Why People Like You Joined the CIA
Brower, Brock
Why People Like You Joined the CIA by Brock Brower A lot of people under thirty-five don’t seem to have the foggiest why anybody ever joined the CIA. I happen to be only a few more days...
...Won’t do, unfair...
...I couldn’t find out what was happening...
...As another agent has explained to me, the idea was to help “Communists to organize for their own rights within the system...
...Know what I was doing...
...He was a natural, he was soon told, for “Cord Meyer’s shop...
...This was, you might call it, a ‘safe house,’ ” Polly Wisner says...
...Meanwhile, nobody else was clubbable...
...More and more, and from within the Company, there was carping...
...In those long bygone days-when nobody ever dropped out-there was only the one secret life, and that one was highly official...
...Another friend, nOw an architect, was, in Morocco as a photo-intelligence officer with the Navy...
...It has to be reason itself...
...The ostentation...
...Who else...
...in the military...
...John always wanted to be a diplomat...
...Yet, within the Company, it was not just the fanatics who behaved badly...
...He started acting up there...
...The Company, right or wrong...
...Its killing edge had been tempered, he explained by a South Vietnamese villager...
...They joined the Party in the 30s...
...One, now a New York publisher, sat back, miles away, and listenedi,over earphones to strange Slavic tongues on the airborne black plane’s radio inteycept...
...I was, I admit, ferreting him out...
...They assigned John first to the side of the Company that works strictly on intelligence-gathering, analysis, etc...
...other graduate study program...
...Tempting, but too loaded...
...Nohody, everybody agreed, could posqibly lose by doing this patriotic backqlley stint instead of two years’ greasy K.P...
...Our conclusion back in the 50s was that any ex-Communist ought to be able freely to say No to the first question, Yes to the second question, and Nuts to the third question...
...His wife hated every minute of it...
...They dropped old friendships, all correspondence - “Really so that other people wouldn’t be compromised by knowing us”-and withdrew into what John calls “the entourage...
...He took me to lunch, said what a shame it was...
...One of the s h e l l - s h o c k e d of the Cold War...
...He circumnavigated the world five times...
...8 n the other hand, to the fanatics, his being in Cord Meyer’s shop put him with the weirdos...
...Then the scandal over CIA payments to the National Student Association broke and struck him its glancing blow far off in his distant North African town...
...Everybody was to be protected, and to protect each other, because there was total agreement on a liberal-democratic Cold War policy...
...We talked for two days solid, on a verbal ramble that sent us stumbling, again and again, into tangled, toofamiliar pasts...
...That is gh the Company, where it was un ood, in some of the shops, that true patriotism was the last refuge the scoundrels...
...Their only fate was bloodshed and exodus...
...So, a prevailingly dark house, within which only people like John can distinguish their own gray practices...
...He was never very happy, but always terribly good...
...It was some of the best men-Des Fitzgerald, Dickie Helms, et a1.-who served the Company in its worst lies and most murderous strategems...
...He also completely’cwitched his field of academic interest...
...In 1956, Dulles decided on a round-the-world inspection tour of the overseas stations...
...Except maybe Curtis Lemay...
...Not being able to talk about what you were really doing in Washington, D.C., was a first step up in its sub rosa hierarchy...
...The country need not necessarily even exist at the time of play (as many did not in the 50s and OS), so long as its potential leaders are somewhere in Paris, or the French-speaking world, as students or stevedores or other emigres from France’s colonial past...
...He even led a delegation to Washington to protest Vietnam...
...He shakes his head ruefully...
...When?ll!t~~~ irlterviewed him as Director of National Intelligence, up at Lanqe he had hanging on his office Wall a cruely curved, machete-like blade forfed from an old car spnng...
...Som$inw.s he came up out of his bunker and stopped off briefly to visit me in London, before disappearing tight-lipped into the Mittle-europan dist,mce...
...But then Frank stayed on, saw how people were just being herded into open cattle cars, to be transported off God knows where...
...He quit, really, because he didn’t want to play anymore...
...He was always far more outraged by any abuses of power than I was...
...There is an odd inverse ratio, on hindsight, between knowledge and virtue among those who served the Company...
...This society can’t stand that kind pf secrecy...
...I figured this for a pretty unique, air-sick Naval fantasy, until I found out that John, during the brief time he was assigned to the Air Force, was doing much the same for the Strategic Air Command pilots...
...Even a CIA critic like Victor Marchetti can summon up memories of the pall over the Company, the sensitivity to word of Wisner’s suicide: “It was treated like a killed-in-action sort of thing...
...Why was there nobody at the Rome station who could speak Italian...
...And the whole point was, wasn’t this better than open conflict...
...He was surprised I could name so many mutual acquaintances whom I knew as well as he did had worked for the Company...
...Sure, fine, but what did you do with the kook who thought it up...
...Despite the fact that neither was officially ever to be acknowledged...
...The best you could do was a kind of countering effort...
...But you were supposed to get to know-in that grand euphemism for the Company’s clandestine operations -the other side of the house...
...Talleyrand didn't go far enough...
...The neo-Thomis something there, I remember saying...
...A few years after he left, the proper term would be “stability...
...It left a searing impression on him...
...That meant they’d be coming down-get this-in the middle of the Kurds...
...George F. Kennan, not E. Howard Hunt...
...It has to be more than treason that is a matter of dates...
...At thq Frne it was called simply “a bhck plme.’’ Absolutely no markings...
...That plunged many a careercarver into th eady intelligence work that, up ugh the OS, not only built the natiopal security system b u t coincidentdy created the country’s first secret mwitocracy...
...I recall the story here because it shows from another angle the kind of betrayal of its very own that the Company so often pursued, that I think, ultimately, is what leaves John feeling so had, and therefore, so ambivalent in his discourse on his worth to the Company, and the Company to him...
...He felt so frustrated...
...For the grand old friends and consummate diplomats like George F. Kennan and Jacob Beam and Lewellyn Thompson and “Chip” Bohlen, who were being so unfairly and stupidly savaged for their service to country...
...But in a different, much starker way, there was that pall of secrecy over what we tried to recollect together...
...State just stood there,” John says, “watching the pingpong ball go back and forth...
...Echoes of Uriah Heep, Uriah the Hittite, etc...
...Details not exactly being the strong suit of the chief negotiator, the late James Donovan, who had previously done the exchange of U-2 pilot Powers for the KGB’s Colonel Abel...
...So he partially vanished for half a decade, and in a way, never surfaced agaiq...
...That was Frank’s finest moment...
...Object: to win the hearts and minds of any present or future African, Middle Eastern, or other Third/Forth World country on the geopolitical horizon...
...The disaster only proved what he had believed all along about the guys like Hunt et al...
...Avery real person...
...He finally said okay, come ahead, but bear in mind I could cause him trouble...
...But he’d gotten out of the habit of writing letters, he told me later, because he hadn’t been able to explain, didn’t want to pretend, why not make things easier all around by an indifferent silence...
...The old colonial mores, under a new native regime, were turned on their ears...
...Iran was more Kermit Roosevelt than Frank, but Guatemala really was Frank...
...John did his time as a general intelligence officer...
...Cast not once, but twice...
...Army was never contpetent-should never have been allowed-to enter, not even with hal{ .8· million troops...
...of the house is lately said-after the havoc of the Congressional investigations-to lie in some ruin...
...But news of any international crisis, like the Dominican thing in 1965, could drop him into the blackest brooding over the total meaning of his life...
...What all this cost John, after five years of the secret life, is a price qouted him right out of repeated history...
...Suffice it that we roomed together briefly in the early 50s, that we kept up a correspondence, that we saw each other once more between continents, that he then disappeared for five years...
...But did he really think the secret ties, the ‘double motives, the subornation left anybody’s intellectual conscience unscathed...
...Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun,/ And left the vivid air signed with their honor...
...But they do...
...He felt very strongly against the Redbaiting...
...It has been going on in Paris for years, like, as John says, “a particularly complicated chess game...
...I never teach anything that could possibly touch on my past activities...
...He retook the bar exam, worked on conservation interests, invested his money well...
...I know people who can remember Downey as almost glorystruck when the Yale rowing coach recruited him into the Company for the adventurous life ahead...
...The suit made a big hit, one of the many little things that helped smooth the way for the exchange that brought everybody out, including over twenty Company men...
...But I know that for John, not so long ago, these things were not...
...At his worse moments, he retreated into the fantasies of a RedMenaced hardliner...
...Nor would I, to my chagrin, ever likely be...
...The weirdos did things like publish a lot of Mexican newspapers, back Wog labor unions that were full of lefties, and make a big deal out of Encounter, a magazine that got its cover blown so bad that Stephen Spender almost went over to the other side...
...Some loss...
...All he has to do is drop a word about Leopolddle in 1961, and he knows what the next student question will be...
...Far lower down, John was drawn into ais hush-hush Free World game as a Job Qfficer Trainee...
...They were as much a part of the 50s approach to power as the Company men...
...Frank was the first Allied officer into Rumania,” his widow, Polly Wisner, recalls...
...John would happily have stayed right where he was...
...There were practical concerns, sure but John really believed that people like him like me, were honorbound to outcrusade the yahoos...
...There it is again, I remember thinking, the old pingpong game between CIA and the Pentagon...
...What had convinced Wisner himself to join in this covert effort was six months in Bucharest, right at the war’s end...
...John had kegt up: “You’ll remember I always planned to have a diplomatic career,” he says, with some edge, “and then teach...
...We had a tense, unsatisfactory exchange over this business of signing the vivid air with your honor, a point I maybe tried to press too hard...
...So John joined up, to keep as far away from the fanatics as possible...
...Consider again...
...What was the point of interfering when the interference either lost you the country, or got it back for you in worse shape than before...
...Thanks, but no thanks..Instead, he landed a professorship out at a small, very conservative midwestern college, where he was much in cahoots with the new president to upgrade the curriculum, the quality of students, etc...
...His job was to tell the pilot, somebody like Francis Gary Powers, if the unfriendlies were on to him, when to turn tail and pull out of another country’s air space...
...The desperate folly of all this is that it destroyed the saving sense of honor that many like John took with them into the Company...
...As he insisted himself, “I never met a caricature...
...Watch out for the fanatics...
...He sometimes disappeared off elsewhere as many as four days out of the week...
...When they started, it was just two tiny little buildings...
...That fitted with the love-hate relationship that grew up between Wisner and Dulles, stoked by their arguments over the future course of the Company...
...First, long ago, when work done for the Company was to be proudly hidden...
...He was obsessed by the Russians, by their daring to go in...
...The thinking was that with th’e Kurds, gold was about your only chance of getting out alive...
...what else could you expect from those guys...
...What he put forward toward that ambition, early on, was a summa cum laude in philosophy, excellent French, and valedictorian rank in his class...
...Others privy to Wisner’s convictions say he took Allen Dulles himself to task for going along with his brother John Foster on that score...
...But he still carried with him that aura of a fine mind focusing on a harrowing world, and ran an elite enclave within the already elitist Company, to win the battle for loyalty from the best future leaders among the non-Marxist intelligentsia...
...The Inspector General‘s Report states that the plan was abandoned because Donovan gave Castro a different diving suit on his own initiative...
...Western Hemisphere was the Company dump for burnt-out fanatics...
...In fact, during those Eisenhower years, John Foster Dulles only used State as cover, and ran the politiFa1 side of the Cold War through a separate operations chief over at the Company, his brother Allen...
...Now I know why you can't answer any of them," John said...
...Back in 1947, he had been called down to Washington to pull together the legionaries of the old 0. S. S. in order to mou@ an international covert effort against what were once called “Comintern ambitions...
...It seemed the natural thing to do...
...High doings, and the great relief of finding people around him who were politically sane about the Red Menace...
...Eventually his C.O...
...After that, he was out...
...They were your kind of people,” he argued back...
...That is how utterly upside-down and backwards the political equation that sums up freedom and Man's Fate has been turned over the past several decades...
...Sure I did...
...With the result that the rightwing backers of the college got rid of the new president for promoting all this activism, along with John...
...And as much as I dissented-and I did-I also thought, ‘Hell, I’m pretty good at this too.’ ,’ The game could be called Hearts and Minds...
...And now, when so often the same work can only be sheepishly, or disgracefully, admitted...
...Hell, you weren’t going to win...
...We did a lot of good things, and I don’t see it makes that much difference where the support comes from...
...The Company men (as well as the KGB) try to think enough moves ahead to “turn around” a future Togolese cabinet minister, in a carefully covered gambit of recruitment, intelligence-gathering, and “nationbuilding...
...I was ostracized...
...Not five but fifteen years later, I got hold of an address for him, in another country, and wrote...
...Frank used to get furious, tell me from now on, we were seeing only people from the Agency, but a week later he’d ask me, where had all the ‘newsies’ gotten to...
...says Nolan...
...Indeed they do...
...And he was fascinated with the Company’s efforts to keep the lines open-as all intelligence services doto “the opposition.’’ ; In the matter, for instance, of John Thomas Downey and Richard George Fecteau...
...He did not write back...
...What any bright FSO would have been damn lucky to find himself doing over at State, that young, that close to the power...
...But before he really chose to answer, they shipped him off to the Pentagon, then o.ver to the elite shantytown around the Reflecting Pool where, before its Langley, Virginia, headquarters were built, the Company roughed it Hooverville-style...
...In British society, yes,” Polly Wisner says...
...Here is Jim Donovan-the guy who has already done his stuff once, a guy the Other Side trusts-down in Cuba, trying to cut a deal, very tough negotiations, very delicate discussions, everything has got to be above-board because Fidel holds all the cards, and the Company is setting Donovan up-not even telling him, keeping him unwittingto hand Fidel Castro this nice big germ bag...
...He started out one way, east to west, while Wisner headed off the other, to tidy up his stations, first Berlin, then Greece, when the hungarian thing blew...
...He flew in secretly with a Rumanian pilot to help exfiltrate American airmen...
...Consider Colby's own covert policies...
...An’d he argued strongly against any mere holding action in the flux of history which was the conventional wisdom among ralt, a la Reinhold Neobuh in . In fact, he was convinced that sustaining absoluted-moral not st-might be inherent in the process...
...Instead, he spent the next twenty years in a Peking jail (“I don’t think it benefited anybody...
...So far away that when the Bay of Pigs turned into a fiasco, he felt no real concern, beyond that of any ordinary citizen...
...Only the Company with Company men, on Company...
...Any man with too much time in, say, Bangkok was to be humped off to Iceland to handle cultural affairs, then returned Stateside to the Mexican desk...
...In fact, the Wisner hospitality in the early 50s stood a kind of defiance to the McCarthyite hysteria and its excesses...
...Can you imagine...
...Henry Wriston, then president of Brown University, and a sort of Council-on-ForeignRelations narc, attempted to “rehabilitate” the Service by turning all its cranky specialists into smooth generalists...
...time under Company rules...
...Much in the spirit of that midnight alumni @thering I’ve mentioned above, qany of my friends ended up in clandestine team support of those black planes...
...People who would later advise the White House against any attempt to invade Cuba, who would even argue that, in the struggle for the political future of Central America, the enemy was as much United Fruit as Che Guevara, who understood that the relative peace of the world depended upon avoiding confrontation, not seeking it in every unaligned boondock...
...That grant he got to go to Africa was a post-do.ctoral fellowship, almost a kind of lagniappe from the Company...
...Rebellion was irresponsibly raised, but then there was no follow-up from the Free World in aid of the so-called “freedom fighters...
...There were legal problems answering in this brash manner, but Lillian Hellman got away with doing so before HUAC, as did others after her...
...Yes, he says, he began to question the worth of the game...
...In fact, the whole bias of people like John within the Company was against fanaticism, and toward the intellectual subtleties of the conflict with the Soviets for non-brute power...
...In that same way, it recalled the elan of travel and adventure and hope for the world that has gone into every movement of young people upon their political fate, right down to the Peace Corps (though today’s young people seem to be moving on fate a lot closer to home...
...But perhaps almost as important was the high-wheeling interchange that used to go on at the Wisner home on P Street, among the White House aides, the gentry from State, the folks sometimes down from the Hill, the Alsop brothers, and the Company men...
...That got him attention from the Company’s campus representatives even before he left for Grenoble on a Fulbright...
...When he got home, I took him out to the farm, and for twelve, fourteen hours, he was all revved up, struggling against i t . . . . ” What he was struggling against was breakdown...
...He couldn’t finally see what good the Company was doing, trying to line up all those unformed, unpredictable, soon-to-be countries in advance...
...His next job was out’of.the country...
...Recall...
...When John was in Leopoldville, attempting what half-above-board remedies he could find, another kook was actually delivering an ampule of toxic virus to the station chief, targeted for Patrice Lumumba’s toothbrush...
...But I never had any feeling of a threat about reintegrating...
...The Agency had the pick of the finest people for the only game in town,” John argues...
...Back in London, he was deeply agitated...
...Right in the midcile of the Suez Crisis...
...After Hungary, there would be far less effort to roll back Communism...
...He’d been part of trying to pull the Congo together when Patrice Lumumba got loose, and that had proven the arrogance of both sides...
...In fact, all sides...
...He was reassigned as chief of the London station until the burdens plunged him into a second bad breakdown...
...Nolan even has photographs behind his desk of Castro in the scuba outfit, swimming off a yacht on a tow line, the face mask up on his forehead, the famous beard out over the black rubber cowl...
...He analyzed the effects upon localized public opinion when only the Morning but never the Late edition of The New York Times is available to the readership...
...Sure, some Company men found it hard to cut the cord, but the classic way to eke yourself out was to pursue ,+an “alternative career” at night, like Georgetown Law School or some...
...Taking gold to the pilots...
...One of the typically John things he tried to do was rewrite the canned Red-Menace lectures he was obliged to serve up like red meat to Lemay’s winged lions...
...So he quit, went off to California to continue his Islamic studies, pick up his doctorate...
...His own government would have been so much more sensible about handling a thing like this...
...It is a terrible shock for many Company men to find out what duplicitous stratagems proceeded without them, but it is a great moral relief not to have been included...
...I mean, can you imagine...
...Jesus, were you a spook...
...Wasn’t this really future peace-keeping...
...As with any crack-up, circumstances alone cannot be blamed, but here they surely forced a rigid, proud, secret-laden man beyond what loss of lifelong cover he could endure...
...Nor is he one...
...He was determined to put all that far behind him, for job security in a strange land, and didn’t discuss the Company with anybody, ever...
...With State still watching, just as John said, the ball go back and forth...
...This led to a huge displacement of talent in the Company’s favor...
...As well as the three questions: Are you a member of "the Communist Party...
...A tragic Cold War episode, the aftereffects of which weighed hard upon many Company men, especially the then-Deputy Director of Operations, Frank G. Wisner...
...I always put it down to his illness, his going more intensely into secrecy and hardline, seeing a Russian under every bed,” says Polly Wisner...
...Polly Wisner remembers...
...A few years later,” he still thinks, “it would have all been different...
...They had to be turned away...
...Oh, he says, he’s still around somewhere...
...If I didn’t know exactly where to, to do what, I knew who for...
...Never mind the kooks, I argued, we know about kooks...
...He often criticized my own haphazard editorial line as ‘‘rudderless gunboat diplomacy...
...What’s more, he couldn’t see himself as a station chief, and if he stayed in, it meant going to Vietnam, and he wasalready opposed...
...These brutal seizures were described by one of the leading Communists as “salamislicingyycutting a little off the end each coup-and the conviction grew among these first Cold Warriors that the only hope, in Italy first, then elsewhere, was to slice back...
...He still has great feeling for the members of the entourage...
...I Colby still argues that Vietnam should have been kept a basic covert operation...
...Nobody was a caricature...
...a sj ob was to analyze these U-2 phc$os down inside a concrete bunker, tq pick the attack targets for the forwwrd-based planes across the Midi...
...He kept it as a souvenir of of the 500,000 far more modern weapons the company put into the hands of the People Self-Defense Progrm after Tet...
...He’d just won an award as the best political science teacher at his university, by vote of the students, and a couple of finks in his department, in typical backbiting academic style, were threatening to expose his past ties...
...Two young Company men who had been captured in 1952 as part of an inane, paramilitary incursion onto the Chinese mainland...
...And he is right...
...In a way, it was like slowly going down a dark roster of far-flung and unspoken names to find only a gathering of alumni, most of them the class idealists...
...He waved them away...
...N ever mind whether I first knew him in high school, at college, or abroad, since he would prefer to keep all this a little vague...
...He was brought in by Robert Kennedy to keep an eye on details...
...The McCarthyites (Joe, not Gene) used to boast they were ferreting out the Commies and homos in the State Department, and my roommate and I delighted in turning the zoological description of a ferret-a really despicable animal-right around against them...
...But wasn’t he at least keeping the world safe for safety...
...His last research had not to do with Islam, but with an abstract model of political perception...
...Have you ever been a member of the Communist Party...
...A harsh and instructive case, showing the awful stress that the Company put upon its own people, that of Frank Wisner...
...When he didn’t answer, I telephoned...
...those 'extra-wide corridors out at Laarsley the clandestine personnel the spooks" -still run the place from behind their co10r-key-coded doors· They always have, always will Despite some talk around, even from William Colby, that "science and technology" have thrown a scattering pale of light across the shadows once left around the world bt black operations...
...I happen to be only a few more days under forty-five, was never in the Agency, did only a very minor stint with the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, but I once had a close acquaintanceship with an ex-agent that maybe says a thing or two about really why...
...They gathered socially into the enclave, to keep and exchange confidences that literally settled the present world order...
...I was after him, a bit weaselly, red of eye, related to the polecat...
...That seemed the honorable way for any citizen to unburden himself, if he wished so to do, of a questionable political past...
...Instead, there was a psychological focus on new stratagems designed to be, though still disruptive in means, more meliorative in ends...
...The Company sent him word that gee, they were sorry, did he want to come back to work...
...The upshot was that I came away wanting to help him keep whatever anonymity was his, to invent some, well, code name for him...
...A typical 50s phrase...
...I always thought of myself,” he admits, “as a secret dipIomat...
...Sensitive work, handling such cables...
...Maybe only right realpolitikwas going to ough the Darkness at Noon, of Longing which were rthu oestler's several apocalyptic names of our supposedly rapid slide into political enslavement...
...Don’t worry, he tells me, that idea never got anywhere here...
...A Company man went to Abercrombie & Fitch, bought one the right size, and then delivered it to Nolan, who took it out of a Miami safe house across the Caribbean, to Donovan...
...So when John moved over to the real work he was to do for the Company, he went at a time when the Company men were coming round to a view of the world struggle as far more ambiguous than their earlier “win strategy” had allowed...
...The two of us had started, and, as much as I respected his words, knew how closely he would always judge himself, his situation, I wasn't satisfied...
...The only one who would have anything to do with me was a British official of the Red Cross...
...It was to be a present from Donovan...
...That is why I will call him John, because John-nondescript as it is, the same first-name-but-no-familyname way they like to answer the phones at the Company-also happens to be his real name...
...But it fits me here, a little too well...
...But the sense of a Soviet threat-after the take-overs by Communist governments in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, other Eastern European countries-was profound...
...But I was chagrined that he could name so many others whom I hadn’t known had...
...Masterman insists it was his agents’ utter integrity that really held the famous Double-Cross System together during World War 11...
...Then, a few months ago, Nolan was able to learn for the first time from a report of the Church Committee the following: “The Technical Services Division bought a diving suit, dusted the inside with a fungus that would produce a chronic skin disease (Mandura foot), and contaminated the breathing apparatus with a tubercule bacillus...
...But not in this society...
...under a Company fiction that he had never been in its employ...
...Under an unspoken gentleman’s agreement that held as tightly as any security classification, or did mostly...
...And I wonder now if the kind of thinking isn't what really broought him into the Company...
...John is as deep into political quiescence, semi-exile, unanswerable questions about a suspect life, and the vagaries of disowned conspiracy as any of the old boys who made up the Red Menace...
...There had to be a grand American mobility to the coming world order, but that could only be achieved outside the shoddy, know-nothing, in t politocs of the 50s...
...To a large extent, that upheaval had been encouraged by the promissory fictions of Radio Free Europe, the Committee of One Million, etc., spawned by the Company...
...Even with the roof fallen in, and rubble strewn down...
...What it came down to,as warfare, was "a back-alley..struggle between rival terrorists" Something the U.S...
...Wisner wanted to keep the operation small, along the M.I.5/MOI.6 lines he so admired from the British Services...
...I called one of my old contacts...
...These were clever people playing a clever game...
...If that sounds contortedly familiar, a lot like our own McGovernites, John puts it much more baldly...
...Who wasn ’t there...
...He joined the Company in the 50s...
...Cord Meyer had long since ceased to be much of a World Federalist, having cast his lot with the Company as a converted Cold Warrior himself...
...John got put into the Air Force because the deal then was that a Company recruit had to prove himself with the military before he could be finally accepted, on a five-year stint, into the Company...
...No more old China hands losing China...
...And to be fair again, at the time John went over to the clandestine side of the house, there was great doubt and turmoil over the consequences of much Company action...
...I dragged out these lines to quote to John on my ‘visit...
...The only real players were those civilians working for the Company versus the military stationed at the Pentagon, arguing over proper Cold War strategy...
...But the greater awe was reserved for those who altogether absconded, went off, under deep cover, into the chill, hardshadowed oblivion of the Cold War, for the sake of the country...
...He hurried to Vienna, already sick with a case of hepatitis, and helped put together the escape route for $e Hungarian refugees...
...As one such, John was sent to Paris for two and a half years, under NATO cover...
...An old argument between us over the Evil Men Could or Could Not Be Let Do, as Nation States...
...Their anti-communism was only a mirroring of the Side...
...Because-if you can imagine this-somebody’d figured out that after they’d finished incinerating Mother Russia, they’d only have enough fuel left to fly about a third of the way back...
...But how long could things stay that old-school-tie, or even that secret...
...he has since told me...
...That I othet side...
...Had the Lewellyn Thompsons very worried...
...Nobody's satisfied unless they hear it all, and if you can't tell it all-and you never can-you better not start...
...Brock Bower is a Washington writer...
...who worked for “Western Hemisphere...
...I happen to know a Washington lawyer named John Nolan, who was not a spook, but who was much involved with the Company during the prisoner exchange after the Bay of Pigs...
...No flamboyance, total secrecy, very few people, all very close...
...That year, out on the farm alone, he found a shotgun that the caretaker thought had been well hidden away...
...These things,” he finally said, “are always ambiguous...
...Just the kind of moral conundrum to set John, who was about as good a man at breaking out of double binds as I knew in the 50s...
...But he wanted to hold his own, within the Company, and at great psychic cost, lie did for a time...
...He tries never to bring up the past in any context whatsoever, because by place and dates and circumstances alone, he is rudely recognizable...
...It wasn’t even the CIA then, only a small, dark first effort...
...Back then, for exwple, there was a mysterious aircraft, ht$r called the U-2, that kept sho+g up at our overseas bases...
...He should have quit...
...One of the details that Nolan handled was the purchase of a scuba diving outfit for Fidel Castro...
...called him in, asked how he proposed to explain to the widow of a recently crashed B-52 pilot that the Soviet threat was greatly exaggerated...
...The less “witting” they were, the greater their surviving sense of decency about what they did...
...Over the years, he built up an organization, elite and tight and imperious, that he liked to call his “great big Wurlitzer...
...You remember how we used to argue about people who'd been in the Party," he recalled to me "what was the right way for them to answer the three questions...
...He carried on a circumscribed life...
...But make no mistake...
...If so, who were your friends...
...But when he got back from France, he was married, broke, about to be drafted, and shut out of State...
...A small-step approach to a greater degree of liberalization within Communist governments was okayed...
...Personal code, the British will tell you, is the only hedge against complete amorality in this business...
...At one point, he happened to joke about his own later life, “I’m really Uriah Pariah...
...He hated that building out there,” she says of the Langley headquarters...
...Once he’d written very funny letters, mocking the IvyLeague editorialist in me, hellbent on “christenizing Europe,” as he put it, “a messiah in an M.G...
...And for nearly a decade, Wisner followed his own straitened style through the several coups that established the Company’s very early, very secret credit...
...Eighty per cent of the cable traffic I saw was about Downey and Fecteau,” John recalls...
...I’d brought along Hunt’s spy novel Undercover to finish on the plane, and John acted as if he’d caught me reading political pornography...
...Then there was the disastrous loss of a highly placed agent in Poland, whose blown cover allowed the KGB to roll up the whole Polish network like so much chicken wire...
...But between 1954 and 1956, the Foreign Service all but closed down to ride out what may have been a worse demoralization than McCarthyism: “ Wristonization...
...T his skewed idealism was part and parcel of a loyalist-careerist spirit then abroid in the lan& a hybrid combination bf pride in s@p, liberal-leaning anti-Communism, . qnd faceless selfadvancement...
...Stay away from those intellectuals...
...Sometimes, though so rarely, there might be a leak...
...Through the Company...
...He’d been the first, after all, to introduce me to Auden, Spender, the poets of the politically conscious 30s...
...S o he pulled together the first stalwarts for the Company’s secret operations in Europe...
...I think continually on those who were truly great,” says Stephen Spender, the subverted editor of Encounter, in his only good poem...
...These were the days of the Hungarian Revolution...
...John wasn’t maybe doing much toward keeping the world safe for democracy, since there wasn’t too much Wilsonian hope that his clients were going to be future liberal democrats...
Vol. 8 • November 1976 • No. 9
