Red Rag Blues (42 page)

Apart from the bank-robbery con, which is based on an actual crime in New York in the 1960s, the plot—Cabrillo's arrival from Venezuela, broke; his attempts to make money; his move to Washington and his double-dealing with Senator McCarthy—is invented, like most of the characters. Joe McCarthy existed, of course, and Bobby Kennedy worked for him, as did Cohn and Schine, in 1953. Kim Philby was a reality too (although he didn't visit America that year) and details of his remarkable career as a KGB agent who almost became head of MI6 are as accurate as I could make them. Philby's KGB controller, Peter Cottington-Beaufort—surely a
nom de guerre—
is fictitious. All the words spoken by these people are imagined (although, in the chapter on the Fantoni hearing, the events studied by the Sub-Committee—union disputes, race riots, sabotage—are based on fact).

The rest—from Max Webber and Billy Jago to Prendergast and Fisk to Stevie and Scatola, and all the others—are invented characters. Two people are re-invented, so to speak. Luis Cabrillo and Julie Conroy first appeared in earlier novels of mine:
The Eldorado Network
and
Artillery of Lies,
which described his career (with her guidance) as a double agent in World War Two. The Double-Cross System existed. It sold the
Abwehr
a stream of “secret” information, largely false, all part of a hugely successful Allied deception campaign. (Wagner appears in there too.) I based Cabrillo on a real double agent, codenamed Garbo, who satisfied both sides so much that he was awarded the Iron Cross by Germany and the MBE by Britain. When the war ended he vanished to South America. So there are echoes of reality in Cabrillo.

Max's U-turn with HUAC in exchange for a Warners contract is fiction. Nevertheless, Warner Brothers enjoyed a good working relationship with HUAC: in 1952 the studio made
Big Jim McClain
(John Wayne as a HUAC investigator rooting out Communist spies) and the film ends with a big credit to the Committee for its help.

As far as I know there was no Mafia family called Fantoni in the New York area. I found no record of HUAC or McCarthy's Sub-Committee accusing the Mafia of Communist infiltration, although God knows the Mobs did more damage to the fabric of American society than Larry Adler, Arthur Miller, Zero Mostel and Dashiel Hammett, who—along with many hundred of individuals—were caught up in the witch hunt for no good reason, and sometimes for no reason at all; and got harassed, sacked, jailed or exiled.

One exile who typified many was Carl Foreman, who wrote the screenplay for an outstanding Western,
High Noon.
When John Wayne gave Gary Cooper the Oscar for his role in the movie, he growled: “Why can't I find me a scriptwriter to write me a part like that?” Too late: Carl Foreman had been blacklisted in Hollywood (he had refused to name names) and was now in England, looking for work. Soon the Duke joined The Motion Picture Alliance For The Preservation Of American Ideals—one of several McCarthyite organizations—and he discovered that
High Noon
was in fact stuffed with subversive, anti-American ideas. Foreman spent the next twenty years in England, making films. He collaborated on the script of
The Bridge On The River Kwai
and got no credit. The film would have been refused distribution in the US if his name had appeared on it. The blacklist cast a very long shadow.

Which takes me to McCarthy, a difficult man to re-create because he was so unlike his cartoon image. He joined the witch hunt late in the day. In 1950, four years after his election to Congress, his prospects were poor. He'd accomplished very little, he faced re-election in two years, and the tax people were on his tail. He urgently needed a popular cause, to boost his career. Friends offered ideas. Develop the St. Lawrence Seaway? Introduce a pension for elderly Americans? Worthy, but dull. Then someone said Americans were worried by the threat of Communist infiltration in Washington. McCarthy liked the sound of that. A month later, during a speech in Wheeling, Virginia, he held up a piece of paper: a list, he said, of 205 known members of the Communist Party still working at the State Department. Or was it 57 members? Later, McCarthy couldn't remember. By then he'd lost the paper. No matter; and no matter that he couldn't prove his accusation. That speech was the pebble that started an avalanche of national support. He'd found his cause, he'd won his publicity; and by the time he was re-elected in 1952 his reckless
offensive had destroyed so many jobs, reputations, even lives, that he was known as the most feared man in America.

McCarthy was not the first US senator to exploit the Red Scare for political gains. In 1949—the year before McCarthy's Wheeling speech—Senator Lyndon B. Johnson already had his sights on the Presidency. LBJ was from Texas, and he needed Texas oil money to back his ambition. The Texas oil barons hated a man called Leland Olds, who for nine years had been head of the Federal Power Commission. He was patriotic, hardworking, fair-minded and effective. LBJ used his chairmanship of a Senate subcommittee to remove Olds. By smear and distortion, he painted Olds as a Communist and destroyed his career, a skilled hatchet-job which McCarthy must have observed. The Texas oil barons were grateful. Eventually, with their help, LBJ made it to the White House. Meanwhile, as long as McCarthyism was in full flood, LBJ never spoke out against it. (Nor did Senator John F. Kennedy.) “You don't get in a pissin' contest with a polecat,” Johnson said privately.

McCarthy wasn't so much a politician as an operator. All he had going for him was his Red Scare. He must keep exposing more and more security risks, attacking great institutions, because his power came from knocking over his enemies. His fall was as stunning as his rise. In 1954 he chose to fight the Army, lost, was censured by the Senate and ridiculed in the Press, and soon found himself ignored. Two years later he was dead, virtually a suicide. He drank himself to death.

Yet McCarthy was likable; that's what is so surprising. When he wasn't damning citizens as traitors he was relaxed and friendly. He had a bluff, Irish charm. He was, at first, welcomed by the Kennedys; might even have married into the family. Bobby Kennedy worked for him loyally in the summer of 1953, a career move which Kennedy biographers have found hard to explain and even harder to justify. At that age, Bobby was a grim and unforgiving soul for whom “liberal” was a dirty word. Later—much later—he discovered the hardships that poverty, hunger and ill health could inflict on others, and his outlook became humanitarian. But in 1953, Bobby Kennedy didn't like people. (His reluctant, fingertip handshake kept them at bay.) He liked a fight. He was impressed by McCarthy, and he respected his politics. He grieved when McCarthy died. Few politicians attended the funeral; Bobby did.

In
Red Rag Blues
, all the intelligence agencies eavesdrop on each other. This is only a slight exaggeration. By 1953, the FBI had a free hand to bug and tap. Hoover had certainly penetrated the CIA, so it's hard to believe the CIA didn't return the compliment. The FBI bugged many senators, and McCarthy must have been a prime target—he was under constant surveillance by Hoover's agents and the Bureau had a fat file on him. The CIA bugged McCarthy as a matter of course. MI6, KGB and CIA existed for the purpose of gathering intelligence, so it would be surprising if they didn't bug and tap everyone who interested them.

If this suggests a certain lack of secrecy in Washington, think of William Hansen, the FBI agent who spied for the Russians for 22 years, earning $643,000, which lay in his bank account for any investigator to see. In 1993, after a break in his spying, he got in touch with his handlers again. The Russians didn't trust their luck. This had to be a trap. They complained to the American authorities that an FBI agent tried to sell them secrets. The Bureau searched, but couldn't find him, although there were many telltale signs that Hansen was not to be trusted. When, eventually, he was arrested, he described the FBI's security procedures in two words: “Criminal negligence.”

Even Hansen was overshadowed by the CIA agent Aldrich Ames, Chief of Counter-intelligence in the Agency's Soviet Division, and therefore a man with a safe full of secrets. He also had a home full of debts. With no prospect of promotion to help pay his bills, he sold the secrets to the Russians. They gave him two million dollars. His CIA record wasn't spotless (he'd had a bad drink problem), but no alarm bells rang when he bought two new Jaguars and a half-million-dollar house—for cash. He spied for the Russians for eight years. He was arrested in 1994. By then, despite all that Ames had done for the KGB and against the CIA, the USSR was collapsing. Ames's treachery wasn't even a footnote to history.

By contrast, anything in
Red Rag Blues
seems almost routine.

D.R.