Back Channel (30 page)

“How long will I be in Washington?”

“Until the crisis is over, or until we persuade Fomin to deal with us directly. And that last is unlikely, I might add. Next.”

“Are the missiles a real threat? They really could hit Washington and New York, like the press is saying?”

“Yes. Next.”

“You said we’d come back to how I’m going to meet the President.”

“Yes. Well, this is where the plan gets complicated.” As if the rest were not. “Let me explain the cover story.”

He did. And as she listened, her fists clenched with anger and her eyes grew wide with dread.

PART III
Prisoner’s Dilemma

October 23, 1962–October 29, 1962

Washington, D.C.

On Tuesday, October 23, just past seven in the evening, Margo Jensen stood in a bleak urban rain waiting miserably for the D.C. Transit bus. The stop was on Fourth Street in Southwest Washington, just north of G. Her red Cornell umbrella shielded her from the downpour but not from the autumn night that chilled her bones; although the weather was not the cause of her trembling. Twenty-four hours ago, President Kennedy had told the nation that the Soviet Union had placed missiles with nuclear warheads in Cuba. Now Margo was off to her first meeting with Aleksandr Fomin, to help Kennedy and Khrushchev figure out what to do about them.

Margo cupped a hand above her eyes, peering into the downpour in search of the bus. Earlier today, as she crossed the street after work, a skidding car had nearly run her down; her nerves were so stretched that she had caught herself wondering whether the driver might have been trying to hit her. Everybody in the city seemed jangly. In her apartment building after Kennedy’s speech last night, people were thronging the hallways, arguing and shouting, talking about where they were from, and where they had friends, and where they intended to go with their families once the station wagon was packed. The two propositions on which they all agreed were that Washington, D.C., was Ground Zero, and that Ground Zero might not be the best place to be.

Margo had watched the President’s address with the two roommates she had met only Saturday night, when she moved in. Hope and
Patsy were interns in dull federal departments, just as Margo herself was: for her cover work was in an obscure corner in the Labor Department, in the office of a woman named Torie Elden, principal deputy to the functionary charged with calculating unemployment numbers each month. Torie was in her thirties, and unmarried, and what was known at this time as a woman of speed. She was also, via the tentacular relations of the old Negro families, a distant cousin, a key factor in the selection of her office as Margo’s destination, for the fiction at every point had to be plausible. Anyone dogging her steps would suppose that Margo, exhausted and distracted following the events in Bulgaria, had chosen to take a leave of absence from school, opting instead to use family connections to gain an instant, and fairly easy, internship deep in the labyrinth of federal bureaucracy. And if Torie persisted in giving her peculiar looks all through that first morning, as she explained which reports went into which folders and when, there was behind the surface fiction a second fiction that, through the operation of the Washington rumor mill, would soon provide the indelicate explanation for the sudden White House command that Torie find her cousin a place.

Margo dutifully took notes, and spent the rest of Monday filing and fetching (as Nana huffily referred to secretarial work), all the while waiting for the promised contact. Fomin had not said how he would get in touch with her, but the vanished Niemeyer had assured her that the Soviet spy would figure it out. At her briefing on Saturday, Mr. Bundy had said much the same.

“How will he know where to find me?”

“He’ll know.”

As for Hope and Patsy, they were madly curious about her but had evidently been warned not to ask too many questions. Dark-haired Hope was a Midwesterner, quiet and studious; blond Patsy, a loud, rangy Californian. But the oddest part was that when she arrived they said they had been expecting her since Friday.

You are going to be playing on a much larger stage now,
Harrington had said.
The people who will run the operation will likely be from the very top.

That much Margo understood. It explained why they had cut off her access to the State Department, and why Niemeyer had done his vanishing act. But, the more she pondered, the more the chain of
events escaped her. Fomin had visited her on Tuesday. Niemeyer had disappeared on Wednesday. Her emergency codes had been cut off on Thursday, and Torie Elden had evidently been contacted on Friday morning.

Yet her reunion with Harrington had not come until Friday night.

What was going on?

She was on the bus now, headed north on Fourth Street. Every few blocks, the bus bumped over the tracks of the city’s vanished streetcars. The apartment they’d found for her was in a development of townhouses and residential towers known popularly as “the new Southwest.” In the morning, the bus would have been crowded with bureaucrats heading to work, but this time of night, the clientele was harder, and darker, and angrier. As the bus crossed the Mall, the Capitol dome shimmered murkily through the night rain. Soon she was passing thickly clustered federal office buildings. Gazing out the window, she remembered yesterday morning’s briefing by a highly curious Torie Elden, who was busily trying to figure out why she had a second intern, even though the budget provided for just one.

“Either you know somebody or you are somebody,” Torie had murmured in genuine admiration. “Your application never even got to my desk.”

“It was a last-minute thing,” said Margo, lamely, because the briefing had not covered that particularly detail.

“My boss told me not to ask too many questions.”

“That’s probably a good idea.”

“We don’t really have an office for you. You’ll have to sit in the file room. It doesn’t have a window.” Striking a saucy pose, hand on ample hip. “Does that meet your approval? Or are you going to complain to somebody who’ll call up my boss and make him give you my office instead?”

“Of course not,” said Margo, blushing. The briefing hadn’t covered that issue, either.

An awkward pause. “I thought your side of the family was all Republicans.”

“I’m a Democrat.”

“You’re not even old enough to vote.”

“I’m old enough to serve my country.”

Torie laughed. “Margo, honey, you’ll be working as a file clerk. If you want to call that serving your country, that’s up to you. But there are people out there who risk their lives. Don’t put yourself in their category.”

“No, ma’am. I won’t.”

The Labor Department was housed in a granite monstrosity, occupying two blocks north of Constitution Avenue, fronting on Fourteenth Street. Its somber gray walls were decorated with enough pillars and pilasters for half a dozen government buildings of more ordinary dimensions. It was constructed in the 1930s, an era when size and elaboration were often mistaken for importance.

On Tuesday, Margo lunched with a brace of fellow interns: the one who worked for Torie, and four or five others from around her floor. The group had taken the newcomer to the basement cafeteria, to lay out what they called the rules of the road. The linoleum was colorless with age. The vast room smelled vaguely of cat. As Margo struggled with her overdone chicken breast, they peppered her with advice: Never let Mr. Baldwin get you alone in his office, or anywhere else. Don’t talk about civil rights. And don’t mind what anybody says about you: They’re just jealous.

Jealous of what? Margo asked.

“Of your obvious friends in high places,” they said, scarcely bothering to hide their snickers.

Margo didn’t know where to put her eyes. “It’s just that Miss Elden is my cousin,” she said, but this wasn’t enough to get her off the hook.

As they crossed the room to bus their trays, an older man bumped into her, spilling his tray but, oddly, not hers. As he crouched to pick up his food, she heard his papery voice close to her ear. “Yenching Palace. Tonight. Eight. Alone.”

She might have ignored him, or even assumed that she’d misunderstood him, except that the last time she saw him he was wearing a Cornell hat and snapping her picture.

All of which explained how Margo had come to be riding the bus
through the chilly night rain, wishing Mother Nature hated her a little less.

Margo stepped off the bus at last, on Connecticut Avenue at Macomb Street. The public library was directly across the street. The Yenching Palace, a Chinese restaurant, was two blocks north of the library. She wanted the two blocks, hoping the walk might calm her. The neighborhood was called Cleveland Park, and Margo knew it well. During high school, she had spent a couple of weeks in Cleveland Park each summer, because one of her white girlfriends was the daughter of a congressman who had houses both here and in Westchester County. Margo wondered whether Fomin, in choosing the restaurant, was aware of her familiarity, and decided arbitrarily that he must have been.

Trudging north, leaning into the wind, Margo cinched her coat more tightly around her neck. The umbrella was inside out and useless. She felt the same way. Instincts honed over the past month led her eyes into alleys and doorways, but she didn’t know what she was looking for. Bundy had told her that no American agencies would have surveillance on her. Margo wasn’t sure whether to believe him; or, for that matter, whether he meant his words in warning or reassurance.

Connecticut Avenue in this part of the city was nearly all commercial, but the leafy lanes crisscrossing it were filled with the large, elegant homes of the city’s well-to-do. No Negroes lived in Cleveland Park. She wondered how long that change would be in coming. Both Congress and the White House were in the hands of the Democratic Party, but the chances of passing an open-housing law were near zero. These were the pressing matters on which Margo Jensen focused as she continued across Newark Street. She was determined to think about anything except what was really happening: Kennedy’s speech, and her own role in preventing what the people thronging the hallway of her building were worried would happen next. The dream was now the reality.

Margo stopped beside Engine Company 28. The roll-up door was open, and a couple of firefighters watched her as she stood in the rain. Next door, the Yenching Palace announced itself in bright neon letters, yellow rimmed with red. The outer wall was an odd shiny bluish-green.
Behind a low wrought-iron fence, a scattering of tables stood outside, but in this weather nobody was seated at them.

She stood a moment, working on her breathing. She felt as madly determined as she had in Varna, and conquered her nerves the same way: by remembering Claudia Jensen’s expectations of her granddaughter.

You have to wow them,
Nana always said.

She would.

She plunged through the doors.

In his mind, McGeorge Bundy followed
GREENHILL
’s progress up the avenue. He had only imagination to guide him. He knew she was going to the Yenching Palace—she’d called the assigned number to say so—but beyond that bit of information lay only mystery. Bobby Kennedy had wanted her watched every minute, but Bundy rejected the idea out of hand. Fomin would notice. He was among the best the Soviets had, and he was bound to spot surveillance. And, given that the back-channel negotiations were supposed to be secret from each side’s security apparatus, he would take any sort of observation as a sign of bad faith.

Though the attorney general had argued, the President had backed his national security adviser’s judgment. But it was a near thing. With midterm congressional elections two weeks away, the President wanted to look decisive.

“Decisive,” in the ExComm, being a code word for bombing and invasion.

Then, today—Tuesday—the group had discussed what to do should one of the U-2 surveillance planes be shot down. Here the Joint Chiefs were adamant. The men who were asked to go up on those overflights had to know they were protected. A couple of voices protested that any sovereign had the right to shoot down planes over its airspace. But the ExComm supported the JCS. So did Kennedy. The decision was clear: If a U-2 was shot down, the surface-to-air missile sites would be
bombed. This, of course, would mean killing Russians—all the SAM sites had Soviet crews—and would certainly lead to war.

Emotions around the table were running too high. Bundy didn’t know how much longer he could hold this thing together.

Back in his office, the national security adviser considered his options. His various worries were beginning to intertwine. There was the risk that Kennedy would act rashly. There was the risk that the back channel wouldn’t work. There was the risk that
SANTA GREEN
had been betrayed from within. If they had a leak, there was no reason to think that the leaking had stopped. He didn’t think the back channel was at risk, but the rest of their planning Kennedy discussed two or three times a day with a dozen or more advisers, all of whom had deputies and assistants and wives and mistresses and who knew what else. If the President ordered an attack, it was entirely possible that the Soviets would know about it before the orders were delivered to Homestead Air Force Base. Yet he couldn’t seek help from, say, the Federal Bureau of Investigation—not in the middle of the Margo Jensen–Aleks Fomin show.