Margo spent the night with yet another female minder at a high-ceilinged apartment on Central Park West in the Sixties, and in the morning, beneath the gleaming dining-room chandelier, she was debriefed by a pair of hard-faced men she had never met before, neither of whom offered a name. They provided her with two days of newspapers to assure her that the American public knew nothing of her arrest. Reading the headlines, Margo learned that Bobby Fischer had ruined his adjournment analysis, and, from a superior position, allowed Botvinnik to slip away with a draw—a fact that seemed scarcely relevant at the time, but would turn out later to matter a great deal. Then the questions, fast and direct, although they wrote her answers into their notebooks with agonizing slowness while the minder lurked in the shadows like a bad conscience.
Margo spent a day and a half with them, all her needs provided for, but none of her many questions answered. Such as: Who told Bobby to invite her? Such as: How was Agatha? Where was Agatha? Such as: How did Fomin learn so much about Margo herself so fast? Such as: Didn’t it seem to them that she escaped from the DS a little too easily? Such as: Didn’t Fomin’s questions to her suggest that there really were missiles in Cuba? Such as: Are we going to war? Is everyone going to be blown to bits?
The official debriefers made note of her questions but explained that they were not authorized to answer, only to ask. As for Harrington, upon arrival on the final morning, she said the same thing, in more flowery language: “It’s not unusual at all, dear, for someone who’s been through what you’ve experienced to think she’s unlocked the secrets of the universe. Best to let it lie. All of this is being handled at higher levels, I assure you. As for you, my dear, it’s time to return to your normal life.”
Margo asked again about Agatha: “She’s fine, dear, that’s all that I can tell you.” Only when Margo blurted that she might like to be like the minder one day did Harrington turn correcting: “No, dear, you wouldn’t, I can assure you.”
And then there was the matter of Margo’s father and his fate. Harrington was dubious: “It’s just exactly the sort of thing the Russians would dummy up, dear. To upset you, dear. To get you to love them more than you love us.” But when Margo asked why on earth they would bother when they could have pulled out her fingernails instead, Harrington only shrugged and said there was no predicting the mind of a man like dear Aleks Fomin.
Until that moment it had not occurred to Margo that Fomin might have a first name, and she asked Harrington to repeat it.
“A-l-e-k-s-a-n-d-r.”
After that there was paperwork for Margo to sign, concerning confidentiality (again), as well as her release of the federal government and its agencies and assigns and employees from any and all liability in return for a payment of ten thousand dollars into an account in her name at the Riggs National Bank across the street from the White House, to be turned over upon her attaining the age of twenty-one or receiving her degree, whichever came first, providing she kept the terms of—
Margo signed, not bothering to read the rest.
Harrington checked the signatures, filed the papers away, then launched into a lecture about how her part in this drama was officially over, and she should return to her normal life as swiftly as possible. And how she must never, under any circumstances, try to contact any of the people she had met during what Harrington insisted on calling “this little adventure.”
Then Harrington gave Margo a hug, wished her well, and urged her to do her best to forget everything that had happened in Bulgaria.
“Suppose I can’t.”
A moment later, Harrington was gone, the debriefers with her, and GREENHILL’s minder was leading her down to the street, where a taxi was waiting, the driver paid in advance for the hour-long trip up to the house of Margo’s youth, in the sleepy Hudson River town of Garrison, where Claudia Jensen would be waiting to scold her granddaughter back to health.
Margo spent the first day sleeping, and in the morning, over breakfast, asked her grandmother whether there had ever been a hint of a secret truth behind the official tale of how her father died. Nana was furious. She marched into her study, unlocked the drawer of her enormous claw-footed desk, and pulled out a red satin box Margo had seen a hundred times. Inside, resting on a bed of silk, was the European–African–Middle Eastern Campaign Medal awarded to Donald Jensen, together with two service stars, one for Tunisia, the other for Algeria. Margo stared at the bit of metal and multicolored cloth. As a child, she had been terribly impressed. Only in college had she discovered that the same decoration was awarded to every member of the armed forces who served in the theater.
“Do you want to take this away from him?” Nana snapped.
There was, of course, a larger history, of which Margo remained innocent. The simple facts, some even today not declassified, are these: Margo Jensen, American student, was arrested by the Darzhavna Sigurnost late on the night of Thursday, October 4—the day of the Botvinnik-Fischer contest at the Olympiad. Because of the time difference, the news of her arrest arrived in Washington early on the evening of the same day. By coincidence, on that very day the Air Force was in the midst of a determined effort to wrest control of the U-2 surveillance flights from the Central Intelligence Agency. The collapse of SANTA GREEN tipped the balance in the negotiations—the spies, said the airmen, could do nothing right—and a few days later, the President’s national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, finally agreed. He had the President sign an order formally transferring authority to the Strategic Air Command. SAC immediately scheduled an overflight of Cuba for the next day, but it was postponed due to weather.
GREENHILL by this time had been back in the States nearly a week. She escaped from the DS early on the morning of Friday, October 5, and flew to Vienna with Ainsley later that morning. She went onward to Paris, where she boarded the flight for Idlewild Airport in Queens, arriving on October 6. She was debriefed, and the tapes and transcripts were sent off for analysis.
As for Harrington, with SANTA GREEN behind her, she flew to Florida to assist in the debriefing of a Cuban asset who had been exfiltrated by boat after another aborted effort to discover what the Russians were building ninety miles off the coast. Harrington was old-school, and believed passionately in human sources, but the United States, as it moved rapidly into the technological era, was raising a new breed of intelligence officer, of whom Gwynn was typical. The new breed disdained human sources—in ordinary language, spies—because spies, as mere mortals, could lie, make mistakes, get drunk, fall in or out of love, take bribes, get tortured, create diplomatic incidents. The new breed believed that the only reliable intelligence was culled from that which could be intercepted, detected, recorded, measured, or photographed. So it was that, six days after Margo arrived at her grandmother’s house in Garrison—to be precise, Sunday, October 14—a U-2 lifted off from Laughlin Air Force Base in Texas. The plane was part of the 4080th Reconnaissance Wing, and the pilot, in accordance with the rules governing the U-2 program, had resigned his commission in the Air Force prior to undertaking surveillance over hostile territory. Flying at seventy thousand feet, he made the first American overflight of Cuba since the crisis began back in the spring with Smyslov’s cryptic message on Curaçao. Onboard cameras snapped hundreds of photos of the target areas. The Soviet troops on the island were aware of the surveillance, but had difficulty tracking the plane; in any case, they had no orders to fire.
This would shortly change.
The pilot completed his mission safely. Although the U-2 flights were now controlled by SAC, the photographic analysis still took place at the Central Intelligence Agency’s new headquarters in McLean, Virginia—often referred to, inaccurately, as Langley, which is an unincorporated community. By the following day, the Agency’s experts had completed their analysis of the photographs. The supervisor of the photographic section briefed the deputy director of intelligence, who immediately called National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy. They met that evening at Bundy’s office in the basement of the West Wing. There was no longer any question, said the DDI: the Soviets were constructing launching sites for intermediate-range ballistic missiles.
“How do you know?” Bundy asked, because he possessed that rarity among politicians, a mind that was persuaded by evidence rather than by conclusory assertion. He was a short, thin-faced, scholarly man, in narrow tie and spectacles. At Yale he had studied mathematics, dazzling his professors, who urged him to enter the academy. For a while, he even had. He had been dean of arts and sciences at Harvard at the unheard-of age of thirty-four, and had almost single-handedly ended the system under which rich kids got in automatically. He liked things neat. He believed in logic. He believed in compartmentalization. He did not suffer fools. Despite his diminutive stature, he had dressed down more than one Cabinet secretary or senior senator. He had destroyed careers, but never casually. Bundy craved information, and the man sitting across from him was excellent at providing it.
“I’ll show you,” said the deputy director, an Air Force lieutenant general, and proceeded to draw from a file the photographs of a site near San Cristóbal: the missile trailers, the missile launchers, the antiaircraft batteries.
“Are you sure these trailers are carrying ballistic missiles?”
“At that size and with those launchers, the cargo can’t be anything else.”
“Missiles that could carry nuclear warheads to our shores.”
“Yes, sir. Intermediate-range. Probably the R-12. What we call the Sandal.”
Bundy nodded, outwardly calm but inwardly worried. The Sandal had an effective range of well over a thousand nautical miles. Fired from Cuba, the missile could probably carry a warhead as far north as Chicago or New York. Hitting Washington wouldn’t pose any sort of problem. A nuclear war would end in five minutes.
“Are the missiles operational?” he asked.
“Not yet.”
“How long?”
“We’re not sure. We’re working on it.”
“And not a bluff, I take it—wooden missiles painted to look like the real thing.”
“No, sir. Believe me, our people can tell the difference.”
“Have you checked this with YOGA?” YOGA being the Agency’s highest-ranking asset in the Kremlin, a colonel of military intelligence named Oleg Penkovsky.
“We’re trying. But the indications are consistent with everything YOGA’S told us about Soviet weaponry.”
“Ah. He did that missile course at Dzerzhinsky, as I recall.”
“Yes, sir.”
Bundy looked at the evidence before him on the table. The deputy director would say later that he detected in the national security adviser’s visage more sorrow than anger, and he would be right. Bundy, the DDI knew, had just today appeared on Issues and Answers, ABC’s Sunday-morning news program, and told the nation that the Administration had yet to see any evidence that the Soviets had plans to install nuclear weapons in Cuba. This assurance was based on the CIA’s own Special National Intelligence Estimate 85-3-62, forwarded to the White House in mid-September, which concluded that the placement of missiles in Cuba “would be incompatible with Soviet practice to date and with Soviet policy.”
But public embarrassment was not the reason for Bundy’s evident pain. The cause was the failure of his furious efforts to prevent just this occurrence.
President Kennedy had stressed repeatedly, in public and private alike, that the United States would never accept the introduction of strategic weapons anywhere else in the hemisphere. Ever since the Cuban Revolution, the American nightmare had been that the Soviets might put nuclear missiles on the island. The Administration had decided a year ago that the only way to prevent this from happening was to replace Castro with a friendly regime. The result was MONGOOSE, an Agency operation to use covert means, including sabotage and assassination, to topple the dictator. Bundy had been reluctant to go along but had seen the necessity: do nothing, and sooner or later the Soviets would be unable to resist the temptation.
But MONGOOSE had proved farcical, with nothing to show for the money spent—although a handful of clever Cuban exiles and a couple of Mafia kingpins were each several hundred thousand dollars richer.
“Thank you, General,” Bundy finally said. “I’ll get this to the President. I suspect we have a couple of busy weeks ahead of us.”
Elsewhere in the city, the man called Viktor was listening to the raving of his contact.
“You people had her and you let her go. Why would you do that?”
“It was not my decision,” said Viktor, morosely. He adjusted the gold-rimmed glasses. They were sitting in the back of a noisy bar on Capitol Hill. Young men and women laughed together at adjoining tables.
His contact was unsatisifed. “I don’t care whose decision it was. I want to know why the hell you let GREENHILL go.”
“It was the judgment of my superiors. I do not fully understand.”
“Well, I think I do.” The American drained off his beer, signaled for another. “My government is split over how to deal with the missiles. The military, State, the intelligence agencies—everybody’s split. Hawks against doves. Sounds like yours is, too.”
Viktor shook his head. He pushed his glass away. The vodka was not nearly cold enough. He did not understand how Americans could manage without the bone-chilling crispness of a vodka properly served. “Her interrogator was the great Fomin himself. As you know, he is a legend in our services. He was also one of my teachers. It is not possible that he is among what you call the doves.”
“Then it wasn’t his decision.”
“Perhaps not. He is always making plans and conspiracies of enormous complexity in order to confound your side. He would have fought hard against any order to release this GREENHILL. Therefore it is likely that her release will serve his purposes.”
“Can you find out?”
“Fomin will not tell me. He keeps his secrets.” Viktor wiped his mouth. “Perhaps I should meet this GREENHILL myself.”
“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea,” said his contact. “Besides, if she wouldn’t talk to Fomin, why would she talk to you?”
“I am not Fomin.” A grim smile. “Perhaps I shall leave her no choice.”