Agents of Innocence (15 page)

Washington; April 1970

Rogers was summoned to Washington three weeks later. The Operational Approval branch didn’t like his plan of action. Neither did John Marsh, the operations chief of the NE Division, who urged Stone to recall Rogers for “consultations.”

It was the first real rebuff Rogers had faced in a career that, until then, had been a steady progression of successes and commendations. Hoffman tried to assure him that being summoned home was part of the game, a rite of passage in mid-career. They didn’t take you seriously in the front office until they had hauled you on the carpet and given you a lecture. Anyway, Hoffman said, if Rogers wanted to play it safe, he should have chosen another career.

Hoffman was kind enough not to add: I told you so. But Rogers could hear him thinking it anyway.

Rogers dreaded the trip. He was edgy at home with Jane, distant in their final few nights together, restless and temperamental even around the children. He didn’t like being second-guessed, especially by people who hadn’t recruited an agent of their own in years. He also didn’t like to be reminded that he was in mid-career, no longer a prodigy, exposed to attack from people back home who regarded him as a threat or a rival. Rogers liked to keep his life in neat compartments. The biggest one, called work, had suddenly passed out of his control.

Rogers tried to relax on the airplane. He had a few drinks. He thought of his athletic exploits in high school. He reminisced about old girlfriends. He reviewed in his mind some of the intelligence operations for which he had been commended in the past.

On the Paris-Washington leg of the flight, Rogers struck up a conversation with an attractive French woman, blond and blue-eyed, in her mid-thirties.

She was carefully coiffed and dressed in an expensive tweed suit. When she moved, Rogers thought he could hear the rustle of her undergarments.

Rogers asked the woman why she was travelling to America. Business or pleasure?

“Pleasure,” said the woman, drawing out the syllables of the word. Rogers heard the sound of silk and satin as she adjusted herself in the seat.

“Any plans?” asked Rogers.

“We shall see,” said the woman.

She was the wife of a French industrialist, she explained. A flat on the Isle Saint-Louis, too many parties, too many responsibilities. She was tired of Paris and wanted a holiday in America.

Rogers found the woman overwhelmingly attractive. When she leaned forward to talk to him, he could see the fine white powder of her makeup, the gloss of her lipstick, and the fullness of her breasts. She had the perfect manners of a woman kept for the pleasure of a refined and wealthy gentleman.

As they were leaving the plane, Rogers, without quite knowing why, asked for the name of her hotel.

The woman blushed and averted her eyes but said quietly, “The Madison.” She handed him a card with her name: Véronique Godard.

“Shall I call you?” asked Rogers, taking the card.

“As you like,” said the French woman, closing her eyes as she spoke.

Rogers was staying at a cheap hotel in Arlington where the agency booked people who were home on TDY. He checked in, called several friends to announce his arrival, and took a stroll across the Key Bridge to Georgetown.

He sat in a bar debating whether to call the woman from the plane. It felt strange even to be asking himself the question. He was monogamous, for reasons of personal sanity as well as security. The conviction that he was happily married was central to his sense of well-being. But he felt a restlessness, a pull toward adventure and doom, an impulse like the feeling one gets occasionally on a high balcony looking out over the edge of the railing.

Jump, said Rogers to himself. He saw the French woman in his mind’s eye, arrayed on a bed of soft pillows and white linen.

He went to the phone and dialed the number of the Madison.

I’ll invite her to dinner, Rogers told himself. Who knows what will come of it? We’ll have a meal together. An innocent flirtation.

“Good evening, the Madison,” said the hotel operator.

“The room of Madame Godard, please,” said Rogers. He felt as nervous as a teenager on his first date.

Ring-ring, ring-ring.

What would he say when she answered? Hello. I am infatuated with you. I can’t get you out of my mind. No, obviously not that. He would think of something when she answered.

Ring-ring, ring-ring.

Rogers’s palms were sweating. He heard a voice. It was the operator.

“I’m sorry, sir. There’s no answer.”

Rogers went back to the bar and had another whisky. He waited thirty minutes and called the hotel again.

The same nervous wait. Again, no answer.

He decided to have dinner at his favorite French restaurant, Jean-Pierre on K Street. When he arrived and saw the soft banquettes and the delicate watercolors on the wall, he called the hotel again.

“Madame Godard, please.”

“One moment,” said the operator.

Ring-ring.

“Allo….”

It was a man’s voice. Rogers thought he could hear a woman’s voice in the background, singing.

“Allo?”

The man had a French accent.

Perhaps it’s just the bellhop, Rogers told himself.

“Hello,” said Rogers. “Is Madame Godard there?”

“Un instant,” said the man in French.

“Hello,” said a woman’s voice.

“Véronique,” said Rogers. “This is Tom, the man from the plane.”

“Who?” said the voice.

“The man from the plane,” repeated Rogers.

“Oh yes. Hello,” she said in a lower voice. She sounded embarrassed.

“I though perhaps you might be free for dinner this evening,” said Rogers.

She lowered her voice almost to a whisper.

“Not tonight. I am busy. Perhaps another time.”

“Yes, perhaps,” said Rogers, knowing that he wouldn’t call again.

“I am glad that you called,” said the woman in a voice that was barely audible. Rogers pictured her standing in a bathrobe, talking on the telephone in a whisper while her boyfriend jealously paced the room. It was a perverse sort of satisfaction, but not very lasting. The Frenchman, after all, had Madame Godard.

“I think you are beautiful,” said Rogers. What did it matter now? He could say whatever he wanted.

She gave a slight laugh that was, at once, a protest of modesty and a further seduction.

“Goodbye,” said Rogers.

He looked at the phone fondly, a last remnant of the woman, before hanging it up.

“C’est dommage,” Rogers said to the headwaiter as he returned to his seat. The waiter smiled indulgently.

Rogers ordered medallions of venison with chestnut puree, a house specialty. After drinking down most of a bottle of Burgundy, he wondered if perhaps there was an angel in heaven with the task of keeping him faithful to his wife, despite his own flights of desire. He tried to remember the priest’s admonition in school long ago. Was the adulterous wish the same in the eyes of God as the act itself? Surely not. But he couldn’t quite remember. Perhaps he was getting old.

A shuttle bus arrived at the hotel at 9:00
A.M.
It had smoked windows, so that any KGB agents who happened to be cruising along the George Washington Parkway couldn’t be sure just who was taking the exit for the Central Intelligence Agency. The bus deposited Rogers in the basement of the building. He passed through security and took the elevator to the wing where the DDP and his minions planned their global escapades. A secretary in a distant outer office welcomed Rogers, gave him coffee, and took him down the hall.

The agency’s headquarters looked so clean and wholesome. Someone had once told Rogers that it had been designed to look like a university campus. A place where people smoked pipes and went to seminars. How distant that image was, Rogers thought, from the world that he inhabited.

“The problem with your operational plan is that there isn’t any plan,” said John Marsh.

Rogers listened impassively. He was seated in a conference room with Marsh and Stone. The room was decorated with photographs of past heads of the clandestine service. A gallery of chiselled features, measured judgments, stiff upper lips.

“I had thought these issues were resolved a month ago, only to find that they were not,” continued Marsh.

Marsh made an interesting contrast to Rogers. He was shorter, neater, tighter, meaner. Where Rogers looked relaxed and informal in his corduroy suit, Marsh was dressed fastidiously, like a salesman at a Brooks Brothers store. He wore a blue pinstripe suit, a white shirt with a button-down collar that rolled just so, a yellow tie, striped suspenders, and a pair of black tasseled mocassins. His hair was combed back tightly against his head. If someone had told Marsh that his head looked as smooth and hard as a bullet, he probably would have felt flattered.

“At the risk of sounding immodest,” Marsh went on, “I must point out that the central problem in the PRQ is the same one that I tried to bring to Tom’s attention in the cable to him in Kuwait. Which was, shall we say, mislaid.” He chided Rogers in the curt, bloodless way that a schoolteacher corrects a dull pupil.

“It shouldn’t be necessary to remind someone of Tom’s experience and standing…”

Rogers noted that he was being discussed in the third person. He had a momentary desire to punch Marsh in the face.

“…that the essence of any successful intelligence operation is control.

“An uncontrolled agent is like an unguided missile,” continued Marsh. “We have no hook, no handle, to manipulate his behavior. The uncontrolled agent can go running off in whatever direction he pleases, talk to whomever he likes, do or not do what we request—as it suits his fancy. In my opinion it’s better not to deal with such a person at all, regardless of how well placed he may be, because the potential for mischief is so great. I regard it as essential, especially in an organization like Fatah that is already thoroughly penetrated by the Soviets, that we work only with people who are under discipline.”

As he finished his discourse, Marsh took a white linen handkerchief from his breast pocket and dabbed it against his mouth. Rogers decided he had been right in a judgment he made several years ago: Marsh was a pompous ass.

Rogers offered a brief defense of his recommendations in the
PECOCK
case, repeating the same arguments he had made in the PRQ. He spoke calmly and carefully, trying to sound like himself and not a misshapen version of Marsh.

“Control would certainly be preferable,” said Rogers, “if it were possible. But I don’t think it is in this case. At least not yet. We’re dealing with someone at the top of his organization, who believes in his cause. He isn’t a defector. He isn’t a crook. He isn’t a pervert. If we want control, we should go after somebody who is less important and more vulnerable. Somebody who will be more susceptible to pressure.”

“That’s defeatism,” said Marsh. “You are assuming you can’t recruit the agent through financial incentives when, by your own admission, you haven’t really tried.”

You fool, thought Rogers. You wouldn’t know a potential agent if he walked up and bit you on the ass.

Rogers turned to Stone.

“All I can do is ask you to trust me,” Rogers said. “That may sound unprofessional. But I know this case, and I know what will work with this agent, and I hope you’ll trust my judgment.”

Stone, who had been listening silently to the two younger men, eventually spoke up.

“This isn’t an easy case,” the division chief said. “We all have an enormous regard for Tom’s work, and we also have a pressing need for the intelligence he can provide about the Palestinians. But our need isn’t so pressing that it makes sense for us to launch an insecure operation.”

Marsh nodded.

“I want to take a day or so to consider the issues that we have discussed and talk to a few people who are wiser than I am,” concluded Stone. “I’ll let you know my decision as quickly as possible.”

The meeting ended.

Stone asked Rogers to stay behind a moment.

As Marsh walked out of the conference room, he could hear the division chief inviting Rogers to join him for dinner that night at his club.

Dinner with Stone was a ritual, born of his early days in the officers’ mess of the prewar Army, nurtured in London during the war, sustained in the years since then at dinner meetings around the world with agents, case officers, and friends. Stone regarded dinner as a play in three acts and liked each detail of the production—each dish, drink, and morsel of conversation—to be precisely right.

Rogers arrived at the Athenian Club promptly at seven-thirty. It was a brick building in downtown Washington, squat and solid like a broad-beamed Victorian banker.

“Can I help you?” said the doorman, discreetly stopping Rogers at the foyer. The doorman had memorized several thousand faces. He knew everyone who was a member. More important, he knew everyone who was not, and each person in this latter category was greeted with the same polite but firm query: “Can I help you?” The doorman in this case helped Rogers to the lobby, where Stone was seated in a leather chair by the fire, reading a newspaper.

Stone rose and escorted his guest up a grand stairway to the drawing room on the second floor, where another fire was blazing and two big leather chairs awaited them. An old black waiter in a white coat arrived and took their drink orders.

“A dry gin martini,” said Stone.

Rogers, swept along by the tide of the encounter, ordered the same. They made small talk for forty-five minutes, talking about their respective families, current events, low-level agency gossip.

A waiter brought menus and both men ordered steaks. Stone selected a bottle of Bordeaux from the wine list. At eight-fifteen exactly, the older man rose from his chair and led his guest to the fourth-floor dining room, past acres of starched white linen, to a corner table. Dinner conversation was slightly more focused, touching on events in the Middle East, life in the Beirut station, the agency’s ups and downs.