Kolchak's Gold (36 page)

“What are you really doing here?”

“MacIver told me to bail you out.”

“What's your title?”

“I'm a programming officer.”

“In the field?”

“Sometimes we work in the field.”

“What's MacIver's title?”

“Assistant Deputy Director of Programming.” He hacked out a dry smoker's cough. MacIver was a heavy smoker too. “None of that proves anything, does it. I could have got all that from one of your books. Or if I was a KGB agent I'd know it. Look, I'd better spell it out for you.”

It was about bloody time.

Ritter was forty-nine years old. His parents had emigrated from Germany in 1937 when he was thirteen; they had settled in Boston and joined the German-American Bund, which he thought ridiculous. He broke openly with his parents at the beginning of 1942 when he was eighteen; he had not yet received his draft notice but he volunteered and was taken into the army.

According to what he told me, he was approached by OSS recruiters in 1943 but was turned down after an FBI security check revealed his parents' affiliations. Ritter went into army intelligence instead and spent two years in Italy, France and Germany, mainly spying out soldiers who profiteered on the black market.

When the Central Intelligence Agency was formed in 1947 out of ragtag remnants of OSS, MI and other security groups he went in as a legman and was used extensively thereafter in foreign postings because with his German appearance and accent he was not likely to be taken for an American agent. But the fact that he was not a native American militated against his being promoted to any office of administrative importance within the excessively chauvinist agency.

In the sixties he got another black mark against him because he was one of Cord Meyer's people engaged in recruiting for the CIA on U.S. campuses and when these activities were made public the pressure from the liberal wing had truncated several promising careers, Ritter's among them. He had found himself doing tours of duty in Iceland, Chile and Thailand.

Then in late 1971 he had been recalled to Washington by Evan MacIver, whose protégé Ritter had become, when MacIver was promoted to the post of Assistant Deputy Director of Programming.

In the Washington area one out of nine federal employees works for the Central Intelligence Agency. It is funded by vouchered but confidential Class “A” funds audited only within the Agency itself; the budget is hidden within various federal programs including the Defense Department, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and various executive departments. Called the Agency by outsiders and The Firm by insiders, CIA has its headquarters in the midst of four hundred acres of trees near the Memorial Parkway inside the belt Interstate Highway 495 near Langley, Virginia; the building is modern, imposing, suitably enormous (it rivals the Pentagon in size) and shaped rather like a gigantic Louis XVI palace with two vast courtyards and endless interior corridors. A significant part of its square footage is below ground level. It is an enormous satrapy under the director who controls the operations of some two hundred thousand employees who are engaged in espionage, deception, insurgency, dissemination of propaganda, analysis of intelligence, counterintelligence, “black propaganda” (the publication of forged documents to embarrass the enemy), “black documentation” (the preparation of false facts to be fed to enemy agents), and “political action”—the euphemistic term for disintegrating or overthrowing a nation's government while leaving the appearance that the government collapsed from natural causes. The Programming Division is known informally as the department of dirty tricks and it receives the largest share of CIA's budget and personnel.

The operations of such an organization are complex because it is not enough merely to attain an objective; in order to succeed, the Agency must also conceal the fact that the objective has been attained. Ideally the Agency should be able to conceal the fact that it has even tried to attain the objective.

Unfortunately these ideals are rarely met in practice.
*

Ritter's explanation—his “spelling it out”—was rambling and anecdotal. In substance what he said was that Evan MacIver had become concerned about me after my affair with a known Mossad agent ripened; that the Mossad connection began to worry the Agency when it became clear I was going to Russia; and that because of these things and the gold, the Agency took a bet on me—so they “ran” me in a sense, with MacIver serving as a sort of Control. (I recalled that lunch in Washington when MacIver had said, “I think you get your nocturnal emissions from dreaming you'll find that gold of Admiral Kolchak's.”) Ritter revealed that in November 1972 the Agency had assigned “a warm body, full time” to retrace my steps through the files of the National Archives, to find out what I'd found.

“Also,” Ritter said, “you were pretty specific about what you'd found, in your letters to Mrs. Eisen.”

I stared at him.

He said, “We didn't get it from her.”

“Then you opened my mail.”

“Inside this room I'll admit that. Outside I'd have to deny it.”

“How?”

“A man on your house in Lambertville. Raided your mailbox every morning. Look, we had to.”

My house in Lambertville is on a dirt road that serves half a dozen farms. It was my habit to go to the post office only to buy stamps; I mailed everything from my own mailbox, where the rural-route carrier picked it up.

I'd written about some of my discoveries to other friends as well, and to my agent and editor; I presume MacIver's “warm bodies” prowled those as well.

I said, “Then you took this gold thing seriously.”

“Five hundred tons of raw bullion. How many dollars on the open market? Five billion? Maybe it sounds far-fetched to you, Harry, but we couldn't afford not to take it seriously. Especially with you bedding down with an Israeli agent.”

I felt a hot suffusion of angry blood in my face and I was tempted to tip the table right over against his ballooning belly.

He must have begun to see cracks in my composure long before that but he hadn't let on; now he said, keeping most of the sarcasm out of his voice, “You begin to get the picture. We can keep tabs on you. We can read everything you read in the free-world collections. We can even follow you right into the Sebastopol archives. But we can't see the same stuff they're letting you see. There's just no way for us to get to that stuff, not with anybody who'd know what to look for.”

He stabbed a long cigarette at me as though it were a pistol. “But you know what to look for, Harry.”

I didn't tell him I had destroyed the documents which could put “Paid” to the whole thing; I didn't tell him much of anything. He was doing the talking. I was too stunned to do much more than absorb his revelations.

He said, “That's about the size of it. You believe I'm who I say I am?”

“I do now.”

“Then why don't you work for us?”

“I'm not that hungry.”

“I find that hard to believe, Harry. We know your financial picture. You had to stretch things to come over here at all. You're going to have to sweat like a coolie when you get home, just to pay your back bills. Now, you can't touch that treasure and you know it. What are you going to do, carry five hundred tons of gold bricks in a false compartment in the bottom of your suitcase?”

“You don't really think I came over here to steal five hundred tons of gold?”

“No. But I think you came over here to find it. Now about working for us—there'd be a fat finder's fee. A real fat one,” he said obliviously. “We'll get you a Panama bankbook—Panama banks ask even fewer questions than Swiss ones.”

“You'd be buying a pig in a poke. I haven't got any gold.”

“You can't afford to stick to that line, Harry. It's inoperative. The Organs
*
knows you talked to Bukov. They're just biding their time, waiting until they get you pinned like a butterfly on a board where you can't even keep flapping your wings. They mean to cancel your ticket, Harry, and here you're trying to climb a greasy pole all by yourself. You're just hastening toward doom, you know, and I can assure you you'll catch something you weren't chasing.”

“You mix a mean metaphor.”

“Sooner or later you'll tell me where it is.”

“Sooner or later you'll tell me why I should know where it is.”

“Because if you hadn't found it,” he purred, “you wouldn't deny you were looking for it.” And he beamed at me in triumph.

I am not expert at thinking on my feet. I do my best work at a typewriter when there's time to reflect and to compose and to polish. This is one reason why I never would have made the grade as one of Fitzpatrick's favored round-table wits.

What I said, with literal truth, was, “I haven't found an ounce of gold, let alone five hundred tons of it. But let's assume I did find it. What then?”

“Then you tell us where it is and you're off the hook.”

“What do you mean off the hook?”

“Harry, at this moment in time you're the only human being alive who's had access to the records on both sides of the Iron Curtain.”

“So?”

“You're the only human being alive who's in a position to find that gold.”

“Suppose I couldn't find any records over here to support my investigation.”

“You'd have said so a long time ago.”

“What do you think I've been trying to tell you all afternoon?”

“It's a little late to ask me to believe it now,” he said, “but let's get back to the original question—what happens now.…”

He was right. If I'd opened the conversation by admitting I'd been looking for the gold, but adding that I hadn't been able to find it, he might have believed me. As it was I'd put my foot in it with too many palpably false denials.

“We're onto you,” he went on, “and I rely on your own knowledge of the intelligence apparatus to tell you what happens next—or if not next, at least soon. How long does a secret stay secret, Harry?”

“Don't play cat and mouse. I'm tired of it.”

“We have people in The Organs. Not higher-ups, but people. Double agents. That goes without saying, right?”

“Go on.”

“From extrinsic evidence”—he pronounced the phrase with a precise Germanic inflection that made it sinister—“we can assume they have people on our side. Once in a while, you know—a piece of fact gets into their hands that they couldn't have obtained if they didn't have double agents in our gang. I mean, a couple of hundred thousand employees, Harry, I don't care what kind of security clearance you run, you're bound to turn up a few rotten apples, aren't you?”

“In other words if the CIA thinks I've found five hundred tons of gold, then it won't be long before the KGB will think it too.”

“That's the size of it.”

“You're saying if I don't play ball with you, you'll turn it over to the KGB.”

“That's unfair.”

“The hell it is. If the gold exists at all it's in Russia. There's no way for you to touch it anyway. If you knew where it was, you could only use that knowledge as a bargaining point. Trade it to the Russians for whatever you happen to need from them this month. So that's the threat, isn't it?—either I find the gold for you or you trade
me
to the KGB and let them get it out of me. That way your hands stay clean.”

He brooded at me; I said, “It doesn't matter to you. You'll trade them the gold or Harris Bristow, whichever's easier. That's what we're really talking about, isn't it?”

“You've got a low opinion of your country.”

“The CIA isn't my country.”

“Is Nicole Eisen your country, then?”

“If I had that information do you really think I'd give it to the Israelis?”

“It wouldn't be the first time a citizen betrayed his country for the love of a woman.”

“It's not America's gold,” I said. “Whose country would I be betraying?”

He was shaking his head in feigned exasperation. “You've got a hole in your argument. What makes you think the only thing we could do with that gold would be to turn it over to the Russians?”

“I suppose you'd just send in a fleet of trucks under the cultural exchange program and cart it off to Washington?”

Ritter said, “Well there might be ways. Didn't the Germans almost succeed? If you forge proper-looking papers you can get away with all sorts of things. If we did it right and did it fast enough they wouldn't even get curious until it was gone. Then all they'd find out is they should have got curious a lot earlier.”

“Is that what MacIver thinks? You people are incredible.”

“Just tell us where to look, Harry.”

“Even if I knew, why should I tell you?”

An insidious assumption hid behind Ritter's coaxing. It was the same flummery used by the witch-hunters who insist that if you don't cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee, you are perforce a traitor. Such illogical reasoning ridicules the democratic concepts of liberty: it denies any right to privacy—the essential freedom without which there are no others.

I was no longer prepared to accept my-country-right-or-wrong simplifications. To study and write the history of CIA blunders and atrocities is to put an end to innocence.…

In January 1942, a month after Pearl Harbor, the American freighter
Absaroka
was torpedoed just outside the harbor of Los Angeles. A month later a submarine shelled an oil refinery near Santa Barbara. In one of my books
*
I reported that the two attacks, as well as several other incidents along the West Coast of the United States and Alaska, were perpetrated by Japanese I-class submarines. As a result of these shellings the California Hearst press began a banner campaign against the “yellow peril” on our beaches and not only was the reality of war brought home to American soil, but thousands of Japanese-born American citizens were rounded up and herded into concentration camps in the Southwestern desert for the duration of the war. Subsequently I learned that the Japanese navy had no fleet submarines in American waters at that time; and recently declassified Pentagon files prove that the attacks on the West Coast were ordered by Washington and that the high-explosive shells were fired by American ships. At the time, Harold Ickes privately justified these cynical acts as being necessary to morale. (They have a Watergate ring to them: there is nothing new under the sun.)