The Shadow Cabinet (11 page)

“A woman professor who thinks Lenin's revolution wasn't really his but belonged to a woman named Inessa Armand,” Donlon said. “Angus bought some letters from a Soviet émigré in Paris last year—Lenin's letters to her, smuggled out. According to Rankin, the letters prove that Inessa Armand was the brains behind the Bolshevik revolution. She's writing a book.”

“I don't remember hearing the name. Who was Armand?”

“Some Frenchwoman who left her family and threw in with Lenin, lived with him for a while. She died in Russia in 1920, I think—typhus. She had Lenin's child, or so Rankin claims. She says the letters prove that too. She's a dyke.”

“Who?”

“Rankin. You think I'm kidding?”

Wilson said nothing. They drove through Middleburg without stopping. “She's probably gone home by now,” Donlon said, looking out at the illuminated entrance of the stone inn. “It's a shame, it's a shame with a woman like that. Horses. That's a hell of a way to have to get your sex.”

“That's a stupid expression,” Wilson said. “‘Get your sex.' What is it—something a pharmacist hands out?”

But Donlon only laughed and turned on the radio.

Left for Wilson on Matthews' desk in the deserted real estate office that evening were two messages from Rita Kramer at her downtown hotel, asking him to call. He set them aside. Beneath was a flimsy envelope with his name scrawled on the front, barely legible, written in a thick, childlike hand. According to the typewritten note from the office receptionist, the envelope had been given her late that afternoon by a young man who hadn't identified himself.

Inside was a certified check drawn on a nearby suburban bank, payable to Haven Wilson for three hundred dollars. “For auto damages. Out of town for 3 months,” read the block letters on the slip of paper clipped to the check. The note was signed
Davis
, but the name was in primitive block letters, not really a signature at all.

He stood silently at the desk, puzzling over its meaning. Three hundred dollars was an extravagance. The old station wagon was barely worth that. The check was strange, so was the signature, and on a misty autumn evening, alone in the office, a phone ringing somewhere downstairs in the darkness, that made him a little suspicious.

Part Two

1.

The lamps in the executive offices of the Pentagon and in the paneled seventh-floor suites at the State Department had been lit throughout the long gray autumn afternoon. A faint mist was still falling in the darkness beyond the draped windows. The lights from the homeward-bound cars and buses stretched down Twenty-third and Fourteenth streets and out across Memorial, Roosevelt, and Wilson bridges and on into the Virginia hills, an endless geometrical beading of white foci, strung and restrung in symmetrical loops along the boulevards and access roads. It had been a drizzly day, a day when affairs of state were susceptible to minor depression, the denial of blue skies and autumn vistas, a day when the powers of abstraction were prey to bronchial complaints, wet shoes and leaky umbrellas, stalled traffic on Capitol Hill and along Pennsylvania Avenue, planes grounded or delayed, taxis unavailable, limousines late, briefing papers damp, and appointments postponed.

Nick Straus had been working alone in the Pentagon suite that evening, shut away in a small windowless clutter of subterranean offices between B and C rings in the bowels of the building. The rooms occupied by the Defense Intelligence Agency's special-watch group lay behind a steel-clad door operated by a cipher lock. They were deserted now except for Straus, who stood nervously at the Xerox machine in the anteroom, copying documents.

The anteroom where the Xerox machine was located was known to the resident intelligence analysts as the Gallery because of its collection of covert posters and artworks tacked or stapled to the acoustical-tile wall above the gray rows of combination safes and bar-lock cabinets. Some were the products of the DIA graphics and visual aids section, drawn up at the request of the special-watch group. Others were less professional, slapstick jibes at the intelligence or policy establishment, dashed off by some anonymous wit. Others had been casually stolen from one of the many bulletin boards along the miles of Pentagon corridor, the original message altered in ways often obscure to everyone but the thief.

One of the oldest dated from the Watergate era, a three-foot-high poster carefully prepared by DIA graphics to the specifications of some watch group wag. At the top left was a grainy photograph of a sweating, beetle-browed, jittery-eyed Richard Nixon, and next to it, in bold letters, two questions: “Who Shafted Dick Nixon?” “Who Was Deep Throat?” Beneath the photo and the questions was an enormous open mouth, like some smoky grotto or subterranean cavern, dark with shadows, at the far end of which, near the epiglottis, sat a small candlelit figure in a rocking chair, a diminutive Whistler's Mother. The poster was scrawled with the conjectures of those who'd passed along the corridor over the years—“Al Haig?” “George Peterson?” “Bill Safire?” and a few other names—but the face that greeted those curious enough to lean forward to identify it wasn't a man's face at all but that of a Victorian spinster, shawl over her shoulders, lace at her throat, a puzzling, abstract smile haunting Pat Nixon's thin lips.

Nearby was a more recent poster, its message hand-scrawled on a Top Secret cover sheet: “CIA Intel Scoop: Why Did Anwar Sadat Really Go to Jerusalem?” The cover sheet, when lifted, revealed a sepia photograph, cut from some ancient European photomagazine, showing a battalion of steel-helmeted German soldiers goose-stepping through a cobbled street in the Rhineland. The answer, a sardonic comment on the DIA/CIA intelligence rivalry, lay in the caption beneath the photograph: “A clandestine reunion of the East Mediterranean directorate of the Waffen-SS.” The heads of three of the German soldiers had been circled and identified in the margin: “SS Obergruppenführer Anwar Sadat,” “SS Obergruppenführer Menachem Begin,” and “SS Obergruppenführer Zbigniew Brzezinski.”

Some punster had added a fourth name to a fourth figure, not among the Wehrmacht storm troopers, but in the grainy sidewalk crowd visible across the cobbled street just to the right elbow of the battalion guidon—a small blank-faced, jug-eared blond boy looking on, awestruck, from the curb. The head had been circled and identified in the margin with a felt-tipped pen: “U.S. Obergruppenwunderkind Jimmy Carter.”

To the right of this poster was a much-enlarged reproduction of a U.S. satellite photograph taken on a winter afternoon some hundred and forty miles above Moscow. The resolution was not as fine as that obtained by recent satellite imagery but accurate enough so that the digitalized radio pulses revealed a score of figures just dispersing from the Palace of Congresses within the Kremlin walls, astrakhan and felt hats visible, like the Zil limousines and the mounds of snow heaped at the foot of the steps. The enlarged photo had been sent to the DIA special-watch group following an interagency squabble a number of years earlier involving the Air Force, DIA, CIA, and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in the interpretation of certain telemetry intercepted from the Soviet missile-testing facility at Tyuratam. The Air Force and the CIA had won the bureaucratic battle, and the gloating Air Force interpretation team had sent the photograph to DIA, captioned “Another Triumph for Air Force Technocracy.” The photo had been taken on the day of an important Politburo meeting and Brezhnev was thought to be among the departing figures.

A disgruntled DIA analyst, one of the team losers, had penned in his own riposte, “And Another Victory for CIA/AF Photo-Interpretation!” attaching identities to those heavily bundled individuals meandering toward their limousines: “Dr. Spock (in dark glasses)”; “Joan Baez (carrying guitar case)”; and “Chairman Brezhnev and Jane Fonda (drums and vocal).”

Judged too sophisticated for the golf club literati at Air Force intelligence, the poster had remained in the Gallery.

Further along near the Xerox machine was a large multicolored poster from some long-forgotten Pentagon briefing session for a congressional committee, apportioning global shares of the U.S. foreign military assistance dollar, the largest of which went to Israel. Someone had mounted the graph in the A ring corridor not long after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Pentagon resentment at Israel's insatiable weapons demands was growing, not merely because of the political costs to the U.S. in the Arab world, but because many in the Pentagon were convinced that weapons transfers to Israel had seriously depleted U.S. inventories in Europe and elsewhere and had dangerously eroded U.S. military readiness.

A critic of U.S. economic and military support for Israel had scrawled in the caption: “Support Israel! Buy U.S. Savings Bonds.” The poster had appeared originally in the corridor outside the office of an assistant secretary, but had been quickly removed by one of his deputies, who was often visited by officers from the Israeli defense attaché's office. It had reappeared in the DIA special-watch anteroom, a highly restricted area where unaccompanied visitors weren't allowed, a special pass was required, and senior officials seldom strayed. Over the years, additional in-house graffiti had been penned in, reflecting a growing cynicism about the Israeli lobby. “Support Golda's Goyim,” one exhortation read: “Henry Jackson for SecDef!” Or: “Watch out for Meir's Mafioso on the Hill! Report all Congressional Briefings to FBI!”

But the most recent graffiti was more subtle, more elusive, and, for Nick Straus, more ominous. An early advocate of détente, of nuclear arms reductions and minimal deterrence, he'd paid a price for his policy views. The admonition which most depressed him was one scrawled on the poster just recently by an anonymous hand. It read: “Support Menachem Begin's New Irgun! Demolish Détente!”

He'd had no difficulty guessing its meaning.

But this rainy evening, his mind was on other things. He was copying a series of DIA and NSA intercepts describing Soviet troop movements along the Afghan and Iranian frontiers during the 1979 crisis. He'd already been retired from the Agency at the time, and these months were voids in his historical memory. An archivist by nature, solitary and tenacious, he was convinced that such fragments would inevitably yield a better logic to Soviet depredations than those credited to Moscow by the Carter innocents or the new chauvinists of the Reagan administration. In the overstuffed safes of the DIA special-watch group, he'd discovered a windfall of such documents, some dating to 1970.

He'd been copying them for three months now, choosing them selectively from the cache he'd discovered, but it was risky work. The noise of the Xerox machine muffled the sound of the cipher lock being operated in the corridor, and he'd once been surprised at the machine by a returning secretary who'd missed her car pool. He'd had difficulty explaining why these old documents interested him. What could he tell her—that the official or public version of Soviet activities from Cuba to Afghanistan was inaccurate and that successive U.S. administrations had known more of these clumsy reactive postures than they understood or had dared reveal?

He cleared the machine and looked quickly at a second folder of papers, a collection of intercepted Soviet messages deploying the airlift in 1973 to relieve the encircled Egyptian army trapped on the east bank of the Suez Canal. But these documents were familiar to him, intercepts he'd seen while still at the Agency; and he turned off the machine, relieved, assembled his copies in an envelope, and carried the folders back to the suite of deserted offices. Like the anteroom, these offices were lined with safes and cabinets, leaving barely enough room for the desks. He shared the outer room with two other analysts, one a Russian linguist, like himself, and the other an Air Force major. The two secretaries worked in alcoves just outside the two small rooms belonging to Colonel Dillon, the watch section chief, and his deputy.

On their desks, as on those in the outer office, lay the only conspicuous evidence of the special watch's mission, the daily monitoring of Soviet missile dispersion, movement, and replacement, from which was defined, by others, the calculus of Soviet strategic intent. This evidence stood on individual desktops: missile replicas distributed by a West Coast aerospace giant with a Washington staff twice the size of the Soviet embassy. Each desk in the section held a cluster of miniature missiles, Soviet as well as American, mounted on plastic pedestals and pointing toward the low acoustical ceiling. The small American Minuteman was dwarfed by the massive Soviet SS-20, a bone-and-city-crushing tyrannosaurus rex from the bogs of the Dnieper, all the more ominous when compared with the graceful American bird, a dove from the cities of light, the product of a more sophisticated, more advanced evolutionary lineage. In recent months, the missile clusters had become popular Pentagon desk pieces. A more expensive chrome model, with nose cones opening up to become cigarette lighters, could be found in the larger, more prestigious offices.

Straus had taken the documents he'd been copying that evening from a bottom drawer of one of the safes in Colonel Dillon's office. Dillon was a former defense attaché in Moscow, a man of staff school intelligence and shaky historical memory, and his intellectual vagueness when dealing with anything less certain than the Soviet global design was responsible for the windfall of documents Nick Straus had discovered. The office had become a historical lumber room. Telegrams, intercepts, staff studies, and option papers that should have been retired years ago had been kept to nourish Colonel Dillon's dim historical wick. New safes and bar-lock cabinets had been moved in to accommodate the overflow, squeezing two of the special-watch staff out the front door to an adjacent office down the corridor.

Yet if Nick Straus was grateful for Colonel Dillon's obtuseness, he'd also begun to despair at ever completing his covert after-hours projects. How would he find the time to pilfer the most important documents from this vast archive and to write the definitive history of post-1972 Soviet foreign policy, stripped of its burden of hysteria, secrecy, cant, and executive privilege, like his still top-secret analysis of the Cuban missile crisis.