EDGAR P. RAWLS STRAIGHTENED his knitted-wool necktie as he walked along the corridor to his boss’s office. He knocked on a door marked “293: NAGEL ”. From behind the door came a noise that sounded like the belch of a laryngitic duck. The noise bore a vague resemblance to “Come in”, so Rawls opened the door and went inside.
Rawls was forty-one years old, though like most CIA men he could have been anywhere between twenty-five and fifty. His jagged face had no laugh-lines on it. A pair of dead-blue eyes stared grimly at the world through his tinted spectacles, and his expression was one of sardonic indifference.
He had joined the CIA early in 1965, where he was employed in the Special Operations Division. In the following year he worked in Vietnam under William Colby (who was later the Director of the CIA) in Colby’s Provincial Reconnaissance Units programme. The PRU had been set up to infiltrate the Communist areas for the purposes of disruption, intimidation, interrogation, abduction, terror and murder. Rawls excelled in all these fields.
In 1967 Rawls became involved in Colby’s “Phoenix” programme in South Vietnam. Essentially, the work consisted of remorseless elimination of Communist spies, assassins and terrorists. In its first thirty months of operation, the Phoenix programme cost the Vietcong over 20,000 casualties. Of these, at least 3,000 were directly attributable to Rawls.
After this, Rawls was transferred to the Western Hemisphere Division of the CIA’s Clandestine Services section. From November 1970 he worked in Chile towards the overthrow of Salvador Allende Gossens, who led that country’s first democratically elected Marxist government. Once again, Rawls did his job with surgical efficiency.
Between 1975 and late 1977, Rawls was transferred to the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence, and he worked as a liaison officer between the CIA and the US National Security Agency at the American Embassy in Bonn. He was involved in the exposure and capture of Lothar-Erwin Lutze and his wife, Renate, both of whom had worked in the West German Defence Ministry. During his inquiries, Rawls discovered that the Lutzes had passed on NATO’s secret defence plans for West Germany to the KGB, along with a great deal of research data and top secret communications. Rawls gave the news to the BfV, West Germany’s counter-intelligence agency, and the Lutzes were subsequently brought to trial.
Rawls’ extraordinary career did not end there. Between 1977 and 1980 he continued in the CIA/NSA liaison, but this time he was based in the US Embassy in Moscow. By then, however, the KGB had amassed a large and disturbing file on Rawls, and it was decided that an agent of such alarming efficiency could be tolerated no longer. In September 1980 Rawls was expelled from Moscow, and he returned to CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia.
Rawls had now become something of an embarrassment to his masters. Clearly he was one of their top field operatives, but his usefulness at home was another matter. He could no longer be placed in embassies abroad without exciting comment, and he was becoming too old for the kind of spectacular clandestine work in which he had once excelled.
He was therefore put into the tender care of Milton K. Nagel, the head of Anglo-US Intelligence Liaison. Nagel’s official brief was to ensure the free flow of intelligence between the CIA, the NSA, MI5 and MI6. Unofficially, his job was simply to extract the intelligence that the UK preferred to hide from the US. To do this, Nagel exploited every goodwill mission made by American officials to Britain, and he tapped every British phone call that the NSA could unscramble.
Rawls did not like his boss. Nagel was a loud-mouthed slob who ate hamburgers instead of taking baths. Unlike Rawls, he had a coarse, resonant sense of humour, and he was entirely open about his contempt for “smart-assed prima donnas”, of whom Rawls was one. He was short, fat and sweaty, and he disliked Rawls’ penchant for vigorous efficiency.
“Good morning,” he said, as Rawls closed the door. “Take a seat.”
Nagel leaned back in his swivel-chair and put his feet on the desk, knowing that this would irritate Rawls.
“Got a job for you,” he said.
Rawls nodded.
“Some two-bit hood by the name of Grünbaum got himself arrested and killed in the DDR. It seems that this boy ran a Brit-sponsored network over in Thuringia, or somewhere like that.”
“So?”
“So people are asking questions about it.”
“What people? What questions?”
“The Brits have put some guy named Wyman onto it. For some reason they’re worried by Grünbaum’s getting blown, and they want to know how it happened. Christ knows why they’re so upset. This kind of thing goes on all the time, and nobody gets screwed up about it.
“Funny thing is, instead of making the routine inquiries, Wyman’s been avoiding the Firm altogether. Six days ago he got in touch with Frank Schofield in Rome.”
“Who?”
“Frank Schofield. Old-time Kansas newspaper hack. Did some work for us during the war, and after that he used to help us out from time to time. He’s retired now, but he still knows a lot of the old crowd, so he’s still a good vehicle for discreet inquiries into the Company. Or so Wyman thinks.”
“What happened?”
Nagel gave a frog-like smile.
“Schofield got in touch with one or two people over here, hoping that everything would be nice and quiet. In fact, our people gave him virtually nothing, and then they told me what was happening. Wyman was taking a stupid risk asking Schofield for help. He should have known that we’d find out about it.”
“Who is this Wyman? How come he knows Schofield?”
“Wyman is a typical English cocksucker. I think he’s a professor of philosophy, or something like that. He’s pretty amateur, even by Brit standards, and that’s saying something. Anyway, he met up with Schofield in Rome in the mid-fifties when he worked at the British Station. They’ve been good buddies ever since.”
“Okay,” Rawls said. “So what do I do?”
“If Wyman is avoiding routine lines of inquiry, it means something funny is going on. If something funny is going on, I want to hear the joke. I mean, if you want to know why some op. has just got burned in Germany, you don’t normally go running to some old fossil in Rome. If you want Company help, you ask the Company, right? So why doesn’t Wyman want us to know what’s going on? I want you to find out.”
Rawls frowned.
“Sounds as if I might be chasing my own ass.”
“Sure you might,” Nagel said.
“Yeah.”
Nagel grinned evilly.
“What’s the matter, boy? You don’t look too happy about it.”
“That’s because I’m not. I’ve got one old idiot in London, another old idiot in Rome, and some prick in Germany who doesn’t know how to run a network properly. What kind of network was this, anyway?”
“Don’t know,” said Nagel. “You’ll have to find out. We do know what kind of stuff he was sending back.”
“Go on.”
“This is an old network.” Nagel referred to some notes. “It never produced a regular supply, but there’s stuff been coming over since ’57 that we know about, and it’s probably even older than that.
“Most of the stuff’s chicken-feed. Troop movements, stuff like that. There was only one moment of glory, back in ’70. If you remember, Brandt met Stoph at Erfurt for the first time, and this guy Grünbaum got the word on it nice and early. That gave us time to act.”
“Yeah,” Rawls said. “I remember.”
The occasion Nagel was referring to was the Erfurt meeting on March 19, 1970, between Willy Brandt, the West German Chancellor, and Willy Stoph, Chairman of the East German Council of Ministers.
It was the first official meeting between East and West Germany, and it resulted in diplomatic relations between the two nations. That in turn led to the four-power Berlin Agreement, which allowed full international recognition of the DDR.
The success of the Erfurt meeting largely resulted from Grünbaum’s work in February 1970. By obtaining advance warning of the meeting, the Western powers were able to ensure its success by judiciously spreading rumours throughout East Germany. Normally, the DDR’s Politburo had to use hired mobs to greet visiting foreign dignitaries. But on this occasion the East Germans came out spontaneously in their thousands to welcome Willy Brandt.
The whole affair was something of an internal embarrassment to the Politburo, and it finally convinced them of the public demand for diplomatic relations with the West. It was also Grünbaum’s moment of glory, as Nagel expressed it. For perhaps the only time in his sordid career, the German had achieved something worthwhile.
“What you’d better do,” Nagel said, “is get over to England and see this guy Wyman. Figure up a good excuse for being there and get clearance from the Firm. You’ll find that Wyman’s working in some third-rate sub-department somewhere in London. Find out what it is he does, and use it as an excuse to meet him. See what you can get out of him without letting on that we know about his trip to Rome, and we’ll see about what to do next. Think you can do that?”
“Of course I can,” Rawls snapped.
“Great. I’ll send you all we’ve got on Wyman and the Krauts, and you can go as soon as you like.”
“Okay,” Rawls said, as he left the office.
Nagel knew that Rawls felt deeply insulted that a man of his proven ability should get a dreary assignment like this. That was precisely why Nagel had given it to him. A fat smirk crept across his face as Rawls left the room.
“Smart-assed prima donna,” he chuckled.