Checkpoint (3 page)

BEN: 
You know that on the Net you can listen now to Nixon and Kissinger talking on the phone the very day the Pentagon Papers came out?

JAY: 
Nixon and Kissinger, really?

BEN: 
Nixon and Richard Helms, too, but there are some long beeps in that one. I think it’s at the National Security Archive. Kissinger and Nixon talk about how many soldiers have died, and then Kissinger says something like, “Vat the papers make clear, Mr. President, is that it didn’t start vith you but vith Kennedy and Johnson.” Which is certainly true.

JAY: 
The point is that you reach a moment when a different kind of action is necessary, and I’ve reached that point.

BEN: 
Well, now, Daniel Ellsberg sent a bunch of Xerox copies to some newspapers. You’re talking about something very different. Very different. You’re talking about suddenly leaping onto the world stage. You don’t have any idea what you might set in motion, what kind of uproar, what kind of clamping down would follow. There’s no way to predict. You want this wastebasket of a man to become a martyr?

JAY: 
Just listen to me a little.

BEN: 
I’ll listen, but you see I’m in a bit of a pickle now. If you then go do this, or attempt to do this—because, believe me, you will fail if you try—but if you attempt it, then I become an accessory.

JAY: 
I hate that legal language. Skip it, skip it.

BEN: 
What I should be doing is picking up the phone and calling the Justice Department and saying, “Um, Mr. Ashcroft, there’s this guy I know who may need to go to Guantánamo Bay for a while and cool down. No, he doesn’t need a lawyer.”

JAY: 
You wouldn’t do that.

BEN: 
Maybe I should, though.

JAY: 
If you picked up the phone, I might pull out a gun.

BEN: 
I don’t think you would.

JAY: 
I might—I might well. And I might threaten you with it.

BEN: 
I just don’t think that that’s in your nature.

JAY: 
And when you saw the gun, you would put the phone down. Wouldn’t you?

BEN: 
Yes.

JAY: 
And because I’d threatened you with the gun, with an actual physical bullet—not a bullet in the stomach or the head, of course, but a bullet, say, in the lower leg—it would stop our conversation, because it’s a violent threat, and I would ask you to leave, and you would leave, and do you know what would happen then?

BEN: 
I’d be very upset, extremely upset, because you’d pulled a gun on me and I’d start driving home, shaking my head, after having come all the way down here, for Christ’s sake,
at your request,
you sick prick! And I’d call Julie on the cell phone and tell her that you were delusional. And then she and I would figure out what to do.

JAY: 
And you might be compelled to call the, uh, authorities and say that there’s this guy you know who’s talking about etcetera, etcetera. And I would know that that’s what you would feel you had to do, and that would mean what? What?

BEN: 
I don’t know.

JAY: 
Just that I would have to hurry up and proceed with my plan so that I could get it done before the warning would get through.

BEN: 
So in other words, if I tried to lunge for the phone right now?

JAY: 
There would be an ugly scene of one kind or another, and you would leave. And your leaving would ensure—would absolutely guarantee—that I would go ahead.

BEN: 
Oh.

JAY: 
How is Julie?

BEN: 
Ummmmm. She’s fine, she’s doing well, she’s good. She’s fine.

JAY: 
And your son, how’s he? How old is he now?

BEN: 
He’s thirt—no, that’s right, he’s fourteen.

JAY: 
Whoa, fourteen.

BEN: 
Yep.

JAY: 
And you’ve taken up photography.

BEN: 
Yes.

JAY: 
It’s helpful to have a hobby. I have a hobby, too.

BEN: 
Jay, assassinating the president isn’t a hobby.

JAY: 
I’m sure not getting paid for it. It’s pro bono all the way. So, what are you photographing?

BEN: 
Oh, I don’t want to—nothing—I don’t know.

JAY: 
You must know what you’re taking pictures of.

BEN: 
I’m taking pictures of trees, actually. Tree pictures.

JAY: 
Trees are good.

BEN: 
Yes, they’re very specific. Each one is different.

JAY: 
And what are you going to do with these tree pictures?

BEN: 
They’re just for me to have.

JAY: 
And you’ve stopped working on your book about the Office of Censorship? What’s wrong, man?

BEN: 
Nothing’s wrong.

JAY: 
Well, then?

BEN: 
I’m into Cold War territory now.

JAY: 
What about the Cold War?

BEN: 
Passive defense.

JAY: 
Passive defense?

BEN: 
Yep, that’s what I’m looking into. You know what that is?

JAY: 
No, enlighten me.

BEN: 
It was the whole idea that we could design things and rearrange things—cities, for instance—so that they would be less damaged during an atomic attack.

JAY: 
Oh, I see.

BEN: 
The more spread out the cities are, the harder it is to do a lot of damage with only a few bombs. So there were names for various urban configurations, like the galaxy pattern. I think that was the ideal pattern. One think tank in the sixties did a few studies on “ordered sprawl.” That was their dream, ordered sprawl, because it would result in the fewest deaths in a nuclear attack.

JAY: 
Groovy. And you’re looking into this?

BEN: 
Yeah, and earlier, in the fifties, the tax rules were changed so that developers could use accelerated depreciation when they built strip malls—and so suddenly all these strip malls started making money—and the question is, Why were the rules changed? Was it just the real estate lobby, or was it the civil defense people?

JAY: 
Oh, I get it.

BEN: 
And then of course there was the National Defense Highway System—all these ring roads and beltways built to encircle the cities—and what I really want to know is how much institutional overlap was there between the city planners, and the highway planners, and the real estate lobby, and the defense planners?

JAY: 
Fascinating, very interesting.

BEN: 
Well, no, it’s not that interesting, but it interests me. You go on these little research forays.

JAY: 
Sure, sure, that’s what it’s all about. For you.

BEN: 
Some of the federal money—you may get a kick out of this—some of the money that paid for the studies on ordered sprawl went through the Stanford Research Institute. Now that was a classic Cold War think tank—they were doing all kinds of stuff for the CIA. In fact, the CIA hired them in, I think it was the seventies, to do remote viewing experiments. Did you hear about that?

JAY: 
No, I don’t believe I did.

BEN: 
Oh, this is your kind of thing. They’d take a psychic—in other words, they’d take some deluded person who thought he was a psychic, or some charlatan pretending to be a psychic—and they’d stick him in a room and give him some map coordinates. And these coordinates were very important, because they corresponded to a location in Russia that the CIA was curious about, where there was a research institute—probably a research institute very similar to the Stanford Research Institute. So the psychic was supposed to sit there and ponder these map coordinates, and tap into the paranormal world, and then he was supposed to draw the buildings that rose up in his mind.

JAY: 
Psycho-CAD! Nice. Edgy.

BEN: 
Yep.

JAY: 
I swear the CIA was a magnet for every drunk and every paranoid wack flake nutjob who’d gotten a college degree.

BEN: 
It does sometimes seem that way.

JAY: 
You know, I’m starting to see now that all the totally off-the-wall conspiracy theories, all of them, are true. It’s not just that Roosevelt knew about Pearl Harbor. It’s not just that Japan was ready to stop fighting before we dropped the bomb. It’s that—all right—you’ve got AIDS developed as part of those germ-warfare experiments in Africa, those monkeys that escaped.

BEN: 
Jumping species, well, yeah, there’s some evidence—

JAY: 
That’s definitely CIA. And then there’s the whole thing where we dropped bombs full of bugs and germs on the North Koreans. Another little CIA venture. And the POWs at the time said, Um, yes, we dropped bugs, and an international panel said, Yes, they dropped bugs, and then the professional discreditors went into high gear and came up with that whole rigmarole about “brainwashing,” right?—that the POWs who confessed to dropping the bugs must have been subjected to sinister Russian methods of interrogation.

BEN: 
Mm-hm, I’ve actually—

JAY: 
And abstract art! I mean, that was—that was really the last straw for me with the CIA. Abstract painting, promoted by spooks in the federal government to prove how tolerant our democracy is of ugliness. All that awful art, that makes you puke uncontrollably even to be in the same room with it, for all those decades—five long decades—pushed on us by that sorry crew of goofballs at the Central fucking Intelligence Agency! I mean, it’s nuts! It’s totally and completely wiggy! And yet it’s true.

BEN: 
I’ve actually met some of those professional discreditors at conferences. Somebody will present the results of years of painstaking research, careful sifting and weighing of documentary evidence, and these guys pop up and they start tag-teaming: Pish, posh, shoddy research, conspiracy theory, Grassy Knoll, beneath contempt.

JAY: 
Yeah, well, people really have a desperate need to keep the lid clamped on for as long as possible, because when that kettle blows, and that foulness spews up toward the sky, then we’re going to see how rotten it’s been in Denmark this whole time. A great and shining nation. It’s total tripe, it’s forcemeat—it’s BAD SAUSAGE, man. We’re a bunch of greedy meddlers who don’t know the first thing about the countries we’re dealing with.

BEN: 
Generally we know the first thing, but not the second and third.

JAY: 
Somebody has to be held accountable. Every covert action we’ve ever engaged in has made the world worse. Every one.

BEN: 
Are you sure it’s every one? Albania, sure.

JAY: 
Yes, it’s every single one. Every shark that we propped up, every progressive we pushed down. And that’s because it’s systemic. That’s what I’m beginning to recognize. The people who are drawn like moths to covert action, the guys who want to lie and spoof their way through life—they’re obviously going to be your sneaks and wackos and paranoids. Or they’re depressives who keep trying to lift their mood with higher and higher stakes, like that guy who blew himself away at the top of the stairs.

BEN: 
Who’s that?

JAY: 
That guy you once told me about.

BEN: 
You mean Frank Wisner?

JAY: 
Wisner, yes! So then you have a whole government agency filled to the gills with sneaks and wackos. And the money is flowing like wine. Obviously they’re going to screw it up every single time. Look how many years the CIA was in there with the Taliban. Years and years.

BEN: 
Ah, that was thanks to the Carter administration, that was Zbigniew Brzezinski. Then Reagan and Bush ramped it up hugely. You don’t want to think about all that too much, though, because then you get cranky. You want to keep focused, keep to a small canvas.

JAY: 
Man, I know what you mean about cranky. I get so cranked up. I mean—so what you’re saying basically is that the CIA gave us urban sprawl? Jesus, man, that’s—whoo!

BEN: 
Well, no, no, be careful, now, I wouldn’t go that far. There may be some institutional overlaps, that’s all I’m saying. But what I’m hoping is that some of the people who did these sprawl studies may still be around, and they may still be sharp enough to shed some light on the fine structure of the events they were part of.

JAY: 
You want to interview them.

BEN: 
Yeah, and that’s always the painful part of doing Cold War research. You find the number and call, and maybe a son or daughter answers, or maybe a nurse’s aide, and then after a long wait your man comes to the phone. He’s got a reedy, old-man’s voice: “Hello?” He’s a guy who once, long ago, had strong, tough feelings toward the Russians, and now he doesn’t remember too well what was going on back then, what the motives were, why there was all this bustle and activity. He’s probably got pale blue pants on and he’s probably not wearing a belt. He’s become an outsider in his own life. It seems rude to interview him, and yet—

JAY: 
And yet you have to, you have to. Don’t you? You have to pick up the phone and call him up.

BEN: 
If you want to tell the story, you at least have to try to talk to him.

JAY: 
Right. That’s right. So you’re, ah, sunk pretty darn deep into the fifties and sixties now.

BEN: 
I am, and I do enjoy learning more and more tiny things—stacking new tidbits onto the tidbits that I’ve already got stacked. A lot of material was declassified under Clinton. That may be the best thing he did—he didn’t like secrecy, except of course in some areas. So yes, I’m still interested in the Second World War, of course, but the fifties lure me as well. But okay, I see where you’re going.