High Jinx (3 page)

The following morning after breakfast the physical training director, Master Sergeant ‘Newt,' announced in an imperious voice that there would be a handball game at 1100 for ‘all' the enlisted men, a game at 1400 for ‘all' the officers. The winning enlisted team would play the winning officers' team at a Grand Encounter at 1600. The losers would stand the winners drinks after dinner, ‘all they bloody well can drink!'

It was a welcome diversion.

Blackford didn't know when the idea had come to him, but without hesitation—after observing from his window in his quarters Sergeant Esperanto lope off to the court at five minutes before eleven—he walked out and across the yard to the radio shed.

He entered it, and went through the open door to the room whence the light had shone.

He did not know what to look for, but instinctively he opened the drawers of the sergeant's desk. He knew something of radios, and discovered nothing in the logs of the past few days to arouse his attention. But he did note that although the exact time of all transmissions was carefully noted, there was no entry in the logbook for the early morning hours of two days ago. Or indeed—he flipped the pages back—any record of any transmission at any time later than ten at night, or earlier than eight in the morning.

He spotted the sergeant's jacket, hanging on a hook on the door, and reached into its pockets. From one he drew out a small cardboard-bound telephone directory. He flipped through it: there were perhaps thirty numbers. He studied them alphabetically. Adams, J … POR 4377. He looked at each entry, noting nothing more than that most of them were London numbers. His eyes paused over ‘Claus, R … KEN 21881.'

Why five digits?

He examined the other numbers, all of them the conventional British three letters followed by four digits.

He took a leaf from the scratch pad on the desk and wrote down, ‘Claus, R KEN 21881,' put the paper in his pocket, and walked out.

Three days later Colonel Mac left a handwritten notice on the bulletin board.

‘The gates of the compound will be open at 0700. The staff is at liberty. Make the usual arrangements.' He scrawled out his name. And then he added at the bottom of the page, ‘R.I.P.'

3

It was the Albanian affair that finally decided the question for Rufus. He was not by temperament an advocate, but he had to make himself exactly that, an advocate of radical intervention in London.

The Agency had only just begun its postmortem. It would take months and months—these investigations
always
took months and months—to assemble all the data. And under the circumstances surrounding Operation Tirana, some of the data would never be assembled. What was now—ahead of any such investigation—gruesomely plain was this: there were five different sites where the British-American-Albanian team landed. At every one of those sites, ‘they' had been there. Ready and waiting. Not only that, they had evidently known at which of the five sites Agent One had been scheduled to land. Because Agent One, unlike the others, hadn't been executed right away. The deadly cool Albanian military, no doubt under specific supervision of the KGB, had taken their time in dealing with Agent One. Perhaps a week, or even two—it was a full month before The Album, as they now uniformly referred to it, had come in (‘one of the best examples of exhibitionistic sadism
I've
ever seen,' the Director had muttered on closing its gory covers). The second to last photograph in that album had shown Agent One seated on a chair, an Albanian newspaper in his hands, the glaring eight-column headline clearly visible. His upper body and head showed bruises and lacerations. His chest was bound by a strap to the back of the chair, but his arms were obviously under his own control as he held up the newspaper dated March 20, 1954.

That was the first of the two final photographs in The Album.

The second picture, the final picture, showed a small hole through the newspaper, which had dipped down from eye level toward the floor. Agent One was slumped forward, a large bullet wound on his forehead. It had been the moment of his execution.

The balance of The Album was devoted to full-face photographs of forty men. Thirty of them were hanging from a gibbet. The others had been shot, some in the head, some in the chest. The Albanian asset, a native of Tirana, had finally been heard from—a full twenty-six days after D-Day. His radio message was remarkably languid in rhythm, given what he had to communicate and the hazardous circumstances under which the transmitter must have operated. The message, delivered in near-pastoral tones, was that Operation Tirana had been ‘a great disappointment,' that ‘as far as your contact can establish,' all forty-one of the operation's agents that had parachuted into the five points about the city had been ‘awaited by the indigenous military' which had ‘banded them together.' Some had been shot on being captured. The balance had been driven to the People's Jail and ‘there, one at a time, they were hanged on the gallows in the courtyard.'

‘Who is this character we got out there?' the Deputy had growled. ‘Sounds like he was covering a fucking sports event—sorry about that,' he muttered. (People did not use obscenities around Rufus.)

The Album, unadorned in the brown-paper wrapping posted in London, had been addressed to the U.S. Ambassador by name. His deputy had opened the package, alone in his office, and, examining it, had no idea what it was all about. He summoned an aide from the Eastern European division and asked if he was familiar with the language in which the headlines were written.

Yes. ‘It is Albanian.'

‘What does the headline say?'

‘It says, “
COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY PLOT FOILED/INVADERS AND TRAITORS FOUND, EXECUTED
.”'

The deputy knew nothing about the operation the epitaph of which had been sent to him in this cheap leather album. He rose and went to the ambassador's office—Ambassador Joseph Abercrombie Little, a portly man of late middle age. It had once been written in the Hershey (Pa.)
Chronicle
that J. A. Little knew more about the manufacture of chocolates than any single other living being outside Switzerland. He had been made ambassador in recognition of his devotion to the Republican ideal of worldwide nourishment. He was reluctant, on surveying The Album, to betray ignorance similar to his deputy's of what it was all about. He turned then to his deputy and told him, in knowing accents, that he would discuss the entire matter (‘It is deeply confidential, Reginald') with the CIA station head, Anthony Trust, whom he summoned by leaning over and depressing the switch that put him in telephonic contact with his secretary. He nodded to the DCM, who knew the meaning of that particular nod and excused himself from the room.

Anthony Trust—tall, slim, young, dark, sharp-eyed, well groomed, almost playfully cheerful in expression—came in. Wordlessly the ambassador handed him The Album.

‘What do you make of this, Anthony?'

Trust opened The Album. After turning a few pages, the cheer drained from his face. He sat down and continued, slowly, to turn the pages. He dwelled at some length on the final two pages. The ambassador waited impatiently.

‘Sir, who else knows about this?'

‘Only Reginald. Oh yes—and the Eastern language specialist, What'shisname.'

‘You will need'—Trust's demeanor had evolved, inoffensively, to that of the senior, addressing a subordinate—‘to instruct them most forcefully not to mention to anyone what they have seen.'

‘Are you familiar with the … operation?'

‘Yes. Yes, sir.'

‘What do you propose to do with'—Joseph Abercrombie Little pointed to The Album—‘that?'

‘I shall need to cable Washington from the Code Room.'

‘Well, go ahead. And,' the ambassador turned his head down as if to survey other, perhaps more urgent matters appealing on his desk for his attention, ‘if you have an opportunity to do so, you might suggest to your superiors in Washington that I am more useful as ambassador if I have some idea of what is going on around here.'

Anthony Trust said nothing, forced out a routine smile, and walked out.

It was six in the morning in Washington when the Director took Trust's call. He had specified that any development concerning Operation Tirana was to be reported directly to him. When, on D-Day plus 1, nothing had come in, the gloom among the officials who had planned it displaced any other concern. The Director, during those agonising first few days of total silence, very nearly gave up even attempting to concentrate on anything else. He had even had to pinch himself to listen to a discursive soliloquy by the President of the United States in the Oval Office on the subject of the communist penetration of Guatemala. What was difficult in the Oval Office proved very nearly impossible when talking with his brother, the Secretary of State, who desired from the Director ‘input,' as they were then beginning to call it, for a speech he was preparing to deliver to the Council on Foreign Relations on the subject of ‘The United States and Spain: A Fresh Appraisal.' And, following those first few days … still nothing. Nothing, nothing at all, about an operation involving forty-one men. Until now. The call from London. The report on The Album.

The Director reached his office before seven. The three designated officials he had had summoned were there waiting for him.

Rufus spoke. ‘The very first question, Allen, is: Do we show The Album to the Brits right away or do we bring it over and examine it ourselves first?'

‘Attwood'—the reference was to the head of the British MI5—‘already knows about the transmission from our asset. All that The Album does it add concrete proof that what we suspected turned out to be so. Gruesomely so. We shall have to let him know—let him examine The Album—right away.'

‘Yes of course. You're quite right.' It was unusual for Rufus—the most experienced, the least impulsive man the Director had ever known, in public life or private—to pose a question as involving serious alternatives and then instantly to acquiesce in the implication that it was a silly question to begin with. The Director made a mental note to probe the matter (what did Rufus have in mind in questioning whether the British should be shown The Album?) when the two were alone.

And so it was resolved. Trust would take The Album to Attwood at MI5, have it copied, and then fly directly, whether on commercial or military aircraft, to Washington with the original.

‘I can't pretend I am looking forward to examining the album described by Trust,' Allen Dulles said, rising. ‘I'm going to have a little breakfast.' He nodded at his colleagues, motioning to Rufus to stay as the other two left. ‘Sweet roll with your coffee?' Rufus allowed his eyes to skim his own paunch, resolved that it was not inordinate in a man sixty years old, and nodded. The Director came right to the point.

‘You've got something heavy on your mind, Rufus.'

‘We all do, Allen.' Rufus was appropriately dressed for someone who had something heavy on his mind. But then he was always dressed as if on his way to a funeral. Or, for that matter, to a wedding: dark three-piece suit, grey tie, white shirt. Somehow it was right for him, and in any event, no one ever burlesqued Rufus. He had hair only above the ears and at the back of his head. His brown eyes were either sound asleep (that was when Rufus was given over to analysis, parting company with his surroundings as though hermetically insulated from them) or fiercely active, concentrating on what was being said or on what he was saying; analysing, dissecting, probing.

‘Treason is heavy stuff,' said the Director, somewhat sententiously. ‘And treason is our business. So I guess it is fair to say we always have
something
heavy on our minds.'

‘Yes,' said Rufus. ‘But this is different. Every detail. Every last detail. The penetration by Soviet forces of Operation Tirana is almost unique.' (Rufus was too cautious to say about anything that it was ‘unique'; if questioned on the matter, he'd have commented that only God could know whether anything was ‘unique.') ‘We mount the most important countersalient since the beginning of the cold war. A bid actually to split off—to liberate, to use your brother's wonderful, if hubristic, word—an appendage of the Soviet Empire. We are not only frustrated in bringing off the operation, we are checkmated at every technical level. We plan five entirely separate drops. And it appears there were five ambushes there waiting for them. They knew the coordinates of the five different drops. Only one Westerner—as a matter of fact, it was I who selected those five drops from the twenty-five locations nominated as possible candidates for the operation—knew the drops' locations. One man on our side knew all these details. And KBG-Albania knew all those details. A comprehensive job of treason. It isn't a case of one man overhearing one critical conversation, because there never was one critical conversation. What we are facing is a man—a thing—that has got hold of the entire mechanics of our enterprise.'

The Director puffed on his pipe and stirred his coffee. ‘I think you are probably right. So where do we go from here?'

‘To the Soviet Embassy, I would say.'

And so Rufus disclosed what had been brewing in his mind since it became clear to him—well before the Albanian transmission; before The Album's arrival in London—that Operation Tirana had been a total disaster. Otherwise,
one
of the forty-one special and specially trained agents would have got through. When none did, Rufus sensed that none ever would.

Rufus now argued that a special team physically enter the Soviet Embassy.

‘You do mean the Soviet Embassy in London?'

‘I do mean the Soviet Embassy in London. London is where the coordination on Tirana was done. The information we need is in the Soviet Embassy in London.'

‘Which is protected by British law.'