Tree of Smoke (35 page)
Authors: Denis Johnson
Tags: #Vietnam War, #Intelligence officers, #Vietnam War; 1961-1975, #Fiction, #War & Military, #Military, #Espionage, #History
With a pen and blank paper and a stack of dictionaries, he waded into battle against its horrific vagueness:
When Nature, by an odd caprice, suddenly portrays in a boulder the body of a man being tortured, one can think at first that this is just a fluke and that this fluke means nothing. But when, during days and days on a horse, he sees the same intelligent charm repeating itself, and
when Nature stubbornly manifests the same idea
; when the same pathetic forms return; when the heads of known gods appear in the boulders, and when there emerges a theme of death for which man obstinately pays the price; when the dismembered form of a man is answered by those—
become less obscure
, more separate from a petrifying matter—of the gods who have always tormented him; when a whole region of the earth develops a philosophy parallel to that of its people; when one knows that the first men used a language of signs, and when one discovers this language enlarged formidably in the rocks; then surely one can no longer think that this is just a fluke and that this fluke means nothing.
Yes, the intent of the mysterious M. Artaud was unspecified, as was the location of his Country of the Tarahumaras, whether somewhere in the New World or only in the head of this Artaud; but the doctor’s reasons for selecting the passage were obvious: the pale traveler, the indecipherably alien land.
The doctor, himself, was a cipher. Apparently he’d stopped practicing medicine long before his death, but wouldn’t go home. Sands thought he understood.
And Sands had kept, in addition to the several publications, one of the notebooks, the doctor’s private jottings. Stolen it. The doctor’s notes stood up in a strong, square script which Sands was translating, along with the doctor’s favorite passages, into a notebook of his own.
Dear Professor Georges Bataille:
In March of 1954 I read, in manuscript form, your essay “Pre-historic Painting: Lascaux, or, The Birth of Art” in the offices of the Library of Fine Arts at the Sorbonne, where my brother’s wife is employed. I was visiting my homeland from Indochina, where I have resided for nearly thirty years.
Skip recognized the title—
Lascaux, ou, La Naissance de l’art
—a big, beautiful volume with color plates of the paintings on the walls of a cavern system in France’s Lascaux region; he cursed himself for letting the book go, but it had seemed too valuable for stealing.
I have recently acquired the book, with the photographs. Of course it is superb.
May I direct your attention to a book by Jean Gebser, an Austrian “professor of comparative civilizations”—
Cave and Labyrinth
? I quote:
“To return to the cave, even in thought, is to regress from life into the state of being unborn.”
“The cave is a maternal, matriarchal aspect of the world.”
“The church of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the Camargue of Southern France in which the gypsies worship Sarah, the black Madonna.”
(M. Bataille: In Spain, 3,000 gypsies live in caves near Granada.)
(M. Bataille: Is the mind a labyrinth through which the consciousness gropes its way, or is the mind the boundless void in which certain limited thoughts rise up and disappear?)
(M. Bataille!—We think of things in caves as black, but aren’t they pale, almost translucent, very pale…)
“Theseus by entering the labyrinth is re-entering the womb in order to gain a possible second birth—a guarantee against the second, irremediable and dreadful death.”
(M. Bataille: In the year 1914 Count Bégouën discovered the Trois Frères cave in the Pyrénées—here a tunnel that can only be wriggled through like a birth-canal ends in a massive chamber covered with Paleolithic 12,000-year-old images of the hunt, including fantastic were-animals. This chamber was used for initiating adolescent boys into the ranks of manhood in a ritual of death and new birth.)
“If the cave represents security, peace, and absence of danger, then the labyrinth is an expression of seeking, movement, and danger.”
(—Seeking an exit, M. Bataille, seeking an escape? Or seeking a secret at the center of things?)
(After longer than sixty years of life, I see myself.)
(Chaos, anarchy, and fear: This drives me: This I desire: to be free.)
Yes!
The body of Bouquet’s unfinished letter to the scholar Bataille—impassioned, intricate, verbose—Skip was still working on.
After a month in his burrow he let Père Patrice lure him out into the weather to view the tunnel into which Dr. Bouquet had disappeared. They walked through the village and out the north end and along a trail to the west, hardly half a kilometer. At the base of a rain-eroded hillside lay a scoop in the earth, no more than that. The fatal blast had undermined the entrance, and the rains had caved it in. As with so much else in this country, its depths were denied him.
“This is not a critical area,” the priest announced. “The tunnel was not used.”
“Who laid the booby trap?”
“He took his own dynamite, I’m sure. Some dynamite to get past a cave-in, perhaps. Then—he exploded himself.”
On the walk back Skip told the priest, “I’m glad I didn’t have to go inside.”
“Inside the tunnel? Why did you want to go in?”
“I didn’t.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I’m a coward, Père Patrice.”
“Good. You’ll live longer.”
The priest had come many times to the villa for supper. If his duties to the parish hadn’t taken him far and wide he’d have turned up every night. The cuisine was marvelous. Mrs. Diu, it turned out, knew omelets, sauces, dainties, anything you could name in French, and though she didn’t often have exotic ingredients, still she served simple, delectable meals of fresh fish or pork with rice and wild greens, and local fruits for dessert. She baked delicious dinner rolls and golden loaves: here, Sands felt, he could have made it on bread and water.
In these ten rainy weeks, the colonel hadn’t visited. Except for the priest two or three times a month, and Nguyen Hao about as often, Skip stayed friendless and returned to his natural solitude—he knew this about himself, the only child of a working mother, a widowed mother—to the solitude of rainy school-day afternoons. In the smallest of the three upstairs bedrooms he pursued his calling as an arbiter of fragmentary histories in his uncle’s “2242” file. A languid pursuit. He could only stand so much at one sitting. The colonel’s file cards had been alphabetized according to the names of people either questioned or mentioned in interrogations between 1952 and 1963 throughout what was now South Vietnam. He’d passed the cutting and pasting stage and begun making new headings for each of the nineteen thousand duplicate cards and arranging them according to place names mentioned, so that someday—not soon!—it would be possible to look at this information as it related to district, village, or city. Why hadn’t it been kept to these categories to start with? And why should he care? As with CORDS/Phoenix, officers had ventured out, asked questions, made notes, gone on to other posts. He longed to trip on a clue and follow it to some ravaging discovery—Prime Minister Ky spied for the Vietcong, or an emperor’s tomb hid millions in French plunder—but no, nothing here, all worthless; he sensed it with his fingers on these cards. Not only were the data as trivial and jumbled as those of CORDS/Phoenix, but also their time had passed. These three-by-five cards served only as artifacts. In this they held a certain fascination.
At the beginning of August, Hao brought him a bigger French-English dictionary—Skip’s request—and a packet of photocopies from the colonel: a somewhat famous article from
Studies in Intelligence
called “Observations on the Double Agent,” by John P. Dimmer, Jr.; and a partial draft of the colonel’s own article, the one that had made some trouble for him, seven typed pages with handwritten notes—ideas more inflaming than French texts, more sinister than Eddie Aguinaldo’s cryptic warnings. On the one hand completely reasonable, on the other alarmingly disloyal.
The colonel had clipped a covering note to Dimmer’s “The Double Agent”:
Skipper, refamiliarize yourself with J. P. Dimmer, and have a look at these pages from my draft. I’ve got more, but it’s a mess. Will dribble it out to you. Or you’d go crazy trying to sort it out.
Sands well remembered the afternoon in which he’d last heard mention of “Observations on the Double Agent.” Remembered it not for the mention, but for other remarks the colonel had permitted himself.
Along with Sergeant Storm he’d come to rescue his nephew temporarily from CORDS/Phoenix. Once in a while the colonel took him to lunch, today on the terrace of the New Palace Hotel. At the top of the stairs a sign announced today’s
FESTIVAL OF HAMBURGERS
. Skip remarked that again it was overcast, and Jimmy Storm said, “Ain’t no sky in the tropics.” Jimmy wore civvies, he was zingy; Skip suspected he took Benzedrine.
The colonel, his chair cocked, his right hand on the railing, sat with the eastern half of Saigon spread out behind him and before him a long buffet, the Festival, apparently, of Hamburgers. His left hand gripped a cocktail. “The Agency is in a state of shock. The Kennedy thing and the Bay of Pigs business have left us quaking. We don’t know how to behave, how to carry out our mission. In Cuba we’re blundering around—we as an agency, and we as a nation. We’re the Russia of the Western hemisphere.”
Sands said, “And how do you see things working out for us here? At the moment?”
“It depends on the Vietnamese, Skip. We’ve been saying ‘It depends on the Vietnamese’ so long it sounds like bull, but it’s the truth. The question is, how do we help them? You, me, us, sitting at this table. I mean the three of us. I think we take a new approach. We’ve got to be more aggressive in handling the data.”
“Aggressive?”
“The three of us.”
“Us?”
“The question about intelligence-gathering is where do you stop taking the initiative? Do we get out there and beat the bushes aggressively, accumulate everything aggressively, and then passively leave it to others to sift? No. A sifting goes on continually, at every level.”
Jimmy: “A selection.”
“And I don’t like the goddamn selection, Skipper. What gets sifted out, among other things, is that one particular piece of information that’s going to make life unpleasant for us by troubling our superiors. And what’s left over is a lie that lands on the desk above, a happy lie, a monstrous lie.”
Jimmy: “A happy monster.”
“The lies go up, and what comes back down is poor policy, mistaken policy. Stupid ideas get generated out along the designated paths, and way out here, in the field, our limbs start jerking in a crazy way. Then when so ordered we file a report that says with care and deliberation we thrashed around causing havoc. You know how it works, Skip: Mindanao. We swing from being tepid and ineffectual to being ardent and silly.”
Jimmy: “Ardent—that’s a good word.”
The colonel said, “Why should we wait for the silliness from the center of the hive? Why not generate our own scenarios?”
At this point Jimmy Storm took notice of a patron sitting down to another table, a rather tall young Asian woman, prepossessing, strikingly kempt, sheathed in a glamour of silk, and said, “I’d like to get into her groovy gravy.”
The colonel laughed. “HAH!”
His jester picked a bit of meat from its sauce with his fingers and slurped it into his jaws. “Or maybe Skip wants to.”
…The article’s draft began with a handwritten note—the colonel’s block printing—photocopied:
WE DON’T HAVE AN INTRO YET
Want to revitalize the distinction between analysis and intelligence—clarity of thought, purity of language, correctness of speech, etc, clarity of fact—appreciating how a lack of clarity has led to the complete perversion of the intelligence function of our Agency. Its motives and its purpose. And its means. Its methods.
Let’s hit that as the main thing—the distinction between analysis and intelligence.
Orwell—“Politics and the English Language”
As far as intro—
BASICALLY TO SAY HERE THAT WE’RE TALKING ABOUT TWO FUNCTIONS OF THE CLANDESTINE SERVICES—INTELLIGENCE AND ANALYSIS. AND THE BREAKDOWN OF BARRIERS BETWEEN
THE TWO ETC
On the next page began the typed material. Skip anticipated an embarrassing mess. By the third sentence he could see the colonel must have had assistance:
Cross-Contamination of the Two Functions
Our figures of speech with regard to the process of communication give us our model for this discussion. We speak of “lines” of communication and “chains” of command, reminding ourselves that data move in a linear and linked fashion through the ranks of those interpreting it. In the case of the functions of our intelligence services, we view this movement as originating in the field and terminating in archives, in plans, or in operations. Hard data collected by the officer in the field slows down as it trickles up the chain, and eventually finds itself stalled by considerations as to its impact—on other operations, on the goals of higher-ups, and even on the career-path of the person passing it along—until related data climbs up parallel structures to corroborate it, or—most unfortunately, perhaps dangerously—until command finds a need for it as justification for political policy, and those in possession of this data sense this need.
This hesitation and doubt is an indication that the intelligence function has been polluted by the analysis function. Data is being interpreted, albeit unconsciously, perhaps, and its effects on command anticipated. We speak of “command influence” on the intelligence function, and the fact that we possess a term for it acknowledges its existence; however, we have thus far failed to grapple with the operations, the mechanics, of command influence.
This paper suggests, in broad outline, that “command influence” operates through the cross-contamination of the two functions of the clandestine services: intelligence and analysis.
Cross-Contamination of the Two Categories
As data hesitates on the chain, awaiting (1) the accumulation of pressures to drive it upward and (2) the corroboration of related materials, the segregation of human intelligence from documentary intelligence is threatened and finally gives way. Simply put, the need to examine the veracity of sources yields to the pressures of process. The result is cross-contamination: data from human sources, notoriously undependable, become the support for doubtful interpretations of documentary sources, and these interpretations come to be seen as shedding light, in turn, on data from human sources.
The cross-contamination of these two categories, human intelligence and documentary intelligence, is a sub-process of the broader breakdown between the two functions of intelligence and analysis.
Cross-Contamination of the Two Waves
Meanwhile, the interpretive process, we remember, is always subject to appropriation and enlistment in the service of policy. Cross-contamination renders data vague, malleable, and eventually useless as anything but an ingredient of internal bureaucratic and political chemistries.
A detailed examination of the processes by which the needs of command are communicated downward along the chain must wait for another occasion. At this point let it be enough to acknowledge that a sense of the needs of command does travel downward through the chain in the same kind of wave action by which data are communicated upward. The result is cross-contamination of the two waves.
It is to be stressed that this process is of an entirely different nature than the intelligence-gathering process of our Agency in its earliest incarnation, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). There the function of Intelligence remained almost untouched by policy, because policy is the game of peace, whereas the OSS served a command structure pursuing the objectives of war. From that era we have allowed to survive the old model of field-to-archive, field-to-plan, field-to-plan-to-operation. However, that model no longer serves us well.
The model of a chain on which two waves of data under pressure cross-contaminate one another is truer to the actual processes of our Agency today. The downward pressure derives from the needs of command, while the upward pressure derives from the need to satisfy command.
At this point in the discussion let us again acknowledge the process’s lack of utility, as we have now illuminated the ategory of service in which intelligence becomes useful, that is, in the pursuit of the objectives of war.
Cross-Fertilization of the Two Goals
This paper will leave open the question of how we shall apply the lessons of this improved model to our contemporary wartime situation, i.e., in South Vietnam. However, some thoughts assert themselves for consideration:
Groups wage war either with the goal of achieving political aims, as in the case of revolution, or with the goal of ensuring survival, as in the case of counter-revolution. (A long parentheses: We leave aside the instances in which the two goals become blurred, for instance when nation-states engage in empire-building, in market-building, or in defense against these two aggressions. And we deliberately forgo the elaborations and subtleties that would result from bringing Clausewitz and Machiavelli to the table. We reiterate: our focus is on using an improved model to consider the role of intelligence in our contemporary wartime situation, and thus we simplify.)