Memorial Bridge (34 page)

"But you are claiming authority beyond the merely criminal." He indicated the diagram on the easel. "I see the word 'intelligence.'"

"
Counter
intelligence, General. OSI would be to the air force what the FBI is to domestic intelligence."

"But there it is, 'intelligence.'"

This was a turf boundary Dillon knew better than to cross. "Air intelligence would not be affected by OSI. Your operation is to the air force what CIA is to worldwide espionage activity. The distinction is not original with me, sir, but is implied by the National Security Act."

"Nonsense. Counterintelligence belongs with intelligence, and wheth
er the civilian sector accepts that or not is of no importance to us. Counterintelligence in the military is a function of intelligence." The general's skin, even the skin showing in the part of his hair, had turned bright red.

"To the extent that is true, it shouldn't be. It is an entirely separate discipline. Experience suggests that when the two functions are melded, counterintelligence always suffers. I must tell you quite frankly"—Dillon stared fiercely at the officer, knowing full well that his statement was armed—"that, after a thorough evaluation of air force security systems, including the carryover CIC, the vulnerability of this service to Soviet penetration terrifies me." Before the intelligence chief could respond, Dillon swung toward General Macauley. "And nowhere is that more true than in the Strategic Air Command."

Macauley slowly took his cigar out of his mouth, studied it for a moment as if reading the tiny words on the paper band, then said calmly, "You don't know what you're talking about."

"No one has clear responsibility in your command for security, General, presumably because you reserve it to yourself. Yet one of your wings, the 509th, has been assigned the atomic mission. Surely you know enough to assume that a Soviet espionage operation is already under way at your present headquarters at Andrews, as well as at Offutt in Nebraska, to which you're moving, and certainly at Roswell, New Mexico, where the 509th is stationed. In the last six months, since the appropriations bill authorized the full establishment of SAC, the number of personnel in your command has increased fourteenfold, everyone from bomber pilots to clerk-typists. I suppose you know all of the pilots and navigators personally."

"I handpicked them."

"And the clerk-typists?"

The general did not answer.

"The secretaries who will be handling correspondence between the Pentagon and Omaha, and between Omaha and your proposed network of—how many bases?"

"Twenty-seven."

"The signal corpsmen, General? The aircraft mechanics, the crews who see to the maintenance of the atomic bombs in your charge? Did you handpick them?"

Macauley tongued his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other.

"Do I need to tell you, General, what Soviet agents—saboteurs included—could do to this country from the inside of your command?"

Macauley withdrew his cigar to study it again. "I have to admit, young man, the Soviets
do
worry me. But what
really
worries me"—General Macauley looked around at his peers, his wide eyes announcing a punch line—"is the navy."

The men laughed, but falsely.

Macauley mugged, "Can you imagine a plane with an A-bomb in its belly missing the wire, trying to land on a flattop?"

The generals laughed, but still weakly.

That the image of a bomb-laden airplane crashing on a ship seemed horrible to Dillon, instead of amusing, marked him as an outsider more surely than anything he had said.

Of course, the joke was only a way to put Dillon in his place, and once that was done the men fell smugly silent.

Macauley said soberly, "I'll take care of security in SAC, don't you worry, Mr. Dillon."

"By yourself, General, you simply can't. Your base at Roswell, because of its proximity to Los Alamos, falls under the jurisdiction not only of your G-2, but of the army and of the Atomic Energy Commission. Do you think that they will
ever
coordinate security with you under the present setup? The same thing applies now to the globe." Dillon pointed to the map. "You know better than I what the North Pole frontier means for airplanes. But I know what it means for organization. Security in Omaha and in New Mexico requires absolute coordination and control from Washington."

"I'll have that."

"With all due respect, General, you will not. Your security people, no matter who they are, will not have the clearances they would need to know what the whole picture of attempted Soviet penetration looks like. Do you think the FBI will be coordinating counterintelligence with your security officer in Omaha? I promise you it will not be. And unless it can deal with an air force organization with integrity, which boils down—as in the Bureau and in the new CIA—to a single director with total control over all aspects of operation, those crucial resources will be permanently unavailable to you. And you will have, on your own, no way of knowing which of your clerks or maintenance crewmen takes his orders not from Moscow but just from the Soviet embassy here on
Sixteenth Street or from the Soviet UN delegation in New York or the consulate offices in San Francisco or Amtorg, the Soviet trade organization in Manhattan. The FBI may well know, General, because those are bases we have covered, but we won't trust that kind of information with you or with anybody in the Pentagon because, however well your airplanes operate, your security systems leak all over the place. And when I return to the Bureau next week I am going to make sure they understand that about this place. It won't matter how heroic your pilots are. In the next war, the way things are run here, they will have been defeated even before their planes leave the ground."

A colonel in the back spoke up. "Not everybody agrees that there are Commies behind every bush. What are you saying, first the State Department, now the Pentagon?"

"Alger Hiss is not the issue," Dillon said firmly. "Not even Oppenheimer is. Congress may be hysterical about cell group meetings in the thirties, but that is not what I'm talking about, not 'pinkos' or 'fellow travelers' or people who gave money to the Scottsboro Boys. The threat is from deep-cover NKVD agents who operate freely all over this country. The last thing they would do is attend a left-wing rally or sign a petition or balk at taking a loyalty oath. If you don't think the Soviets have an elaborate, professional espionage network in place in this country, you are not paying attention. And if you think the air force can protect itself from those agents using a set of narrowly conceived, competing systems it inherited from the army, you are doing the work of the enemy."

At last Dillon saw that these heroes of the world conflict to whom he had felt inferior—that
they,
not he, were the provincials. He had lived his entire life in two cities, yet he was the one who understood the real meaning of events in Czechoslovakia. He saw the void behind their great chests full of commendations and awards, and he realized that every ribbon they had won had narrowed them. They were getting ready to fight the last war all over again, and the one thing they didn't want was news that the next war would be different, that it had already begun.

Dillon expected the generals to be angry at him, but it was wariness, not anger, that he sensed in General Eason's voice then. The smooth, white-haired senior commander said quietly, "If you sense some uneasiness in our reaction, Mr. Dillon, I think it's because, as a group of men charged with defending the American way of life, we are very sensitive
to proposals that smack of what, given our experience, can only seem like a Gestapo. The OSI you're talking about would range freely and have total unchecked powers over all aspects of the air force mission."

"The OSI, as I propose it, would be totally accountable to you, General."

"I would appoint its director? He would serve at my pleasure?"

Dillon glanced at Randall Crocker, whose mask of neutrality was still firmly in place. Had he settled into the oblivion of a pseudo-objectivity? But the meaning of Crocker's impassivity was clear: Dillon was on his own. He brought his eyes quickly back to the chief of staff. "The director would be appointed by and serve at the pleasure of the commander in chief. That is to say, of the President."

General Eason quite pointedly did not react to Dillon's assertion, and it was evident that he had intended his remarks to be conclusive. No one behind him spoke.

A terminating silence ensued—the OSI was a Gestapo—and that would have been it, but Dillon raised a hand, like a pupil. "If I may add ... I have come to my conclusions by looking at air force cases and problems again and again, until finally a single abstract idea arose from all the different details. And that is what I presented here, not a Gestapo, not even a police force, but an investigative agency the purpose of which would be to answer
your
questions."

Dillon's words were simply bouncing off the wall of their stolid common refusal. He was blathering on now because he did not know how to end it. His voice trailed off weakly as feelings of anger and disappointment burned in his throat. He had felt so confident for a moment there, as if his arguments
were
swaying them. But he was the one swaying, swaying back and forth—the taste in his throat turned foul—like an animal on the stockyards killing line.

When he looked at Crocker, Dillon's feelings curdled into shame. He had let his mentor down.

Crocker was staring at him over the knuckles of his folded fists. When at last he spoke it was the meager phrase "Thank you, Mr. Dillon," uttered with an exquisite detachment. A bored judge at the end of a meaningless civil trial.

Torts, Dillon thought; from the same root as "torture." He took a seat on the side of the room, apart from the others.

Crocker pushed himself up out of his chair and, without his cane,
crossed with a lurch to the podium, which he clutched. He pivoted around to face his audience.

The generals and colonels softened nothing in their expressions as they awaited their dismissal.

Crocker said, "I want to test my impression, gentlemen. Am I correct in sensing that everyone in this room thinks the Office of Special Investigations as outlined here is a bad idea? If I'm wrong, please indicate."

No one spoke.

Crocker nodded. "Well then, I want you to hear from me what I intend to recommend to the President when I see him on this matter later today. First, I will recommend that he issue an executive order establishing the Air Force Office of Special Investigations immediately to supersede and replace AF CIC and CID. I will inform the President, of course, that you oppose my recommendation." Crocker paused. His concentration faltered as he thought of the old barn on his place in Maine. He had tried years before to demolish it, using the time-honored method of hooking a tractor and chain to one post and hauling away, expecting the other posts and the roof to collapse in a heap. When he had gunned the tractor across a dozen yards of field, then looked behind, he was shocked to see the entire stalwart barn intact and dragging along behind him. That's who these bastards were.

"And second, I will recommend to the President that he appoint as founding director of OSI Mr. Sean Dillon, from whom we just heard." Crocker swung toward Dillon. "Providing, Mr. Dillon, you would accept the appointment."

"I would, sir," Dillon answered at once, to his own bottomless surprise.

Several of the officers reacted audibly, but it was Macauley whose shock brought him to his feet. "You can't do that!"

"We're talking about what the commander in chief can do, General. Not what I can do."

Macauley opened his hands toward Eason. Eason in turn raised an eyebrow at Peters, the provost marshal. Peters stood up. "The lines are very clear, Mr. Secretary, both in traditional army regulations and in the air force charter of the National Security Act. Civilian and military spheres of authority are separate and distinct. The organization proposed here is a line organization, under the purview of the chief of staff,
manned by military personnel. It is illegal to insert a civilian into that line. Mr. Dillon would have no basis in law for exercising authority over the air force men assigned to this organization."

Crocker leaned across the podium, seeming to peer at the provost marshal, but what he was seeing was his barn. "So the director has to be an air force officer?"

"That's right."

Crocker nodded slowly, full of grudging admiration for a structure that so refused to fall. If they couldn't stop an independent OSI from coming into being, they could stop it from being independent. "What rank would the director properly hold?"

Peters looked quickly toward General Eason, who, with a cock of his head, took over again. He said slowly, "Worldwide command? Responsible directly to my office? He would have to hold the rank of brigadier general."

Crocker was still nodding. "Thank you, gentlemen. That clarifies things for me." He abruptly straightened at the podium. His leg clicked. "My third recommendation to the President today will be to immediately have drafted proper legislation and lay it before Congress at once, commissioning Mr. Dillon an officer in the United States Air Force, holding the rank of brigadier general."

A special law was passed by Congress and signed by the President making Sean Dillon the youngest general in America. With Lafayette, he was one of only a handful ever to be directly commissioned at that rank.

Cass and Richard arrived in Washington by train on the morning of the ceremony. It was June 27,1948.

Sean was waiting on the platform. Cass saw him from the train window. He was dressed like an FBI agent, dark suit and hat, despite the sultry southern weather. She saw the anxiety in him as he stared the length of the slowing train. She had an urge to call out, but the window was closed firmly between them.

Richard was three, and he traveled whenever possible in his mother's arms. His face fell naturally into an expression of wide-eyed curiosity, but it looked at times like pure wariness, and that was the case now.