An Honorable Man (28 page)

“It's a grubby business we're in, you and I,” the director said. He nodded at the FBI sedan parked in the lot, distinguished by its being undistinguished among the roadsters. The director spoke in a tone of cool observation. “We got lucky on this. The newspapers are content to believe that an accident killed a decorated veteran. They're looking for heroes.” He nodded at Beth and her father, who walked ahead on the path. “What does she know?”

“Nothing. The old man has taken it hard. He was surprised. Ignorance or wishfulness. Who knows? She gave him the story that Roger was being hounded for being queer. That's all she knows.”

“Let's leave it that way.” The director cleared his throat, inflected with tentativeness. “You'll be going to New Haven soon, I expect.” He looked at Mueller. “You'll be back. You'll get bored.”

Just then they were passing the assembled news crews, and one reporter, recognizing the director, separated from the pack of cameramen and klieg lights. He stopped in front of the director, blocking his path, and thrust his microphone forward. “Sir, can you tell the American people how you feel about Roger Altman?”

Mueller stepped aside so he wasn't caught on film. The director hesitated before he answered, but when he spoke his voice was stentorian. “Were the senator from Wisconsin in the pay of communists he would not be doing a better job of sowing mistrust in our Great Land. He owes this young man's family an apology.”

Mueller joined the director in the parking lot to hitch a ride across the Potomac. Mueller had to walk past Beth's red convertible to get to the director's limousine, and he had to walk past her. She came around the back of her car to open the passenger door for her father, and the two of them, Mueller and Beth, found themselves face-to-face. She observed Mueller, eyes meeting. They were stopped and they stayed looking at each other, she at him and he at her, each waiting for a sign, or for the other to speak. They looked at each other across the few feet of parking lot. Mueller didn't have the courage to say the one thing he wanted to say. The thing he'd ruined. He accepted that all he saw on her face was anger and recrimination and, yes, pity. In the long silence of the moment he knew everything she'd felt for him was clouded by grief. When nothing was said she walked away.

Mueller was in the backseat of the limousine when she came over to the open window. There was no emotion at all on her pale face, but as soon as she spoke, Mueller stiffened.

She said angrily, “You're just like all the others.” She walked off.

Mueller went for the door to follow her. The director forcefully put his hand on Mueller's arm. “Let it rest for a while.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

O
N THE
morning of April 1, 1953, James Speyer Kronthal was found dead in the upstairs bedroom of his brick town house in Georgetown by Metropolitan Police, who had been summoned by his longtime housekeeper when she arrived at 8:30 and found the home suspiciously quiet. He was fully clothed, sprawled on the floor, an apparent suicide. He wasn't shot, as Robert Altman is in the novel, but in many other respects my character is based on the sad, troubled life of James Speyer Kronthal.

Kronthal was a brilliant young deputy of Allen Dulles's who had worked in the OSS with Dulles in the Bern Station during World War II. He was one of the original sixty or so people whom Dulles brought to the CIA. Those initial recruits were not required to take a polygraph test, as would later be the case with all new agency employees. Kronthal came from a wealthy banking family, attended Yale and then Harvard, where he earned a graduate degree in Art History. CIA investigators would later discover that Kronthal led a questionable life in the art world, working with the Nazi regime, brokering art stolen from Jews. It was during this period that German intelligence caught him in a homosexual act with an underage German boy. Kronthal, through his banking relationships, and his art interests, was ­acquainted with Hermann Goering, head of the Luftwaffe, which kept him from arrest and scandal.

When the NKVD followed Soviet troops into Berlin in 1945, they found Goering's private files, including the file on Kronthal. Kronthal had replaced Dulles as the Bern Station Chief in 1945, a key intelligence position, and the NKVD prepared another trap for him, filming him with a young boy. The Soviets blackmailed Kronthal, and he became the first Soviet mole in the CIA. He worked for Dulles and during this time reported his meetings at the highest level of the CIA to Moscow.

Kronthal's homosexuality came to light in Washington within the inner circles of the Agency at the time that Senator Joseph McCarthy was conducting witch hunts for homo­sexuals in the State Department. Dulles treated what amounted to an intelligence catastrophe as a political problem, not as a counter­intelligence problem. Dulles was a sharp student of history, and in his memoir he referenced the case of Alfred Redl, counter­espionage chief in the Austro-Hungarian Empire's military uncovered as a Russian spy, who was “invited” to commit suicide as an honorable way out of an intelligence mess—and to prevent the political embarrassment that would follow if the incident came to light.

Dulles invited Kronthal to dinner when the betrayal was discovered. He gave Kronthal a speech about honor and duty, and how compulsions destroyed careers. Kronthal walked home to his town house in Georgetown, where the next morning the police discovered him on the floor of his bedroom, an empty vial on the floor. The note he left for his sister spoke about the difficulty his homosexuality posed for his career. The entire episode was hushed up and didn't come to light for many years.

The hostile political environment in Washington D.C. required that the episode be kept secret to prevent a McCarthy witch hunt of the CIA, which Dulles, and even Eisenhower, knew would jeopardize the effectiveness of the Agency at a time when the Cold War was at its height. I happened upon the incident while reading Joseph J. Trento's
The Secret History of the CIA.
I was intrigued by the idea of an Ivy League–educated young man who lived a secret life within a secret career. If you worked for the CIA, you couldn't tell anyone, even your wife, what you did for a living, or even where you worked, and being a closeted homosexual compounded the layers of secrecy. I wondered how Kronthal managed all this in his mind.

Several characters in the novel quote lines of poetry or prose. The sources are: John Webster: “Oh, my worse sin was in my blood; Now my blood pays for it”; T. S. Eliot: “Tenants of the house. Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season”; William Shakespeare: “In offering commend it” and “Why then 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison”; Rudyard Kipling: “We're poor little lambs who've lost our way. Baa! Baa! Baa! We're little black sheep who've gone astray. Baa! Baa! Baa!”; Ezra Pound: “In her is the end of breeding. Her boredom is exquisite and excessive. She would like someone to speak to her, And is almost afraid that I will commit that indiscretion.”; Lillian Hellman: “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashion.”

Several books and web sites were indispensable sources of information about Soviet and American espionage in the 1950s. They are:
Confessions of a Spy
by Pete Earley (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1997);
The Secret History of the CIA
by Joseph J. Trento (Basic Books, 2001);
Spy Handler
by Victor Cherkashin with Gregory Feifer (Basic Books, 2005);
Legacy of Ashes
by Tim Weiner (Random House 2007);
Cloak and Gown
by Robin Winks (Yale University Press, 1987);
The Lavender Scare
by David Johnson (The University of Chicago Press, 2004);
Farewell
by Sergei Kostin and Eric Raynaud, translated by Catherine Cauvin-Higgins (AmazonCrossing, 2009);
Widows
by William R. Corson, Susan B. Trento and Joseph J. Trento (Crown Publishers, 1989); Frank Olson Legacy Project at
http://www.frankolsonproject.org/

I owe particular thanks to my agent, Will Roberts at The Gernert Company, whose probing questions led to important revisions to an early draft; and to my editor, Emily Bestler, whose fine editorial eye found gaps in the narrative. Special thanks go to my fellow writers at the Neumann Leathers Writers Group—Mauro Altamura, Amy Kiger-Williams, Aimee Rinehart, Dawn Ryan, Brett Duquette, and Rachel Friedman—who were the novel's first readers, and to my sons, Joe and Arturo, with whom I had long discussions that helped me see things I hadn't considered. Eric Olson shared the torment of a family from whom the CIA withheld the terrible circumstances of a father's death. To my readers: Robert Boswell, David Gernert, Alex Miller, Kelly Luce, Carin Clevidence, Nahid Rachlin, Rivka Galchen, Andy Feinstein, Polly Flonder, Rae Edelson, and Sujata Shekar. To my advocates: Brendan Cahill, Lauren Cerand, Alex Miller, and Milena Deleva. I also wish to thank Jayne Anne Phillips, Alice Elliot Dark, Rachel Hadas, and Tayari Jones at the Rutgers Newark MFA—teachers, writers, and mentors. And to my wife, the remarkable Linda Stein, partner, teacher, reader, critic, muse.

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