All the Houses (24 page)

His voice becomes lower and slower as he continues. That's of the utmost importance, he says. Clear, decisive action is needed.

*   *   *

In the courtyard at the Tabard Inn, Tim drapes his arms over the back of his small chair and clasps his hands behind him. He tilts the chair onto its hind legs. It's a balmy day, and the light lusters the two friends he's met for lunch. He listens to them trade tattle, between bites.

Because what I hear is, Schultz has been offering to resign on a daily basis, Jodi says, referring to the secretary of state.

I wouldn't call it daily, says Dick.

He's spinning his wheels.

It's not like Schultz is the only guy who's got problems.

The clusters of iron furniture are like big spiders that screech every time they move. He and Dick and Jodi meet up once a month, sometimes more, for breeze-shooting purposes. The Washington breeze: the braid of information and misinformation and you-didn't-hear-it-from-me, the airstream of open secrets. Flirting also plays a part in it, the weightless, daytime flirting that keeps things interesting.

Look at this woman eat, Dick says.

She is a tiny woman with an enormous appetite, now making short work of a cheeseburger. For Tim it's like watching his daughters when they were younger and had hands as small as Jodi's and ate real food—before all the diets. Do Jodi's feet even reach the floor? He is a giant by comparison.

She takes a sip of her iced tea. I'm still recovering from last week, she says. I was in Phoenix, which was like Satan's armpit. So hot I couldn't eat.

What were you doing out there? Dick asks.

Talking to loons, she says. These people had their own logic that I couldn't follow. I understood what they were saying on the face of it, and going from A to B it made sense, but once they got out to F or G it was just gobbledygook. This group called the United States Council for World Freedom, they're out there in the desert plotting how to eradicate communism globally.

I hear they've got Scottsdale pretty well cleared, Tim says.

When you're out in that kind of heat there's a different thinking process that happens, she says.

Tim dreamed, once, that he and Jodi were standing together at a cocktail party, a fund-raiser in a great empty plain of a room, with a huge marble floor and no one else there but the waiters. When he awoke he retained that image, and it has stayed with him as though it's a secret they share.

And how goes it in the inner sanctum? she asks him.

I wish I knew. You know how many people are on our staff, Tim says. It's one hundred eighty-something. And McFarlane talks to maybe half a dozen of those. The rest don't know what the hell they're doing. I mean, some do, but we've got guys who are literally wandering the halls.

She narrows her eyes, even as she eats and eats. It's an impossible situation, she says.

Exactly, he says. That's off the record.

Mitchell scoops up a bundle of Jodi's fries and eats them one by one out of his hand.

If you want any fries, just help yourself, she quips.

On paper Tim and Dick Mitchell have the same credentials, same track records in Washington. Tim would never swipe fries off someone's plate without asking, though. At work, he relies more on diligence, while Mitchell has his card shark's memory, his agility, and a talent for endearing himself to older men.

There's been talk about your hardworking marine, Jodi says to Tim. They're saying that the lieutenant colonel has gone operational, she says. That he's been jetting off to Ilopango and Tegucigalpa. They say his ass is way out on a limb.

How people relish the sheer insiderness of inside information, the specialized lingo of the agency and bureau, the acronyms within acronyms within acronyms—and inside the innermost one, a rumor about a petty feud or somebody's drinking problem. Or North's irregular (since nobody really knew what was illegal) activities. Every fact has its own, erratic momentum. It sticks to other facts, and they drag words along behind them. For instance: after the president was diagnosed with intestinal cancer he said that he did not suffer from cancer. He later clarified that while he did have cancer, he did not
suffer
from it. He didn't feel that he had suffered.

Jodi has stopped eating: Any chance you could confirm—

I can't, Tim says.

It must make you uneasy, she says.

I see the guy sometimes. I barely know him.

You know what the complaint is, she says. You've got all these military officers, ex-military working over there—they don't understand politics. They resent it. They see Congress as the enemy.

Tim nods. It's a familiar rap on his bosses, but to him it seems superficial, a description as opposed to a diagnosis. I don't think anybody really knows, he says. Knows the whole situation.

You're talking about North, Jodi says.

North isn't so bad, he says. Everything's happening interstitially now.

Jodi notices the time. She lays cash on the table, stands up, and backs away, smiling. Gentlemen, she says. It's been a pleasure.

After she leaves another spark lights up Mitchell's face. He taps the edge of the table twice, with both hands, and tells Tim: You managed that well enough.

He isn't aware that he tried to manage anything. He doesn't think of it that way. But he can see from Dick's expression that his friend knows all about North's game, maybe more than he himself does.

There is too much to know, too little to do. Every morning the agency staff descend from Annandale and Arlington by the thousands, with their lunches in brown bags, and succeed by dint of their long memories and regulatory vim in maintaining what the outsider might take to be stasis but what, to these balding Virginians, is a delicate equilibrium. A hippopotamus perched, just so, on top of a pole. Required to maintain the balance are strategic delays, lunch at one's desk, gallons of sour coffee, thousands of ballpoint pens, careful ignorance of what might be happening in other departments, and countless memoranda with titles like “Initial Proposals Re: Preliminary Steps to Prevent Negative Consequences.”

Tim's position is superior to those of the pencil pushers, yet he has limited authority; it is not for him to direct policy or to be captured on camera as he marches from a doorway into a waiting black car. He is a platinum conduit, a fancy connector, through which top-secret matters ooze their way along, and as they go past, small adjustments can be made, suggestions offered, deposits of information amassed. He is close enough to the peripheral bureaucracy that he nurses a fear of becoming engulfed by it, of turning into a numb-assed, forgotten desk rat, to whom none but the most inscrutable and irrelevant documents are routed, and routed last—the fear that his would be the desk where disregarded memos go to die.

(
From the testimony of Timothy Atherton, June 24, 1987
)

MR. RUDMAN.
What is the PROFS network?

MR. ATHERTON.
PROFS stands for “Professional Office System.” This was a system of IBM computers we installed in, I think it was 1984.

MR. RUDMAN.
How were these machines used?

MR. ATHERTON.
Instead of putting everything on paper, members of the staff could send messages by computer.

MR. RUDMAN.
Just to be clear on this, one computer could send a message to another computer?

MR. ATHERTON.
That's correct. Meaning one person could send a message to another person, directly through the computer.

MR. RUDMAN.
And did that alter the way work got done?

MR. ATHERTON.
Traditionally, we had a procedure in place so that memos would be seen in a certain order, first this person and then that person. Once the computers were there, some people stopped following the procedure.

MR. RUDMAN.
Were you aware at any point of efforts on the part of your superiors to destroy sensitive computer messages?

MR. ATHERTON.
I was not, no.

MR. RUDMAN.
Were you aware that copies of the messages were stored on the system's mainframe?

MR. ATHERTON.
I was not aware of that. I don't think anyone was.

A few years earlier, the White House had been no more technologically capable than a bank branch, but just recently a man who'd worked on the president's campaign promoted, then installed, an office computer network. Now every desk has a machine, its rounded screen traversed by letters and numbers, a glowing green armada of characters arranging themselves into directives and updates and schedules. Now messages can be sent directly from one person to another, rather than by the standard routing arrangement. Nobody has oversight over the flow of it all.

It was part of Tim's job to review the documents intended for the national security advisor, forwarding some of them along and rerouting others. He has tried to maintain an equivalent control over the computer messages, but often he'll ask for a document only to be told that it has been sent straight to the boss. There's no controlling the little green characters. North, he knows, sends everything directly to Poindexter and McFarlane.

The men who do still observe the old procedures come to Tim with their complaints. Exhibit A would be Red Menace, who works in one of the staff offices across the street. He has a way of darting into the White House, of standing at the threshold before he enters a room, making quick, dull eye contact before stepping softly inside, reaching behind him to shut the door. Then he presses his hands against his gray blazer and stares at the wall and insists that there are bad actors at State, undermining everything the president has set out to do.

Has McFarlane read my memos yet? he asks.

Tim has received paper copies of four memoranda from the Menace, directed to McFarlane. If memory serves, they all outline variations on a theme: the threat of a communist takeover of Mexico. It is one of the Menace's bugbears—today the villages of Nicaragua, tomorrow the beaches of Cancun.

I'll ask him when I see him, Tim says.

Will you?

Yes, I will.

And as for a meeting—

He's traveling with the president all week, Tim says. It's unlikely.

All I'm asking for is five, ten minutes every so often. Otherwise why have experts on the staff?

It's not just you.

It's my duty to keep him informed. I have twenty years of experience in the region. For all I know he hasn't even received any of my updates. He's spending all his time with the news media. At least he could learn enough to speak intelligently to these reporters whose company he so enjoys.

I will ask him, Tim says.

I know it's not just me. I've been talking to some of the others. We have no access. We are spinning our wheels.

Tim keeps most of the Menace's memos in a file drawer. He rarely passes them on to McFarlane, who dislikes their tone, the implicit suggestion that the national security advisor isn't doing his job properly. He knows that the Menace has been whining to people on the outside, people like the U.N. ambassador, about the way things are going. It's not as though Tim doesn't have sympathy for the analysts whose white papers and memoranda McFarlane barely skims, but this one does himself no favors by piping up in every single meeting or flooding the boss with written appeals.

*   *   *

He goes across the street, looking for North.

Inside the Old Executive Office Building, the grand rooms that once housed the Department of War are themselves embattled, in disrepair, spattered with bits of chipped-off paint, stalactites of dust in the corners. Distinguished area experts bring in box fans during the summer and space heaters during the winter. Exposed wiring dangles from the ceiling in one of the men's rooms.

Within this massive and sodden building the rhetoric of crisis is slung about. He waits outside a meeting of the Outreach Working Group on Central America, where North is holding court, and after the meeting breaks up he intercepts North. He wants to discuss the computer messaging system. Let's walk back to my office, North says. In his head he has rehearsed what he means to say.
I think we need to get something straight. These are the rules. An organization has to abide by its own rules, or else chaos will result.
But those are words in his head, spoken to an image of North, and here is the man himself, swaddled in his noble causes. Rules and procedure and caution are impediments, obstructions to right action. Tim has to portray himself as a fellow warrior.

All messages from you are considered high priority, Tim says. I'll see to it that he gets everything right away—

You bet, I'll route everything through you, North says.

I only ask because that hasn't been the case recently.

What happens is, I'll be working late, I'm here at ten p.m., or on a Sunday, and since you're not here I just send it directly.

But if you route it to me, it'll still go to the boss as soon as he's in.

You bet.

Room 392 is North's command center: There are multiple terminals and a printer with paper spilling out onto the ground, and several different-colored phones, one of which is answered by the prettiest woman in the building. As they walk in, she calls out messages like numbers in a bingo game, ending with, And you-know-who came by to say that Motley still hasn't sent the draft directive you asked for.

That's just what we were talking about upstairs, this BS from State. If we didn't have one or two friends over there, I don't know what we'd do.

Then he turns to Tim and grabs him by the forearm. Hey, listen to this.

He proceeds to tell Tim a variation of the story Tim told him in Miami, but now it's the secretary of state making the joke about the man and the elephant, the story exaggerated and turned into a parable of ineptitude. He clearly has no idea that Tim told it to him originally, and that it was about a different man, no memory of that at all.