Andersen, Kurt (52 page)

Other than that
—other than the fact that he spied on me for army intelligence for several months.

So my discovery phase is finished. Now I know what happened with a high degree of confidence, as Stewart would say.

I’m tempted to turn this into a PowerPoint presentation.

After the CIA threatened Alex with exposure of his homosexuality in August 1967, he agreed to spy on his Yugoslav lover. Sometime that fall, maybe in October when we went to Washington, he agreed to spy on radicals at Harvard as part of the CIA’s Project RESISTANCE.

He told the CIA about our plan. And the CIA secretly taped those debriefings. “WHEEL-14,” says one of the CIA documents, using Alex’s code name, “had provided information in April 1968 regarding a domestic plot to assassinate POTUS. Surveillances included technical coverage of debriefings of him by SOG representatives in New York and Boston.”

Chuck, it turns out, became a government informer some months before Alex. He’d felt terrible after he called his father a war criminal and modern-day Judenrat for designing a computer communications network for the Pentagon, and in the spring of 1967, when Professor Levy introduced him to a young colonel in the Army Intelligence Command for the continental U.S., CONUS, Chuck agreed to pass along information as one of hundreds or thousands of agents and informants engaged by the army in their domestic intelligence-gathering operations. Which is why he didn’t think he had to worry about the draft and why, after he was arrested at the Pentagon protest in October 1967, he was sprung immediately.

But over that fall and winter, according to his letter to me, Chuck decided he’d made an awful mistake, that he couldn’t have it both ways, that he was on the wrong side of history, the rest of us were absolutely right, the war was irredeemably evil and we had to do something to try to stop it. In January 1968 he started giving
dis
information to his army handler from Fort Devens. He was fully committed to Operation Lima Bravo Juliet and had not, as of February 18, 1968, told army intelligence or anyone else about it.

After Johnson announced he wasn’t running for reelection and the rest of us decided to call off the mission, why did Chuck persist? What was he thinking? About this I can only speculate. He’d switched from would-be air force officer to earnest young antigovernment radical to government informer and back to committed comrade. He had signed up to be a double agent for army intelligence but then became such a radical true believer that he became a
triple
agent—on our side but pretending to be on the army’s side and pretending to the army that he was still only pretending to be on our side. And in the end, by himself, on nobody’s side. Maybe the toggle on his moral bearings short-circuited and burned out, and he was unable to flip the switch again. Maybe it would have happened even if he’d never learned that I cheated on him with Buzzy. Maybe he got too invested in becoming an action hero. Maybe the acid trip with Buzzy over Thanksgiving had frazzled crucial bits of his brain. Gobbling a hundred Benzedrine tablets during the last two weeks of his life certainly didn’t help. (“Side effects,” I know now, “may include aggression, grandiosity, excessive feelings of power and invincibility, and paranoia, and with chronic and/or high dosages, amphetamine psychosis can occur.”)

The last time Stewart and I spoke, he said that “Macallister definitely was the one who really gave up Charles Levy. Gave him up in the process of trying to save his ass, actually. Sort of beautiful and tragic.” When Alex and Chuck had their phone conversation on Easter 1968, Alex confessed that he, Alex, had been working with the government—”we’ve all been sneaky and disloyal in our own ways,” Chuck said to him in response, alluding to but not revealing the fact that he, Chuck, had been a federal informant as well. Anyhow, Alex thought Chuck could somehow be cajoled, maybe recruited, at least neutralized—brought in from the cold—by an experienced intelligence professional. He set up a meeting between Chuck and a CIA officer the following day at Chuck’s boardinghouse in Washington. Meanwhile, Chuck arranged his own meeting with army CONUS intelligence agents at the same time and place—and for some reason, he didn’t tell either his CIA contact or his army handlers that the other would be there as well.

What precisely was Chuck’s plan on that day in 1968, the fifteenth of April? Did he want to prove to each set of spooks that he was connected, a real player? Did he think he was somehow protecting himself from each by having the other present? Did he lie to the army about who the CIA man was? Did he have some James Bond–ish denouement negotiation in mind? Or was he just goofing with them all? Did he
intend
to go out in a glorious, murderous, murky blaze? Had he gone completely nuts? The possibilities are not mutually exclusive.

According to Stewart’s electronic surveillance log, the CIA man, during the fifteen minutes after he arrived to meet with Chuck, chatted good-naturedly about swimming and Alex and Harvard, took an offered cigarette, and suggested twice that Chuck “put the gun away.” Chuck asked the guy which languages he knew and if he had been posted overseas, what subjects the CIA preferred its officers to study in college, and whether or not he thought JFK had been killed by a government conspiracy.

The CIA man’s last line in the ELSLURS log is “You expecting somebody, Chuck?”, to which Chuck’s answer is “Maybe (unintelligible).”

Then comes “Unidentified Male 1: ‘Don’t, asshole—’” and the notation “Shouts (unintelligible), multiple rounds fired, 11 seconds,” and finally, “Unidentified Male 2: ‘I’m hit, f***, I’m hit.’” The transcript ends at “1418 hours.”

Stewart says the two unidentified males were army intelligence agents, probably CONUS undercovers in costume—long hair, mustaches, hippie clothes. The CIA man, thinking he was being ambushed by radicals, drew his weapon and fired at the armed intruders, hitting one of them, who died later. Both CONUS men fired back, killing both the CIA officer and Chuck, who was holding a loaded .9mm Luger that had never been fired.

The CIA and army intelligence immediately took over jurisdiction from the D.C. police. The case never became a criminal case, never officially passed through the local prosecutorial system at all, which was undoubtedly easier to accomplish in Washington than it would have been anywhere else, since the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia—that is, a federal government official—also acts as the local district attorney.

One CIA memo I got from Stewart refers to “information classified pursuant to an Executive Order in the interest of the national defense involving intelligence sources or methods.” Another refers to “the likelihood that public exposure” of “the Agency’s interest in the problem of student dissidence would result in considerable notoriety,” and that “the incident carries the highest embarrassment potential for the Agency, activities and relationships which in certain contexts could be construed as delicate or inappropriate and would have serious domestic implications.” A third CIA memo notes that “ODFOAM, which was informed of the case two weeks prior to the incident, has declined to take responsibility for it, on the grounds that POTUS was in Hawaii on 15 April and the incident concerns CIA and ODIBEX internal security.” POTUS is the president, and in CIA jargon, ODFOAM is the Secret Service and ODIBEX is the army. “CIA Office of Security is severely inhibited in the actions it can take against any of the suspects, Agency employees or proprietaries for fear of compromising other operations.”

In other words, it was a Keystone Kops tragedy in which confused agents from competing intelligence agencies accidentally killed each other. So the CIA and army intelligence decided to engage in cover-ups. Both agencies’ domestic spying operations were secret and probably illegal. If they’d been revealed at the time, with a nineteen-year-old Harvard boy dead in the bargain, a catastrophic political crisis might have resulted.

What was more, prosecuting Buzzy and me would have been difficult, given that Alex and Chuck were, legally speaking, federal agents operating improperly—Alex’s evidence against us might have been inadmissible, in the criminal bar’s term of art, as “fruit of the poisonous tree.”

Did the army lie to Professor Levy about the circumstances of his son’s service and death, or did he fabricate his own story to make his wife feel better? I don’t know.

I encouraged Chuck’s radicalism and our plot. I cheated on him. Mea culpa. But not mea maxima culpa. For forty-six years, I’ve believed it was my long-distance call from the Times Square pay phone to the Secret Service that got Chuck killed two weeks later. That was the straightest, simplest explanation. Now I know it wasn’t so, that the mysteries of why Chuck died and why Alex and Buzzy and I were allowed to walk away are much, much more complicated. Occam’s Razor is a good rule, but there are exceptions to the rule.

There are things I’ll never be certain about. Alex and Chuck each believed that spying for the government was their ace in the hole, giving them immunity from the draft and maybe protection from prosecution. Neither knew the other was a spy, at least until the very end. So: did the sangfroid and commitment to the cause that each of them showed that winter and spring increase both their mutual admiration and their feelings of guilt about being snitches? Did the secret-agent provocateurs unintentionally provoke each other?

As I began writing this morning, I thought the puzzle was finished, the soluble mysteries solved.

Buzzy had been a true believer and, like me, at the final crossroads, took the right fork while Chuck zigged and zagged and took the left.

Alex, clever, hard-hearted Alex, had been a snitch all along, telling the CIA what we had planned, waiting for the last moment to call in the feds and shut down the plot.

Looking over one of the old typewritten pages from the CIA yet again, I focus on a stray fact I didn’t really notice the first twenty times I read it.

I actually think:
Aha.

“Sorry. Mr. Macallister is in South Africa, on safari. He can only be reached in an emergency. Would you care to leave a message?”

“I’d like to set up a meeting if I can.”

“Will he know what this is in reference to?”

“Uh-huh. We’re friends. When does he return home from
safari
?” Why am I wasting energy on
attitude
with an assistant?

“I’m afraid he’s going straight from Jo-berg to Rio for the World Cup, so … Ah, you’re in luck—he has an opening on Monday afternoon, August fourth.”

“Perfect,”
I say, not wishing this imperious boy in Santa Monica to think I’m even a bit put out by having to wait almost a month for an appointment with Alex the great and powerful.

You’re in luck,
the scheduler at Wheel Life Pictures said. I feel sometimes as if half my life consists of people telling me how lucky I am. Sometimes the congratulations concern actual good fortune. But sometimes when I feel lucky—becoming a grandmother at forty-seven, ending my marriage at fifty-eight—no one else sees it that way. And often the luck is the glass-half-full kind—lucky that I got diabetes when treatment was improving, lucky that my dad died seven years after getting Alzheimer’s rather than twenty. People of my generation constantly talk, with smiles more self-congratulatory than abashed, about how lucky they were to escape death during their daredevil youths, stories that tend to involve drunken swimming off rocky shores at night and driving cars without seat belts while drug-addled.
The shit we got away with as kids!
We are the Smuggest Generation.

I am lucky. But people haven’t known the half of it.

I was lucky I didn’t blow myself up as we mixed our batches of acetone peroxide. I was lucky that Lyndon Johnson made his political-surrender speech four days before we planned to kill him. I was lucky, as it turned out, that two of my coconspirators had been independently in league with the government, which forced the government to let me go free.

Because my father had survived a Nazi camp and breezed into America, I grew up thinking that luck ran in our family. Now I know that my father wasn’t just lucky, that he supplied information about his friends to the Nazis while he was imprisoned and then to the Americans after liberation. He possessed knowledge that he traded to improve his own chances for survival and contentment. He snitched. I told myself in 1968 that my call to the Secret Service was intended to save Chuck from his own haywire behavior, but it was also—maybe mainly—about self-preservation and self-advancement. I snitched. You can decide how far the apple fell from the tree.

I’ve been lucky for decades that the government files on our case were never accidentally or deliberately pried open, that I was never blackmailed, that no personal or professional or political enemy of mine ever used my brief but inexcusable criminal past to besmirch and destroy me. Again, however, it wasn’t just luck. I’ve been careful, too, mostly.

An hour ago, the Ink Spots came up on my iPod shuffle.
I don’t want to set the world on fire / I just want to start a flame in your heart … I’ve lost all ambition for worldly acclaim / I just want to be the one you love.
It’s too pat, right? But it’s true. As a young girl, I had large ambition for worldly acclaim
and
to be the one he loved. As an older girl, for a time, I wanted to set the world on fire more or less literally. And then as a young woman, I reverted overnight, trying for the rest of my life to set the world on fire in a strictly figurative sense, to work hard, become successful, and leave both radicalism and true love—every form of wild romance—to others.

When I first moved to L.A., I was fixed up with an older guy who ran some kind of left-wing storefront operation. On our first and last date, before he used the phrase “back in the day” five different times and before we got into a shouting argument about charter schools (I’m pro) and Hezbollah (anti), he said he remembered seeing me at SDS events in Cambridge in 1967. He’d “developed a thing” for me, but then I “just, like, disappeared,” and he assumed I’d “gone underground.” When I said I was sorry I didn’t remember him, he told me that in 1970 he’d been indicted for attempted murder after “somebody fired a rifle into the Cambridge police station.” He smiled as he said it. I remembered reading about the incident at the time. The charges were dropped, he told me. “The shit we got away with back in the day, huh? We were so lucky.”