Mission Compromised (5 page)

A woman who introduced herself as Carol Dayton, and identified herself as the NSC's administrative and security officer, handed Newman a checklist of offices to visit, forms to fill out, and documents to sign. In less than two hours, the Marine major had taken care of all the obligatory paperwork, been photographed for the treasured blue White House pass, had his retinas scanned, had his fingers printed, had signed reams of nondisclosure agreements for classified security “compartments” he had never known existed, been issued access codes for the White House Situation Room cipher locks, and been taken on a quick, cursory tour of the old structure so he wouldn't get lost on his
way to work. He still didn't have an office, a desk, or a phone, and each time he asked one of the otherwise helpful and amiable administrative clerks where the Special Projects Office was, they shrugged or replied, “I dunno. Guess that's up to Dr. Harrod.”

It was, all in all, relatively painless—even the stop at the small medical clinic on the second floor, where a Navy corpsman drew three vials of his blood. He asked why, given that the Marine Corps already maintained his medical records, but the young man only shrugged and said, “Got me, Major Newman. Guess they just want to have your blood type on hand in case you get a paper cut.”

The corpsman thought this line was hilariously funny. But Newman made a mental note to keep one of his military dog tags, with his blood type stamped into it, on a chain around his neck, even if he wasn't allowed to wear his uniform.

By the time he had finished crossing all the t's, dotting all the i's, and all but signing his life away, it was shortly after noon. Newman decided he had just enough time to race out to his house in Falls Church—where he and his wife sometimes lived together—for a change of clothes.

As he strode out of the towering gray granite structure, a cold autumn rain was being wind-whipped up West Executive Avenue between the West Wing of the White House and the Old Executive Office Building. He turned right, toward the South West Gate, the wind and rain lashing his gray, military-issue raincoat, the drops darkening it as he walked. By the time he reached the Ellipse, where he had left his six-year-old Chevy Tahoe, Newman was soaked.

He found his car and a ticket citing him for parking without a White House sticker. Newman got in, backed out, and wheeled around the circle, south of the white mansion he had already come to dislike,
and headed west on Constitution Avenue, across the Roosevelt Bridge, and onto Route 50 into Virginia and toward his home, five miles away, in Falls Church.

 

 

Newman and his wife Rachel had bought the three-bedroom, brick split-level on Creswell Drive nine years earlier—when they were still in love with each other instead of their separate careers. Newman had met Rachel on a blind date arranged by his sister Nancy. She and Rachel had been roommates at the University of Virginia, and they had driven up from Charlottesville on a lark to “meet some Marines” while Peter was attending the Officer's Basic Course at Quantico in September '78, after he'd graduated from the Naval Academy.

Despite their differences, Newman was smitten by his sister's friend. Like Newman's sister, Rachel was a nursing student, but Rachel didn't want to work in a hospital—she wanted to fly. “Didn't you know that the first flight attendants all had to be nurses?” she asked him one day. Besides, she said with her ravishing smile, “Flying is more romantic.”

Rachel really was a romantic. She had grown up on a comfortable farm in Culpepper, Virginia, riding horses and searching for wildflowers in the meadows. Often she'd ride horseback into the countryside with a picnic lunch and spread a blanket to read sonnets or write poetry. He, on the other hand, was both a military man and a sports nut. Many of their early dates consisted of football games at UVA and Annapolis, parades at Quantico and Washington, and visits to the many Revolutionary and Civil War battlefields that dot the Virginia countryside.

After graduating from the Officer's Basic Course, Newman had been ordered to take command of a rifle platoon in the Second Marine
Division at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. And until he deployed to the Mediterranean with the Third Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment later that year, he spent every weekend when he wasn't on duty somewhere between Camp Lejeune and Charlottesville, trying to be near Rachel while she finished up her last year at “Mr. Jefferson's University.”

When Rachel graduated in June of '79, she did what she said she was going to do: she got hired by TWA and went off to their flight attendant training school. By the time she finished the TWA training course in Saint Louis, Missouri, Newman was deployed with his infantry company in the Mediterranean aboard the USS
Fairfax County.
He wrote to her every day and proposed to her over the phone from Athens, Greece, while the ship was in port for repairs.

They married in the chapel at Camp Lejeune soon after Newman returned from his first deployment, which coincided with his promotion to first lieutenant. By then TWA had decided that Rachel should be based at Dulles Airport in Virginia—meaning that her flights would originate and terminate there, even though she was trying to make a home for herself with her new husband on the coast of North Carolina.

Rachel had a difficult time adjusting to military life. In fact, she never quite did, though to be fair, she did her best. She watched how many other new service wives reacted to their husbands' line of work, but she never felt like she fit in. No matter how hard she tried, Rachel couldn't tell a corporal from a colonel and wasn't about to surrender her life to simply become an extension of her husband's career. And with deployment following deployment, she figured out why her husband's friends would joke, “If the Marine Corps had wanted you to have a wife, they would have issued you one.” Stuck miles from her family and exhausted from racing up and down Interstate 95 for her
flight assignments, Rachel was heartsick and terribly lonely. When he was home, her husband seemed totally unaware of the problem.

Newman wasn't quite as oblivious as he seemed. He just didn't know what to do about his wife's growing unhappiness. He had confided to one or two of his comrades that his wife “wasn't really happy.” One of them had suggested that he might want to try marriage counseling. But to a self-made man like Peter Newman, that implied weakness, and besides, he thought, real men don't need outsiders to solve their marital problems.

By 1985, Newman was a captain—already decorated for service in Grenada, Beirut, and Central America—and on the fast track to future promotions. He was assigned as a tactics instructor back at the “Basic School” in Quantico, where he and Rachel had met seven years earlier. He decided that if they bought a house, she'd feel like she had more ties to him and it might give them a place of their own from which to build a relationship.

They found a place in Falls Church, Virginia. Newman knew it would be a long daily commute for him, but Rachel had loved the place at first sight—it was convenient to Dulles and she'd simply had enough of living in the cramped, run-down quarters on sprawling bases like Lejeune and Quantico.

When they first saw the house on Creswell Drive, surrounded by towering oaks and maples, complete with a fenced backyard and quiet neighborhood, Rachel had excitedly said, “It's perfect for raising a family! We can put a sandbox over there, and you can hang a swing from that branch right there and give our kids lots of rides!” Rachel, the romantic, dreamed about how she could turn a house into a home.

Now, almost a decade later, there was no swing, no sandbox, and
no kids. And every time Newman looked at that inviting branch on the maple tree in the backyard, he would think of Rachel's two miscarriages and hate the tree for mocking his virility and his wife's infertility.

After completing his three-year stint teaching tactics to new officers at the Basic School, Newman had been rewarded with a year as a student at Quantico's Amphibious Warfare School. While there, he was deep-selected for major, and after graduation, he was assigned to command the Second Force Reconnaissance Company at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. He and Rachel rented what they called “the house on Creswell” to a Navy commander assigned to the Pentagon. When Newman and his wife moved back into the house in 1992, he'd insisted on repainting the entire interior. The Navy commander and his family had decorated one of the upstairs bedrooms as a nursery. Newman now used it as his home office.

 

 

As Newman made the turn off Sleepy Hollow Drive, he noticed for the first time a dark-blue, late-model Chrysler sedan making the turn behind him. It hung back about a block, but he saw it as it followed him onto Creswell. And as he turned into his driveway, the Chrysler cruised past, two men in suits sitting in the front seat. Newman memorized the license plate number, make, and model, for later, in case it was something to warrant his suspicion. His first thought was that this was Harrod's way of keeping tabs on him, and he resented it.

He let himself in from the attached garage, shut off the security alarm, ran upstairs to the bedroom that he occasionally shared with his wife, and began changing clothes. He figured that Dr. Harrod wouldn't be hard to please—he'd be happy with anything that wasn't a uniform. He chose a dark blue pinstripe suit and a white shirt. As he was putting
a half-Windsor knot in his best blue-and-gold regimental-striped tie, he saw the note on his dresser.

 

Dear P. J.
—
I drew this afternoon's flight to Chicago. Tomorrow I fly to San Diego and then back here. I'll stay at the airport and nap. My next assignment is to fly to London from Dulles and the turnaround back here. I should be back Friday night. I left a salad for your dinner. Love, R.

 

“Great. More rabbit food,” Newman mumbled to himself. For whatever reason, the Rachel who had once loved a good steak had suddenly become a vegetarian. On those rare evenings when they actually sat down to eat together, she would serve him up a big plate of green stuff with the admonition, “If you eat this you'll live longer.”

And he would invariably reply, “If this is all I get to eat, who wants to live any longer?” The humor she initially found in this line was very short-lived.

Knowing that weather or mechanical problems could cancel her flight, Newman flipped over his wife's note and wrote,

 

R
—
Couldn't get out of the White House assignment. Don't have an office phone number yet. Will leave a message on your pager when I know what it is. Will probably be late. Don't wait up. Love, P. J.

 

He left the note on her dresser, wondering as he did so why he even bothered.

After checking his outfit in the mirror, Newman set the security alarm, locked up the house, and eased his car down the driveway onto
the street. It was still raining hard, and as he was wondering half aloud if it was going to change to snow, he noticed the blue car easing away from the curb nearly a block away. It followed him onto Route 50 as he headed back into Washington, but stayed a respectable ten to twenty car lengths back all the way into the city. Newman took the E-Street Expressway off the Roosevelt Bridge and soon pulled up to the South West Gate on West Executive Avenue.

A uniformed Secret Service officer came out from the guard booth as he pulled his Tahoe up to the gate. Newman rolled down the window and showed the officer his new White House ID and the “West Exec” parking pass. The guard checked the ID, the parking pass, the car's license, and said, “You're Space 73, Mr. Newman. It's about halfway up on the left, just past the OEOB entrance.”

“OEOB?”

“Old Executive Office Building.”

Newman nodded, wondering what else he needed to know just to work here every day. One thing he had just learned was that the White House Access System computers somewhere in the OEOB had already been updated to reflect his new status. He had been “Major Newman” the first time he'd entered the eighteen-acre White House complex that morning. Now he was “Mr. Newman.”