Jack's Widow (13 page)

“I well remember the night when very sensibly you told me that you didn’t want to know what was in that file. Well, the contents are very different now. I’ve edited it down to the people that you’ve met that we have an interest in. The ones we would like you to have a chat with.”

Jackie was surprised by the lengthy list of senior politicians, diplomats, writers, and others, all men, that she had forgotten. As Guy pointed out their names and told her what they were now doing, she began to grasp how useful her role might be.

He impressed upon her that even if she had not seen some of them since her days as First Lady she was probably the only person capable of persuading them to pop round for a drink when next passing through New York. Not only that, she could do so without arousing any suspicion; her perfect excuse was to bring back good memories of her times with her late husband.

“We know it will work,” muttered Guy. “As I said, if these guys wanted to visit any other woman with no guards present, warning bells would be ringing. But you aren’t any other woman, you’re unique.”

He then admitted to her that the CIA had been watching her guests arrive and depart during the last fortnight.

“I apologize but it was the only way,” said Guy.

“And what did you discover?” she said with an arch smile that told him he was forgiven.

“Curiously, when you invite one of these Eastern Europeans, all their watchers come with them. It took us a while to analyze why.

“First, it’s your invitation, it’s informal. You don’t have a majordomo or anyone other than your secretary, so unlike most of the other functions that these guys attend, there is no printed list of do’s and don’ts. In short, no etiquette is made available, no list of who will or will not be received.

“Second, you aren’t some dull diplomat, they’ve all heard of you, they’re all very keen to meet you, and they all want to come along on the off chance that they will. As it’s a short gig—your guest is usually on his way to dinner—it’s regarded as a risk worth taking.”

Guy explained how unusual this was, that normally at least two of the bloodhounds remained behind to guard the hotel room.

“Of course we don’t kid ourselves that high-level information will be left in an American hotel suite, but there is a lot we could discover if we could get some access.”

Clearly, he set out the proposition.

First, the agency wanted to use her intelligence and intuition to dig out any information about her visitors that she thought they might find useful. The agency would occasionally suggest a line of questioning to her. If the visitor brought a briefcase, a coat, or anything else that could be searched while they were on her premises, the agency would like her permission to do so. A CIA man would be out of sight in the apartment.

“The president insisted that I tell you that we will want to take the chance to investigate your guests’ hotel suites if we are able to ascertain that the room will be unguarded.” Guy explained that to an expert just the contents of a closet could reveal a lot. The CIA might also be able to install a microphone somewhere.

“Assuming you agree to this, it is up to you to decide whether you want to tip us off as soon as your visitor leaves—that’s just in case they’re planning to return to their hotel—or if you prefer that we watch from the street?”

She told him she would think about it as well as the other subject that Guy had gingerly raised, the resumption of her formal dinners.

He also delivered a letter to her. She recognized the White House letterhead. It was from Lyndon Johnson, hoping that she would say yes without delay.

To convince her how important the work could be, Guy told her that without even knowing it, she had already discovered something of value. The information that she had given him about the Russian’s worries about his ill daughter could be useful. With her permission, the agency, without revealing how they had found out, would like to do a deal whereby they gained some low-level information from him in return for drugs currently not available in the U.S.S.R. that would alleviate her symptoms.

Guy explained that simply by gauging these men’s attitude she would give them a valuable insight into their current state of mind. Although it was acknowledged that it might well be a personal problem that pushed a man into being overargumentative or drinking or smoking too much, with these hard-boiled apparatchiks, the Eastern European dictatorships only allowed for the survival of the fittest. Any sign of nervous behavior was much more likely to result from their interpretation of the current political conditions at home and, more importantly, their position within it.

“Finally, Jackie, I feel I have to tell you, and I would have done so even without the president’s instruction, helping us like this does have dangers. Obviously we will be very careful. Like all our sources we will protect you, as much for our sakes as for yours. If these foreigners ever became even slightly suspicious of you, they would stop coming. You also need to know that if we are ever, even in the slightest way, concerned about you, we would put more security around you and the children. We would, of course, warn you and explain why we were doing it.”

She didn’t hesitate. For the woman who had inspired her husband to write
Profiles in Courage
there could be only one answer.

“If you really think that I could make a difference I would love to help.”

“Only you,” replied Guy truthfully.

O
n one of the last warm nights of summer, the evening of September 24, 1965, Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy gave her first dinner party as a widow.

Secret Service men, three deep, kept watch as the guest of honor, the tall, craggy Harvard professor John K. Galbraith, who had worked as economic advisor to Jack Kennedy during his electoral campaign, and had been rewarded with the post of American ambassador to India, arrived with his wife. They were followed by family, her sister, Lee, and Bobby and Ethel Kennedy, old colleagues such as Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Averell Harriman, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., all with their wives. Limousines deposited the writer Truman Capote, the Italian industrialist Gianni Agnelli, and the rest of the twenty-one guests who were dispatched up to the raspberry dining room on the fifteenth floor. Among the diplomats were a Romanian and the Indian ambassador and his wife, invited especially because after dinner the entire group were scheduled to go to the opening of an exhibition of Indian paintings at the Asia House.

As news of this event spread the crowd in the street thickened. At
ten-fifteen
P.M.
they were rewarded by the appearance of the hostess, regal in a pure white full-length crepe sheath beneath a cropped, sleeveless ermine jacket. Her stylish accessories, matching elbow-length gloves and satin high heels, were further emblems of her return to fun.

As her guests filled the waiting Cadillacs, America’s newest spy was in business.

The party went on to the Sign of the Dove restaurant where Jackie danced well into the small hours, but before the night was out she would complete her report, a chore that she did as soon as she had left her guests and her mind was still full of what had just passed between them.

Under Guy’s tutelage she had learned how to file a memo in agency style. It was essential that any information she gleaned was not only passed on swiftly but also blended in with the work of every other agent, incisive and anonymous.

At first the CIA was content for her simply to respond to those foreigners who wanted to maintain their friendship. As time went on and they came to respect her full and intelligent accounts and to rely on the data garnered by their covert snooping around her guests’ hotel suites, they became more aggressive in their needs.

As soon as they flagged someone they wanted to put under the microscope they would first check against Guy’s complete list of Kennedy White House guests. This had been completely refigured by the agency. For their own purposes it had been put into alphabetical order, but to help jog Jackie’s memory the inventory remained in date sequence but was expanded to include anything that might act as an aide-mémoire. So a facsimile of the menu or a photograph of the table arrangement or the flower displays taken at the time was included. The agency painstakingly placed a photograph, preferably a head shot, next to every single name.

For more background Jackie also utilized specialists who had worked in foreign relations for her husband. Many of them had been stationed abroad for long periods so she had found it easier to remain
close to them, untainted as they were by knowledge of Jack’s “girling” activities at home. They prided themselves on their close and continuing relationships with contacts from their old stomping grounds. Often she only had to mention a name to get chapter and verse on someone, or at least enough to start a conversation.

These old friends were invaluable if she had no recall of the agency’s intended prey. As soon as she was armed with enough facts to make her confident that any future meeting would be viable, she informed them. The agency then made it their business to find a mutual contact and work out a strategy whereby their next victim could be grafted on to her guest list in a perfectly natural way. With no relaxation of the Cold War, the CIA would occasionally, in desperation, infiltrate people that she had never met. She was aware that unsuspecting acquaintances were being used but she felt no guilt about putting America’s needs first.

Her salon was rivaled by no other hostess. Her table was graced by excellence and genius, and her foreign guest would be grateful for his or her inclusion.

Once again she served her old French favorites, poulet chasseur and filet de boeuf Wellington, but was quite likely to provide a simple dish of the very best homemade chocolate ice cream as dessert.

Meanwhile in a hotel suite not far away, the CIA hunted through suitcase linings, inside toothbrushes and fountain pens. They photographed the contents of passports, note pads, and even checked the blotters on the desks and inserted microphones.

Some kind of normality finally slid into her life even though the Jackie-mania was unrelenting. The children thrived and her relationship with her in-laws settled into a mellow acceptance.

She went out with men, selecting those she had known for some time. Jackie asked John Carl Warnecke, an architect she had met when she was First Lady and with whom she had worked to save Washington’s Lafayette Square, to create Jack’s memorial at Arlington Cemetery. While he was working in Hawaii she took the children on holiday there. Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping mogul,
slipped in and out of her life. They frequently were guests at the same parties. She enjoyed his company, he was an encyclopedia of ancient myths, he could recite Greek poetry in French as well as English. She enjoyed his relaxed attitude; he knew everyone, from kings to tin-pot despots, but totally lacked snobbishness. In his casual way he made her feel calm and secure. He kept asking her to visit Skorpios, his home in Greece, but the memory of all the publicity when she had done so five years ago kept her from saying yes. While crisscrossing the world he would phone her out of the blue. Not too proud to be accommodated anywhere in her crowded calendar, he had ended up at many Sunday lunches in the country where she had been surprised both by the depth of his knowledge of flowers and how attentive he had been to Caroline and John.

She also stayed close to two men who could assist her with her work; both had been close to Jack. The urbane British peer Lord Harlech was a former British ambassador to America and an expert on the political scene. So, too, was Roswell Gilpatrick. Unknowingly their knowledge often helped her CIA work.

She visited Buenos Aires, Rome, Madrid, and Seville, and cruised the Dalmatian, Adriatic, and Mediterranean coasts, but the international company she kept did more than just influence her travels, they also altered her view of what was sexy.

The discovery that some of the best-looking men had so much blood on their hands banished her trust in appearances. In the past she had always gone for classical good looks but now she found that they were not enough. The men she was now attracted to were the attentive and thoughtful types who valued women’s minds. Meeting foreigners so frequently, she became accustomed to their voluble, if heavily accented, voices and to their championship of ideas, even if their arguments were overly emotional. She was enthralled by men who valued passionate debate with her.

But early in 1968 her carefully constructed new life ended.

It began with a dinner party in March. The guest list had expanded to twenty-eight.

They included the usual mix. Among them was an attractive
American author in the heavyweight league with a literary mistress who punched above her weight because of her ability to go for the jugular, an artist currently in vogue, who with his male muse tended to shock both on and off the canvas, a widower from the U.K., a senator and his wife whom she had known for years, all solid and reliable, an Italian contessa who was heavy going but had a cleavage that kept many men happy throughout all three courses, a financier and his model girlfriend, a former American ambassador and his wife, two of her own in-laws plus partners, and a sprinkling of socialites.

The man of interest to the agency was a Hungarian who had survived every putsch and was suspected of being the most senior Soviet spy in Budapest. He was clever and had a tendency toward self-deprecating humor, and she was not surprised when another guest, the former U.S. ambassador to Hungary, whispered that his reputation as a vicious infighter and longtime survivor was deserved.

She sat next to the charming Magyar but at the end of the meal she had still failed to ask the questions the agency had suggested. Forced to vie with the novelist pouring scorn on French poets, she was worried that she was never going to find time for a heart-to-heart. She succeeded after discomfiting the writer by expounding on her love for Baudelaire, and quoting him in French, at length. The author, beaten, returned to his Pétrus and she got her chance with the man from Budapest.

Now they had all left and she was alone. She stepped out of her Ferragamo satin shoes, hung up the Givenchy cocktail dress in crimson triple chiffon, slipped off the Schlumberger bangles, the Saint Laurent earrings, and her underwear. Dressed in nothing but a long, cool white cotton shift, she sipped a glass of water and sat at her desk mentally mapping out her report.

Over coffee, her Hungarian had been quite open about his country’s frustrations with the slow-moving economy of the rest of the Eastern bloc. He also confided that his wife was keen to adopt, an idea that he would not countenance. Jackie wondered if this might prove useful to the agency.

The widow had said good night and thanked her small loyal staff, but the extra personnel that had been drafted to help were still cleaning up. Confident that the Secret Service detail would check around the fifteen-room apartment and ensure they were all off the premises, she ignored the sound of empty bottles being taken out of the kitchen. She was glad that the children were staying over with her mother. The temperature was high and humid and the windows were open so the noise of the street was louder than usual and might well have woken them. In the background she could hear the sound of someone counting the napkins. Somehow some of them always vanished. Jackie still didn’t know whether people deliberately kept them, but now that she was left with just a handful of the original white linen ones that had been a wedding present she had stopped having her initials embroidered on their replacements.

As soon as she began to entertain on a larger scale she and her house keeper noticed that other things had gone missing. Reluctantly, all personal effects, items recognizably belonging to her or the children, were removed from the public parts of the fifteen-room home.

Nonetheless the odd book still vanished, not to mention ashtrays.

She got up to close the door to deaden the din and took up her pen. As she did so she was aware of the last staff and the Secret Service men leaving.

She must have been writing for well over thirty minutes when she heard a small grating sound. She was accustomed to the city throwing up all sorts of clamor and continued. This report must be ready for collection tomorrow. She addressed it to a Mr. Collingwood, Collingwood Antiques, Oyster Bay. Since the Secret Service and the CIA were kept entirely separate, in the morning her maid would collect it from the hall table and deliver it to the doorman.

It was always picked up by nine
A.M.
Jackie had made it her business to check.

During her spy-craft lessons Jackie was given clear instructions to alter the address and the town on each envelope, and to ensure
that the agency knew that the report was both urgent and from her, the word “antiques” was always included in the address.

On the off chance that the letter fell into the wrong hands, the former First Lady was taught not to mention anything that could link her with the contents and always to use the paper and pens that the agency provided because they revealed nothing about their origination. Also the agency gave her a list of code names to use which read like a global
Who’s Who.
It included all the major leaders, their councils of ministers, senior military staff, royalty, financiers, and anyone else who had been of interest to the agency since the end of World War II.

If her visitor was too junior to have an alias the agency assigned a number to him.

Thus it was very simple to write about a person and his views on his peers in a way that no outsider would understand.

So engrossed was she that she didn’t hear the subtle grating sound again or the quiet breathing of a slender young man sliding, forcing himself through the narrow opening of the back door, which led to the emergency stairwell and had not been completely shut and locked after the sacks of dirty table linen had been dragged through.

In fact it wasn’t until she had finished her notes half an hour later, put them in an envelope, and left it on the large mahogany console in the hall that she realized that every light, except the Chinese lamp that she had just walked by, was off. At first it was just minor irritation that flummoxed her. The people who worked with her, her cook, the maid, and the special agents had all been with her for years. They knew that she hated the corridors of the apartment being in darkness. She assumed that one of the relief waiters had not known this and thought they were doing her a favor by turning the lights off on their way out.

She walked through the double doors into the library. She stopped to turn the orchid on the baby grand so it would catch the morning light. All the walls with their delicate paneling and elabo
rate cornices were painted her favorite greenish-yellow that she called citron. It was a neutral background with a twist for her collection of French and Italian Old Master drawings and watercolors. These, like the clusters of animal sketches, were hung away from the bright but damaging sunlight that poured in through the fourteen windows that looked out onto Central Park. Large beveled mirrors, framed in matching gilt or maple, reflected the capacious French fauteils and sofas, their cushions covered in heirloom fabrics picked up on her travels. On her way through the dining room Jackie smoothed the everyday chintz tablecloth that reached down to the ground and walked past the neatly piled little gilt chairs brought in for this evening. As she drifted through she switched more lights on and thought no more about the darkness until she entered her bedroom.