Who's on First (24 page)

“What've you got tailing her?”

“Two submarines, two U-2's, two destroyers, one cruiser.”

“And standing by?”

“We could get any aircraft over her within two hours, the cruiser and the destroyer within five hours. The subs are on her tail right now.”

“What alternatives have you considered?” The President rather liked conversations of this nature. Less than totally organized in his own verbal enterprises, he enjoyed precision in others; absent prolixity.

“Well, sir, the question is of course political. Militarily, we can do anything you tell us to do. We can apprehend the
Mechta,
we can sink it, we can cripple it. I think, actually, that exhausts the possibilities.”

“I should think that would,” the Secretary commented. “Unless you want to admit a fourth hypothetical possibility, which is to parachute Billy Graham down, convert the captain, and have him steer the boat back to Portsmouth.”

“Why do you go and pick on Billy Graham?” the President said. “He's a sincere individual, and I like him. Foster, you're the last Puritan.”

“Not if our foreign policy is successful, Mr. President. In that event there will be more Puritans.”

The President chuckled. “Okay. Let's think a bit about the possibility of an accident. Seems to me, if the
Andrea Doria
can bump into the
Stockholm
in broad daylight off Nantucket, one of our young pilots might run into the
Mechta
in the middle of the night, no? Any wop pilots on those destroyers?”

“We'd have to proceed on the understanding that the Soviet Union would know right away it wasn't an accident,” the Director said.

“Of course! Goddamit, Allen, I wish you'd remind yourself every now and then that I had a little to do with winning a world war. I can see the
obvious
things. Tell me things that
aren't
obvious.”

“Sorry, Mr. President. Let's go on: The Soviet Union would know we did it intentionally, but they very likely wouldn't announce the motive. In reclamation damages, they wouldn't get to take the deposition of our people on the bridge if we pleaded
nolo contendere
—we do not contest—”

“I know what
nolo contendere
means,” the President snapped. “That's what Billy Mitchell did, wasn't it?”

“Well not exactly, sir,” the chief of Naval Operations said, but before explaining, he was cut off.

“Never mind. So we get three or four men, the captain of the cruiser and two or three others. What instructions do we give them?”

The Director spoke. “I'm afraid we'd have to sink her. If we merely crippled her, you'd have a Soviet vessel in the act within twenty-four hours taking over the towing operation, and another one scooting off with … precious cargo.”

“Yes. Well. How easy is it to sink a vessel the size of the
Mechta?
”

“She's nine thousand tons, sir, C-3 class freighter, 410 feet. I should think if we came in on her quarter at an acute angle, at a speed of say twenty knots, you'd gash off her rear end without serious risk to the cruiser.”

“Casualties?”

“At midnight there wouldn't be much going on, couple men on the bridge amidships. I don't know where the crew's quarters are. Probably the layout is conventional, and the after end is reserved for engine and cargo. Conceivably we could carry it off without casualties.”

The President looked about him. “Anybody want to add anything?” He stood up, and everyone in the Situation Room rose simultaneously.

There was silence.

“Arleigh, deploy to sink the
Mechta
during the midnight hours tomorrow, subject to hearing again from me. Foster, please be here for breakfast tomorrow at eight.”

They filed out of the room. The secretaries who had been detained for late work if necessary heard the President discussing with the Secretary of State a certain stiffness in his golf stroke since the ileitis operation. The Secretary attempted to direct the discussion to his own physical ailments, but the President, as they entered the elevator, was still talking about ileitis as a handicap.

29

“I know it's late, and I'm sorry. It's this simple: I have to see you. I can go to you, or if you prefer I'll send a car.”

“Hm,” the former Secretary pondered. “Better send for me. Alice has guests, and it would be less awkward to leave the house than to remove myself from the party to another room.”

“Sorry.”

“Don't worry. Crises are the routine of governments.”

A half hour later he climbed out of a black car still dressed in black tie. The Director opened the door and led him into the study, where his guest sat down in the usual armchair, while the Director walked over to his studio bar. “What will you have, Dean?”

“Nothing.”

“I'm going to have a whiskey. It's been one hell of a day.” He put down his pipe, mixed a scotch and soda, cut a piece of cheese from the platter, stuck a couple of crackers on the plate, and walked back and sank down deep in the armchair opposite.

He sipped from the drink, and said: “Here's where we are.” Instinctively he looked at his watch. “The Russians got hold of one of those E-beam machines I talked to you about.” He raised his hand to deflect the questions. “Hold up on how they got it. They
got
it, and it is steaming toward Sebastopol, if you want to know exactly, at sixteen knots, course 075 degrees, five hundred miles out to sea, and present intentions are to sink it.”

“To
what?
I'll have a brandy.”

The Director returned with the snifter. “My formulation was theatrical and I apologize. The intentions are indeed to sink it, but to make it appear to be an accidental collision at sea.”

“Have you arranged for a suitable iceberg?”

“Dean, Dean.
A United States cruiser has been designated to effect the collision
. It is apparently practical and might even be done without loss of life. The Soviet Union would know, of course; but the chance they'd make the accusation publicly is, by the general reckoning, including my own, small. The whole glorious idea of a Soviet satellite is that it's one hundred percent Russian. Not something cannibalized from American bits and pieces. Do you agree they wouldn't go public with it?”

The former Secretary paused. “I agree. They would, however, almost certainly retaliate. That is their mode. They might draw the noose again on Berlin. They might pick up one or two of our people, maybe even more, in Russia, or in Eastern Europe, and do an espionage trial. I doubt they'd sink a U.S. cargo vessel. They don't normally come up with asymmetrical responses, but in this case I think they would. Make it absolutely clear to me: What's in it for us?”

“As far as we can tell, what's in it for us is what we've been after throughout this whole operation: the first satellite, and all that signifies about strategic missile capability and other countries' belief in us.”

“Theirs would follow soon?”

“Theirs would certainly follow. How soon we can't say. Anywhere from two to six months later would be my guess.”

The former Secretary twirled his glass. “Talk to me about Khrushchev.”

“Khrushchev is now pretty much the whole ball game, but he leaned heavily on the military to get there, especially on Zhukov, who would like a fresh war with breakfast every day. Khrushchev is hot-tempered, wily, ambitious, ruthless—but, we have reason to believe, cautious. Anybody who survived Stalin has gifts of guile, and caution.”

The Secretary held his snifter to his lips without tilting it. After an interval he said, “Here's what bugs me at that end. If they had simply
stolen
our machine, we had
caught
them in the act, and then had
sunk
the ship that was carrying it away, their reciprocal gesture would tend to be formalistic. But in this situation
we're
the aggressors.
We
abducted a Soviet scientist and got the fruit of Soviet research from him.”

“Remember, he gave it to us: We didn't torture it out of him, or anything like that.”

“A nice distinction. But not one that Khrushchev would be likely to dwell upon. As far as he's concerned, the satellite technology developed by Russians is Russian property—and
we
took it. Whatever professional admiration he may have for the
way
you got it, he is unlikely to be mollified. How did they find out about the scientist?”

“We don't know. Torture, I suppose. We were given no reason to believe they didn't buy the whole Algerian cover. Hell, they delivered a shipful of arms to Algeria! But anyway, what then happened—to back up—is that our old Russian defector got word they were going to string up his old friend, so
he himself
told them about the machine, and where they could get one—which they promptly did, and loaded it on a Soviet freighter.”

The former Secretary whistled. “Ah well. We shouldn't be surprised when men act on emotion.”

It occurred to the Director that, in another setting, he'd have commented that no doubt the defector took the position that he would not turn his back on his old friend in Russia. “Never mind him, though you can imagine what life was like when Ike was told a Russian defector in the United States turned over to the Communists our principal technological secret—but to go back: I agree. The Soviets would look about for retaliatory opportunities. And hell, there's no way of predicting where they'd act or how. We need to speculate on the probable ferocity of their response—”

“Hold that for a minute, Allen. Let's suspend that, and think domestic for a moment. Now I'm going to tell you something that's been on my mind, gnawing away, since the election. It has a very direct bearing …”

He rose and clasped his hands behind his back, a posture habitual with him when lecturing presidents, judges, congressmen, students, or grandchildren.

“In my judgment, the domestic mood is dangerously flabby. Hungary proved that. If I may say so without offending you, your brother's rhetoric, going back to 1952, is now either not heard at all or confined to rallies at the American Legion, and dismissed as rodomontade. Now up to a point I personally welcome this: I am, I suppose, one of the architects of the doctrine of coexistence. What I do
not
welcome is something I fear is happening. And,” he sighed rather self-consciously, “it is happening within the womb of my own party.”

“The party of brains …”

“Precisely. And precisely because it is the party of brains, its strategic consequences are the more to be feared. What is happening is the crystallization of a blend of superiority-and-disengagement, based on the assumption that because we have hydrogen bombs we can drop on Moscow, we are safe. Never mind Hungary. Never mind—when you come right down to it—Berlin: people and places that can't be saved with hydrogen weapons.

“Now”—he lifted his hands to protest any interruption—“I am not saying that attitude has prevailed among thoughtful Democrats. I say it is inchoate in the writings, the attitudes, the acts, of some extremely influential Democrats and not a few Republicans—you saw what they almost did to the military budget? In the Senate,
and
in the House? It took everything Ike could throw at them to get it stitched together again. There is a kind of post—World War, post-Korean, post-Wilsonian languor. Never mind the editorial thunder; it can't
really
be said that the public—or the intellectuals—were
deeply
moved by the Hungarian repression. That same lethargy wafted the whole Suez venture, however misbegotten in the first place, into nothingness. What this country needs is one hell of a jolt, and I'm here to tell you that under the circumstances, a satellite might very well be the kindest thing that ever happened to us. A Soviet satellite.” Again he raised his hand to keep from being interrupted. But the Director was merely staring at him. For a moment both men were silent. The former Secretary resumed, “Obviously it would be different if in that little Russian freighter we had packaged an entire intercontinental ballistics technology. But we
know
—you
told
me—what advances they've made, advances we can't undo by one sinking in the North Atlantic. That fact hasn't entered the U.S. consciousness.” Again, there was a silent moment. “Why not let them go ahead and wake us up by firing their blasted satellite?”

After a third silence, the Director spoke. “You make the point very well. But you leave out, don't you, the factor of world opinion? I am, as you know, as liberated as any man in America from the usual cant about world opinion. But at certain levels it is an overwhelming palpable force, and nobody knows that better than you. You created NATO. It was do-able only because these people felt the need and the comparable size of our muscle. Can we survive a Soviet satellite?”

“I don't deny the event would shock. I deny that anything that would immediately issue from the event would have conclusive strategic consequences. By contrast, a continued erosion of American resolution, sheltered by technological complacency, would inevitably show up in those little hard encounters three, four, five years from now. I would rather, I am saying, take the jolt now and recover than continue in the direction I think we're headed.”

The Director drew a deep breath. The two men sat sipping for a moment.

The former Secretary rose. “Allen, think it over. Call me at any hour. Indeed, perhaps I should leave it that I will expect a call from you before dawn tomorrow. I'll come back, or you can come to me; or, if there is nothing more to discuss, we'll leave it at that.”

The Director stood and clasped his friend's hand. “Foster's having breakfast with the President. I'll have a prebreakfast breakfast with Foster.”

“Has the President made up his mind?”