Andersen, Kurt (44 page)

“Something like that. The piece of the story I still don’t have nailed is the other asset in your group. Which I still think there must have been, and which has to be what saved you. It’s
killing
me. Like when you can’t get a final, big thirteen-letter phrase in a crossword puzzle. I can’t pry shit out of INSCOM.”

“That reminds me.”

“You forgot to tell me you were a Defense Intelligence Agency asset after all? Signed up by your uncle Ralph?” He isn’t obviously joking.

“
No.
I got a Freedom of Information letter back from them a week or so ago—’in the interest of national security, involvement by the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command in the activities which are the subject matter of your request can neither be confirmed nor denied.’ They Glomarized me.”

“There you fucking go.” He seems both happy and unhappy, intrigued and disappointed. “The puzzle’s done.”

After he pays the check in cash and then shows off by having a conversation in perfect Spanish with one of the parking valets, we get in his car and he opens a manila envelope with both hands and holds it in front of me. Inside is a fat number 10 envelope, which I take out. “Happy birthday,” he says.

As we drive, I barely look up, marvel at no L.A.-by-night panoramas, do nothing but skim a sheaf of xeroxed CIA documents originally typewritten and sent via special pouch and specially numbered blind memoranda, many of them circulated directly to the director of Central Intelligence. Stewart tells me I “lucked out.” Richard Helms, the CIA director back then, tape-recorded conversations in his office, and before leaving the job in 1973, he didn’t manage to destroy all seven years’ worth of transcripts. “Somebody made a few temporary stayback burn copies that didn’t turn out to be temporary.” Thus, what I’m holding is the unredacted lowdown on Alex Macallister, junior spook.

“Wow,” I say. “ ‘EYES ONLY safekeeping.’ ‘Destroy the one burn copy and the ribbon copy.’ ‘Destroy all notes and other source materials.’ It’s so … spy-novelish. OCI is what—Office of Central Intelligence?”

“Current Intelligence.”

As we turn from Highland onto the Hollywood Freeway, I make a plosive sound. “Why do they
write
like this?”

“Don’t get me started. It’s one of the worst parts of the job.”

“‘Beginning 1967 Americans with existing extremist credentials’—‘extremist
credentials,
’ that’s hilarious—‘have been assessed, recruited, tested, and dispatched for assignments. Agents who have an American ‘Movement’ background are useful as agents to obtain biographic and personality data, to discern possible susceptibilities, and to develop operationally exploitable relationships with recruitment targets of the above programs.’”

“That’s Updike,” he says, “compared to the shit I see.”

“What, are they paid by the syllable? I thought CIA were supposed to be the intellectual ones.”

I read on silently, except when I need Stewart’s help deciphering. “RYBAT?”

“Highly sensitive information.”

“Coo-bark?” I ask, mispronouncing KUBARK.

“It’s K-U-bark. Headquarters, Langley. K-U is the prefix for the Agency.”

“So K-U-DOVE is … “

“Clandestine Services.”

We turn off the Hollywood Freeway onto Mulholland. “What’s A-M mean?”

“Cuba.”

“And A-M-THUG?”

“Castro.”

“Huh. Some code. Whoa—my
name.
Spelled right! Why does it have an asterisk penciled in?”

“Unclear. Your old man’s connections, your uncle Ralph, some stray clerk sometime making a stray mark for whatever reason. I don’t know. You’re completely ruining the view with the light on, by the way. Those pages are not going to disintegrate. You can read them all later.”

I ignore him and continue reading. “I know O-D means ‘other departments of the government,’” I say as we turn down Benedict Canyon, “but what’s O-D-FOAM?”

“Secret Service.”

At my house, I take off my shoes but spend another half hour on the bed reading the trove. After his initial recruitment by the CIA in the summer of 1967 to spy on his Yugoslavian Communist friend, Alex started reporting on us and members of Harvard SDS as part of Project RESISTANCE. He contributed to a secret report called “Restless Youth,” produced by the CIA’s Office of Current Intelligence on student radicals and commissioned personally by LBJ. Alex informed his CIA handler in April 1968 of a potential threat against the president in Washington, D.C., and CIA in turn informed the Secret Service—which was, according to a memo, already aware of the assassination plot against Johnson. Alex continued feeding information to the CIA about Cambridge radicals until 1971, when we graduated. He even had a CIA code name, WHEEL-14.

That must be why his movie company is called Wheel Life Pictures. I always assumed it was just a lame pun that some boyfriend of Alex’s made up.

After examining the mysterious chronic dampness in the corner of my bedroom, Stewart says I need to get the roof repaired. He’s taken off his pants and turned on the TV. He’s on the bed, watching the new live-action HBO show about cats and dogs and horses and rats who talk and curse and dream and have sex and occasionally kill one another.

“Is that supposed to be a comedy?” he asks as he flips to the news channels.

“I don’t know, but one last question. What is CHAOS?”

“From the ancient Greek, abyss, a state of extreme confusion, formlessness.”

“Seriously.”

“In the summer of sixty-eight the Agency put all the domestic anti-radical crap under one roof. That’s what they called it.”

“Unbelievable! Did they name it after the evil spy organization on
Get Smart
?”

“Beats me. Maybe.”

I put down the papers. “This is just stupendous.” Life imitates entertainment. Alex Macallister, my James Bond playmate, worked on Project RESISTANCE, became a CHAOS agent, had a code name containing a number. “
Thank
you.” I lean over and kiss Stewart.

“If reading old files counts as foreplay, you’re sicker than I am.”

As I brush my teeth, I realize I didn’t understand something Stewart said at dinner.

“Honey?” I say as I walk barefoot and half-naked back into the bedroom. “One more thing, absolutely the last—”

“Shhh,”
he says, pointing at the TV.

There’s an old silent clip of Buzzy in black tie talking to George W. Bush. “The influential Washington insider and FOX News commentator,” the anchor says, “was found dead early this morning, killed by a hand grenade, in his luxurious northwest Washington home.”

“Oh my God.”

“Although it was initially reported as an execution-style terrorist killing, ATF and FBI sources now tell FOX News they believe Bernard Freeman’s death to be a suicide.”

“Oh, Christ, oh, fuck, fuck,
fuck.
He killed himself because of me, because I’m outing us.”

Stewart takes me in his arms. He does not refute my theory. I’m shivering, not because I’m cold.

“How close are you to done?” he asks. “With the book?”

“Why? Fairly close, I guess.”

“In case Freeman left a note. Telling all. Burning you before you can burn him. Check your voice mail, see if anybody’s called. I should probably clear the fuck out of here before the camera crews or the feebs show up.”

26

On the first Saturday in February 1968, I didn’t wake up until after the sun had gone down, so my father’s favorite cliché, the cold light of day, could not literally apply. But I was pleased and surprised to discover that I remembered everything we’d discussed and debated and decided to do. I was clear and calm, as if I’d been initiated into a secret club of heroic problem-solvers, had at last made a real moral choice, the only moral choice—to
act,
to eliminate the bloody tyrant. The night had had its dreamlike qualities, but it was a dream unlike any I’d ever had, because it made perfect sense while it was occurring and still made perfect sense afterward.

I phoned Chuck, and he phoned Alex, and we all agreed to meet at Tommy’s Lunch—nominally for dinner, since none of us had eaten a real meal in twenty-four hours, but implicitly and actually to reaffirm our decision in the cold light of day, to make sure none of us was chickening out.

Each of us was tentative at first, and we addressed the matter at hand by indirection, in a kind of ad hoc code. By the time our sandwiches were ready, however, Buzzy was referring to the plan as “Lima Bravo Juliet”—LBJ—and it was clear we were all in. Alex was grinning and wide-eyed, as if he’d been cast in a movie. Chuck seemed reborn, loose and determined; a weight had been lifted. Buzzy said it was important that we act and speak in public as we had all year, keep the same hours, go to classes as usual, everything outwardly unchanged.

“So: D-day?” he asked. “We need a couple of months.”

“April Fool’s?” I proposed.

They all gave me sharp, shocked looks.

“I’m not saying it’s a prank! I just mean the first of the month.”

“Right,” Alex said, “that is during spring break.”

“Okay,” Buzzy said, “we’ll aim for one April.”

As we walked out into the frigid darkness of Mount Auburn Street, Alex declaimed loudly, “Into the breach, we band of brothers, we happy few.”

“Brothers and sister,” Buzzy said.

I wondered if I would lose my nerve.

However, as we focused on our secret plan to improve the world instantly, the world obliged by becoming more atrocious. Consider the following Thursday, the eighth of February. On that single day, police shot and killed three students, two of them in the back, and wounded dozens of others during a protest at a black college in South Carolina; George Wallace, the segregationist former governor of Alabama, announced his third-party candidacy for president and said
he’d
make Washington safe “if it took thirty thousand troops with two-foot bayonets”; and we read an Associated Press dispatch in
The
Harvard
Crimson
about the spasm of bombs and artillery shells that had wiped out Bến Tre, South Vietnam, and a U.S. Army officer’s explanation that “it became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” The following week, more than three thousand Americans were killed and wounded in Vietnam, the most ever and twice the rate of the previous month. The tipping point that had sickened and frightened me in January was tipping all the way.

The newspaper was full of stories suggesting that Johnson might be about to turn Vietnam into a nuclear war. The Pentagon admitted that H-bomb experts from MIT and Columbia had gone to Saigon to assess “the effectiveness of new weapons.” Early one morning Buzzy called me to read aloud from an article in the
Times
about the chairman of the joint chiefs testifying to a Senate committee. “They ask him if they’re planning to use nukes anywhere in ‘Nam, and the fucker answers, ‘I do not
think
that nuclear weapons will be required to defend Khe Sanh.’ He doesn’t ‘think’ so, not in Khe Sanh, anyhow. What about anywhere
else
in Vietnam, General Wheeler?”

How could we shrink from the obvious conclusion? It was clear to us that by eliminating one person, the right person, we might save the lives of many thousands of people. We really might prevent World War III.

The radical wankers around us that winter and spring seemed more impotent and vain than ever, talking and talking and talking some more, which only fueled our conviction that we were serious and they were whiny children. They insisted that the university hire more Marxist faculty members. When another Dow Chemical job recruiter came to campus and said that he supported the manufacture of napalm and was “proud to work for Dow,” SDS did nothing. For a week, I shook my head or rolled my eyes every time I passed a kid wearing a black armband, one of the hundreds of students who were supposedly “fasting” to protest the war—and who then demanded rebates of fifteen dollars apiece for the week of cafeteria meals they’d skipped in protest.

True, public opinion seemed to be shifting a little. Walter Cronkite came back from a tour of Vietnam and, shockingly, expressed his opinion on the evening news—”with each escalation,” he said, “the world comes closer to the brink of cosmic disaster.” Two weeks later, Eugene McCarthy, the peace candidate, ran a close second to Johnson in the New Hampshire primary.

We four, however, had our own take on these supposedly hopeful signs. “Armbands and peace rallies aren’t what’s doing this,” Buzzy said. “
Resistance
is. Those never-say-die Charlies in Saigon and Khe San are. Fighting fire with fire is.”

“By the way?” Alex said. “In New Hampshire? Gene McCarthy
lost,
and LBJ
won.
My dad says Adlai Stevenson told him that McCarthy is never going to be nominated, let alone elected president.”

We were not unlike the clipboard-clasping eager beavers all around us campaigning for McCarthy, my roommate and Sarah Caputo organizing carpools up to New Hampshire and out to Wisconsin. Like them, we were smart and hopeful and indefatigable, well organized and goal-oriented, with time on our hands. Which was why we thought we had a special destiny. Instead of harnessing our youthful energy to stuff envelopes and phone strangers and knock on doors and drive voters to polling places in order to rid the world of Lyndon Johnson and end the war,
our
little Children’s Crusade was efficient and didn’t require convincing thirty million Americans to vote for some goofy Minnesota poet. Unlike the fires set and store windows smashed and random cops shot by poor black people, the act of violence we envisioned was rationally, carefully, coolly premeditated and planned. We weren’t wild-eyed romantics or dead-enders, I thought. We would be effective. We were
pragmatic.

What I think each of us felt, although none of us said so, was that we were invincible. We’d gotten away with every Bond mission unscathed, and with driving drunk and missing curfews and calling ourselves radicals and taking drugs and having sex and cursing our parents. We’d been admitted to
Harvard.
We’d gotten away with planting the M-80s in the ROTC building and holding the Dow recruiter hostage, and Chuck had even gotten away with fighting the U.S. marshal at the Pentagon. What hadn’t we gotten away with? Luck had always been on our side. Now we were daring it to abandon us.