The Union Club Mysteries (9 page)

There was a rather despairing air about this particular evening at the Union Club. I had been glancing over the front page of the paper and tossed it to one side in disgust.

Baranov said, reading my mind without difficulty, "There just isn't anything new to say or do about the hostage situation in Iran." He faded out, after having delivered himself of that useless comment.

"I wish," said Jennings wistfully, "that we had withdrawn everyone at our embassy the week before the takeover. We should have. I imagine it was a failure of Intelligence that we didn't."

"Fooey," I said. "Who needs spies and secret messages for an open-and-shut case like that. We knew the Iranian mood; we knew we were treating the Shah in New York. We should have—"

Now at last Griswold opened one eye and glared at me. "Damn fool," he muttered. "If you don't know anything, why talk? There was no reason to expect a flagrant breach of international law like that when even the Nazis always behaved correctly in that respect. Then, too, you can't carry an evacuation through at a moment's notice. It would take time and careful preparation and if we went about it and the Iranian mob, very well orchestrated by the way, then took over, everyone would have said that the hostages were taken only because we had tried to evacuate the embassy. Of course, as Jennings said, our Intelligence capacity was not exactly utilized to capacity." Jennings smiled. "Then you admit that Intelligence can fail."

"Certainly," said Griswold, lifting his scotch and soda to his lips and then wiping his white mustache delicately, "now that I've retired. There were failures even when I was active, under unusual circumstances, as when I wasn't called in soon enough. For instance—"

I have always maintained [said Griswold] that it was the English language that allowed the Tet offensive to be such a surprise. Militarily, it was the turning point of the Vietnam war. It destroyed President Johnson politically; it broke the faith of the American people in victory; it made an eventual evacuation inevitable. And all because one person was proud of his knowledge of English and others wouldn't listen.

You have to understand the difficulties that lie in the way of working with secret messages. Even if a message represents a true estimate of the situation and has safely been sent off, will it be intercepted? If it is not intercepted, will it be correctly interpreted? If it is correctly interpreted, will it be believed? Stalin's spies in Germany in early 1941 kept him perfectly up to date on Hitler's plans for an attack on the Soviet Union, for instance. Stalin simply refused to believe the reports.

Then, too, the art of decoding messages has enforced such complexity upon the mechanics of cryptography that the weight of precaution can break down the process.

For instance, there are some systems of cryptography that follow the solution to the puzzle of the perfect solvent, the material that is supposed to dissolve all substances. The problem in the case of such a solvent is: what do you use for a container?

Actually there are two solutions. One is to saturate the perfect solvent with glass and when it can dissolve no more, you can safely use a glass container. What if you need pure solvent, however, without glass or anything else dissolved in it?

In that case, you reason that the solvent must be formed in the first place, for no naturally occurring material is a perfect solvent. Therefore, you carry the formation through to the point where you have two substances which are each themselves unremarkable but which, on mixing, will give you the perfect solvent. You keep each in a separate container and when you are ready to use the perfect solvent, you add some of each component to the material you want dissolved. The perfect solvent forms at the site of use and dissolves the material.

You see the analogy. In cryptography, you can send two messages, each of which is meaningless without the other. In that case, interception of one will be of no help to the enemy and of no harm to us. Interception even of both may not serve the enemy, if he doesn't appreciate the connection of the two. It also means that at least one of the messages does not have to be very obscure.

Suppose a particular message cannot be decoded without a keyword, arbitrarily selected for the occasion, and that the keyword is sent separately by another route.

If you want a keyword that is as little as ten letters long, then the number of possibilities of ten-letter combinations based on the twenty-six letters of the alphabet is almost exactly a million billion. Nobody's going to guess that combination by luck, and no one can possibly think of using force and of trying every possible combination one at a time.

How do you decide on the keyword? One way—not the only way—is to have an agreed-on book (one that is changed periodically) and choose a ten-letter combination at random out of it. You then use a small coding machine to code the message around the keyword and send the keyword itself separately. The keyword can be and sometimes is just a scrawled notation such as 73/12 indicating page 73, line 12. Look up the page and line of the book of the week and the first ten letters, or the last ten letters, or whatever you've agreed on is the key.

Either message might, for some reason, not arrive, but it is in the highest degree frustrating if both messages arrive and yet, even taken together, make no sense. Something of that sort happened in January 1968, and it was fatal.

Here are the essential details. A message came through to Saigon headquarters from an operative in Hue. The agent who sent it was the best we had. He was a Vietnamese, heart and soul on our side, and with an excellent command of English that he ordinarily took care to hide. He actually operated with the Vietcong, so you can imagine the risks he ran.

He kept his coding machine well hidden, of course, and the books he used for determining the keyword. They were British paperback thrillers in rotation, and it was his choice. He liked them. They were literate and he ceaselessly polished his English on them. He was proud of his facility with the language—all this turned up afterward, too late—and on those occasions when he met with our men, he would trot out his full vocabulary, and go out of his way to demonstrate his knowledgability on the matter of synonyms, idioms, ambiguities and so on. Our men, being native to the language, didn't know it nearly as well and, I imagine, listened with impatience or, I strongly suspect, didn't listen at all—a terrible mistake.

The key arrived and seemed perfectly clear. Stripped of the red herrings with which it was routinely surrounded, it read "13 THP/2NDL" which was interpreted, quite reasonably, as the thirteenth page and second line. That was turned to in the book, the first ten letters taken, and fed into the computer. The message was then inserted and what came out was garblement, absolute chaos and meaninglessness.

They were astonished, and I imagine they tried it several times before being satisfied that something was wrong. They decided that, through some error, the agent had used the wrong book. They sent a message back to Hue in order to get a confirmation. That meant the loss of time. When they got back nothing, they sent an army officer and I suppose you can imagine what he found.

The agent had disappeared the morning after the message had been sent out. He has never been heard of again as far as I know, so that we can assume the Vietcong finally discovered the game he had been playing. As I said, it was January 1968, and considering what was about to happen, the enemy must have been highly sensitive to all sorts of things.

Well, then, what to do with the message? It didn't work and it wasn't ever going to work. The people at Saigon were quite convinced on that point.

They were therefore faced with two alternatives. The first was simply to ignore it. If a message were intercepted and you never received it, there was nothing to be done, and operationally this fell into the same category. It might just as well never have been received.

However, it
was
received. The receipt was on record. And if it carried an important communication—as, in point of fact, it did, though no one knew it at the time— someone would have to be blamed, and whoever made the decision to ignore the matter would be the candidate. The people at Saigon had a healthy resistance to the notion of being scapegoated, and looked for a second alternative.

They found one. One of the operatives had a month's leave coming and had in any case intended to whoop it up in the United States for a while. He went, took the message with him, and brought it to Washington. Carefully, he placed it in the lap of the Department and it was their baby now.

The Department was as helpless as the Saigon people were. They brooded over it, discussed it, dared not throw it away lest it be
their
butt in a sling—and they, unlike the Saigon people, had no one to whom to pass the buck.

Two entire weeks passed before someone finally took the chance of saying, "Let's ask Griswold!"

I can understand the hesitation. They knew my opinion of the Vietnam war and they had the definite feeling I wasn't to be trusted in matters relating to it. But now they had nowhere else to turn. If they had only understood that as little as three days before.

They found me, brought me in, and put the entire case before me. What they wanted me to say was that in my expert opinion they might as well consider it a garbled message; that you can't get something out of nothing; and to forget it. Then, if the worst came to the worst, it would be
my
skin that would be separated from
my
body.

Before I got into that position, however, I demanded to see the man from Vietnam, who was still in the country.

I said, "Tell me about the Hue agent, the one who disappeared. Are you sure he was captured and to be presumed dead? Are you sure he wasn't Vietcong all the time; that he finally didn't decide he had had enough, sent off nonsense and joined his friends?"

"No, no," said the other, "I don't think that's possible at all. His wife and children had been killed in North Vietnam rather atrociously and he wanted his revenge. Besides—" he grinned, "he had a thing about his command of the English language. Sometimes I think that held him to us more than anything else. He might desert us, he might forget his passion for revenge, but he would never give up the chance of lecturing Americans and Englishmen on their own language. Not that we listened, of course. On the few occasions I met with him clandestinely, he was unbearably tedious on the subject."

"For instance?"

"I scarcely remember. He always said that all languages were ambiguous, but that native speakers were so used to the ambiguities they never paid attention. Like that."

"Did he give examples?"

"I don't remember."

"Well now, we have here '13 THP/2NDL' for thirteenth page, second line. Why the extra letters? Wouldn't 13/2' have been enough?"

"Hey," said the man from Vietnam, "he always did use that combination, but your questions have reminded me. He claimed
that
was ambiguous."

"The 13/2?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"He didn't say—I don't think he said." "So he sent it off in this version to prove it was ambiguous?"

"I don't see that. It's the same thing, with or without the letters. Thirteenth page, second line."

"Not at all," I said, and explained. He stared at me as though I were crazy.

I was right, of course. With the new key, the message decoded beautifully, and the full details of the forthcoming Tet offensive lay before us.

Except it wasn't forthcoming; it took place on that very day and we were caught flat-footed.

"But what are you talking about?" I demanded in astonishment as Griswold returned to his drink and seemed to lapse into deep thought. "What did the phrase mean if not '13th page, 2nd line'?"

Griswold said, "No problem. That's what it meant. And they were using the right book. It was just that the agent realized the phrase was ambiguous and lent itself to misinterpretation. And with a little thought I could see what he meant, as I think anyone should."

"But / don't," I said.

"So think a little. The lines on a page aren't numbered so '2nd line' means 'line 2' counting from the top in the conventional way. No problem. However, pages
are
numbered and
that
produces the confusion since '13th page' is not necessarily 'page 13.'"

Baranov said quite loudly, "Griswold, you've finally come apart. What else can '13th page' be but 'page 13'?"

Griswold said, "I notice you have a paperback in your jacket pocket, so we don't have to send for one. Would you take it out and turn to the first page of the novel? Got it? That's the first page? Very good. Is it page 1?"