The Envoy (20 page)

‘Sorry about this,’ said Bill, as he finished threading a tape through the recording machine. ‘I hope we can get through this as quick as possible and then go for a beer.’

‘Bill.’

‘Yes.’

‘Spare me the “make a friendly rapport with the prisoner” shit. We’ve both done the course on interrogation techniques – so give me some professional dignity.’

Shepherd sat down and sighed. ‘Listen, Kit, I was being
genuine
– it wasn’t a trick. To be perfectly frank, I feel totally fucking embarrassed by this.’

‘Sorry, I’m feeling a bit touchy. Let’s just get on with it.’

‘The most embarrassing bit comes now.’ Shepherd took a Bible out of his briefcase.

‘You can’t be serious – you mean I’ve got to fucking swear.’

‘Yeah, I know, it’s stupid, but the shadow of McCarthy is still with us. Thomas Jefferson must be turning over in his grave.’ Shepherd picked up the Bible and turned on the machine. ‘30 April 1956, the US Embassy, London, England. Minister Counsellor Kitson Fournier, you are being interviewed under section five of the National Security Act. By agreeing to this interview, you are waiving your rights guaranteed under the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution. Any statements you make may be cited as evidence and used against you in any future proceedings. Do you agree to proceed with this interview?’

‘Yes.’

Shepherd winked and held up the Bible. ‘Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you make a total of two telephone calls from public phones in Portsmouth, England to the Soviet Embassy on 17 and 18 April of this year?’

‘Yes.’

‘To whom were you speaking on these occasions?’

‘Refer to DCI.’ It was a standard response indicating the answer had to be withheld on security grounds. The question could only be answered with the permission of the Director of Central Intelligence.

‘Did you make and file a transcript of these telephone conversations?’

‘There were no conversations as such. They were simply coded signals consisting of a single word or two.’ Kit frowned and pointed to the recording machine.

Shepherd pressed the pause button. ‘Listen, Kit, I’m not
supposed
to stop this thing. It’s not SOP. I’ll have to write a note.’

‘Bill, who the fuck are you working for? British intelligence or US intelligence?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Don’t play the innocent. You know what I mean – the only people who have phone taps on the Soviet Embassy are the Brits. We don’t. I know that because I tried to tap the Sov lines as soon as I got here – and was told off.’

‘OK, Kit, it’s shared intelligence.’

‘They’re pretty selective about what they share.’

‘And so are we.’

‘Listen, Bill, this interview is a sop to the Brits. The British Foreign Office has been leaning on the Ambassador to beat me up a bit and put me back in my box – so they called you in.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I’m guessing.’

‘Listen, I’m just given a brief and background information to carry out a section five interview – the intelligence isn’t sourced or evaluated. Shall we carry on?’

‘OK.’

Shepherd pressed the record button and the wheels started turning. ‘What were you doing in Portsmouth on April 17 and 18?’

‘Refer to DCI.’

‘Would you consent to being monitored by polygraph for the rest of this interview.’

‘Yes.’

Shepherd attached the lie-detector sensors. The polygraph measured heart rate, blood pressure, breathing and hand
perspiration
. When Kit was finally wired, the questioning continued. ‘Have you ever paid for sex with a prostitute of either sex?’

‘No.’

‘Have you ever taken illegal drugs?’

‘I visited an opium den in Saigon in 1945. I mentioned this when I was interviewed for a top secret clearance in 1951 – so it should still be part of my records.’ Kit knew it was an entrapment question.

‘Have you ever attended a meeting of a socialist, communist, fascist or national socialist party?’

‘No, not in the sense of an official party function. But I have attended numerous social functions with persons who are members of such parties.’

‘Was your attendance consistent with carrying out your
official
duties?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you currently engaged in a sexual relationship?’

Kit frowned. It was another cum-stains-on-the-cassock
question
from the puritan legacy that lumped together sexual sin, witchcraft and national security. ‘No, I am not having a sexual relationship of any sort.’

‘Could you describe your financial situation?’

‘I am entitled to draw up to thirty thousand dollars a year out of a family trust fund managed by Medler and Gower, but I haven’t withdrawn any money from it since leaving university. I live well within my government salary and, in fact, nearly fifty per cent of my net pay is reinvested by Medler and Gower in a personal fund.’

‘For what purpose.’

‘I don’t know – maybe to give to a charity. I don’t think about money very often – in fact, I consider the topic vulgar.’ Kit was completely aware that the purpose of this line of questioning was to establish a pattern on the lie-detector readout for the purpose of comparison with the questions that really mattered.

‘Do you ever buy works of art?’

‘The last painting I bought of any value was one called
Mestizo
by the Brazilian artist, Portinari.’ Kit smiled. He was full of
admiration
for the deft way that Shepherd had sprung the
pseudo-McCarthy
trap. ‘I would like to amend my previous answer where I said that I only met members of socialist and communist
parties
when carrying out official duties. Portinari, whom I met and conversed with at an art exhibition, is a member of the Brazilian Communist Party. I’ve also met the artists Kahlo and Diego Riviera, whose politics could be described as left wing, at a
family
party in Georgetown.’ How, thought Kit, Senator McCarthy would have loved this – East Coast blue stockings with red
paintings
. But it was better to own up than be caught in a lie.

‘What attracted you to the Portinari painting, the
Mestizo
?’

‘The subject’s face, as the title
Mestizo
suggests, contains
features
of all the races – Indian, African, European – that inhabit the Americas. I also like his calmness and dignity.’

‘Could you describe the painting as homoerotic?’

Kit wanted to say, probably a lot less than the image of Jesus on the cross, but knew it would only make things worse. ‘I don’t see it that way.’

‘How do you see the painting?’

‘I’ve already said – as the universal everyman of the New World.’

‘Some critics would describe the painting as socialist
realism
– like those brawny workers you see on Soviet propaganda posters.’

‘I think they’d be wrong. The
Mestizo
has a lot more subtlety and complexity. In any case, I bought it for my father, who always said he admired Portinari.’ Kit waited for the next question. He knew he’d been skewered. If anyone on the House Un-American Activities Committee got hold of this interview, his career would be finished. You weren’t allowed anything that didn’t conform. You were condemned by the very paintings on your walls and the books on your shelves.

Shepherd continued. ‘Have you ever passed on information to a member of the Soviet Mission that could be detrimental to the security interests of the United Kingdom?’

This was the question that Kit had been waiting for. This was the reason he had gone without sleep for forty-eight hours and taken a mild dose of barbiturates before the interview. He was going to lie and the polygraph readout would continue as flat and bland as a pancake. ‘No, I have not.’

Shepherd turned off both machines. The interview was finished and Kit was more certain than ever that the tape and polygraph results would soon be on their way to the British Foreign Office – and thence to MI6 and MI5. The whole episode reeked of host country pressure.

‘Sorry, Kit,’ said Shepherd, ‘I really put you through it. I had to.’

‘Aren’t you going to ask for a urine sample?’

‘No, I’d have to watch you do it.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Yeah, in case you swap someone else’s piss for yours. And there’s no way I’m going to ask you to whip your cock out
without
a half dozen medical witnesses to sign a disclaimer.’

Kit was relieved. A barbiturate bearing pee sample would have sunk his boat. ‘Come on, Bill, who do you think pushed for this interview?’

‘I honestly don’t know.’ Shepherd paused, then looked closely at Kit. ‘You were lucky you weren’t PNG’d. Come on, let’s go for that beer.’

‘It’ll have to be a quick one. I’m flying to Washington this evening.’

‘War without death.’ Uncle George smiled and picked up a
document
file from his desk. An old friend of George’s was a Brigadier General in the US Army Chemical Corps and passed on copies of the latest research. ‘They’ve just carried out trials using
volunteers
from the 82nd Airborne Division. Listen to this.’ George opened the file and read, ‘The next time I saw Sergeant Lynch he had left the ward and was taking a shower in his uniform while smoking a cigar.’

The enthusiasm was worrying. Kit looked into George’s watery blue eyes and tried to detect signs of incipient madness. Perhaps, he thought, the Chemical Corps friend had passed on samples of the drugs too.

‘Don’t you see, Kit, this is the dawning of a new era. Nuclear bombs are soon going to be as obsolete as the crossbow. We’ll saturate the battlefield of the future with chemical clouds of this wonder drug. It won’t burn lungs or harm bodies, but it will change consciousness. Trained killers will turn into lotus-eaters. War without death.’

The project that Uncle George was enthusing about was MK-ULTRA, the Agency’s mind-control programme. Nothing was ruled out: hypnosis, mental telepathy, psychic driving,
hallucinogenic
drugs, mescaline, psilocybin, marijuana, heroin, induced amnesia, prolonged paralysis and intense
auto-suggestion
were all part of the mix.

‘The problem is,’ said Kit, ‘how do we stop our own troops from being affected by the LSD?’

‘We’re working on that one. There might be an antidote.’

George, Jennifer’s father, was an uncle by marriage. He was a retired colonel and had been a classmate of Eisenhower’s at West Point. George never got a general’s stars, not because he lacked ability, but because he lacked guile and duplicity. In most ways, Kit preferred George to his own blood relations. He didn’t seem to have a dark side. Whenever Kit visited the States, he preferred staying on the farm with George and Aunt Janet. And they liked having him too. In a way, he felt they needed him as a surrogate son.

Kit put his hand on George’s shoulder and gave an affectionate squeeze. ‘I’m really grateful that you picked me up at the airport and brought me here. With Mom in France, I didn’t want to be stuck alone at Maury House.’

‘What about your sisters, are they still in New York?’

‘Yes, they’re sharing a flat in Greenwich Village. Caddie’s qualified now and Ginny’s still trying to make a name for herself.’ There was, thought Kit, a certain serendipity to the careers of his sisters. Caddie was a doctor who specialised in venereal diseases and Ginny wrote avant-garde plays and hung around with
beatnik
poets. In some ways, their worlds overlapped.

‘Have they got boyfriends?’

‘I don’t know, but somehow I doubt it.’ Kit wasn’t greatly
interested
in the sex lives of his sisters. They did go to bed with people, but more, Kit thought, out of clinical or psychological curiosity than love. Caddie must be an impossible partner. Kit imagined potential lovers being examined for genital warts, primary
chancres
and urethral fistulae. She also liked showing off her collection of medical photographs illustrating the latter stages of terminal syphilis and advanced cases of granuloma inguinale. And it was Caddie, bless her heart, who had told Kit about eproctophilia: a condition where people become sexually excited by flatulence.

‘Well,’ said George, ‘I’m glad that our Jennifer’s settled. Do you see them?’

‘Quite a bit. I’ve bought a boat that I’ll be keeping near where they live in Suffolk.’

‘If Janet was a better traveller, we’d go see them.’

Kit smiled. It was Uncle George’s coded way of saying that his wife wasn’t sober enough to make the trip. ‘How is she?’

‘Not bad. Having you here’s a help – but don’t think that means you have to stay here all the time.’

‘I love being here.’ Kit meant it. It was a way of being close to Jennifer that no husband could ever experience. He could see where she came from and what had shaped her – all the way back to the womb. It was all there: the river, the bay, the rickety old jetty where a pre-pubescent Jennie sat wearing muddy knickers with her feet dangling in the water and minnows nibbling at her toes; the marsh whirring with hummingbirds; musical soirées and candlelight; the long rambling wooden house with polished oak floors bearing the furtive footstep echoes of Mad Betty, the ghost of an early nineteenth-century maid. And her father – a scarred soldier who tried to gentle and calm everything he touched.

‘I’m trying,’ said George, ‘to grow Chinese artichokes this year. Very rare plant. We love Jerusalem artichokes, but they make Janet fart. I’ve just found this book called
Five Acres and Freedom
. You don’t need much to survive. We could all be self-sufficient, you know – and tell General Motors and Standard Oil to go to hell.’

‘You’d better be careful, Uncle George, you’ll end up in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee.’

‘Screw them. What’s more American than the frontier spirit and looking after yourself? Capitalists aren’t real Americans – they’re parasites.’

‘You remind me,’ laughed Kit, ‘of when you were in that play.’

‘That’s was all your sister’s idea.’

‘Perfect casting though. You stole the show.’ George had played the old counsellor, Gonzalo, in
The Tempest
. Ginny had directed it with a local amateur drama group.

‘Well at least I didn’t forget my lines. Listen,’ George drew himself up straight.

George sat back down. ‘I fear I may be boring you.’

‘Far from it. Do it again.’

‘Now, sir, you mock me.’

‘Actually, George, you were fantastic in that play.’

‘Was I?’

Kit nodded. He could tell that George enjoyed the praise. The harmless little vanity made Kit warm to him even more. ‘You know I’ve got to go to Washington tomorrow?’

‘Would you like to borrow the car?’

‘No, Anne Truitt’s giving me a lift from Easton.’

‘Oh, I like Anne. Are you going to be staying with them in Georgetown?’

‘No, I’m going to be staying with Cord and Mary Meyer.’

‘Hmm.’

‘That sounded like a very serious hmm. What’s hmm mean?’

‘You mean you don’t know? What sort of intelligence agent are you?’

‘I don’t know. Unfortunately, we don’t pick up the latest
salacious
gossip over in London town. It sounds like something’s wrong
chez les
Meyer
.’

‘The junior senator from Massachusetts.’

‘Poor Cord. He doesn’t deserve this.’

‘The Kennedys have moved in next door – that big place, Hickory Hill.’

‘Thanks for filling me in. If my bedroom door opens in the middle of the night, I’ll have to remember not to moan “Jack honey” in a throaty Vassar purr.’

‘My generation weren’t saints either – so I’m not going to pass judgement.’

The cherry trees were no longer in blossom. Washington springs came early, then flopped into long sweaty summers that stretched from May to October. The British Foreign Office classified the town as a semi-tropical posting. Kit had no affection for the
capital
: a Potomac fringe of grand white government buildings, a handful of wealthy enclaves – then miles and miles of slum
housing
and poverty sprawling further than the eye could see or a taxi driver would venture.

The State Department Building was the ugliest piece of
architecture
that Kit had ever seen. It was a long seven-storey slab of beige brick and concrete with metal window frames. Kit showed his ID to a policeman in a glass cubicle. The cop pressed a buzzer and Kit entered the entrance lobby. The floor was highly-polished reddish-brown linoleum tiles that made your shoes squeak and echo. The State Department coat of arms was mounted on the wall facing the entrance. There were also
photo-portraits
of Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles. Kit pressed a button to summon the elevator and checked his tie and hair on the gleaming stainless-steel doors while he waited for a lift to ‘the Seventh Floor’. There were plans to renovate the lobby into a fake eighteenth-century reception hall. And that, thought Kit, would be worse: the epitome of nouveau riche vulgarity. From time to time he penned memos begging that the plans be scrapped. He could hear the sneers of the French Ambassador already.

Kit exited the elevator and walked down the corridor to John Foster Dulles’s office. In the reception area outside the office was an oil painting of Key House. It had been painted in 1903 by the grandson of Francis Scott Key who wrote the national anthem. The style of the painting was about a hundred years out of date even in 1903, but Kit always looked at it with affection because the beautiful eighteenth-century house was set in an early American Arcadia. The house lies on a slight rise above the Potomac River; the thickly wooded banks are turning autumnal; there are dogs and horse-drawn carriages in the foreground, boats with sails in the background. The house was demolished in 1949 to build a four-lane freeway.

A door opened and an assistant undersecretary of something or other told Kit to ‘go straight in’. Foster Dulles seemed much more relaxed on his home ground than he had in London. This time there were aides dancing in attendance to take notes and fetch documents. After the usual small talk, Dulles got straight down to business. ‘It seems, Kit, the next few months are going to be a very challenging time for Anglo-American relations –
probably
the most difficult this century.’

‘Things were,’ said Kit, ‘pretty bad over Indochina.’ Kit knew that Dulles had been in favour of using atomic weapons to stave off a French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, but Anthony Eden’s firm opposition had defeated the plan.

‘The problem with Anthony,’ – Dulles pronounced it Ant’nee, an affectation that annoyed the British – ‘is that he never
understood
the danger of a Red Asia.’

A cloud of foul breath drifted across the desk. Kit tried not to breathe in.

‘But,’ the Secretary of State continued, ‘the problem has now shifted to the Middle East. What do you think Eden’s trying to pull off in Egypt? He doesn’t seem to be handling Gamal Nasser very well.’

Kit looked closely at Dulles. ‘I’ve had a few indications, but…’

‘Indications about what?’

Kit looked around nervously at the others in the room. Dulles made a gesture and the aides left the office. As soon as they were alone, Kit continued. ‘Last winter I was invited to a drinks party at the private home of the Minister of State at the Foreign Office. When I went to have a pee, I noticed a telephone in the hall between the minister’s bedroom and the bathroom. So I did the natural thing, unscrewed the earpiece and put in an MOP transmitter.’

Dulles frowned.

Kit continued. ‘At first, most of the stuff we picked up was “cabbages and kings” – that’s what we call worthless chatter – but eventually the FO minister received a late-night call from the Prime Minister.’ Kit took two sheets of paper out of his briefcase and handed them over. ‘That’s the transcript of the telephone call.’

Dulles adjusted his bifocals and began to read aloud from the transcript. ‘“What’s all this poppycock you’ve sent me about
isolating
Nasser and neutralising Nasser? Why can’t you get it into your head that I want the man destroyed?”’

It was odd to hear the Prime Minister’s words spoken with an American accent. For a few seconds Kit wondered if Dulles was speaking his own thoughts. The illusion was broken when the Secretary of State looked up at Kit. ‘I didn’t realise that Eden could get so mad. What brought this on?’

‘The Prime Minister thinks Nasser is stirring up trouble in Jordan and other neighbouring countries. And some of it may be down to medication: Benzedrine and sleeping pills aren’t a good combination.’ For a second Kit thought about MK-ULTRA: they were experimenting with the same drug mix to induce hysteria. ‘Read on, sir, it gets better.’

‘“I don’t care if there is anarchy and chaos in Egypt. I just want to get rid of Nasser …’” Dulles finished the Eden transcript and looked intently at Kit. ‘You can see where this is heading, can’t you?’

Kit felt very uncomfortable under the heavy Dulles stare. ‘Are you suggesting, Secretary Dulles, that the British are planning to assassinate Nasser?’

‘That’s a question that we should be asking you – you’re
supposed
to be our eyes and ears in London.’