The Company: A Novel of the CIA (56 page)

"You really shouldn't have baited them the way you did," Bissell said once they were safely past the gawking secretaries and back in his office.

Torriti, rolls of body fat spilling out of a chair, one arm draped over its high wooden back, the other caressing the cigar, wanted to get the relationship with the DD/0 off on the right track. "Don't appreciate being hassled," he announced.

"Asking you for a laminated identity card doesn't come under the category of hassling, Harvey," Bissell suggested mildly.

"They weren't asking. They were ordering. Besides which I long ago lost any goddamn ID I might have had. Didn't need any in Berlin. Everybody knew me."

"I can see everybody here is going to know you, too." Bissell nodded toward a sideboard filled with bottles of alcohol. "Can I offer you some firewater?"

Peering through the cigar smoke, the Sorcerer studied the sideboard. The DD/O's stash of whiskey seemed to have Gaelic brand names and boasted of having been aged in barrels for sixteen years; he supposed that they'd been bottled and put on the market as a last resort when the family-owned breweries faced bankruptcy. For Torriti, it was one thing to be a consenting alcoholic, another to actually drink this upper-class piss. Good whiskey burned your throat. Period. "Today's Friday," he finally said. "Its a religious thing. Fridays, I go on the wagon."

"Since when?"

"Since I noticed the labels on your whiskey. Your booze's too ritzy for my tastes."

The Sorcerer eyed the DD/0 across the desk, determined to get a rise out of him. He was familiar with Bissell's pedigree—Yale by way of Groton, an economist by training, an academic at heart, an officer and a gentleman by lineage, a risk-runner by instinct. It was the risk-runner who had attracted Dulles's attention when the Director (bypassing the Wiz's chief of operations, Dick Helms) shopped around for someone to replace Frank Wisner, who had been diagnosed as a manic-depressive and was said to have retreated to his farm on the eastern shore of Maryland, where he spent his waking hours staring off into space.

Bissell absently tortured a paperclip out of shape between his long fingers. "Your reputation precedes you, Harvey."

"And I race after the son of a bitch trying my goddamnedest to live up to it."

"Sounds like the tail wagging the dog," Bissell remarked. He stuck an end of the paperclip between his lips and gnawed on it. "I'm running a new project, Harvey. That's why I brought you in. I want to offer you a piece of the action. It's big. Very big. I'll give you three guesses."

The Sorcerer was having second thoughts about Bissell's fancy Gaelic whiskeys but he didn't know the DD/0 well enough to admit it. "Cuba, Cuba and Cuba."

Bissell nodded happily. "Khrushchev recently boasted to the world that the Monroe Doctrine has died a natural death. I'm going to prove him wrong. President Eisenhower has authorized me to develop a covert action capability against the Castro regime. We re going to base it on the Guatemala model but the scale will be larger—we're going to spread rumors of multiple landings and uprisings and frighten Castro out of Cuba the way we frightened Arbenz out of Guatemala. The plan calls for the creation of a government-in-exile, intensive propaganda offensive, cultivating resistance groups inside Cuba and training a paramilitary force outside of Cuba for an eventual guerrilla action. The whole package goes under the code name JMARC."

The Sorcerer puffed on his cigar. "Where do I fit in?"

The DD/0 slipped around to the front of the desk and unconsciously lowered his voice. "I brought you back in order to put another arrow in our quiver, Harvey. I want you to set up a general capability within the Company for disabling foreign leaders. We re going to call this capability 'executive action.' The in-house cryptonym for executive action will be ZR/RIFLE. ZR/RIFLE's first order of business will be to assassinate Fidel Castro. If you succeed it will make the military option superfluous, or at the very least, simpler."

"Don't tell me you haven't already tried to kill Castro."

Bissell began patrolling the rut in the carpet. "The people who up to now have been in charge of that particular show tend to move their lips when they read. If I told you about some of the plots— "

"Tell me, if only so I won't make the same mistakes."

"We had an asset in a hotel ready to dust Fidel's shoes with thallium salts to make his beard fall out, but he never put them out to be shined. We contaminated a box of his favorite Cohiba cigars with botulism toxin and smuggled it in to another asset who was being paid to deliver it to him. Our man took the money and ditched the cigars and disappeared. The Technical Service elves toyed with the idea of fouling the ventilating system of Castro's broadcasting studio with LSD so his speech would slur and he'd ramble on during one of his marathon orations to the Cuban people. There were other schemes that never got off the drawing boards—dusting Castro's wet suit with fungus spores that would give him chronic skin disease, filling his underwater breathing apparatus with tuberculosis bacilli, planting an exotic seashell on the ocean floor where Castro liked to skin-dive that would explode when he opened it."

One of the four phones on Bissell s desk rang. He snatched it off the hook, listened for a moment, then said "Put him through on the secure line." Wiggling a finger in Torriti s direction to indicate he wouldn't be long, he grabbed the red phone off of its hook. "Listen, Dave, the problem is your act's too slick. It smells American, which means it can be traced back to the Company. The trick is to make everything look less professional and more Cuban. I'm talking about lousy grammar when your Cubans deliver the news, I'm talking about needles getting stuck in grooves when they play their theme songs, I'm talking about starting the programs several minutes early or late. Rough edges, Dave, are the secret for this kind of operation... That's the ticket, Dave... I know you will."

Bissell flung the phone back onto its cradle. "Ever hear of Swan Island, Harvey? It's a mound of guano off Honduras with a fifty-kilowatt medium-wave transmitter broadcasting propaganda to Cuba."

Torriti said, "Am I reading you right, Dick? You're complaining that the propaganda show is too professional and the executive action show is too amateur."

Bissell had to laugh. "You're reading me right, Harvey. The only rule is that there are no rules." He plunked himself down behind his desk again and began screwing a chrome-plated nut onto and off of a chrome-plated bolt. "You still speak the Sicilian dialect?"

"It's not something you forget. I'm half-Sicilian on my mother's side."

"You were the OSS's point man with the Mafia in Sicily during the war."

The Sorcerer hiked his shoulders in a disgruntled shrug. "You can't judge a man by the company he keeps if he works for an intelligence organization."

"I want you to keep company with the Mafia again, Harvey."

Torriti leaned forward; his sports jacket sagged open and the pearl handle of his revolver came into view. "You want the Cosa Nostra to hit Fidel!"

Bissell smiled. "They've been known to engage in this sort of activity. And they have a reputation for being good at it. Also for keeping their mouths shut after the fact."

"What's in it for them?"

"Cold cash, to begin with. The man I want you to start with—Johnny Rosselli—entered the United States illegally when he was a teenager. He faces deportation. We can fix that if he cooperates with us. Before Castro came down from the mountains Rosselli ran the Cosa Nostra's casinos in Havana. Now he has a finger in the Las Vegas gambling pie and represents the Chicago mob on the West Coast."

"You got a time frame in mind for JMARC?"

"We don't want to start anything before the November election. We don't like Nixon all that much—the last thing we want is for him to get credit for overthrowing Castro and win the election on the strength of it. I'll tell you a state secret, Harvey—the Vice President s not our sort of fellow. Allen Dulles is close to Jack Kennedy. He wants him to be the next President. He wants him to owe the Company a favor."

"The favor being we waited for his watch to start before we went Castro."

"Precisely. On the other hand we have to get something going before, say, next summer. Castro's got fifty Cuban pilots training to fly Russia MiGs in Czechoslovakia. The planes will be delivered, the pilots will operational, the summer of '61."

"Does Kennedy know about JMARC?"

"Only in the vaguest terms."

"So what guarantee you got he'll sign off on the op if he's elected President?"

"You're asking the right questions, Harvey. We consider it unlikely that the next President will back off from a paramilitary operation initiated by that great American war hero, Dwight Eisenhower. It would leave him open to all sorts of political flak. The Republicans would say he had no balls."

"The people around Kennedy might talk him out of it." Bissell screwed up his lips.

"Kennedy comes across as smart and tough. The people around him take their cue from his toughness more than his smartness."

"Does that great American war hero Eisenhower know about executive action?"

The DD/0 shook his head vehemently. "That's simply not a subject we would raise in the White House."

Torriti tugged a rumpled handkerchief from a jacket pocket and mopped his brow. Now that they had exchanged confidences he felt he knew the DD/0 better. "Could I—" He tossed his head in the direction of the sideboard.

"For God's sake, please. That's what it's there for, Harvey. You'll find ice in the bucket."

The Sorcerer grasped a bottle with an unpronounceable Gaelic word on the label and helped himself to four fingers of alcohol. He dropped in an ice cube, stirred it with a swizzle stick, tinkling the cube against the sides of the glass. Then he drained off two fingers' worth in one long swig.

"Smooth stuff, isn't it?"

"Too smooth. Good whiskey, like good propaganda, needs to have rough edges." Torriti ambled over to the window, parted the blinds with his trigger fingers and stared out at what he could see of Washington. It wasn't a city he was comfortable in—there were too many speed-readers who knew it all, too many fast talkers who never said what they meant, who expected you to read between the lines, then left you holding the bag if anything went wrong. Bissell had earned his grudging respect. There was a downside to the DD/0—Bissell'd never run a goddamn agent in his life, never run a Company station for that matter. On the other hand he had a reputation for getting the job done. He had gotten the U-2 reconnaissance plane— a glider with a jet engine and cameras that could read Kremlin license plates from 70,000 feet—off the drawing boards and into the stratosphere over Russia in eighteen months, something that would have taken the Air Force eight years. Now this DD/0 out of Groton-Yale with a taste for swanky whiskey wanted someone whacked and he fucking came right out and said it in so many words. He didn't beat around the goddamn mulberry bush.

Torriti turned back to Bissell. "So I accept," he said.

The DD/0 was on his feet. "I'm delighted—"

"But on my terms."

"Name them, Harvey."

Torriti, dancing back across the office, set his glass down on the top-secret papers in Bissell's in-box and ticked the points off on his fingers.

"First off, I want good cover."

"As far as the Company is concerned you're the new head of Staff D, a small Agency component dealing with communications intercepts."

"I don't want James Jesus fucking Angleton breathing down my goddamn neck."

"You have a problem with him, you bring it to me. If I can't fix it I'll bring it to the Director. Between us we'll keep him off your back."

"You want me to push the magic button on Fidel, fine. But I don't want any other government agencies in on this. And inside the Company every fucking thing needs to be done by word of mouth."

"No paper trail," Bissell agreed.

"Executors of ZR/RIFLE need to be foreign nationals who never resided in America or held US visas. The 201 files in Central Registry need to be forged and backdated so it looks like anyone I recruit is a long-time agent for the Soviets or Czechs."

Bissell nodded; he could see bringing Torriti back from Berlin had been a stroke of genius.

The Sorcerer ticked off his fifth finger but he couldn't remember the fifth item on his list.

"What else, Harvey?" Bissell asked encouragingly.

"What else?" He racked his brain. "A lot else. For starters, I want an office in the basement. I'm like a mole—I'm more comfortable working underground. lt needs to be big—something like what the President of Yale would get if he worked here. I want the housekeepers to sweep it for bugs once in the morning and once in the afternoon. I want an endless supply of cheap whiskey and a secure phone line and a phonograph so I can play operas while I'm talking on it in case the housekeepers fuck up. I want my secretary from Berlin, Miss Sipp. I want a car that's painted any color of the spectrum except motor-pool khaki. I want my Rumanian gypsies, Sweet Jesus and the Fallen Angel, to ride shotgun for me. What else I want? Yeah. I need to get ahold of a goddamn laminated identity card with my photo on it so I can waltz past the clowns at the door."

"You've got it, Harvey. All of it."

The Sorcerer, breathing as if he'd run the hundred-meter low hurdles, nodded carefully. "I think you and me, we're going to get along real fine, Dick."

"Push the magic button for me, Harvey, and you can write your own ticket."

"Don't know many folks who hang ordinary garden variety shovels over their fireplaces," observed Philip Swett. "You'd think it was a family heirloom."

"It sort of is, Daddy," Adelle explained. "It happens to be the shovel Leo bought the day we met—the day we buried his dog and my cat on a hill in Maryland. Leo came across it when he was cleaning out the basement last month. We decided it'd be fun to put it up."

The twins, Tessa and Vanessa, aged six years and five months, had just planted wet kisses on the scratchy cheek of their grandfather and raced out the kitchen door, their pigtails flying, to catch the school bus in front of the small Georgetown house that Swett had bought for his daughter when his granddaughters were born. Adelle, one eye on the kitchen clock, the other on the toaster, set her father's favorite marmalade on the table.