A Very Private Plot (15 page)

Blackford was glad he hadn't missed the David Brinkley program. The guest was Senator Blanton, the subject was the incarceration of Blackford Oakes and all that it implied. George Will was now questioning Senator Blanton.

Will wanted to know why covert action should end just because the Cold War had ended. Blanton said that since the survival of the United States was not in question, we could certainly do without “CIA-sponsored lying, bribery, blackmail, and murder.”

Will asked the senator to comment on a hypothetical situation. “A TWA airplane is hijacked by an organization called the … the ‘Muslim Order for Justice,' a Palestinian-based terrorist group. Three Americans are killed, two are taken hostage, the Boeing 747 is destroyed. The hijackers disappear into the Libyan mists—”

Senator Blanton interrupted to say that he had always favored very strong legislation against hijackers.

Will went on without comment to say that the day after the TWA episode, the President meets with his National Security Council and wants to know about this Muslim Order for Justice. The Director of the CIA is able to tell him that it's a new outfit with headquarters in Tripoli, organized by Abu Ben Casa, a young firebrand previously with the PLO. Okay, the President says. Now what are you going to do about this outfit? The Director proposes a—Senator Blanton interrupted: “Covert plan?” Will raised his hand, and Brinkley told him to go ahead, and asked Senator Blanton please to listen.

What the CIA comes up with, said Will, pursuing his hypothetical situation, is a recruit anxious to earn a cash reward. His documents are in good order. He has grievances against Israel, and has had extensive training in anti-terrorist disciplines.

“Now skip ahead a year,” Will said to Blanton. He describes a Delta 747 preparing to leave Zurich en route to Cairo. Suddenly six Swiss plainclothesmen materialize, in from the shadows. They quietly approach the boarding ladder and remove two passengers. Their briefcases contain dreaded, security-defying firearms and hand grenades.

How did this happen? “Well, the young recruit penetrated the Muslim Order for Justice. In order to get inside to its leader, he had to perform a ritual execution—which he did. He bribed several intermediaries, forged credentials, tapped phones, and got the details of the whole operation in time to get word to the Swiss police.”

Will was ready now for his question: “Senator Blanton, in the case I have outlined, has the CIA
sponsored
lying, bribery, blackmail, and murder? Of the kind you would make illegal?”

Senator Blanton was visibly flustered. “Let me put it this way, Mr. Will. a) You cannot repeal the strictures against murdering and lying and cheating, and b) your hypothetical situations are too neat.”

“My hypothetical situation, Senator,
happened
—in 1979. The reason you never heard about it is that the plane—it was PanAm, not Delta—left Zurich and landed in Cairo, and nobody there, including the pilots, knew what it was that almost happened.”

Blackford leaned back in his chair. He remembered the briefing he had given the young recruit before he left for Libya. He was a very brave young man; living in Rio when last heard from, raising a family.

CHAPTER 18

MAY 1995

When Mack walked in, Allie, who had been taking dictation, knew to get up with her steno pad and leave the office.

President Clinton came right to the point. “Can you tell me, is there anything else in the world other than his goddamn bill that Hugh Blanton would settle for?”

“I guess he would accept the Democratic nomination next year.”

The President was not amused. “We've got a bum situation here.” He reached down and picked up that morning's issue of the
Washington Post
. “Did you see the organizations lined up behind the Blanton bill? Which by the way he hasn't yet submitted, am I right?”

“You are right.” Mack laughed lightly. “He's waiting for the testimony of Blackford Oakes. Actually, we know that his bill is already written out, word for word. But Blanton wants to give the impression that the testimony of Oakes is absolutely critical. Not, obviously, to the language of the bill, but as supporting material. He wants everybody to believe that the kind of activity he wants to outlaw damn near got us into a world war.”

The President protruded his famous jaw. His bulldog pose. “That's crap of course. Isn't it, Mack?”

“Well, I'd say so. I've been brought up to believe that the Soviets didn't go to war because they didn't want their nice country turned into ashes by our stuff.”

“So what then is Blanton talking about?”

“Arthur Blaustein—his chief counsel, and the Eagle Scout bent on driving that bill into law—thinks he's on to some caper Oakes engaged in which, he thinks, nearly got us into a hell of a mess. But he doesn't have the details, and apparently Oakes is the only person alive, with the exception of Ronald Reagan, who knows the story.”

“Well, if President Reagan, under the intelligence laws, had to inform the congressional intelligence chairman about every covert operation, how come
they
don't know about it?”

“Don't know the answer to that, Chief. But Blaustein looked into every corner of every file and every computer being used in 1985–86. Couldn't find anything.”

“Exactly what did they look for? What'd he say, ‘Dear Computer, please give me the file on the covert action that almost precipitated a nuclear strike, sometime around 1985, 1986?'”

“The key word is ‘Cyclops.'”

“Oh. Well, did Blaustein approach Reagan?”

“He sent him a very nice letter, you know, full of duty-honor-country language, lots of praise for the Reagan administration—”

“Bombed?”

“Yeah, sort of. Reagan was very polite. He said, What did Senator Blanton's committee want to know? Blanton said he wanted to look into a covert operation called ‘Cyclops.' The President replied, Sorry, have no memory of Cyclops. He added a postscript, that he remembered when Boris Karloff was asked to play Cyclops in a horror movie, but said no, because he couldn't stand one of his eyes being pasted over all day.”

The President, who smiled on the least provocation, did not now do so. “Okay, so Reagan is out. Wisely. What about the Soviet end? Have they tried—hell, have they tried Gorbachev?”

“Interesting you came up with that, because that's exactly what Blanton now plans to do.”

“Through whom? Our guy? Has he got the authority to ask my ambassador to forward that inquiry?”

“He'd have to go through the Secretary of State.”

“And the Secretary of State, theoretically, has to ask me, right?”

“Right, unless he simply assumes that you would say yes as a matter of executive-legislative cooperation.”

The President paused. “Let's think that one over, going to Gorbachev. Let's just take the obvious things, okay? One, Mikhail Gorbachev is not going to tell a United States senator that he came close to ordering a nuclear strike against the United States, and that's what it was, agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“Two, if Gorbachev was actually tempted to act against the United States in a really aggressive way during '85-'86, that would have been because we either threatened him or aced him in some critical situation. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“We
know
we didn't threaten him. Well, we threatened him in the sense that we made it impossible for his army to win in Afghanistan. But that story is public, and sending over the Stingers was a covert operation only at the beginning. By 1985, we were doing that pretty openly. But there was never any ultimatum there. So what are we talking about? Something that just pissed the hell out of Gorbachev? Soviet leaders don't threaten nuclear war when they're pissed off. If they did, we'd have had a nuclear war in 1949 … You know what I think?”

Mack had got used to the phrase. When the President used it, either he followed it immediately with what it was that he really thought, as in, “You ass, it's
that
obvious …” or else he followed it with a pause. When he paused after using the locution, that meant he wished his interlocutor to jump right in and say, “What?” Or, even better, “What, Mr. President?”

“What?”

“I think the whole thing is … crap. Whatever Cyclops was, whatever he did, there's no way he could have threatened war. So what we come down to is: What are we going to do about the Blanton bill? I started to ask you, did you see the ad in the
Post
?”

“Same thing appeared in the
Times
.”

“Who's financing that drive?”

“Oh, the usual people. If you get a few thousand signatures, it doesn't cost that much per person.”

The President picked up the paper and began to list the Blanton bill endorsers. “‘The People's Peace Front.' Is that the San Francisco group?”

Mack nodded.

“The Committee for International Justice.' Is that the committee that wants us to try the South Korean gang as war criminals?”

“Among other things, yes. They'd also like it if we strung up Marcos.”

“Marcos is dead.”

“That doesn't bother the Committee for International Justice.”

The President went on, reading out the names of the backers of the Blanton bill. He stopped. “‘The Gay-Lesbian Liberation Frat'—What in the hell does covert operations have to do with—”

“Maybe they think the CIA goes undercover in drag.”

The President put the paper down. “What do
you
think, Mack?”

“Mr. President, I don't think you can stop the bill unless you come out on it. You don't have to oppose it. Just suggest a compromise, the effect of which would be to dilute it. Why not say that perhaps covert action should be permitted only with the backing of the committee chairmen in the House and in the Senate, except when, in the opinion of the Executive, the national interest supervenes?”

“What do you mean, ‘supervenes'? Doesn't that require me to describe a situation in which the national interest can't be confided to the two chairmen?”

“Actually it does, but it never needs to be stated that bluntly. If a bill was passed with that proviso in it, you would have the same authority you now have. You would simply have to make a finding that this situation and that one are situations in which the national interest … supervenes.”

“You know something, Mack, Blanton is not only the darling of the left wing of the party. He also
owns
Illinois. The difference between Blanton working for me next year in Illinois and Blanton spending the campaign giving anti-covert-activity lectures in Frankfurt or—or Hiroshima could mean the difference of twenty-four electoral votes.”

Mack nodded. “We can always go back to my original suggestion.”

“Which was?”

“Give him the bill, and then ignore it.”

“You tell me it's very tightly written.”

“So's the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.”

The President nodded. And then said, “By the way, if Blanton doesn't relent on the Blackford Oakes front I expect the National Guard to come down and release him. Christ, they might as well have put Lindbergh in jail, or MacArthur.”

“You're right, Chief. That's coming to a boil.”

“Maybe I should call Blanton in here?”

“Wouldn't work. Nothing works with Blanton.” Mack looked at his watch. “Unless you want me to postpone it, Mr. President, I called a staff meeting for ten minutes ago.”

The President waved his fingers toward the door. “See you later, Mack.”

CHAPTER 19

OCTOBER 1986

When, at Reykjavik, the news was given out to fifty attending newsmen that General Secretary Gorbachev would be coming to Washington before the end of the year, and that not long after, Mr. Reagan would be paying a reciprocal visit to Moscow, there was spirited talk in Congress on the general question of security. It had recently been disclosed that the new U.S. Embassy in Moscow was a hundred-million-dollar piece of Swiss cheese, designed primarily to oblige Soviet eavesdropping. Congressman Dick Armey characterized the new building as “an eight-story microphone plugged into the Politburo.”

Where exactly would the U.S. delegation meet, Senator Dole wanted to know, in order to discuss the disarmament treaty? Normally, he explained to television interviewer Larry King, when in need of maximum security abroad U.S. diplomats retire to the “bubble.” That is a kind of electronic bunker within which, it had generally been supposed, not even one's guardian angel can overhear you. But, Dole said, it turns out that even our bubble in Moscow had been successfully bugged. “And that which is bugged,” said Mr. Dole, “does not get debugged merely by the touch of a sweeper's wand. The estimated cost of debugging the new embassy has been put at twenty-five million dollars.”

The bubble not being secure, one congressman gravely suggested that the Secretary of State bring to Moscow his own traveling van, “something on the order of what CBS News trots out when there is a local situation to be filmed.” But then a reporter released the judgment of an expert: Such vans could easily be made to emit the sounds even of whispers within. Columnist William F. Buckley suggested that U.S. staff meetings be held in a helicopter a couple of thousand feet over Moscow, but he was not taken seriously. Another congressman solemnly deliberated that perhaps the Secretary should retreat every evening to his Air Force jet and use
it
as an office, but the unspoken consensus was that this would not be dignified. The Senate reacted by voting 70–30 its conviction that in protest against this violation of privacy, Secretary George Shultz should postpone his visit to Moscow, where he was scheduled to meet with his counterpart to do the advance work on the proposed disarmament treaty.