23
IN THE FOLLOWING DAYS, WHICH THEN stretched unexpectedly into months, we were like trapped spelunkers on a shared lifeline with a single instinct: to move toward light and air. Take it from an expert on the underground, those vast lands of the dead: What is found is often discovered in the most arbitrary way, and the artifacts of past lives find us as much as we find them, unvoiced and unavailing if we are not already halfway to the conversation. It was all about the prepared mind, I told my students, or was it the prepared heart? Artifacts were the easy part; they were what they were, and the truth they told was a fine thing, belied only in the interpretation. But lives are a different matter: tales told around campfires, in the flickering flames of lovers’ whispers, in fevered correspondence, recounted in the brimming eyes of friend and foe, in the calibrated squint of the interrogation cell. For the religiously minded, such moments offer windows into the soul, which, like the turbid contents of twin alembics—poured one into the other and back again by the skilled alchemist—transform us, the perceiver and the perceived, as our memories mix and alter in the very act of telling, to become a hybrid . . . as the story of my father became part of our story.
In search of the true author of our lives.
A search that began in earnest on the deck of the Piraeus ferry, as I began seeing that post–World War II interlude of peace transformed into the Cold War, as Elliot got his hooks into my father, just as Elliot had arranged for a huge bouquet of roses to be presented at Laura’s curtain call for a Kennedy Center production of Tudor’s Lilac Garden, prelude to a nostalgic dinner together at the Terrace Restaurant atop the Kennedy Center. Three days later, on Laura’s day off, Elliot invited her to dine at his splendid Virginia home overlooking Little Falls along the Potomac, a two-minute drive from CIA headquarters at Langley.
“For Christ’s sake!” she exclaimed, fending me off as we walked the deck of the Piraeus ferry. “How else was I supposed to get the truth out of him? You sure didn’t manage much.”
After his disgraced career, his wife’s cancer, his daughter’s shaky marriages—“You raise them with all the love and advantages, but judgment in men I must’ve neglected”—Elliot soldiered on with his biography of Edward de Vere, bridge at the Metropolitan Club, golf at Chevy Chase, weekend luncheons at Paul Nitze’s Tidewater farm. On the Winsted board, he had pushed through coeducation and gotten black enrollment up to 12 percent, and promoted the hiring of women and minority teachers. By the late eighties the school’s reputation was again flying high and the Vietnam years were a bad memory. “Well, now it’s a country club, but that’s how the kids like it.”
The spring evening was warm and inviting as they had dinner on the brick patio overlooking the river. Laura found herself drifting under the perfume of the frangipani blooms, the undertones of rushing water, the twitter of nesting cliff swallows, not to mention the spectacular view of the palisades on the far shore of the river, hovering in a band of mauve-green against the encroaching dusk, marred only by the constant scream of aircraft following the Potomac to National—later to be Reagan—Airport. She found herself strangely relaxed in Elliot’s company, considering he’d slit Bobby’s throat on the Winsted board in the summer of 1968 when they jettisoned Byron Folley.
I debated whether to tell her about my bit part in Bobby’s firing. “Positively princely” was how Laura described him to me, with his full head of blond hair slicked back. He wore a beautifully tailored iron gray suit—he still got all his suits from his Savile Row tailor—and a striped Winsted tie. “I thought, for a Williams, at the very least, I should display the colors,” he told her.
The Philippine housekeeper “vanished” after preparing the cold salmon and artichoke salad. But Laura was hardly concerned about chaperones; she was intrigued and glad to hear about a fascinating life and disappointments not her own. The iced champagne helped, and later the ’63 Vieux Château Certan, “a robust Pomerol with a hint of vanilla,” dusty from the basement cave, wafted the past up from them glittering back of the moonlit river—a life of secrets, a life in the shadows, gambling with the fate of the Western world.
“My dear, you remind me of somebody, your gorgeous mother, of course . . . but no, not your mother.”
I could just picture Elliot unabashedly staring into her eyes, as I, too, was taught to do in military intelligence.
“I never had the pleasure of seeing her dance but I danced with her at her wedding where I met my own lovely Margaret,” Elliot told Laura.
Laura motioned with a spread palm toward the foaming wake of the ferry. “That was a little weird, how he’d married my mother’s maid of honor. How he went on and on about what a wonderful spring day it had been at Colonel Fairburn’s estate in Sussex—as if it were yesterday, even though he knew it was all a big charade. Of course, he didn’t tell me he’d been after my mother—after Bobby shot himself and her breakdown—trying to get the truth out of her.”
“And which truth was that, pray tell?”
“About why your father walked through Checkpoint Charlie and disappeared into the arms of the Soviets. And other stuff . . .”
“So, you were both on the same page, so to speak.”
Laura was a pro’s pro around older sophisticated men. She had dined out with choreographers Ashton and Tudor, enduring their biting British wit and caustic remarks. Balanchine had flirted with her in class and felt her up; he taught her many extraordinary things about wine and food—“four wives, and it’s like they didn’t exist.” Elliot was of a different order: powerful, athletic, magnetic, artistic in his own way, and dedicated to old-time virtues and courtesies. Above all, he was loyal to the truth as he saw it: whether Edward de Vere or my father. And he loved women. He’d loved his wife. He loved his daughters.
“Of course, he came on to me—thank God. A real man.”
I don’t think she cared about being seduced; she cared about finding out about her mother’s lover. And she saw in Elliot much of what she suspected Suzanne must have loved in my father—“or choked on.”
“There was a primal faith in him, a patriotism, I suppose, which I found riveting—me, who cared squat about all that stuff. I knew I was supposed to hate everything he stood for, but I wanted to understand it, from the inside.”
By the time the dessert of Devonshire cream and fresh-picked strawberries from an old friend’s—and an apex Cold Warrior’s—Tidewater farm arrived, their conversation gravitated to politics, to the first economic reforms that Gorbachev had introduced into the Soviet system, which Elliot dismissed as cosmetic and not likely to make an appreciable difference unless the whole house of cards was kicked in. He had been showing her one of his prized blue-and-white ginger jars, Jiajing, from the sixteenth century, displaying the Chinese characters hallmarked on the base—“Beautiful vessel for the rich and honorable,” in translation.
“Not so rich,” he said laughing, “but still honorable.”
She began pressing him on what had gotten him into a life of secrets. Leaning on the railing as the bare-ribbed islands slipped by, I could imagine Elliot’s predatory eyes as he told her about Romania in ’45. “Did he tell you how he watched in horror as Stalin’s henchmen loaded up boxcars of terrified Romanians at the end of the war, shipped off for execution or to disappear into the vast gulag?” I asked Laura. “How did you know about that?”
“We were at a restaurant in Saigon, over the curried shrimp. Did he tell you how in his official capacity as an OSS officer he’d literally pulled Romanian friends out of the clutches of the NKVD police at the Bucharest train station?”
“Are you making fun of him?” “I’m marveling.”
“When he told me things like that, his eyes blazed. It sent a chill through me—the conviction of the man. Imagine, seeing terrible things like that.”
I had to smile: If she only knew the half of it. I pictured Elliot snowing her with tales of derring-do, with just a dash of tradecraft details to leaven the mix, stroking the porcelain in his hand as he scolded himself for bringing up such horrors.
Laura had been used to getting her way with men, exchanging fame and favors, but she wasn’t quite sure what she had to offer Elliot. So she snuggled in and began mooning on about her parents’ rotten life and her disappointed stage mother, whose star-crossed ballet career had been ended by the war. When she found this going nowhere, she flipped all her cards. She admitted to Elliot her knowledge about Suzanne’s affair with my father, and about the letters.
The affair was old hat. “So,” he said—his face had hardened, as if he could barely breathe—“you’ve got their letters, John’s letters—and hers? Somewhere safe, I hope?”
“With my lawyers. And I made copies.”
“How long were they writing?” “Almost ten years.”
Elliot smiled, but she caught the panic in his voice. “I feel so much better, my dear—that you’ve finally come clean. Perhaps we can trust each other now.”
She realized that he had known all along of her ulterior motive— his ulterior motive, that this sort of thing was his stock-in-trade. He put the ginger jar on the table between them and tapped it with his nail until it produced a sweet, clear ring. He raised a finger and smiled again.
“You see, it was the affair that brought John back into his nation’s service after the war.”
I felt Laura’s hand on my arm and pictured Elliot’s judicious nod, his angular nose rising and falling as he worked the conversation to the critical subject. “Bullshit!” I exclaimed. “It’s only his career and legacy he’s worried about.”
“Young lady, you don’t happen to know about Edward de Vere, the seventeenth earl of Oxford, do you?” he continued. “He is our unknown author, the man behind the Shakespeare plays. As your mother’s lover— or is it lovers?—was behind so much that transpired in those difficult times: a man elusive, troubled by women, a most reluctant suitor of the world’s troubles but bound to the essential imperative of his illustrious upbringing, his very nature, what became the driving force behind our policy of containment.”
“Unknown author?” she asked, thinking she’d had too much to drink, since she’d heard that name from Max’s lips more times than she cared to remember.
“Lost to history and fortune’s fickle hand.”
Elliot was no fool. He was sharp as ever, but he also understood how the CIA’s legacy was under threat. The Church Senate committee hearings had stomped on everything they had stood for. Within years, the Freedom of Information Act would start shedding light on his old CIA files, along with the most closely held secrets, the unending fuckups of Allen Dulles’s early years that tumbled out in the decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Two months later, at the American embassy in Prague, my suspicions were confirmed: If my father went down—if Suzanne or Bobby had recruited him—Elliot’s legacy got flushed with them. And something else preyed on his mind that night overlooking the Potomac.
“No one in your generation can begin to understand how dark things looked to us,” Elliot told Laura, “how near a thing it was in 1947 and 1948. Poland was gone to the Communists, Czechoslovakia was going, and Britain was financially exhausted and in retreat from the Greek Civil War; the Greek Communists were on the verge of triumph. The April 1948 elections in Italy had been a near thing; the U.S. Sixth Fleet had been stationed in Naples in case the Communists won. And this was before China went Red, before Korea, before the Soviets got the bomb—one crippling body blow after another. We were going under, and we needed experienced men, good men, honorable men for dishonorable work. And we needed to buy time for the freeworld democracies to get back on their feet.”
Elliot took her hand in his.
“And the gist of the letters?” he asked.
“Plenty of sex and even more contempt for each other.”
“Lovely . . . and the last postdate?”
“A postcard from East Germany.”
Laura stared into his eyes from behind her raised wineglass. She knew she had him.
“Dated when?”
“January 1954. Some kind of museum, I think, glass display cases in a museum.”
“A message?”
“Some kind of poetry about a voyage and betrothal.”
“Betrothal . . . but no names, for instance, Kim Philby, or perhaps one Anthony Blunt—were they mentioned?”
She’d laughed to cover her fear, because she knew by then who Philby was: Philby had certainly figured in the letters, but Anthony Blunt had not.”
“Anthony?”
“Or a Melinda, perhaps? Or a Burgess, Guy Burgess?”
“Wrong millennium, I’m afraid. There was a Lakedanos and a Philowona, prince and princess—weird stuff.”
“Could it have been some kind of code that your mother might have passed on . . . to others?”
I had to laugh.
“What he wanted to get out of you was whether my father knew about Anthony Blunt from Bobbie or Susan back in 1954, or worse, years before—the key to Philby and the whole Cambridge spy ring.”
She looked at me trembling, or maybe it was just the sea breeze in her hair.
“Or”—she nodded to herself—“if he knew Philby was the MI6CIA mole.”
“The secret of the century.”
“If he did, if he didn’t turn over the names to the CIA—”
“Or, the FBI, he would have been complicit—or worse—in maintaining the cover of a bunch of dangerous traitors.”
“And Melinda? She comes up a lot in the letters.”
“Donald Maclean’s wife, who lived in New York with their children. Maclean visited her on weekends from Washington, to give her top secret materials for her Soviet handlers—including crucial documents on the development of the atomic bomb.”
“Shit. She was a friend of my mother’s. My mother visited her in New York when she went down from Boston to meet your father at the Carlyle.”
I took her arm and steadied her.
“So, tell me you didn’t have to sleep with him.” “I traded him information.”
“What, the names, Philby and Melinda—Donald Maclean?” “And the message on the postcard.”
“I thought you said he hadn’t seen it—that you didn’t let him see it?” “I copied out the inscription and sent it to him.”
“Like mother like daughter.” “Fuck you . . .”
“Go on about Elliot. He must have been beside himself.”
“For someone out of touch, you seem pretty on top of all this.” “When Philby died in Moscow last year, it was all over the papers again.”
“They’re all dead—dead and gone.”
“Except your mother, the sole survivor of that crew. Was it true, what my father accused her of in the letters: fucking Kim Philby?”
“Let’s talk about something else? I’m rather enjoying the view.”
“After his first tour of Greece with the OSS,” Elliot told Laura, as they picked over the backstory on my father, “after he got fixed up, he was not the same man. He could have honorably returned stateside, but instead he chose to slog it out in France and Germany interrogating those filthy bastards. I figured Suzanne had her claws in him. When he returned to Princeton early in 1946, when I returned to Wall Street, I thought we were done.” Elliot sipped his wine and nodded. “Stalin had other plans. . . .
“John was number one on my list, from our first director, Beetle Smith, by way of Bill Donovan. Greece was a critical priority. Greece was tottering under a Communist insurgency in the north. One of the top republican generals, nicknamed ‘Nestor,’ a guy John had worked with in the Resistance, asked for John personally as part of the American team when we took over from the Brits. Everything hinged on Greece. If Stalin intervened, if Tito acquiesced, it could go against the West along with the whole eastern Mediterranean.
“John point-blank refused. It got to the point where he just hung up on me when I rang his office phone at Princeton.”
Elliot finally threw in the towel, tried to put it out of his mind that his reluctant quarterback didn’t want to play on the team anymore. Then something caught his eye when he was processing security checks for a bunch of his new recruits. In the secret FBI testimony of Soviet agents Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers, Bobby Williams was fingered as a Soviet courier, confirmed by army intelligence intercepts of Soviet cable traffic, Venona. Before the war, after his return from Cambridge and between gigs as a concert pianist, Bobby had been passing U.S. government secrets, much along the lines performed by Whittaker Chambers; he photographed and transmitted official papers from the likes of Alger Hiss and other Washington spies working in State and Treasury. Nevertheless Bobby chaffed at being a mere courier; he desperately wanted to gain access to secrets himself, but all his attempts to get into government failed. In 1942, Bobby joined the U.S. Army Air Corps as a bombardier. Soviet cable intercepts showed he had passed on details of the Norden bombsight from Maxwell Field, near Montgomery, Alabama. When this information was cross-referenced with British counterintelligence, to see if Bobby continued passing information once he was posted to England, Bobby’s marriage to Suzanne, née Brierly-Henderson, stage name Suzanne Portman, immediately drew scrutiny. Suzanne was suspected by British M15 of conveying information before the war for her Soviet handlers, although once the Soviets were allies and she was working in a military hospital, she was largely ignored.
“It was like a load of buckshot in the balls,” Elliot said.
Getting off at Princeton Junction and taking the jitney to the campus station, Elliot pondered whether he should tell John anything—just let it go, let the chips fall where they may. He wasn’t even sure if John was still seeing anything of Suzanne. She’d left England in 1946 and moved to Boston with Bobby. “A decorated and wounded veteran—enough to turn your stomach.” The idyllic campus of collegiate Gothic buildings and tall stately elms draped in spring foliage—“so safe, so charmingly safe”—only reinforced Elliot’s sense that his best friend from school days, “best quarterback I ever played for, including Yale, who as a kid our senior year got me all steamed up to save the world,” was out of the game and out for good.
“John looked like his old self—not the hangdog face I remembered around Suzanne’s splendid digs on Cadogan Square. He’d gained weight, his face had filled out, and he was beginning to get around without a cane. Up to his elbows in his office with stacks of journals and bits of broken pots and reams of photos, as if he were planning to entomb himself for the rest of eternity. I picked up a photograph of some kind of clay tablet with crude characters scratched into it and couldn’t make head nor tails of it.
“It’s a Linear B tablet excavated from the palace at Pylos in 1939, in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens,” my father told him. “We’ve been trying to decipher the language since the early part of the century, when Sir Arthur Evans discovered similar tablets at Knossos. So far, no go—nobody can crack it.”
Elliot had smiled when he handed the photograph back; deciphering, breaking codes was very much on his mind. He suggested a walk by Lake Carnegie.
Elliot had appointments with half the crew team later that afternoon; three seniors would join the CIA after graduation. For an hour or so, they waxed nostalgic about football and rowing days at Winsted. Then Elliot slipped in hints about all the bad news from Europe, how Greece was teetering in the civil war, how close it had been with the Italian elections, when their favorite classics teacher, Virgil Dabney, still working with the Monuments Men, had been recruited by the fledgling CIA to carry suitcases of cash to pay off politicians and union leaders, and so save Italy for the West. “Virgil and ninnykins Angleton did a fine job.”
My father was polite, attentive, concerned, especially with the bad news out of Greece, but he shook his head at any thoughts of reenlisting in the fight.
“But what pissed me off . . . when he began to complain to me about recruiting the Princeton oarsmen: ‘the wonderful kids,’ he called them as we stood and watched practice. And they were wonderful, and plenty of wonderful Yale kids had come on board, as well. Then he stopped me right there on the path and looked at me with that glittering intense stare and stabled a finger in my chest. Didn’t I have something better to do than put those kids in harm’s way? That got my goat. Minutes later, I was spilling top secret beans. I told him about the FBI files on Chambers and Bentley and the interception and decipherment of Soviet cable traffic—could have gone to prison for that. I told him the whole government had been infiltrated with Soviet spies, State, Treasury, the White House—crawling with informants. He didn’t believe me; he just downright dismissed it. That’s when I just let it out; I told him about Bobby . . . and Suzanne. I told him to come down to my office in Washington and I’d show him the file. ‘It will turn your stomach,’ I said. You might have thought I’d put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. It was that kind of reaction. I was picking up the pieces for the next hour.
“John, think about it. You can go back to Greece, sniff around the ruins—they need you.”
A week later, my father walked into Elliot’s office on the Mall in Washington.
“You could have blown me over with a feather; he didn’t even want to see the damn file on the little shit and his bewitching wife. He became the rock, the mainstay as we built the organization during those terrible years of Korea, when Stalin got the bomb, when it was just one horror story after another.”
Princeton, April 6, 1948
Dearest Suzanne,
Will you be at Elysium this weekend? It is imperative that I see you.
I just had a very disheartening meeting with Elliot Goddard. He seems to know about us, around the edges in his bluff, hinting way. Did you ever blab anything to Margaret about us? Things his wife might have passed on to Elliot? Elliot got all hot and bothered about Soviet spies in the U.S. government, and he had some pretty shocking things to say about our true-blue Bobby. Not that I would put anything past the little shit, but I did think he’d turned a corner when he joined the Army Air Corps.
Of course, Elliot is back in government—bored by Wall Street—and recruiting young men here and elsewhere for a new intelligence service. I don’t know all the details about his allegations but will find out more soon. The atmosphere in Washington is poisonous; desperate accusations fly right and left. We must be very careful. Make sure to burn this letter when you’re done—and not a word to anyone.
I’m afraid Mother is already at Elsinore for spring cleaning, which complicates things, as usual. I think she suspects about us; I can hear it in her disapproving voice, her hard scrutiny—ever keeper of the votive flame. Summer will be awkward.
Leave me a message at the white pine in the meadow about when we can meet.
Conspirators in our own lives—that’s what we’ve become! We talk about love; we tell each other how much we love, but is it the act of love that we love? Your body is never out of my mind. I can’t handle a piece of sculpture or pottery in the university museum without getting hard for you. Isn’t that repugnant? You laugh, you cackle, but I’ll have you cunt deep and all.
Friday night, late—such a long drive from Princeton.
I just remembered I promised Mother that I will oversee the cleaning of the Tiffany glass windows in the living room, a delicate, time-consuming job. She always lets me know how my father and grandfather took pride in the job. There is something in that, I suppose: that art survives the disasters of the moment—take it from an aging digger.
I think about you every minute. I count the seconds.
Love, John
Less than two years after his Princeton meeting with Elliot, after over a year in which he’d been Athens station chief, my father was playing golf on weekends at the Chevy Chase Club in Washington with the admiral’s daughter who would become my mother. In the early fifties, a drive from Washington to the Berkshires for a weekend was an arduous ordeal, especially for a man in the days before automatic drive with a bad left leg, which still gave him pain. A gentle stroll on the links became his preferred therapy. Shortly thereafter, he was married to my mother in the National Cathedral, with Elliot Goddard serving as best man and Colonel Fairburn an usher.
He, too, had seemingly turned a corner, but there remained Elysium, and Suzanne—and then the bombshell of Kim Philby.
When we spoke at the embassy in Prague two months later, even with the Berlin Wall down, Elliot still had very mixed feelings about that Princeton meeting: spilling the beans about the Soviet cable intercepts to a man in bed with a Soviet spy had been about the stupidest thing he’d ever done. And it didn’t help that he had a bad conscience. Three of the seniors in the eight-man shell they watched that day became recruits. One of those seniors would die four years later in the shootdown of a spy mission over Communist China. Elliot had loved that boy like the son he never had, felt personally responsible, and never got over it. He mentioned this to Laura and later to me. He remembered that afternoon at Princeton in the spring sunshine, the flash of oars on the lake, his boy as handsome as they come, from a fine old Farmington family—it brought tears to his eyes. He never forgot those flashing oars and the handsome sweating face as the boy stood eagerly on the boathouse landing to hear about how he might help his country in the fight against communism.
Elliot was surprised and not a little terrified when my father showed up in Washington a week later. “John was smoking a mile a minute, walking around my office like a caged animal.” Elliot figured that my father had broken it off with Suzanne. But he wasn’t sure. Nor was he absolutely sure that John hadn’t known all along about Bobby and Suzanne . . . or worse. Under normal circumstances, my father would never have been allowed to join the fledgling CIA; his ties, his proximity to known Soviet agents would have ruled it out. So Elliot swept it under the rug.
“What are they going to do about Bobby and Suzanne?” my father had asked with some urgency.
“During his training at Maxwell Field, Bobby was passing information to Soviet handlers, technical specifications, blueprints of the Norden bombsight, assessments of accuracy. Presumably he kept at it in London during ’44, still milking us at parties for information. Jesus Christ, John, he was milking us at his wedding and she was passing the stuff on.”
Elliot recalled my father’s face compacted like a fist at this point in their conversation.
“What’s going to happen?”
“Probably nothing. That’s the thing: the lack of evidence, Bobby’s word against that of others. Without documents in his—or her—possession, FBI surveillance of transactions, witnesses, nothing will hold
up in court. Unless these bastards get caught red-handed with pilfered documents, or caught lying—then you prosecute for perjury. Otherwise, they deny everything or just plead the Fifth. The problem is, the FBI can’t introduce the Soviet cable traffic into evidence; it’s too sensitive. And the worst of it is, there are still hundreds of undetected spies out there. It’ll take decades to clean them out.”
“And Bobby’s a hero.”
“A wounded hero of the air battle over Germany.” “Maybe better to keep it that way.”
Elliot smiled and placed a comradely hand on his old quarterback’s shoulder.
“Just make fucking sure those two stay tucked away in the woods: out of sight, out of mind. The Republicans are accusing the Democrats of being lax on security—and worse, and the Democrats are going to have to prove their bona fides by being tougher than the Spanish Inquisition on a bad day. And we’ll get caught in the middle. Just you watch: The politics will kill us.”
In the ambassador’s office in Prague, Elliot leaned into my face.
“I gave John the chance he needed, to get away from Suzanne and temptation. I did him a favor and he jumped at it. And when he came home, he married your mother.”
Elliot winced inwardly and sighed.
“I cleaned up John’s file. I even expunged things about his dealings with the Communist Resistance in Greece during the war. I gave him a clean bill of health. I got him back on the team, where we needed him, and how. And he was brilliant, the best of the best, until he betrayed us—betrayed me. I don’t know if Philby got to him; I don’t know if it was loyalty to Suzanne or if she had him by the balls or what, but doing what he did in ’53 was a disaster beyond comprehension. If he’d made a clean breast of his love affair with Suzanne to the FBI, an unwitting lover, they might have swept it under the rug. The worse of it was still having Philby in circulation for another ten years, only to have the spineless Brits let him escape to Moscow. And I think they did it on fucking purpose, so they wouldn’t have to put him on trial and air their dirty, incompetent laundry in public. Just like they tried to cover up Anthony Blunt’s role for over fifteen years. Thank God for Margaret Thatcher—now there’s a woman for you.”
That’s when I confronted Elliot about the trade of Anthony Blunt for Bobby Williams’s place on the Winsted board.
But I get ahead of myself. . . .
To his credit, my father was instrumental in one of the few successes of the early Cold War era: the defeat of the Communists in the Greek Civil War. He spent over a year in Athens in 1948 and 1949 and then returned to Washington, where he ran the Southern Europe division of the CIA, focusing on Greece, Albania, Yugoslavia, and the Balkans— when he worked hand in glove with his British counterpart, Kim Philby. Elliot had been posted to Berlin in 1950 as station chief, the front line of the Cold War against the Soviets.
In 1953, there was an outbreak of rioting by East German workers; the riots threatened to become widespread, and there was the possibility the GDR government might be overthrown. Policy makers in Washington were tempted to provide moral and even armed support to the union protestors. Agency hawks led by Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner thought this might be the long-anticipated chance for the CIA to roll back the Iron Curtain. For the recently elected Eisenhower and his administration, the situation in East Germany was a potential opportunity to prove its anti-Communist credentials. Pressure from Secretary of State John Foster Dulles on his brother, Allen, then the new director of the CIA, had prompted the call from Washington that caused my father to leave Elysium on a fall morning in the fall of 1953. Allen Dulles wanted his fellow Princetonian for consultations. My father knew Germany; he spoke the language perfectly, he had interrogated hundreds of German prisoners in the last days of the war, and many of them were Communists. Now many of those same German Communists were in power in East Germany. After a week going over the situation with Dulles and Wisner, and monitoring all the cable traffic from Berlin, my father decided, “suddenly, very suddenly—not a moment’s notice,” according to Elliot—to fly to Berlin so as to be closer to developments on the ground.
“He arrived at the Berlin office looking like he hadn’t slept for days; he was very overwrought. The pressure from the White House for some real results was enormous. John was all business, determined but at wit’s end with Allen, ‘That preposterous old fart, even if he did go to Princeton,’ John muttered. There was something fragile about his face and eyes that I hadn’t seen in him since the last year of the war. I’d catch him staring out the window with a glassy-eyed look, as if Berlin was about the last place he wanted to be. The next moment, he was demanding to see everything we had on the rioting, every scrap of intelligence. He wanted to debrief some of our operatives personally, and he spent hours and hours with them.”
“‘They’re licking their chops in Washington,’ he told me. ‘They want to break it open. All Allen and Frank Wisner talk about is getting arms to the rioters.’
“I told them, as I’ve told you,” Elliot said to John, “we have no way of doing that, certainly no way of delivering weapons without the Soviets knowing the score. Besides, we both know what it would mean . . . in their backyard.”
“John looked at me and closed his eyes. ‘World War Three.’” “Anything useful out of the agents? I asked him.”
“‘I don’t believe any of them. They’re liars, cheats, opportunists, or double agents—take your pick. I think you have to assume every network you’re running has been compromised.’”
“I was incredulous. ‘That bad?’”
“‘Elliot, what the hell have your boys been doing here all this time?’” “‘Clearly nothing worth squat.’”
“‘We’re deaf, dumb, and blind—it’s worse than Korea. How can the Dulles boys want us to overthrow a government when we don’t even know what’s coming at us?’”
“I remember your father gesturing to the bomb-damaged blocks outside the window of our offices, toward the bleak urban landscape of the East sector. He was in a black mood, so was I. And he’d spent summers in Germany when we were kids, when I was sailing on Buzzards Bay and Bar Harbor. He knew these people. We were all pretty rattled by what we found ourselves up against. We couldn’t find a chink in the armor anywhere.”
That was the last time Elliot saw my father. He didn’t show at the office the next day, nor the next. His telephone in the staff apartment went unanswered. They checked out the apartment and found the bed neatly made, as if it hadn’t been slept in for some time. Most of his things were still in the room, including his diplomatic passport. “That set off more alarms, because you couldn’t go anywhere in the city in those days without your passport. Unless he’d used his regular passport. We put out an all-points alert. We were concerned about a possible kidnapping, something that happened a lot, on both sides. Then we got a report from Checkpoint Charlie about a man who had passed through alone two days before; he wore a beautifully tailored gray pinstripe suit—impeccably dressed, which was why the guard remembered him so well—and carried a large very expensive black leather attaché case. He handed the guard a brand-new American passport in his own name, not the diplomatic passport one would use on official business.
We showed the guard a photograph of John and got a positive identification. He had simply walked across like the hundreds of others who passed through every day to or from work. Oh, and the guard said he was using a silver-handled cane, and limped. That’s what really got me worried: John hadn’t used a cane in years and he walked just fine, at least for eighteen holes.
“It was your worst nightmare, a security catastrophe on a par with Philby. He was the man who knew everything, soup to nuts. He’d just spent a week with our most sensitive files. With the Dulles brothers— with Ike! It froze every ongoing operation, forget about arms deliveries. We were in a state of complete paralysis. We contacted his family, all his colleagues and acquaintances—nothing. We had to sit on our hands and wait it out. I did not share any doubts I might have had—I figured I owed John that much. Hell, I spent my adolescence passing that portrait of his grandfather in the library every goddamn day—that’s what the fight was all about. Winsted and the Aldens were our gold standard. I was never so depressed in my life.
“You have to understand, Maclean and Burgess had disappeared two years before, in 1951. We assumed they had defected to Moscow, but we didn’t know for sure; the Soviets weren’t tipping their hand yet. And that fucking Philby was still on the loose, playing cat and mouse with the press and MI5 and MI6, who would actually hire him again later and post him to Beirut. We wondered, Have we got a Maclean and Burgess defection on our hands—was he part of it? Angleton knew how much John had worked with Philby, and he knew about Bobby and Suzanne, and he knew I knew something about John’s affair with Suzanne. So I was caught in the middle, holding the bag of shit.”
In the American ambassador’s office in Prague, Elliot looked at our questioning faces and snorted. “That’s right, boys and girls, I kept my mouth shut; I risked everything—not the least my reputation and career.”
In early 1954, the United States was contacted by the Soviets about the capture of a top CIA agent. The Soviets knew exactly who they had and what he was worth.
“Thank God, I thought. I was never so relieved as at that news. Of course, they were in no hurry to make an exchange or to offer much in the way of details. But at least he wasn’t a traitor! Maybe he’d just snapped, who knows. But as long as they had John and potentially everything he knew, our hands were tied. The negotiations went on forever. They claimed he’d been arrested with a concealed pistol and had been part of a plot to assassinate a high GDR government official. That seemed pure poppycock. Then, a year later, right before his scheduled exchange for three Soviet agents, the Soviets informed us that John had died of a sudden heart attack. They seemed as baffled and disappointed as we were. If he’d really been a double agent, as many in the Agency speculated, it is hard to believe they would have killed him. Like Maclean and Burgess and Kim Philby, our ever so loyal and infinitely cynical Cambridge cousins, they’d have given him a medal and a pension and he’d have lived out his days as a Moscow celebrity. But it was convenient certainly, just returning his body and personal effects. That way, we never knew how much information they got out of him, or what he gave them. There were no signs of torture but he’d clearly lost weight. Solitary confinement, relentless interrogation, threats, constant anxiety, depression . . . maybe it went too far and his heart just gave out. Pathology showed nothing in the way of drugs or poison. We were days away from executing the exchange—three top spies for him—I just can’t understand. Whatever the case, the damage was deep and widespread. We just never knew, and not knowing is like bluffing with bad cards, and worse: hole cards your opponents have seen.
“In ’57 or ’58, after the Hungarian uprising, we got a couple of defectors, a Soviet general and a Czech secret police official. That’s when we heard that John had been held in Pankrác Prison in Prague for most of 1954. The Soviets told us he’d been captured in East Germany; the Czech defector told us the American spy had been captured on the Czechoslovakian border with Hungary. We knew heads had rolled in the GDR, and as the Soviet general put it, after that close call with the East Germans, Moscow was taking no chances with the fucking Hungarians.”
So Laura had given Elliot a copy of the inscription on the back of the postcard, which he spent months mulling over, to no avail. With the postmark of January 1954, Elliot got one critical clue: My father had been on the lam in East Germany for almost three months. If the card wasn’t a hoax, that is. Laura promised to hand over the letters once she’d had a chance to share them with me—if I agreed.
Then history played a trump card. Two months later in Prague, with the Berlin Wall down and the Velvet Revolution filling the streets of Prague, Elliot would get his chance to read the letters. By which point, we had the missing piece of Karel Hollar’s role in this pitiful charade. With Suzanne and Charles Fairburn and the others to provide supporting roles come Christmas.
All in all, I had to hand it to Laura: I thought she got the better part of the trade with Elliot, but nothing of the answer that really mattered to her.
And like her scheming mother, she’d carefully withheld the critical documents in the horde her mother had hidden in the colonel’s home, damning documents, secret documents that would have stood up in court and convicted a coven of KGB spies. From Elliot, from me, until she was sure of what she needed to know.