Saving the Queen (7 page)

The receiving line was an anticlimax. The Empress had only time to ask Sally for news of Priscilla Lane, their third roommate; and Truman merely said, “Good evening, son.”

They sat at a table for eight. He was between the wife of the American ambassador to Egypt and the wife of the president of General Motors. Sally, opposite, had Mr. General Motors and the Ambassador.

Both ladies asked the usual questions and Black reestablished, for the thousandth time, that one had only to say one was an engineer to catalyze that haze-in-the-eye behind which all attention wanders. But this time, buoyant from wine and excitement, he decided to press on, and reengaged Mrs. Motors during the main course.

“I'm a Republican,” he said, “but I think Truman will go down in history for Operation Down Under—that's what I've been working on since I graduated.”

He tried to sound a little pompous and was a little frightened at the ease with which he succeeded.

“Operation Down Under?” She looked up, struggling to refocus. “What's that?”

Black looked around him, as if by instinct, and leaned closer.

“That, Mrs. Wilson, is secret information.” He paused, having brought his fork to his mouth. Then he stopped, lowered the fork, and said:

“But I suppose it can't be a secret from you and your husband. Nothing is, I guess.” He allowed a moment's pause, and was gratified that she had moved her head closer to his, to catch his words.

“Operation Down Under,” said Blackford in a semi-whisper, “is the mechanism that sinks the whole of central Washington underground, under an atomic-proof carapace.”

“When are they going to do that?” Mrs. Wilson looked startled.

“They
have
done it, Mrs. Wilson. The biggest project since the Manhattan Project. It was completed a month ago. I'm only in on the maintenance. All the President has to do is push
one
button and most of the city of Washington sinks down five hundred feet, and a concrete dome envelops us. In fact”—Black was carried away—“the button is over there right behind the President.” Blackford, with Mrs. Wilson arching her neck in parallel, craning his neck, stood up slightly, then sank back.

“No. You can't see it from here. It's behind the curtain. Remember, that's
secret information.
”

The toasts were effusive, as Black expected, though the Shah seemed nervous—he had had limited experience with chief executives like Truman—but there were no discordant notes, and the President invited everyone to the East Room for a “little entertainment.” As they got up, Blackford saw Mrs. Wilson dive for her husband and point toward the curtain behind the dais. Her husband listened, spoke a single word, looked in disgust over at Black, shook his head, and escorted his wife to safety. Black dove for Sally and they walked out, animatedly exchanging monologues about their experiences during dinner. In the Green Room the guests were given coffee and liqueurs. Black spotted the new president of Yale, Whitney Griswold. He approached him.

“Blackford Oakes, Yale 1951. How is our alma mater?”

Griswold, unattached at the moment, was genial, and asked what Black was doing.

“Well, among other things, I've just read Buckley's
God and Man at Yale.
”

“You must have a lot of time on your hands,” Griswold said, allowing his eyes to catch those of a crusty figure approaching him. They exchanged greetings. Griswold turned—

“What was your name?”

“Oakes.”

“Mr. Oakes, this is Mr. Allen Dulles, deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency.”

Black shook hands and then winked mysteriously and asked sotto voce: “How's tricks?”

Dulles stared at him silently, then turned to talk with Griswold. Black eased away toward Sally—his querencia, his love—to lick his wounds. She was chatting with an overly handsome marine captain, one of the White House escorts bobbing about, performing duties official, semiofficial, and quite unofficial. This one, for instance, was asking Sally what she was doing later that evening.

“What she is doing later is with me,” Black interposed, pleased with his timing. The captain moved to withdraw, though not until after he had maneuvered Black's eyes down toward the chestful of war decorations.

“Sorry, sir,” he said, leaving, in favor of caution—for all he knew, Black was the son of the chief of staff or Truman's nephew or Pendergast's natural son. Sally was generally pleased, and they went together to the East room and listened to Eugene List play Chopin for about twenty minutes. Then President Truman rose, approached the microphone, thanked List, and invited the guests to stay on as long as they wanted to and dance, and everyone stood up, and he escorted the Empress out of the room, followed by the Shah. The room lighted up with talk and laughter, and Black thought it must have been so when Louis XIV went off to bed, though in those days there would be somebody missing, somebody like Sally, he mused, but tonight again she would be all his, and as they lay in Mr. Ellison's bed, listening to his soft music, they would tease each other and observe an oh-so-strict protocol.

Four

One week to go. It was almost over. Black's final instructor, “Alistair,” had obviously spent much time in England. He was a gray man, his mein, hair, face, suit, shirt. But he had an air of competence and experience which Black quickly deferred to, concluding that he was now in the company of someone high in the organization. He felt like a freshman taking introductory physics from Edward Teller. Alistair began by telling Black that he was expected, during the next two weeks, and indeed until otherwise notified, to read in great detail about the English Establishment. He was to go over, every day, a half-dozen English journals, the serious and the yellow press. He was to develop a knowledge of the principal members of the two major political parties, of the Houses of Lords and Commons, of the court, and of the diplomatic and business world.

“That is a tall assignment, and obviously you are not expected to arrive in England two weeks from tomorrow with the same knowledge of English affairs that a native would have. It is only the beginning of an extensive program of familiarization, the purpose of which will be explained to you when you get to London.”

When Anthony Trust had first told Blackford that he would be going to London, his general submissiveness before the counterintelligence discipline prevented him from asking questions about the oddness of his destination, or even from wondering very much about it. Apparently that his mother lived there was the operative point. Perhaps if his mother lived in Pago Pago, he would be sent there, on the grounds that cover means all. But in due course he had permitted himself to wonder. London. There was a sense in which that was the equivalent of dispatching a young counterintelligence agent to Chicago. Surely London, crawling with British agents, was presumably more concerned about the activities of an exuberant revolutionary nation from which she was insulated only by France and the English Channel, not necessarily in that order of importance, and had altogether adequate intelligence facilities, in contrast with a republic insulated, besides, by three thousand miles of ocean? But, of course, London was a great metropolis, where even people who looked like Peter Lorre sank into the woodwork, and Blackford's job, presumably, would be to help the English locate the bad Peter Lorres. He thought for a while about it, but soon dismissed it, having by this time come around to the proposition that if the CIA was nuts, there was little he could do about it except discover it in due course and get the hell out. If it wasn't, it would do him no good to try to outguess motives which very intelligent Americans were making it their business to make it hard for very intelligent Soviet agents to guess at, let alone bright young Yalies, fresh from their bright college years.

Alistair told him that there was no point in his trying to answer questions until Black had gone through some of his homework. Most of those questions would be answered in his reading. But in each of the succeeding days, Alistair would brief Black on a technical aspect of his deep-cover life in London, and he would begin now, on the question of communication.

As a general rule, he began, all communications will be oral—to your superior, given under circumstances prescribed by him.

“If your superior fails to make a rendezvous, or if communication with him through routine channels should lapse, you are to write a letter to”—he gave Black a note paper on the stationery of the Hay-Adams Hotel on which was written: Mr. Alan Wriston, United States Embassy, Grosvenor Square, London.”

“In that letter you will say, ‘Dear Mr. Wriston: I am informed you are the gentleman who can advise me what the duty is on taking English-made suits into America. I am traveling about Britain, but will telephone you in two or three days. Meanwhile this note, in the event it is necessary to undertake any research. Yours truly, G. Truax.'

“Two days after dispatching that letter, you are to sit by your telephone between five
P
.
M
. and seven
P
.
M
. and a substitute contact will be made. The person who telephones you will say, ‘This is George Allan from the Embassy.'

“Now, if he says anything other than that, listen to what he has to say, and play along, agreeing to any suggested rendezvous. Then pack a bag and follow the same procedures you would follow in the event you find you need to leave the country.”

“What are those?”

“I'm coming to that.”

He gave Blackford another piece of paper, on the stationery of the Pullman Company. Written on it was: “1. The London Library. 2. The Shakespeare Hotel, Chapel Street. 3. The Adelphi Hotel.”

“The London Library is in St. James's Square—you will of course know the streets of London thoroughly, even before you arrive there. The Shakespeare Hotel in question is in Stratford-on-Avon. The Adelphi Hotel is in Liverpool.

“At the library, at the information desk, you will ask if there is a message for Geoffrey Truax. If there isn't, proceed to Stratford and ask the same question at the Shakespeare Hotel. If there is none, you are to stay twenty-four hours waiting for a message. After that, go to Liverpool, same procedure, only you stay at that hotel for two days.”

“What if there aren't any rooms?”

“The hotels we're talking about always have rooms. If you hit Liverpool the day of the Grand National, find someplace to stay and keep coming for messages.… Now, short of a world war, one of our people will have approached you by the time you have reached Liverpool and will give you instructions. If no one does, do your best to get out of the country. You will not be given a false passport unless London feels the situation requires you to have one. That decision will be made depending on how your mission goes. Remember, you are whoever you actually are, living a perfectly normal life in London, pursuing whatever it is you are pursuing.”

Blackford took the note papers, read them over, and returned them to Alistair.

“Now a general word on the British situation. On the whole, the British don't like American intelligence operations conducted in their country. I say on the whole,' because since the Klaus Fuchs affair, they have grudgingly admitted that we have certain information they don't have; or that, in any case, if only on account of the proddings of McCarthy, we'll act on certain information they can't, or won't, act on. But they don't really want to know about it in any formal way. At the highest level, the P.M. is aware that we're a presence. But anything we turn up, they want handed to them through diplomatic, not intelligence, channels. This embargo on any official contact between British and American intelligence in England is so rigid that when we need stuff they have that we are sure they'd be willing to give us, we ask for it from Paris or directly from Washington. Never from London.

“Now,” he said, “the situation in England is very grave. Fuchs stole atomic secrets and gave them to the Soviets. That was a considerable public scandal, and they tightened up security at the obvious levels—atomic research plants, that kind of thing. But the Soviets have people everywhere. I mean
everywhere
. I mean, places you would never dream of. Recruiting by the Commies during the late thirties was very successful. And, during the war, there was the grand alliance. Now, in the Cold War, there is a surviving band of pro-Soviet Englishmen who think the West is on the wrong side of history. We know something about the general sources of Soviet intelligence, a lot about the actual information they're getting away with, and very little about who the people actually are. Their cover is superb. We are operating now mostly by deduction: Somebody, in this office, is leaking information. Who? Is that somebody a clerk-typist? A branch head? A division head? An Agency head? A spy? Or is he merely careless? We aren't in a position to check whether the Brits have their own man trying to penetrate an operation, and we've even had a grotesque situation in which after fourteen months of diligent work, we fingered the guy we knew was guilty—only to discover he was a deep-cover British agent dogging the same trail. We blew his cover. That one required a long afternoon's chat between Ache-son and the British ambassador.

“The Soviets obviously have to be more cautious operating in London than they do in most places. But the purges back home have been flogging them on to tremendous efforts—”

“Tremendous efforts to do what?”

Alistair looked at once disappointed and patient.

“The Communists always have a lot to do. Right now they want to put pressure on Attlee to put pressure on Truman not to use the bomb in Korea. They wanted MacArthur fired. They want to get in the way of any moves toward European solidarity. They want to heighten English suspicion of French and German intentions. They want knowledge, on a day-by-day basis, of the disposition of NATO forces, with special emphasis on the location of atomic warheads. They want to know what kind of progress the Brits are making on the development of a tactical and a strategic missile. And they want every piece of dirt they can accumulate on anyone, just as a matter of course.