An Honorable Man (2 page)

“He won't come with this sideshow,” Mueller said.

“They'll leave. Hail a taxi. Go to a hotel.”

Mueller lit another cigarette and then regretted his choice again. He ground it under his heel. Drinking and smoking, two occupational hazards that had begun to wear on him.

The woman walked up the block, but slowed her stride to allow the man to catch up. The air was cold and crisp, sharp like flint. Suddenly she stopped. The two talked on the sidewalk. A bargain was struck.

“There's something odd about him,” Mueller said.

“Odd?”

“The uniform. His shoes. He's wearing loafers.”

The enlisted man opened the iron gate for the woman and then followed her up the steps to the apartment house lobby. He shot a glance over his shoulder before disappearing inside.

“What are you saying?” Walker asked. “It's him?” Then a demand. “You think it's him?”

“Not my call.”

Mueller saw Walker's discomfort and he felt the torment of the decision he faced. Both men knew it would be impossible to recover from a bad call.

“So be it,” Walker muttered. He pulled on his glove, stretching his fingers deep into the leather, and clenched a fist.

Mueller watched the FBI assemble. Walker signaled his agent in the phone booth, who in turn placed a call. It took a minute,
or less, for the Buick and two unmarked cars to converge on the apartment building. Two agents, handguns drawn, stepped from the first car and hustled up the steps to the lobby. Four other men took up positions at their cars, and one crouched agent scrambled toward the rear of the building.

Walker stood in the street barking orders to his team, and the sudden noise brought neighborhood residents to their windows. They saw black cars stopped at oblique angles on the street, doors flung open.

Mueller stayed out of sight, alone. He saw an FBI agent escort the army enlisted man down the stoop tightly gripping his arm. The enlisted man had lost his hat, his wrists were handcuffed behind his back, and his unbuckled pants rode down his hips. He looked dazed and embarassed.

A second agent had cuffed the prostitute and guided her, protesting, toward a car. Her wig was gone and she was hobbling on one broken heel, shouting fierce baritone obscenities at the agent who hustled her down the steps.

“Don't rush me,” the transvestite yelled, “I'll sprain an ankle.”

Mueller waited until Walker emerged from the apartment lobby and then he stepped out from his hiding spot. They met halfway across the street, Walker agitated, his face twisted in a scowl. He waved a stack of bills at Mueller as he walked past. “Keep this farce to yourself,” he snapped. “Don't say a thing. Not a word. Hear me?”

Walker slipped in the Buick's front seat and slammed his door shut. In a minute the cars were all gone and Mueller stood alone. There was one orphaned stiletto heel on the sidewalk that he dropped in a garbage can.

He walked rapidly away. He didn't bother to look behind to see if anyone noticed him, or to check on the curious neighbors. But at the end of the street he happened to turn. An instinct he'd acquired in Vienna after the war, the feeling of knowing when he was being observed. There at the corner in the shadow of a mature tree, a tall man in a gray homburg, hands shoved in the pockets of a long trench coat. There was something suspicious about the figure. Mueller read into every stranger the possibility the person was tailing him, and this man got his attention. Mueller stood there thirty feet away on the other side of the street, staring at the motionless figure, who stared back. Mueller couldn't make out the man's face, or the shape of his jawline in the hat's deep shadow.

“Hey, you,” Mueller yelled.

He went to cross the street, but a garbage truck fitted with a snowplow lumbered by in a riot of noise. When the truck passed, Mueller looked for the man, but he was gone.

2

THE DIRECTOR

G
EORGE MUELLER
understood that he was at a turning point in his career in the CIA, but it still haunted him that he hadn't seen, or chose to ignore, the obvious markers of disengagement along the way. His wishful thinking had blinded him to the Agency's troubles, and it was only when he realized it was too late to recover his enthusiasm for the job that he woke up one morning and thought to himself:
It's over. This is the end.

Things had always come easy to him, so he didn't have the lessons of failure to help him navigate the crisis. Public school in the Midwest and then Yale on scholarship, where he'd met Roger Altman, a year older, who introduced him to crew, dry martinis, and the gentle fun of a cappella singing. Mueller studied political history, read Hemingway like everyone else, and discovered a love for Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. He took up with a smart crowd of young men who affected a calculated weariness toward the world.

Mueller left Yale early to fight against Hitler's Germany, caught up in the great patriotism that drove America's young men into the armed forces. Through friends of friends of earlier graduates, he found himself in Texas training for the OSS. He parachuted behind enemy lines to help French Resistance sabotage rail lines and then played a small but dangerous role in occupied Norway that earned him a Purple Heart. He completed his undergraduate degree after the war and through a series of happenstances—choices presented to him—he worked on Wall Street, became bored, drank, and was recruited by his friend Altman to join the urgent battle in Europe against the Soviet Union. Mueller wanted to believe that he could make a difference in the world.

When things started going wrong they went very wrong. He was caught unprepared. It didn't happen all at once, though. Disappointment came in the slow accretion of small setbacks and his sense of powerlessness grew along the way. In '48 he was newly married, a father, stationed in the occupied city of Vienna running paramilitary operations from a cramped, unheated office across the Second Bezirk, the Russian zone, where the old Vienna with its prancing statues lay crumbling and desolate with burned-out tanks pushed to the side of the Danube. The girl he'd married worked in the office and their long hours together led to a romance. She was on the team that recruited disenchanted citizens of Soviet satellites for the Allies and organized them to be air dropped into the Carpathian Mountains, or inserted by fast boat on the Albanian coast under cover of darkness. Johana was just twenty-two when she joined the team working as a trans
lator. She was beautiful, in a most Austrian way, with alabaster skin, wavy chestnut hair, and large brown eyes. She had all the English she needed with her wartime education in London, and on returning to her hometown she'd been deemed suitable for a job with the Americans, where she was in the thick of things. Their child wasn't planned.

They watched in dismay as missions failed. A few radio transmitters were turned on by teams inserted behind the Iron Curtain, but in most cases there was only radio silence. Ambushed. Coordinates were known to the Soviets in advance. No one wanted to admit the obvious. The Soviets had penetrated the Agency. Someone inside had provided the Soviets with drop points, and then later, the names of CIA assets. Mueller saw the pattern in Vienna and continued to see it when he was brought back to agency headquarters in Quarter's Eye. Men disappeared, networks rolled up. One by one CIA assets were compromised in Vienna, Berlin, and now there was Alfred Leisz. He hadn't been somewhere in Europe. Leisz had been right there in Washington managing the listening post in the basement of the public library near the Soviet embassy.

Traitor
was a word that never appeared in memos; it was unsaid in meetings. But it was whispered at Friday-afternoon vespers when Scotch whiskey released the week's tension among case officers who worked in Quarter's Eye. Mueller too had been reluctant to use the word because it implied a betrayal of unthinkable proportions. Someone in the close group of colleagues was working for the other side. One of them had turned to the Soviet Union. Mueller knew trust was the basis of their work and
he had become guarded in his conversations, cautious in what he said, and matters he once openly discussed he avoided, or simply shut down. Mueller found himself among his colleagues with their Scotch whiskeys knowing they were thinking:
Is he? Was he? Could he?

Everyone privately worried about a Soviet agent in their midst. They worried about other things too, but those anxieties were openly discussed. A great emphasis, by way of defense, was placed upon loud opinions against communism, against homosexuality, against atheism. And this was matched by great enthusiasm for the activities in their lives, the quail hunting, fly-fishing, tennis, drinking. But not discussed, not among themselves or with their wives, who often were in the dark about what their husbands did, or even who their employer was, were their private suspicions about colleagues. Caution depleted camaraderie.

  •  •  •  

The call to meet the director came early in the morning. Dense fog rolled in from the cold Potomac and low visibility in the back of the taxi deepened Mueller's gloomy mood. It reminded him of winter in Vienna. Dampness that penetrated the soul.

Mueller was just shy of six feet, and on the thin side, which made him appear lanky, and he slumped in the backseat. His face was slightly oval, hair parted on the left, and combed straight back, and he wore clear plastic eyeglass that made him look inconspicuous, a man who could sit in a restaurant and not catch a waiter's eye.

He dressed practically, in gabardine suits that held their form
one day to the next and let him keep his trips to the cleaners to a minimum. He used a simple knot for his necktie because it was fast, easy to tie, and quick to remove, and it matched the ­narrow-spread collar he preferred. His leather shoes needed a shine and their soles were wearing thin, but since his divorce he hadn't found a comfortable rhythm to his personal life.

He had long, delicate fingers with nails that almost looked manicured. His were not hands that could strangle a man. They lacked the strength for that. The grip of a tennis racket had helped, but tennis was the sport he took up only when he wasn't near a boathouse with sculls to put in the river. They were the hands of a man with a desk job, hands of a thinker. A callus on his finger came from after-action reports he wrote in a cramped style with fountain pen. No one would look at Mueller and think he was the type to pick a fight in a bar.

“On the right,” Mueller said. He leaned forward to the driver and cocked his head at an angle that was always the same degree off center when he took an interest in the person he was addressing. “Drop me there at the guardhouse.”

Mueller flashed his badge to the military policeman at the locked gate, near the sign that identified the redbrick building as the United States Government Printing Office. It was a silly holdover from the Agency's early days, and taxi drivers weren't fooled; even tour bus guides took pleasure in pointing out what really went on inside the three-story Federal-style building. Who were they kidding? To Mueller the printing office sign fit into the larger pattern of being out of touch, the Agency believing the myths about itself.

Mueller was shown into the corner office by Rose, the director's longtime secretary, who put Mueller on a leather sofa that anchored a sitting arrangement at one end of the room, across from a ponderous wood desk. There was no clutter of paper, only stacked file folders, and the director was absorbed in reading a letter. A cold draft filled the room, carrying with it the musty odor of a stodgy Ivy League club. Mounted antelope and mountain lion heads hung on one wall above a shelf of stuffed game birds, and an antique double-barrel shotgun was cocked open on the coffee table by the sofa. Everywhere were framed photos of the director with smiling dignitaries and elegant women. Mueller knew it was unusual to be in the director's office. An invitation meant a rare commendation or a private dressing down. One never knew which.

“You hunt?” the director said, crossing the room letter in hand.

“Quail.”

“Good man. We should go one day. I know a spot on the bay. Before the season opens.”

The director sat opposite Mueller in a high-backed wing chair covered in chintz and tatted antimacassars on the arms. He wore a crimson house robe open at the neck to show necktie, and tan slippers adorned at the toes with floppy dog ears. His hair was thinning, gray, eyes a keen blue, cheeks flush with drinker's weight, and his snaggletooth bit on a pipe, which he removed and tapped on an ash tray, and said, almost to himself as much as to Mueller, “You have to have a few martyrs. Some people have to get killed. It's part of this business. I wouldn't
worry about Leisz. He knew what he was getting into when he signed up with us.”

He waved his hand in the air at nothing, like the pope. “He's not on my conscience. None of them are. We are not in the conscience business. The Soviets don't play the game that way.”

The director added fresh tobacco to his pipe and applied a match, drawing air to brighten the coals. He looked over his rimless spectacles perched on the end of his thick nose. “I need you to see this through to the end.” He drew on the pipe, releasing quick puffs. Hints of licorice reached Mueller.

“Take some time off if you need to see your son. If you think it's important. I believe in letting the mind rest so it doesn't fight against the will. . . . This is a grubby business we're in. Someday we'll both get back to the classroom, you and I. It's that fondness for thinking that makes us good at what we do here. The professor finds satisfaction in sorting through details and he feels superior when he passes along knowledge. The spy is the same. The daily grind, the mounds of information, the hours of boredom poking around the mounds of information, punctuated by ecstatic moments of discovery. Good researchers hold no beliefs, make no judgments. Evidence declares itself. Am I lecturing too much?”