at fault for her miseries, her predicament.

Because of George, she was still on this horrible job. His proposal of marriage, true, had been the high spot of her whole life. Because of it she had not enjoyed her trip to France at all. When she had not been working, she was mooning and wanting to get back to George and marriage. She had not even taken the time to visit the Louvre. And after all that, when she had flown back so full of high hopes and expectations, George had not been waiting for her, which was really too much. There had been a note under her apartment door, nothing more. He was in New York City investigating a possible job. He’d be back in a day or two with good news. The day or two had frustratingly become almost a week, and his brief, enigmatic telephone calls gave her nothing more definite to expect from his trip.

Less than an hour ago she had received his daily call, the call for today. He was still in New York City, he said. He could not promise to be back tonight or tomorrow, but maybe tomorrow. For the first time she had not hidden her irritation. Was this the way to start a marriage, he in New York, she in Washington, not even seeing each other in ten or eleven days? To pacify her, he had stayed on the phone longer than usual, full of hints about a terrific job, a quick marriage, so on and so on. This had soothed her somewhat, but after he had hung up, the long distance operator had called her. There was an overcharge. The party had telephoned from a public booth and left without depositing the extra coins. Would she pay the overcharge? She would. Where should she send the one dollar and ten cents? To the telephone company in Trafford, New York, she was told. Not to New York City? No, to Trafford. Very well, Trafford.

What in the devil was going on with George Murdock, she wondered now. Why tell her that he was calling from New York City, and then have it turn out he was calling from Trafford? What could there be for him in Trafford? It was a one-street college town, Negro college town at that, and neither of them knew a soul there—except the President’s son, if that counted for anything.

So here was she, stewing, and there he was,
somewhere
,mysterious and behaving like anything but a bridegroom, and she was—all right, to use Leroy Poole’s word—she was
sore
as heck.

The buzzer at her elbow startled her.

She snatched at the telephone. “Yes, Mr. President?”

“Miss Foster, put a hold on all calls, and then come in. Bring your shorthand pad.”

She diverted incoming calls to Mr. Lucas, the engagements secretary, took up her notebook and pencils, and went to the door. Momentarily she hesitated, and then placed her right eye against the peephole.

There were two persons at the Buchanan desk, looking oddly magnified by the glass she peeked through. One was President Dilman, seated, features bunched in concentration as he licked a broad thumb and turned page after page of the pile of bound papers on the desk before him. The other was Montgomery Scott, standing over Dilman, watching and speaking, and when not speaking, dryly working his lips.

Edna had known Montgomery Scott since the day T. C. had appointed him Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. She had never been able to reconcile his appearance with his record. Scott’s silky brown hair was parted low and combed up and over his head to disguise a bald spot. Yet his Vandyke beard was full and pointed. In between, his pink, bland, ageless face, with little pulls and punctures for features, was innocent and noncommittal. His long frame, slouched, carried his familiar sports jacket and dark-gray slacks. His carved meerschaum, the gift of some Middle Eastern potentate, added to his sedentary, scholarly aspect. Yet, Edna remembered, Scott had once been an active cloak-and-dagger man for the OSS. Later, while with the CIA, he had been involved in the overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala, the instigation of the U-2 espionage aircraft, the onetime invasion of Suez, the assassination of Trujillo. Except for the incisiveness of his speech, his incongruous braying laugh, the spade of a beard, there was nothing to indicate that Scott was unique, yet he was the Director of derring-do, with a half-billion dollars of funds (never publicly accounted for) and 15,000 employees (rarely publicly recognized) at his disposal in Langley, Virginia, and around the world. The reporters who admired him referred to him as “Great Scott,” and those who disliked him referred to him as “Great Scott!”

Edna Foster opened the door and entered the President’s Oval Office.

Not until she reached the desk did both men look up.

“Hello, Edna,” Montgomery Scott said to her. “Long time.”

“Yes, good to see you, Mr. Scott.”

Dilman pointed to the chair next to his desk. “Sit here, Miss Foster. I’m going to interrogate Mr. Scott. It’s important, so take down everything. Transcribe it and have it ready for me today. I may want to study it after dinner tonight.”

Edna sat, pulled down the hem of her skirt, pad and pencil waiting. “Any special security rating for this, Mr. President?”

“One copy, for me and no one else, stamped ‘Eyes Only’ and ‘Top Secret.’ ” Dilman indicated the chair on the other side of the desk. “Please sit down, Mr. Scott.”

“If you don’t mind, I will.” The CIA Director slumped into the chair and, propping himself in it like a fishhook, tugged at his short beard, then massaged the orange-stained meerschaum in his other hand.

“All right, Miss Foster,” Dilman said over his shoulder as his eyes remained upon Scott, and he finally swerved his leather chair to face him completely. “Mr. Scott, I’ll tell you why I wanted to see the original file of your daily reports, and why I wanted to see you. Shortly after one o’clock today, from a private source, I learned that the Vaduz Exporters, a Liechtenstein corporation with offices in Bethesda, is a Soviet Union Communist Front organization, operating illegally, shipping arms and ammunition through Liechtenstein to Iron Curtain countries, and from those countries to Africa. I have now found this confirmed in the FBI file on foreign subversive organizations in this area.”

“Oh, yes, Mr. President, we gave the FBI the lead on that two weeks ago, two weeks ago yesterday,” said Scott, with obvious satisfaction. “Unlike Amtorg, the Vaduz people are unregistered enemy agents. Lombardi told me they were already under surveillance, but what came in from our Barazan operative was the first concrete evidence of what was actually going on here. I think the FBI intends to crack down any day now.”

“Tomorrow,” said President Dilman. “The FBI is rounding them up and closing them tomorrow.”

Edna Foster’s mind, which had still been trapped by the mystery of George’s peculiar telephone call, now released itself to the new mystery she was recording in shorthand on the pad resting upon her knee. As her interest focused upon the two men in conversation before her, her pencil darted across the ruled lines, hooking, looping, scrawling.

“Excellent,” Montgomery Scott had said. Then he added, “Of course, that’s no longer strictly a CIA matter.”

President Dilman leaned forward. “I’ll tell you what is a CIA matter and a matter that seriously concerns me. How did you know that Vaduz weapons were pouring into Africa, the Baraza area, for native Communists?”

Scott sat straighter. “It’s in the special daily report I sent you—as I said, I remember the day—two weeks ago yesterday.”

“Mr. Scott, I received no such report from you,” said President Dilman grimly. “It’s not in my file here. Miss Foster brought my file in before you came, and I was able to see what I had overlooked before. One day’s report is missing from my file. As you said, the one dated two weeks ago yesterday. How is that possible?”

Montgomery Scott had shoved the meerschaum into one capacious pocket, and was entirely erect in his chair now. “I can’t imagine, Mr. President,” he said. Then he poked his forefinger at the second mound of sheets before Dilman. “In any case—”

“It should be in your original CIA file that you just brought in,” said President Dilman, finishing the Director’s sentence. “Well, sir, it isn’t. You saw me go through your original reports a few minutes ago. That one daily report is missing from there, too.” He leafed the sheets backward, and then said, “I find only a blue memorandum slip inserted, with the date, and the note, ‘Talley/Eaton to return.’ ” He looked up. “What does that mean?”

Scott, who had become increasingly disturbed, suddenly rapped the desk. “Of course. I remember. Following our usual procedure, that morning I sent out two copies from Langley, one to Governor Talley for you, and the other to Secretary of State Eaton. Later in the day Talley telephoned me that both you, Mr. President, and Secretary Eaton were concerned about the report, and wished our entire file, including the original from which the two copies had been made.”

“Wasn’t that unusual, Mr. Scott?” asked President Dilman.

Scott pulled at his Vandyke. “Why—yes—reconsidering it, I suppose it was. But I saw no reason not to comply. After all, President Truman established our Central Intelligence Agency primarily as a source to supply him, and future Chief Executives, with vital foreign data and information, unedited, unslanted, uninterpreted.” He bent forward, eyes narrowing. “Are you telling me, Mr. President, that although Governor Talley and Secretary Eaton sent for every scrap of that daily report on Baraza in your name, you saw neither our direct copy nor the original?”

“I saw nothing,” said President Dilman, “and until two hours ago I knew nothing. That is why I brought you here.”

“Well, I don’t understand,” said Scott, scratching his jaw through a portion of his beard. “Of course, I can’t become involved in politics, but speaking on a purely factual level, there can be a simple and quite understandable explanation of why your aide and the Secretary of State acted as they did.”

He appeared to be considering what he would say next. At last he spoke. “On occasion, a Secretary of State or some other Department head will withhold information from the President until it is fully confirmed or simply because, at that point, the Department head believes it to be unimportant.

“I can’t vouch for this, but I am told that during the Eisenhower administration the American Ambassador to Mexico learned that Fidel Castro had long been a Communist and had been trained to take over Cuba and convert it into a satellite of the Soviet Union. The top-secret report went to Washington. For some reason it was put aside, never shown to President Eisenhower. As a result, the President and his aides knew too little of Castro’s Red leanings. They blessed him as a democratic rebel, as did most Americans in those early days—only to learn later that he was, in truth, a puppet of the Soviet Union. The original warning report to Eisenhower? Who knows? Maybe somebody thought it was too idiotic and untruthworthy to be treated seriously.”

President Dilman held up his hand. “Mr. Scott, this missing report on Baraza, the one that has been kept from me—do you feel it was such as could be justifiably regarded as idiotic and untrustworthy, or not fully confirmed?”

The Director of the CIA was, in Edna Foster’s eyes, definitely uncomfortable. “Mr. President, I really feel I should not get involved. We are a fact-finding organization. We dredge up the facts, evaluate the source, and present them to you for consideration, and you decide what happens after that.”

“Very well,” said President Dilman, “then you dredge up the facts in that missing report on Baraza. You evaluate the source for me, and I shall do the judging. Since I prefer not to go to Talley or Eaton for the actual report just yet, I must depend upon someone else for the information it contained. Do you have that information in your head?”

“Yes, I have, Mr. President.”

“All right, shoot.”

“The information we received was precisely this: In the hills, on the entire northern frontier of Baraza, there is now taking place a buildup of a native Communist rebel army. Crates from the Vaduz Exporters have been coming in, along with Russian officers who are training these African Communists. The Soviet Embassy in Baraza City is paying for, and directing, the secret buildup. We do not know the size of this Communist force yet, or the extent to which it is being armed. So much for the information. Now, you want the source?”

“The source,” said Dilman.

“The first information came to our Embassy in Baraza City from a Communist defector, a native. To look into it further, our head CIA undercover agent there recruited an educated native, good clearance, who was, as we say, ‘in place,’ on the scene of the buildup. Our report, two weeks ago, was based on this source.”

“And your evaluation of the reliability of the source?” demanded President Dilman.

“As you know, Mr. President, we rate all incoming information on a scale that starts at 1—meaning positively reliable—and this scale grades downward to 6—meaning probably unreliable. Most of the reports that we give further attention to are those rated 2, 3 and 4. The Baraza report? I remember the rating exactly. It was rated between 3 and 4, meaning fairly reliable but requiring more investigation.”

“What have you done about it since?” asked President Dilman.