“So,” said Win, “I’m running through the pages from the Sov Mex City joint, and it’s the usual crap, low-grade, beneath action or contempt, mostly ‘how come we have to work so much overtime’ and ‘how come Boris got Paris when I was supposed to get Paris’ crap, they’re just like us, always whining, and I come across what seems to be some kind of interview with some kind of beatnik defector or something. An American, I mean, southern-fried variety, an ex-marine as far as I can figure out. I track down the actual tapes and run ’em on the reel-to-reel, and over the earphones I hear this guy, Lee Something Something, trying to talk his way into Russia. I should say back into Russia, because it seemed he’d already been there for two and a half years, and now and then he’d burst into bad Russian. Well, Igor and Ivan aren’t having any of it, even if he was a genuine United States Marine and everything, but he’s the asshole type, won’t take no for an answer, always looking for a fight or a chance to impress, and he claims, I kid you not, oh, you’ll get a kick out of this one, he claims he’s the guy who took that shot at General Walker!”
Lots of astonished laughter. Shooting General Walker was a much-approved action in our circle. It had taken place on April 10 of that year in Dallas. Someone had winged a bullet at the old beast as he sat at his desk, plotting the next week’s atrocities. It missed (typically, I was soon to learn), as the unknown shooter apparently had an uncertain trigger finger.
Major General Edwin Walker (Ret.) was a particular bête noire of Clandestine Services. He was an authentic war hero in both the war we thought of as The War and the thing called Korea. He had prospered, but as with so many of that warrior ilk, hubris destroyed him. His anti-communism became a zealotry, then a psychosis, and finally, a craziness. The commander of the huge 24th Infantry Divison in Germany— he and his men would face the red tanks pouring through the Fulda Gap if it ever came to that—he lost all perspective. He indoctrinated his men with John Birch Society pamphlets, he gave them voting instructions, he gave speeches in which he declared that all the postwar Democratic leaders, particularly Truman and Acheson, had been “pink,” as was, by inference, anyone who followed their steps in the Democratic Party of Treason.
It’s not that we were Democrats, although we probably were. Some of us—that would include young Hugh with the soft face and meek eyes and grown-up pipe—were even liberals. It’s not that we were in any way pro-com. But he did not meekly disappear into the night, as one would have hoped. When he resigned after refusing McNamara’s transfer, all this occurring after a newspaperman exposed his ugliness, he returned to America a kind of hero, like MacArthur, I suppose, though lacking the elegance and poise. He set himself up in his hometown as a speechifying one-man infantry division, riding his notoriety to the max, demanding action from Kennedy, denouncing Kennedy and his minions, supporting segregation, generally raising hell and crowding the administration into postures not sound in the long run. Did he seek power himself and imagine a career in politics? Possibly. At one point he threatened to unify his followers, of whom there were thousands, into a kind of political action force, and that sounded ominous. He was a troubling psychopath with clear fascist tendencies who did not like the Negro or any who supported the Negro’s quest for equality, who loathed “diplomacy” as a solution to Soviet expansion as opposed to “battle,” who would leap to his feet and start singing tearfully whene’er Old Glory was unfurled. He may have petered out when his gadfly act grew tiresome and reporters no longer bothered to cover his stem-winders, but all through the summer of ’63, particularly emboldened by the missed sniper’s shot, he seemed to be everywhere, hammering away, not so much a threat in a political or operational sense but more of a malign presence, clouding the policy debate, pushing Kennedy hard to the right even as Kennedy’s own instincts may have pushed him hard to the right already.
I particularly loathed him. He made anti-communism, to which I had devoted my life, stupid, coarse, loud, ignorant, rabble-rousing, and suspect to the intelligentsia, a particularly fickle audience with fear of fighting deeply ingrained. He would be one more reason for them to withdraw from duty and strength; a brute, a bully, a screamer, a sprayer of saliva. No one with an IQ over 100 seemed to care for him.
There was a deeper issue. It was pure policy, and here I apply the New Criticism and speak no more of the general’s manifold unpleasantries and vulgarities. Stripped of all psycho-historical-stylistic nuances, his sense of anti-communism was inimical to mine, that is, ours. He was macho and wanted to dominate by daring and, if it came, winning a military confrontation. That millions would die in such a conflagration meant nothing to him. His was the iron fist in the iron-glove approach, as it worshipped domination, destruction, and enslavement as the highest, purest form of triumph.
Our gestalt was far different. We feared the big war, the full-theater nuclear exchange, the dark piles of rubble, corpses, and poison air that such a crusade would unleash. We felt that to defeat communism, we had to co-opt the soft left and offer sensible alternatives to the billions of people who yearned for freedom from colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. We fought surrogate wars, culture wars, if you will. We funded socialist parties all over Europe, we sponsored fashionably lefty lit mags like Encounter to woo the intelligentsia to our more reasonable approach, we promoted American jazz and expressionism as a way of winning the hearts and minds of the world population to our gentler persuasions. If we had to resort to force, it would not be the 24th Division’s five thousand Patton tanks taking on the T-54s in a new, more tragic Kursk on the plains before the Fulda Gap, and not another iteration of Fat Man and Little Boy providing instant genocide to half the world. It would be a coup here, a labor union strike there, at most an assassin’s bullets. We were influencers, nudgers, political engineers, reluctant snipers. We were not soldiers.
“So what’s the problem, Win?” somebody shouted.
“Okay,” said Win, “here’s the problem. Do I A) snitch this guy out to the Dallas police, or B)”—Win let it build, master comedian—“buy him a new box of ammo?”
The place exploded in laughter, as well you might imagine. No one laughed harder than quiet Hugh, leaning against the sofa, nursing a gin and tonic, tamping his pipe, joining heartily in the merriment.
I was aware that I had the answer to Win’s dilemma. I would buy Lee Something Something a new box of ammo.
It was all different in those days. The building was new and smelled of paint and fresh spackle and putty. It had yet to acquire the dinge that old bureaucratic sites acquire, the grease spots where generations of sleepy clerks have rested their heads, the scuff marks on the linoleum, the bathrooms leaky and stinky and stained with God knows what, all the caulking having begun to rot, the light uncertain and sure to go bad when most needed. No, the new campus smelled delicious, seemed in synchronization with the spirit of Camelot, and also symbolized the official putting of the Bay of Pigs, our last scandal, behind us. It was all beige with muted carpeting, and we had definitely entered the miracle age of the fluorescent lighting system, so it was always illuminated in the stark light of scientific truth, which was oddly comforting.
You looked out windows still dustless and smearless and saw green trees everywhere, as the Virginia countryside, cascades of leaf, seemed boundless and lush. In memory, at least, it never rained a lot in Camelot. From some high north-oriented windows, you could see a flash of the broad Potomac, and on a sunny day, as I remember most were, that plate of liquid turned blue itself off the sky overhead. Trees, walks, freshness, ripeness everywhere, cheer and high morale, pep and vim and vigor, hope and audacity, the perfect background for my treachery in the most heinous yet most successful intelligence operation in history, the Earth’s or any other planet’s.
I had to get that transcript and learn who Lee Something Something was. It was not hard to do. A few days into the next work week, I sent Win Stoddard some kind of meaningless though TOP SECRET/EYES ONLY file with a cover note requesting his input on the propos
ed project. I cannot remember what it was, and I knew that even with the melodramatic stampings on it, Win would routinely stuff it in his desk drawer for a few days before he got around to considering it. I waited a day, then, timing it perfectly, managed to intercept Win on his way to the elevator at 5:04 on a Wednesday afternoon. I could tell by the speed of his gait—I’m not a spy for nothing, you know!—that he was in a hurry.
“Win, say, sorry to trouble you, that report I sent, did you have a chance to look at it?”
“Not yet, Hugh, sorry. This, that, the other thing.”
“I kind of need to get it circulated. Could I have it back and ship it on to the next boy on the list? If Cord calls a meeting on it, I’ll brief you.”
“Sure, Hugh. First thing tomorrow.”
“Damn, I’d like to get it to one of Wisener’s people tonight.”
“Okay, look, I’m in a rush.” He smiled, reached into his pocket, and pulled out his ring of keys. “Here, the little one, it’ll open the drawer right away. Help yourself. You can give me the keys back tomorrow. I’ve got drinks with a senator at the Army-Navy Club, and I’m already behind.”
“Good man,” I said, and I exchanged with him the one secret I will not violate in this account, the Skull and Bones handshake.
As I said, easy, too easy. Security then was a twenty-two-cent hardware lock on a file drawer made of tin-can alloy. No computers, no magnetic striped cards, no monitoring video cameras, nothing in the beige hallways suggesting war or aggression or intelligence, just a fairly messy if broad office that could have housed an insurance company or a newspaper or a driver’s license agency. It had no spy-movie-cliché clubbiness and never did. This was way before the age of computers, and we had not gotten electric typewriters in; everything was on paper, paper was the fuel that we fed into the flames of the Cold War.
Win, being a senior staffer, had a cubicle with three walls of privacy, which made my task somewhat easier, not that it wasn’t easy to begin with. Only a few staffers lounged about, none of them paying much attention to a familiar figure such as mine, and I opened his drawer and found my report and removed it, then pivoted slightly, opened two more drawers, and found what I was looking for in the second one, TOP SECRET/EYES ONLY meaninglessly stamped askew over the title PHONE TRANSCRIPTS/MEX CITY/SOV EMB and a ref to master file RP/K-4556-113M. I slipped this document behind my own legal document, locked everything up, and went back to my desk. I eased it into my briefcase for study at home, but not before seeing for the first time the name that would become so indelible to the lens of history in such a short time. And thus I met LEE HARVEY OSWALD.
My first encounter with him that night, after Peggy and I had enjoyed an old-fashioned and put the boys to bed and she retreated to her boudoir and I to my study, was not compelling. It was, in fact, repellent. I read through the interview transcripts recorded September 27 and 28, 1963, at the Soviet embassy, rm. 305G, at 1130 the first day and 1315 the next.
KGB: And why do you wish a visa?
LHO: Why, sir, I renounce capitalism and wish to raise my family in a society that values the teachings of Marx and the struggles of the workingman.
KGB: But you spent 21/2 years with us, Mr. Oswald, and you seemed at a certain point to have your fill of the teachings of Marx and the struggles of the workingman.
LHO: Sir, that was not my fault. I was undone by jealous people who hated me for my intelligence, for marrying the most beautiful woman, for the heroic will they sensed within me, as the great Lenin and Stalin were envied and hated by petty rivals!
I recognized almost everything I despised in a man. He was arrogant, which, combined with his manifest stupidity, made him particularly appalling. He was pugnacious, bellicose, yet quick to retreat and start sucking up aggressively. To watch the crude ploys of his personality over the play of the interview with Boris and Igor (in Agency argot, all Russian operatives, even if their names were known, as these were, went by the noms de guerre of Boris and Igor) was somewhat dispiriting. He’d throw himself at one until he ran into resistance, and then he’d throw himself at the other. On and on it went. They didn’t have to play Mutt and Jeff with him, only Mutt and Mutt.
From what I gathered—not having seen our files on him or the FBI’s—he was some kind of epic failure, having bungled every job ever handed to him, having offended every boss who ever hired him, having betrayed every friend who ever reached out to him. He had that classic ineffective personality, all front and bluster backed by nothing of substance, bravado for show, cowardice for content, a braggart and a phony, and I guessed that all he claimed for accomplishments would turn out to be lies, as they did. Throw in some other defects: an inability to concentrate, an exaggerated sense of grievance, an IQ that would be classified “dull normal,” no outstanding compensatory talent, and the little man’s classic resentment of all things in the universe larger than himself. He would be both a bully and a coward, a liar and a cheat, without charm or charisma, prone to true belief in nonsensical goals; in all, a human wreck waiting to happen. That would be my department.
He explained to them that his goal in life was to get to Castro’s Cuba, but the Cubans, sensibly, had declined. They had left him with a proviso that if he could get a visa from his good friends the Russians, they would allow him entrance on that document for a limited amount of time. Here he was, giving himself up to the maw of history in order to achieve the greatness he knew as his own and to claim his place in the socialist firmament.
It was a tough sell, particularly on the second day, by which time Boris and Igor presumably had been in contact with KGB Moscow, had seen synopsized accounts of LHO’s unspectacular two and a half years in Minsk and the no doubt unflattering comments on his personality and work ethic from so-called jealous people, and had reached the proper conclusion.
The reds are familiar with this oddity of the American system. It produces men who can move mountains, build industries, win global wars, and break the speed of sound. It can down MiGs over Korea at a six-to-one ratio. At the same time, perhaps inevitably, it produces a small number of malcontents, of ambitious dreamers who lack the skills or the diplomatic grace to achieve anything in life, and rather than face their own inadequacies, they blame some amorphous structure called “the system” and look for its opposite, where they believe they will shine. Then they spend their dream lives imagining themselves as secret agents, destined to bring down the larger apparatus and be rewarded by its opponents, whose conquest they have so wonderfully lubricated.
These odd birds know history superficially and never notice that the first thing a socialist totalitarian state does when it takes over is round up all the secret agents who have worked so hard in its interests, cart them to the Lubyanka by Black Maria at midnight, and plant a bullet behind their ears. Reds cannot tolerate traitors, even traitors who have aided their own cause. Ask the Poumistas of the Spanish revolution, who made that discovery while standing at the execution wall in Barcelona.
Oswald knew or cared for none of this. He was determined to be a traitor, though he had nothing of value to offer his new friends, failing completely to master the nuance that treason was a negotiation and that it takes two to trade, and had failed miserably at his first attempt. Little mongrel. How I loathed him that night, sitting in my study in Georgetown, listening to the midnight crickets and enjoying a splash of vodka.
Then came the key exchange, late on the second afternoon, after they’d already given him their negative decision and before calling in the goons to eject him from the property forcibly when he’d come back to protest.
I gathered that neither Boris nor Igor was there, and this new fellow—we’ll call him Ivan—was a little higher in the KGB tree. He seemed wiser, smoother, less awkward in dealing with the screwball American. Ivan tells him, “Mr. Oswald, it is our conclusion that you would not be happy in the Soviet Union a second time any more than the first. My own recommendation is that you could most appropriately serve the revolution from
within your own borders, pursuing these activities you have mentioned, such as passing out leaflets for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and arguing passionately in private with American citizens on the merits of our system versus yours.”
LHO: Sir, do you know who you’re talking to? I am not some stupid pamphleteer, not by a long shot. I am a soldier of the revolution, I am a man of action.
KGB: Here, now, Mr. Oswald, please settle down, we do not need an incident.
LHO [crying]: No, you listen to me. On April 10, I was the sniper who took the shot at General Walker, fascist, traitor, bully, would-be tyrant, enemy of the left, of socialism, of Cuba, of the USSR. That was me in the dark, with my Eye-tie [?] Mannlicher-Carcano six-five. BANG, I had him dead center, I just didn’t see the window frame that deflected the shot. Me, I, me, I went to war for us and for you. I risked prison, the electric chair, I—
KGB: Mr. Oswald, please, get hold of yourself, there’s no need—
A few minutes later, he would pull a gun and begin to gesticulate wildly, then break down, sobbing on Mr. Big’s desk! It ended with him deposited in the Mexico City gutter. What did he expect? How deep could his self-knowledge have been? He had no awareness that the nakedness of his needs and the tragedy of his incompetence were the signals he broadcast the loudest; he had no idea of the ocean of space between the ideal image of the self he wished and pretended to be and the tragic, limited, feckless little twerp whom he forced the world to see up close and instantly. He was a mess.
The worse he was, the better for me. It took no genius to see the path by which he could be manipulated into anything, and such a ploy was easily within my capabilities. The plan formed perfectly, with no need of revision and only a little required preparation. It would be so simple—like giving candy to a baby.
To make certain of my own intentions, I applied the New Criticism to my plan, laboring intensely to occlude personality, opinion, immaterial knowledge, or rogue or random feeling from consideration and concentrate entirely on the text that was Oswald, understand its dynamics and dimensions without regard to outcome or hope or past indignities or whatever it was that formed the twisted creature he was. I must say, although this sounds egotistical, I felt somewhat like a great white hunter with many tusks in his lodge on the track of a titmouse. I was so overgunned for this safari, it seemed a little obscene, so I made a pledge to myself that though I would use Oswald, even as I loathed and despised him, I would make a tiny effort to see the humanity that lurked underneath, to understand what forces had so warped him, and try to reach somehow the soul in him, and touch it with a gesture that, in whatever larger context of manipulation and betrayal it arrived, had a whisper of authentic human feeling.