The Company: A Novel of the CIA (51 page)

The whine of Russian MiGs screaming low over the rooftops drowned out Ebby. As the planes curled away, he heard the dry staccato bark of their wing cannons. Racing to a window, he saw flames leaping from the roof of the building next to the Kilian Barracks across the intersection. Zoltan, his face creased into a preoccupied frown, wired the transceiver to an automobile battery and fiddled with the tuning knob until the needle indicated he was smack on the carrier signal. Then he plugged in the Morse key. Ebby finished the message and passed it to Zoltan, and then held the flashlight while the gypsy radioman tapped out his words: soviet artillery on Buda hills began shelling Pest 4 this morning explosions heard throughout city one shell landed street outside corvin soviet jets strafing rebel strongpoints according unconfirmed report kgb arrested nagy defense minister pal meleter and other members hungarian negotiating team last night hungarians at corvin preparing for house to house resistance but unlikely prevail this time

Bending low over the Morse key, working it with two fingers of his right hand, Zoltan signed off using Ebby's code name. Ebby caught the sound of tank engines coughing their way down Ulloi. He threw open the window and leaned out. Far down the wide avenue, a long line of dull headlights could be seen weaving toward the Cinema. Every minute or so the tanks pivoted spastically on their treads and shelled a building at point blank range. As Zoltan had predicted when they installed the radio shack on the top floor, the Russian tanks were unable to elevate their cannons in the limited space of the streets. So they were simply shooting the ground floors out from under the buildings, and letting the upper floors collapse into the basements. "I think we'd better get the hell out of here," Ebby decided. Zoltan didn't need to be told twice. While Ebby retrieved the antenna attached to the stovepipe on the roof, he stuffed the battery and the transceiver into his knapsack. The gypsy led the way back through the deserted corridors to the apartment that connected to the Corvin Cinema. Then the Russian tanks started blasting away at the ground floor of their building.

They ducked through the double hole in the bricks and made their way down a narrow staircase to the alleyway behind the cinema. The clouds overhead turned rose-red from the fires raging around the city. Groups of Corvin commandos, boys and girls wearing short leather jackets and black berets, white-and-green armbands, crouched along the alleyway, waiting heir turn to dash out into the street to hurl Molotov cocktails at the tanks that were blasting away at the thick concrete walls of the Cinema and the fortress-like facade of the massive barrack building across the avenue. Someone switched on a battery-powered radio and, turning up the volume, set it atop a battered taxi sitting on four flat tires. For a moment the sound of static filled the alleyway. Then came the hollow, emotional voice of the premier, Imre Nagy.

Gesturing with both hands as if he himself were giving the speech, Zoltan attempted a running translation. "He says us that Soviet forces attack our capital to overthrow the legal democratic Hungarian government, okay. He says us that our freedom fighters are battling the enemy. He says us that he alerts the people of Hungary and the entire world to these goddamn facts. He says us that today it is Hungary, tomorrow it will be the turn of—"

There were whistles of derision from the crouching students waiting their turn to fling themselves against the Russian tanks; this was not a crowd sympathetic to the plight of a bookish Communist reformer caught between the Soviet Politburo and the anti-Communist demands of the great majority of his own people. One of the young section-leaders raised a rifle to his shoulder and shot the radio off the roof of the taxi. The others around him applauded.

There were sporadic bursts of machine gun fire from the avenue. Moments later a squad of freedom fighters darted back into the alleyway, dragging several wounded with them. Using wooden doors as stretchers, medical students wearing white armbands carried them back into the Corvin Cinema.

The students nearest the mouth of the alleyway struck matches and lit the wicks on their Molotov cocktails. The freckled girl with pigtails, who looked all of sixteen, burst into tears that racked her thin body. Her boyfriend tried to pry the Molotov cocktail out of her fist but she clutched it tightly. When her turn came she rose shakily to her feet and staggered from the alleyway. One by one the others got up and dashed into the street. The metallic clack of Russian machine guns drummed in the dusty morning air. Bullets chipped away at the brick wall across the alleyway and fell to the ground.

Zoltan picked up a bullet and turned it in his fingers; it was still warm to the touch. He leaned close to Ebby's ear. "You want an opinion, okay, need to get our asses over to the American embassy."

Ebby shook his head. "We'd never make it through the streets alive."

In the stairwell inside the doorway to the cinema Arpad and Elizabet were arguing furiously in Hungarian. Several times Arpad started to leave but Elizabet clung to the lapel of his leather jacket and continued talking. They stepped back to let two medical students haul a dead girl—the freckled sixteen-year-old who had broken into tears before she ran into the street—down the stairs to the basement morgue. Arpad waved an arm in dismay as they carried the body past, then shrugged in bitter resignation. Elizabet came over to kneel behind Ebby. "Remember the tunnel that runs under the street to the Kilian Barracks? I talked Arpad into going with us—there are hundreds of armed freedom fighters still in the barracks, plenty of ammunition. The walls are three meters thick in places. We can hold out there for days. Even if the rest of the city falls we can keep the ember of resistance alive. Perhaps the West will come to its senses. Perhaps the Western intellectuals will oblige their governments to confront the Russians." She nodded toward the knapsack on Zoltan's back. "You absolutely must come with us to send reports of the resistance to Vienna. They will believe messages from you."

Zoltan saw the advantages immediately. "If things turn bad at Kilian," he told Ebby, "there are tunnels through which you can escape into the city."

"The reports I send back won't affect the outcome," Ebby said. "At some point someone with an ounce of sanity in his brain has to negotiate a truce and stop the massacre."

"You must send back reports as long as the fighting continues," Elizabet insisted.

Ebby nodded without enthusiasm. "I'll tell them how the Hungarians are dying, not that it will change anything."

The four of them descended the steel spiral stairs to the boiler room and then made their way single file along a narrow corridor into a basement that had been used to store coal before the cinema switched to oil, and had been transformed into a morgue. Behind them the medical orderlies were carrying down still more bodies and setting them out in rows, as if the neatness of the rows could somehow impose a shred of order on the chaos of violent and obscenely premature death. Some of the dead were badly disfigured from bullet wounds; others had no apparent wounds at all and it wasn't obvious what they had died of. The smell in the unventilated basement room was turning rancid and Elizabet, tears streaming from her eyes, pulled the roll collar of her turtleneck up over her nose.

Threading their way through the bodies, the group reached the steel door that led to the narrow tunnel filled with thick electric cables. On one stone someone had carefully chiseled "1923" and, under it, the names of the workers on the construction site. About forty meters into the tunel—which put them roughly under Ulloi Avenue—they could hear the treads of the tanks overhead fidgeting nervously from side to side as they hunted for targets. Arpad, in the lead, pounded on the metal door blocking the end of the tunnel with the butt of his pistol. Twice, then a pause, then twice more. They could hear the clang of heavy bolts being thrown on the inside, then the squeal of hinges as the door opened. A wild-eyed priest with a straggly gray beard plunging down his filthy cassock peered out at them. Several baby-faced soldiers wearing washed-out khaki and carrying enormous World War I Italian bolt-action naval rifles trained flashlights on their faces. When the priest recognized Arpad, he gave a lopsided smile. "Welcome to Gehenna," he cried hysterically, and with a flamboyant gesture he licked his thumb and traced an elaborate crucifix on the forehead of each of them as they passed through the door.

10

VIENNA, WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 1956

THE DEPUTY DIRECTOR FOR OPERATIONS HAD LANDED RUNNING. Moving in with his old Georgetown chum, Llewellyn Thompson, now the American ambassador to Austria, the Wiz had set up a war room in the embassy's paneled library and started poring over every scrap of paper he could get his hands on. Millie Owen-Brack commandeered a tea wagon to ferry in the reams of Company and State Department cables and wire service ticker stories; pushing the wagon through the swinging double doors of the library, she would pile up the material on the table in front of Wisner until he disappeared behind the mountain of paper. Groggy from lack of sleep, his bloodshot eyes darting, his shirt damp with perspiration, the Wiz attacked each new pile with a melancholy intensity, as if merely reading about what was going on across a border a few dozen miles away would allow him to dominate the situation. The day before, Dwight Eisenhower had won a second term in a landslide but the Wiz had barely noticed. "Mongolian units are reportedly searching neighborhoods block by block, house by house, hunting for the ringleaders of the rebellion," he read aloud from one operational cable that had originated with the political officer at the Budapest embassy. "Thousands of freedom fighters are being thrown into boxcars and carried off in the direction of the Ukraine. Wisner crushed the cable in his fist and added it to the small mountain of crumpled messages on the floor. "Mother of God," he moaned, noisily sucking in air through his nostrils. "Here's another one from Ebbitt dated five November. 'Kilian Barracks still holding out. Teenagers are tying sticks of industrial dynamite around their waists and throwing themselves under the treads of Soviet tanks. Ammunition running low. Spirits also. Freedom fighters have propped up dead comrades next to windows to draw Russian fire in hopes they will run out of ammunition. Everyone asks where is United Nations, when will American aid arrive. What do I tell them?'"

Tears clouding his eyes, Wisner waved Ebbitt's cable at Owen-Brack. "For six years—six years!—we encouraged the suckers in the satellites to spy against their Soviet masters. We spent millions creating covert capabilities for just such an occasion—we stockpiled arms across Europe, we trained emigres by the thousands. My God, the Hungarians in Germany are breaking down the doors of their case officers to be sent in. And what do we ... What do we do, Millie? We offer them goddamn pious phrases from Eisenhower: 'The heart of America goes out to the people of Hungary.' Well, the heart may go out but the hand remains stashed in its pocket..."

"Suez changed the ball game," Owen-Brack said softly but the Wiz, plowing through the next message, didn't hear her.

"Oh, Jesus, listen to this one. It's a cable from the Associated Press correspondent in Budapest. 'UNDER HEAVY MACHINE GUN FIRE. ANY NEWS ABOUT HELP? QUICKLY, QUICKLY. NO TIME TO LOSE.' Here's another. 'SOS SOS. THE FIGHTING IS VERY CLOSE NOW. DON'T KNOW HOW LONG WE CAN RESIST. SHELLS ARE EXPLODING NEARBY. RUMOR CIRCULATING THAT AMERICAN TROOPS WILL BE HERE WITHIN ONE OR TWO HOURS. IS IT TRUE?'"

Wisner threw the cables aside and plucked the next one off the stack, as if he couldn't wait to hear how the story would turn out. '"GOODBYE FRIENDS. GOD SAVE OUR SOULS. THE RUSSIANS ARE NEAR."' The Wiz rambled on, reading disjointed bits of messages, flinging them to the floor before he had finished them, starting new ones in the middle. '"Summary executions... flame throwers... charred corpses... dead washed with lime and buried in shallow graves in public parks... Nagy, hiding in Yugoslav embassy on Stalin Square, lured out with promise of amnesty and arrested..."

Ambassador Thompson pushed through the doors into the library. "You need a break, Frank," he said, wading through the swamp of crumpled papers scattered on the floor, coming around the side of the table and putting an arm over the Wiz's shoulder. "You need a square meal under your belt, a few hours shut-eye. Then you'll be able to think more clearly."

The Wiz shook off his arm. "Don't want to think more clearly," he shouted. Suddenly the energy seemed to drain from his body. "Don't want t0 think," he corrected himself in a harsh whisper. He drew another pile of papers toward him with both hands, as if they were a stack of chips he'd just won at a roulette table, and held up the first cable, this one with deciphered sentences pasted in strips across a blank form. It was from the Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles. "Here's the word from Washington!" Wisner snarled. "'HEADQUARTERS ADVISING VIENNA STATION THAT COMPANY POLICY IS NOT TO INCITE TO ACTION.' Not to incite to action! We're witnessing the Mongol invasion of Western civilization but we're not to incite to action! The Hungarians were incited to action by our pledge to roll back Communism. The Russians were incited to action by the Hungarians taking us at our word. We're the only ones not incited to action, for Christ's sake."

Thompson looked at Owen-Brack. "Don't bring him any more paper," the ambassador told her.

Wisner climbed to his feet and reared back and kicked the wire wastepaper filled with crumpled cables across the room. Thompson's mouth fell open. "You run the goddamn embassy," the Wiz told his friend icily, pointing at him with a forefinger as his hand curled around an imaginary pistol. I run the CIA operation here." He gestured with his chin toward the tea wagon. "Bring more cables," he ordered Owen-Brack. "Bring me everything you can put your hands on. I need to read into this... get a handle on it... find an angle." When Owen-Brack looked uncertainly at the ambassador, Wisner glared at her. "Move your ass!" he roared. He stumbled back into the chair. "For God's sake, bring me the paper," he pleaded, blinking his eyes rapidly, breathing hard, clutching the edge of the table to steady himself. Then he pitched forward and buried his head in a heap of cables and silently wept.

Out of the blue the Wiz announced that he wanted to see the Hungarian refugees streaming across the frontier into Austria for himself. Heartache, like the common cold, needed to be fed, he said. The chief of station, alerted by the ambassador, gave him the runaround but finally provided wheels when the phone calls from the Wiz turned ugly. Millie Owen-Brack persuaded Jack McAuliffe, the officer who had laid in the screening operation at the Austrian Red Cross reception centers, to tag along as chaperon.

The exodus from Hungary had started out as a trickle but had quickly turned into a torrent when the Russians came back in force. Each night hundreds of Hungarians braved the minefields and the Russian paratroopers who, in some sectors, had replaced the regular Hungarian Army border patrols because they tended to look the other way when they spotted refugees.

Twenty-five minutes out of Vienna, the car-pool Chevy and its chase car (filled with Company security men) pulled up at the first in a string of detention centers. This particular one had been set up in the lunchroom of small-town Gymnasium. The roughly two hundred Hungarians who had come across the previous night—young men and woman for the most part, some with children, a few with aging parents—were stretched out on mattresses lined up on the floor. Many sucked absently on American cigarettes, others stared vacantly into space. In a corner, Austrian Red Cross workers in white aprons handed out bowls of soup and bread, steaming cups of coffee and doughnuts. At the next table a nineteen-year-old American volunteer, wearing a nametag on his lapel that identified him as B. Redford, was helping refugees fill out embassy requests for political asylum. The Hungarian speakers that Jack had recruited wandered through the crowded lunchroom armed with clipboards and questionnaires, They knelt now and then to talk to the men in quiet whispers, jotting down tidbits on specific Soviet units or materiel, occasionally inviting someone who expressed an interest in "settling accounts with the Bolsheviks" to a private house across the street for a more thorough debriefing.

The Wiz, bundled into an old winter coat, the collar turned up against nonexistent drafts, a University of Virginia scarf wound around his neck, took it all in. Shaking his head, he uttered the words deja vu—he'd seen it all before, he said. It had been at the end of the war. He'd been the OSS chief in Bucharest when the Red Army had started rounding up Rumanians who had fought against them and shipping them in cattle cars to Siberian concentration camps. Did anyone here know Harvey Torriti? he inquired, looking around with his twitching eyes. When Jack said he worked for the Sorcerer, the Wiz perked up. Good man, Torriti. Thick-skinned. Needed thick skin to survive in this business, though there were times when thick skin didn't help you all that much. Harvey and he had winced when the screams of the Rumanians reached their ears; with their own hands Harvey and he had buried prisoners who had killed themselves rather than board the trains. Deja vu, Wisner murmured. History was repeating itself. America was abandoning good people to a fate literally worse than death. Rumanians. Poles. East Germans. Now Hungarians. The list was obscenely long.

A small boy wearing a tattered coat several sizes to large for him came up to the Wiz and held out a small hand. "A nevem Lorinc," he said.

One of Jack's Hungarian-speakers translated. "He tells to you his name is Lorinc."

The Wiz crouched down and shook the boy's hand. "My name is Spink."

"Melyik foci csapatnak drukkolsz?"

"He asks to you which football team you support?"

"Football team? I don't get to follow football much. I suppose if I had to pick one team I'd pick the New York Giants. Tell him the New York Giants are my favorite team. And Frank Gifford is my favorite player."

Wisner searched his pockets for something to give to the boy. The only thing he could come up with was a package of Smith Brothers cough drops. Forcing one of his gap-toothed smiles onto his stiff lips, he held out the box. The boy, his eyes wide and serious, took it.

"He'll think it's candy," Wisner said. "Won't hurt him any, will it? Hell, we can't hurt him more than we already have."

The smile faded and the Wiz, rolling his head from side to side as if the heartache was more than he could bear, straightened up. Jack and Millie Owen-Brack exchanged anxious looks. The Wiz glanced around in panic. "I can't breath in here," he announced with compelling lucidity. "Could someone kindly show me how one gets outside?"

The Hungarian restaurant, in a glass-domed garden off Prinz Eugenstrasse, one of Vienna's main drags, was abuzz with the usual after-theater crowd when the Wiz and his party turned up after the tour of the border. Corks popped. Champagne flowed, the cash register next to the cloakroom clanged. Viennese women in Parisian dresses with plunging necklines, their musical laughter pealing above the din of conversation, leaned over candle flames to light thin cigars while the men pretended not to notice the swell of their bosoms. The Wiz, presiding over an L-shaped table in the corner, knew Vienna well enough to remind his guests—they included Ambassador Thompson, Millie Owen-Brack, Jack McAuliffe, a correspondent from the Knight-Ridder newspapers whose name nobody could remember and several CIA station underlings—where they were: where they were, Wisner announced, stifling a belch with the back of his hand, was a stone s throw from the infamous Kammer fur Arbeiter und Angestellte, where Adolf Eichmann ran what the Nazis euphemistically called the "Central Office for Jewish Emigration." The Wiz swayed to his feet and rapped a knife against a bottle of wine to propose a toast.

"I've had too much to drink, or not enough, not sure which," he began and was rewarded with nervous laughter. "Let's drink to Eisenhower's victory over Stevenson—may Ike's second four years turn out to be gutsier than his first four." Ambassador Thompson began to climb to his feet to deliver a toast but Wisner said, "I'm not finished yet." He collected his thoughts.

"Drinking their health may violate State Department guidelines but what the hell—here's to the mad Magyars," he cried, raising his glass along with his voice. "It'll be a great wonder if any of them are left alive."

"The mad Magyars," the guests around Wisner's table repeated, sipping, hoping that would be the end of it; the Wiz's sudden shifts in mood had them all worried.

Several of the diners at nearby tables glanced uncomfortably in the direction of the boorish Americans.

Wisner cocked his head and squinted up at the dome, searching for inspiration. "Here's to a commodity in short supply these days," he plunged on. "Different folks call it by different names—coolness under fire, gallantry, mettle, courage of one's convictions, stoutness of one's heart but, hell, in the end it all boils down to the same thing." Stretching the vowel, Southern-style, he offered up the word in a gleeful bellow. "Balls!"

Jack said solemnly, "Damnation, I'll drink to balls."

"Me, too," Millie agreed.

Wisner leaned across the table to clink glasses with them. Jack and Millie toasted each other; the three of them were on the same wavelength. Nodding bitterly, the Wiz tossed off the last of his wine. "Where was I?" he inquired, his eyes clouding over as he slipped into a darker mood.

Ambassador Thompson signalled for the bill. "I think we ought to call it a day," he said.

"Let's do that," Wisner agreed. "Let's call it a day. And what a day it's been! A Day at the Races, featuring the brothers Marx—no relation to Karl, Senator McCarthy. A day in the life of Dennis Day. A day that will live in infamy." He melted back into his seat and turned the long stem of a wine glass between his fingers. "Problem with the world," he muttered, talking to himself, slurring his words, "men think, for their ship to come in, all they need to do is put to sea. Lost the capacity for celestial navigation. Lost true north."

11

BUDAPEST, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 1956

IN THE SMALL CHAPEL OFF THE CENTRAL COURTYARD OF THE KILIAN Barracks, Elizabet, gaunt and drawn, wearing woolen gloves with the fingertips cut off, stirred the cauldron simmering over an open fire. Every once in a while she would feed pieces of furniture into the flames to keep them going. This was the third soup she had made from the same chicken bones. From time to time, one or two of the eighty-odd survivors would make their way down to the "Kilian Kitchen" and fill their tin cups from the cauldron. Crouching next to the fire to absorb some of its warmth, they would sip the thin broth and crack jokes about the restaurant Elizabet would open once the Russians had been kicked out of Budapest. The day before they had killed the last dog in the barracks, a pye-mongrel nicknamed Szuszi; one of the boys had held its front paws while another cut its throat so as not to waste a bullet. A soldier who had been raised on a farm skinned and eviscerated it, and roasted the meat on a grill. Talk of trapping rats in the sub-basements under Kilian ended when the soldiers discovered that the Russians had flooded the tunnels with sewage. Elizabet was just as glad. She could barely swallow the dog meat, she said.