The Company: A Novel of the CIA (57 page)

"So where's that first husband of yours," growled Swett.

"First and only, Daddy," Adelle groaned, tired of his old gag; her father would be the last person on earth to admit it but he had grown fond of Leo over the years. "Leo's on the phone, as usual." There was a note of pride in her voice. "He's been promoted, you know. For God's sake, don't tell him I told you—he'd flay me alive. He's been filling in as Dick Bissell's troubleshooter for several months now. At one point he had to fly out to LA and actually met Frank Sinatra. Last Friday they told him he'd been named Bissell's deputy on a permanent basis. It means a raise. It means a full-time secretary." She sighed. "It also means more phone calls in the middle of the night. That Dick Bissell never sleeps."

Sour Pickles, the cat with the gnarled snout that LBJ had given Adelle as a wedding present, appeared at the door of the mud room. She'd been sleeping on the laundry that had been piling up for the Negro lady who came three afternoons a week. Adelle spilled some milk into a small dish and set it the floor, and the cat began lapping it up. Leo Kritzky pushed through the kitchen door, a tie flapping loose around his collar. Adelle brushed away with a forefinger a speck of shaving cream on his earlobe. Leo shook hands with his father-in-law and sat down across from him in the breakfast nook.

"Girls get off on time?" he asked.

"They'd still be here if they didn't," Swett growled.

"How are you, Phil?" Leo asked.

"Dog-tired. Bushed. You think raising money for a Catholic candidate is easy as falling off a log, guess again."

"I thought his father was bankrolling him," Leo said.

"Joe Kennedy saw him through the primaries, especially the early ones. Now it's up to the big ticket Democrats to cough up. Either that or watch Tricky Dick take an option on the White House."

Adelle filled two giant coffee cups from a percolator and pushed them across the table to the men. "Where's Kennedy today?" she asked her father.

Swett buttered a slice of toast and helped himself generously to marmalade. "Jack's starting another swing through the Midwest. He'll be sleeping at my place in Chicago tonight, which is why I invited myself over for breakfast—got to get up there by early afternoon and organize an impromptu fund raiser for him. What's Lyndon up to?"

Adelle, who was coordinating the pollsters working for Lyndon Johnson's vice presidential campaign, removed a tea bag from the small china pot and filled her cup. "He's off campaigning in Texas and California," she said. "He figures they can't win without both those states. Did you see the story in the Washington Post where Lyndon blasted the Eisenhower administration over that toy submarine—"

Swett laughed out loud. "I did. I did."

"What toy submarine?" Leo asked.

"And you're supposed to be in the intelligence racket," Swett said. "Some toy company or other put a damn-near-perfect scale model of our new Polaris submarine on the market. Russians don't need spies any more. All those geezers got to do is shell out two ninety-eight for the model sub. I read where it shows the atomic reactor, the two Polaris missiles, down to the last detail."

"Getting Lyndon to raise the subject—to use it as another example of the Eisenhower administration's bungling—was my idea, Daddy. I found the story in the back pages of the Baltimore Sun and showed it to one of our speech writers."

"Want to know what I think, I think it's a crying shame handing them the Polaris on a silver platter." Swett blew noisily on his coffee and swallowed a mouthful. "If I worked for that Company of yours, Leo, I'd send out signals to get the KGB thinking we manufactured the model to mislead them."

Leo smiled. "Life isn't that simple, Phil. If we try to convince the KGB we planted it, they'll figure out we're trying to convince them it's false and assume it's true."

"Then what we have to do," Adelle said brightly, "is drop hints it's true. That way they'll think we're trying to convince them it's true and come to the conclusion it's false."

Leo shook his head. "That might work, unless of course the KGB has some bright USA analyst who says, 'Look, boys, the CIA's dropping hints the toy sub's true, which means they think we'll think they're trying to convince us it's true and we'll assume it's false. Which means it must be true.'"

"Oh, dear, that's much too convoluted for me," Adelle said.

Swett said, "I remember back when you wouldn't even admit you worked for the Pickle Factory, Leo." He regarded his son-in-law across the breakfast table. "What's cooking with Cuba?" he asked suddenly.

Leo glanced quickly at Adelle, then said, "Only thing I know about Cuba is what I read in the newspapers."

"Leo, Leo, remember me? Phil Swett? I'm the guy who used to eat breakfast with Harry Truman. I'm the guy who's on a first name basis with Dwight Eisenhower. I'm the guy who came up with the idea that Lyndon Johnson was fed up with being Senate majority leader and would say 'Hell, why not?' if Jack Kennedy offered him the vice presidency. If Lyndon brings in Texas and Jack squeaks into the Oval Office, folks'll be lining up to shake my hand. Least you could do is stop treating me like a Russian spy, or a dimwit. Everybody and his uncle knows something's going on in the Caribbean. It's an open secret in Jack's campaign that he's been briefed on some kind of anti-Castro operation that's supposed to be in the works."

Leo looked his father-in-law in the eye. "Phil, all I can tell you is that you know more than I do."

Adelle's eyes sparkled with merriment. "The idea that Leo might know things you don't drives you up the wall, doesn't it, Daddy?"

Swett was on the verge of losing his temper. "By golly, Harry Truman and Ike and Jack Kennedy treat me like a patriotic American. But my own son-in-law treats me like I'm working for the Kremlin."

"Phil, believe me, if I knew something about a Cuban operation, I'd tell you. Far as I'm concerned, if Jack Kennedy can be briefed so can you. You've got to understand that the Company is very compartmented. I'm just not involved in that area of the world. Okay?"

Swett growled, "I guess you don't know spit about Cuba. I pride myself being able to read folks real well—I could see the surprise in your eyes when I told you about the open secret in Jack's campaign."

"Leo wouldn't lie, Daddy. Not to you."

"Fact is, I was surprised," Leo admitted.

Leo waited while the security guard verified his ID in the lobby of Quarters Eye, a former WAVE barrack off Ohio Drive in downtown Washington that Bissell had commandeered for JMARC, his scare-Castro-out-of-Cuba operation. Pinning on his red badge, he made his way down the narrow, dimly lit ground floor corridor to a green door marked "Access Strictly Limited to Authorized Personnel." Under it someone had chalked: "No Exceptions whatsoever." Leo dialed the code number into the box on the wall and heard the soft buzz of electric current as the lock sprang open. Inside Bissell's Cuba war room the windows had been blacked out. Two walls were covered with enormous maps, one of the island of Cuba, the other of the Caribbean; each of the maps was fitted with a plastic overlay on which tactical details could be noted using various colored grease pencils. A third wall was filled with blown-up photographs of prime targets: Castro's three principal military air strips with his T-33 jet trainers and Sea Furies parked in rows on the runways; Point One, the Cuban military nerve center located in a luxurious two-story villa in the Nuevo Vedado suburb of Havana; various Army and militia bases, as well as motor pools crammed with Russian tanks and American army-surplus trucks and Jeeps. Leo's secretary, a matronly gray-haired woman named Rosemary Hanks, was sorting the overnight traffic at her desk immediately outside Leo's cubicle off the war room. She plucked a Kleenex from an open box on the desk to blow her nose.

"Are you allergic, Mrs. Hanks?" Leo asked.

"I am. To bad news," she announced in a dry Montana drawl. She waved a cable in the air. "Which is what we just received from Helvetia," she said, referring to the coffee plantation in Guatemala's Sierra Madre Mountains where the CIA had set up a training camp for the Cuban exile brigade that would eventually be infiltrated into Cuba. "We've had our first casualty. One of the Cubans fell to his death from a cliff during a training exercise yesterday. His name was Carlos Rodriguez Santana. His comrades decided to adopt the dead man's number—2506—as the brigades formal designation."

"I wish you'd start my day with the good news for a change," Leo said.

She shook her head resolutely. "Mr. Bissell always wants the bad news first—get it out of the way and move on, that's his theory. Here's the good news: we've found more B-26 bombers than you could shake a stick at. There's an entire fleet of them mothballed outside of Tucson, Arizona."

"That is good news," Leo agreed. He took the cable and pushed through the door marked "ADD/O/A" (Assistant Deputy Director Operations for Action) into his office, draped his suit jacket over the back of a chair and settled down at his desk to read it. Bissell had decided to use vintage World War II B-26 bombers as the main aircraft in the brigade's small air force because hundreds of them had been sold as surplus around the globe after the war which meant that Washington could plausibly deny that it had supplied the planes to the Cuban exiles. The problem now would be to pry a dozen or so of the B-26s loose from the Pentagon's tightfisted paper-pushers without telling them what they were for. The Alabama Air National Guard pilots who had been sheep-dipped to JMARC would sanitize the planes—remove all numbers and insignias that could reveal where they came from—and then fly them down to the runway being constructed below the Helvetia base, at Retalhuleu. The Alabama air crews could then begin training the Cuban pilots, recruited from the exile community in Miami, for combat missions over Cuba.

Leo went through the overnight folder, cable by cable, routing several to the JMARC desk officers in the building; forwarding the good news about the mothballed B-26s in Arizona to Bissell with a note attached asking how he planned to approach the Pentagon brass—perhaps Dulles would want to take the matter up directly with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Lemnitzer, Leo suggested. Mrs. Hanks brought in the loose-leaf news book prepared by the night watch, and Leo read through every item concerning Castro or Cuba that had appeared in the national press or wire services in the past twenty-four hours. He added three eyewitness reports on conditions inside Cuba to Bissell's pouch; one of them suggested that more and more Cubans were attending Mass on Sundays, and interpreted this as a sign of growing passive resistance to Castro's Communist regime. That out of the way, Leo attacked the metal folder with the red slash across the cover. This morning it contained only one item, a deciphered cable from one of the Company's assets in Havana. The cable passed on a story that the asset had picked at a cocktail party for Fidel Castro's brother, Raoul. According to this account, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the Argentine doctor who fought the revolution alongside Castro and emerged as the second most powerful figure in Cuba, had just returned from Moscow, along with Castro's American-educated chief of the Direccion Generate de Inteligencia, the bearded and elegant Manuel Piñeiro. Both men boasted about meeting Nikita Khrushchev, as well as a mysterious Russian who was said to be a leading figure in the KGB known by the nickname Starik, the Old Man; the Cubans jokingly referred to their Russian interlocutor as "White Beard" to distinguish him from Piñeiro, who was known as "Barba Roja" or "Red Beard."

The asset's cable, too, was earmarked for Bissell.

Leo called through the open door for Mrs. Hanks to come collect the pouch and hand-deliver it to Bissell's bailiwick on the top floor of Quarters Eye. His morning housekeeping chores out of the way, Leo swiveled around to the locked file cabinet against one windowless wall, spun the dial and pulled open the top drawer. Rummaging through the files, he found the one he was looking for and opened it on his desk. When his father-in-law had asked about Cuba that morning, Leo had been startled. It's an open secret in Jack's campaign that he's been briefed on some kind of anti-Castro operation. In fact, it was Leo who had briefed the Democratic Presidential candidate. He'd caught up with Senator Kennedy in his Miami hideaway, which turned out to be the sprawling home of Frank Sinatra. Kennedy and three of the five members of the legendary Hollywood Rat Pack—Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis—had been lounging around the pool behind the house, along with a short, balding man who went by the name of Sam Flood and a stunningly beautiful young brunette who had not been introduced. (Only later, when Leo managed to buttonhole one of the Secret Service agents assigned to the candidate, did he discover her identity: she was a sometime Sinatra girlfriend named Judy Exner.) Leo had been taken aback to find himself in the presence of the Rat Pack; he and Adelle had seen them the previous month in Ocean's Eleven, an entertaining film about a caper in Las Vegas. Oh, how Leo had relished the look on Adelle's face when he described Sinatra himself handing him a drink and chatting him up while Senator Kennedy took a phone call.

Back at Quarters Eye in Washington, Leo had drawn up a summary of the briefing for Bissell and kept a copy for his own files. Rereading it now he realized how vague he had been; perhaps it was Sinatra and Sammy Davis and Dean Martin and Judy Exner, boozing it up just out of earshot, that had inhibited him. Kennedy, according to Leo's notes, had remarked that the subject must be important for him to have come all that way to brief him. Leo had said it was CIA policy to keep the major candidates informed on current events. Kennedy, looking fit and relaxed in white flannel slacks and an open-collared shirt, had fixed himself another gin and tonic and had clinked glasses with Leo. I'm all ears, the candidate had said. It's about Cuba, Leo had begun. Kennedy had nodded. Thought it might be, he had said. Leo had started to talk in very general terms about the Cuban exiles being trained in a secret CIA base on a remote coffee plantation in Central America. Had Eisenhower signed off on the operation? Kennedy had wanted to know. Absolutely, Leo had replied; this wasn't the sort of project the CIA would undertake without presidential authorization. If things went according to plan, he had continued, the infiltration of the exile brigade into Cuba would coincide with the formation of a Cuban provisional government, as well as the acceleration of guerrilla activities in the various provinces of the island. You want to be careful, Kennedy had remarked, not to make so much noise that everybody in the world will know the US is behind this. The noise level, Leo had assured the candidate, would be low enough to avoid that particular pitfall and high enough to trigger an island-wide rebellion against Cuba's Marxist dictator. Is there a timetable? Kennedy had asked very casually. Leo had glanced at Sinatra, who was cracking up over one of Dean Martin's stories. Vice President Nixon was pushing the CIA to put the show on the road before the November election, he had informed the Senator. Will you? We don't think that's practical.