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PROLOGUE
Langley, Virginia, 1970
"I don't see why we have to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people. I am referring of course to Chile, gentlemen."
Henry Kissinger's mouth closed like a rosebud, or so it seemed to the Director of Central Intelligence, Vivian T. J. Prescott. Out of the corner of his eye, the Director took note of the tiny, angry doodles his deputy was carving into the yellow legal pad.
Vivian Prescott had been the Director of Central Intelligence ("DCI" in the vocabulary of Washington's power elite) since 1964. During the six years of his reign he had attended perhaps two hundred and fifty of these top secret "40 Committee" meetings. Until Richard Nixon appointed Henry Kissinger—as his Special Assistant for National Security Affairs—Vivian Prescott's voice had carried some weight in this room where the fate of smaller nations was voted up or down.
So sensitive was this secret decision-making body that it did not include a single elected official. All members served at the discre-tion of the executive branch. When over the years since 1950 the public had chanced to learn, through the media, of the existence of this mysterious circle of power, then even the name itself had been changed: from Special Group, to 54-12 Group, to the 303 Committee to, in Prescott's time as DCI, the 40 Committee.
Except for Vivian Prescott, the committee had slowly but surely since 1968 become a rubber stamp in the hand of Henry Kissinger. In Washington's inner circles it was common knowledge that Kis-singer's long knives were looking for the World War II hero, Prescott, where he had gone to ground in his CIA lair in Langley, Virginia.
Kissinger's guttural voice began to boom again. "The election of Dr. Allende poses the most profound threat to democratic forces in Latin America and to our own hemispheric …" The DCI's eyes flinched away from the perpetually moving mouth.
Today's White House meeting included General George S. Brown, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, an ultra-conservative and hard-liner. Prescott's gaze continued to pan the table. Next to Brown was the Deputy Secretary of Defense, a man whose dossier at CIA made him vulnerable any time that Prescott decided to leak his defense contract overrun—more than nine hundred million dollars according to WALNUT, the CIA's most sophisticated com-puter. Kissinger's unreconstructed German accent rasped against Prescott's hearing "… of course there is absolutely nothing that the United States government can do against a legally elected administration of another country …"
The only other man sitting in at today's extraordinary Saturday meeting was an old friend of the Director's that he had met through his father many years before. Morgan Lowry, at seventy, was almost fifteen years younger than the distinguished father of the DCI, but his good, gray air of rectitude and tradition reminded Vivian of his father, Samuel Adams Prescott, whose advanced age, together with the election of his ancient enemy, Richard Nixon, had forced him, finally, into retirement from the political wars.
The Ambassador to Chile, the Honorable Morgan Lowry, was the particular object, this day, of Kissinger's verbal blitz-krieg: "… the President is seriously disappointed that the em-bassy in Santiago remained silent after the death of General Schneider."
The month before, in October, General Rene' Schneider, head of Chile's armed forces, had been assassinated by Cuban exile contract agents of the Central Intelligence Agency. Vivian Prescott had been ordered by White House authorities to set the action in motion. In so doing, also on orders, he had circumvented the American ambassador in Santiago and violated the tradition, since the Kennedy administration, of ambassadorial oversight of foreign covert actions.
Ambassador Lowry's outrage at the execution of the leader of Chile's traditionally nonpolitical military had infuriated Nixon and Kissinger. Lowry's silence, his refusal to join the chorus of the administration's cover story (a jealous husband) had brought him to the 40 Committee and put him under the lash of Henry Kis-singer's tongue. "… a Marxist government, elected or not, in our hemisphere, just when we are on the verge of victory in Southeast Asia, is absolutely …"
The Ambassador's gray head sank lower on his chest. That could be my father, thought Vivian Prescott. Suddenly he realized that Kissinger had paused, was staring owlishly at him. He repeated the question: "Mr. Prescott, does Central Intelligence agree that the Agency's hands are absolutely tied in this Allende matter?"
"Yes," replied the DCI.
Vivian sat across the heavy oak table from Dr. Kissinger. The two men were in dramatic contrast. Haldeman had summed up the power struggle between Kissinger and Prescott as the war of the Gai-Gai toad against the Siberian tiger. The Gai-Gai genus is a deadly poison toad. The world view of the Nixon White House displayed a rigid tendency toward seeing powerful men as paired combatants in the Washington wars of all against all.
The comparison of Vivian T. J. Prescott to a tiger was, the secret services of the world would agree, fairly apt. At fifty years of age Prescott, a former collegiate tennis champion, was as lean and hard as he had been on that day at Forest Hills when, with the young Jack Kramer, the two American whiz kids had humbled the great Australian Davis Cup doubles team in a five-set match. If anything, Viv Prescott was a bit leaner now, the bone structure, especially at the shoulders, more prominent. You had to notice his long power-ful hands with which, according to insiders, he had personally disposed of antagonists in a series of confrontations during the wars, hot and cold. His face and head were classic, with short curly chestnut hair, strong symmetrical features, very large smoky gray eyes. Richard B. Kenner, the current historian of the American power elite, had described the Director of Central Intelligence as the "DCI with the head of Moray's 'Head of Cronus Wounded'." Prescott's wife, in her down-to-earth style, had once commented that her husband "looked like Cro-Magnon man on a good day."
Henry Kissinger was round. His expensive suit did not really fit; it bulged and, somehow, sitting opposite the grace and potency of Prescott in the Brooks charcoal, seemed to make him look even more round and fat. But it was Kissinger who had more power, and since 1968 the 40 Committee had known that the Nixon-Kissinger entry would slowly but surely bring down the tiger. Already several "Special Task Force" teams had been organized by the Nixon men and the director had been excluded. He was not trusted to investi-gate the "bombing-in-Asia leaks" to the media. Instead, an ancient enemy and CIA super hawk, Francis Sherman Scott, had been appointed. Insiders gave Prescott six more months at the outside.
Nixon's master plan was simplicity itself. Henry Kissinger had been made nothing less than the czar of a vast intelligence network whose hidden budget was some twenty-five billion dollars and whose personnel numbered more than one hundred thousand agents. Kissinger's secret army included Military Intelligence, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department Bureau of In-telligence, the Drug Enforcement Administration and, of course, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Besides these, the Nixon--Kissinger group maintained close ties to multinational private se-curity forces including Howard Hughes' organization.
Hughes was so closely connected to Central Intelligence that many of the Agency's "supergrades," or generals, owed their first loyalty to the billionaire and functioned at Langley as double agents in a covert, ongoing power struggle against Vivian Prescott and his loyal forces. Like a tiger at bay, Prescott fought back with cunning and ferocity in the unequal struggle against the Nixon-Kissinger-Hughes forces.
The Prescott circle of power at CIA had been stunned the year before, in 1969, to learn that the Nixon-Kissinger White House had begun to put together its own secret intelligence agency. Presi-dential aides John Erlichman and Charles "Tex" Colson had initiated the recruitment of former police, FBI, CIA and, some said, beyond-the-law clandestine operatives. In charge of the entire array was F. Sherman Scott, Prescott's long-time enemy and rival at Central Intelligence. But Prescott, the spymaster, had counterattacked.
In 1968, the Agency—through its conduit the Pappas Founda-tion—had brought ten million dollars to Nixon in an effort to manage the vice-presidential nod for Spiro Agnew. So Agnew, repellent in style though he was to Vivian Prescott, was the Agency's man in case of a crunch. Besides, the Director had infiltrated his own operatives into Scott's covert team, and through "assets" in the Secret Service, set up a tape recording system in Nixon's Oval Office and Kissinger's executive suite as well. CIA spies in the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had been employed to steal Kissinger's closely guarded Department of State memo-randa and deliver the documents to Langley. Thus, in a finish fight Prescott was confident that the Nixon-Kissinger forces could be mortally wounded from within.
Sitting now watching Kissinger move mechanically through the agenda, DCI Prescott smiled inwardly at the thought of the docu-ment that he had two days before leaked—through a third party—to the New York Times. The memo was from Hughes to a high ranking executive in CIA's clandestine section: "… that we must exert more influence to continue the Vietnam war in order to re-coup losses on the L.O. (light observationary) helicopter program. Order 'Ball Player' to approach 'Bismark's' brother and …" The identity of the cryptonyms would be revealed in the next leak. He would not, the director decided, go down alone. But, in the institutional sense, he was alone. Great generals who had been his friends and World War II comrades—like Ridgeway and Gavin—had been driven out by the hawks among the Joint Chiefs.
The man's mouth kept moving. He was on to the U.S. "commit-ment" to the Greek colonels and "the lesson that teaches us for Chile." Prescott's teeth clenched at the professorial style. Greek colonels, South Korean despots, Iranian megalomaniacs, Latin American gangster premiers: an old professor of the DCI's had once said, simply, "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster." Vivian's eyes shifted. He was looking into the lined face of Ambassador Lowry. An unspoken message passed between the two men before they both turned their attention back to the talking face and the vibrat-ing vocal chords.
… and this bloody Chile business, thought Ambassador Lowry, will be Vivian's downfall, I know it. They will order him to assassi-nate Allende and he will not do it and that will be the end of perhaps the greatest American secret agent in the history of the republic.
It had not been all that one-sided. The Estimates at CIA, under Prescott, had warned Nixon and his national security adviser that Vietnam was lost and that Africa would follow. When, despite these firm predictions, Nixon and the secretary ordered escalation, Vivian through his father had leaked information concerning the illegal and secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos to the New York Times. These stories in the press of the administration's duplicity had drawn blood and had put Prescott's name at the top of the White House enemy list.
Prescott, for his part, had powerful connections and a base of armed men loyal to him at Langley and in addition his estimates about the war abroad and the dissent at home, if made completely public, might wreck the Nixon-Agnew team's chances in 1972. Added to which there was what the DCI knew about Dr. Kissinger's private life.
When the Professor was not moving and shaking the world, he could be found listening to tapes of telephone calls of his aides and colleagues, secretly recorded for him. When he was not listening in on his employees, he was often busy with certain Hollywood stars and starlets.
The CIA had a number of contacts inside the Secret Service responsible for the protection of the White House staff—indeed, they were not so much double agents as they were straight CIA penetrations. These men had provided the Director with a minute-by-minute account of a number of the Professor's enchanted even-ings. "Fullback's" file (the Secret Service code name for Kissinger was "Fullback") was running over with what Vivian told his top aides were "factoids" that can be used if we have to go to the mat with our homegrown Dr. Strangelove and the rest of the Nixon mob.
"Let's see," the DCI would say, and begin the day's reading in his resonant New England diction.
"Item: Nan Marks. According to SL/TOR Miss Marks is to be noted because Fullback did not, repeat not, meet her through Mr. Frank Sinatra. There is no link between Miss Marks and organized crime, repeat no link, as is the case of …
"Fullback called Marks and introduced himself on … Fullback planed to West Coast for private dinner on … Fullback spent evening at dinner table talking about his career and future books he would write. At 2 A.M. Fullback accepted invitation to stay the night in Mark's pool house. At 3 a.m. Marks joined Fullback in pool house."
This sort of caper was child's play to the Agency, but the poten-tial for compromise by organized crime was not. This was Vivian Prescott's most closely guarded material. His sources included former agents of the FBI, the CIA and the Los Angeles Police Department's Criminal Conspiracy Section.
The stage for the Kissinger set-up was said to be the posh Bev-erly Hills club, Le Bistro. An important investor in Le Bistro was said to be one Stanley Silverman, the attorney for and, some be-lieved, the brains of organized crime and crime unions. It was Silverman who, at the club, arranged a meeting between Kissinger and the movie star Heather Court. Ms. Court had long been close to Silverman and his Associated Booking Corporation. Both Sil-verman and the actress had been indicted in 1969 along with a Cuban crime operative Estaban Oguvire in a federal action involv-ing a $13.2 million SEC fraud case. Kissinger was introduced to a table in a private room for VIP's at Le Bistro. The party included Ms. Court.
The LAPD's Criminal Conspiracy Section (CCS) was thoroughly penetrated by CIA-trained police officers monitoring telephonic communication between Beverly Hills and Palm Springs and Meyer Lansky in Israel, where the aging vice lord was fighting expulsion. According to Vivian Prescott's sources, the telephone contacts were routed through a conference line in a mob-owned Miami hotel. In taped conversations, the plan unfolded: To play on the well-known vanity of Nixon's gray eminence; to involve him with a beautiful woman; then to involve him in a scheme to use his influence to secure Israeli citizenship for the fugitive Lansky as an element in his agenda for Mid-East negotiations. According to the director's secret report, the final message from Israel to Beverly Hills was, "The patient is very ill. Find a Doctor immediately."
The Kissinger set-up had, somehow, misfired as Lansky was forced to return to the United States, though he was never jailed, while the doctor enjoyed a well-publicized friendship with Ms. Court. In Chicago in the l950s, Silverman had used exactly the same methods to stop Senator Kefauver from any further crime exposure. But media sophisticates such as Pres-cott or Kissinger knew that this kind of story could be played two ways.
The President's man did not know that the DCI would not leak and use such information against him, did not know that the Direc-tor's image of a carefully married man was only a corner of the canvas of Vivian Prescott's own life. Because he could not be sure, he did not bully the Director or jump down his throat when he disagreed, as he did with almost everyone else.
As if tuning in again, Prescott was aware that the Professor's guttural disquisition had ceased. What had he just intoned?—"… the President's stricture is that the United States government not be compromised in any way should Dr. Allende's regime be-come unstable." The faces of the Nixon men in the room were perfectly blank. Ambassador Lowry stared at his liver-spotted hands, as if looking for traces of blood.
The meeting broke up quickly. Vivian rose first, leaving his deputy, Vic Korcuska, to gather up the charts. He pressed the ambassador's elbow.
"Give my love to your father," said the old man.
The streets around the Capitol were not crowded on this gray November Saturday. The Director's official, bulletproof limousine was waiting. T. T. Provosty, the man who had driven for the Direc-tor since 1964, wheeled away from the curb expertly, waving to the Capitol cop.
Vivian slipped his hands into the pockets of the oxford gray cashmere topcoat and hoped that no one would talk to him during the twenty-minute ride to Langley. But Vic Korcuska was upset.
"Mr. Prescott, I've sat in on some weasel-worded conferences, but this one was too dep for me."
The Director's deputy was ordinarily a very quiet man. He had grown up in coal-mining country poverty before winning a football scholarship to Notre Dame, where he had majored in languages. Discreet, dedicated and blessedly efficient, but difficult to read was Victor Francis Korcuska. He would rise no higher in the Agency, lacking as he did the Eastern Establishment lineage, the Ivy League credentials, the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant patrimony required in the world of Yankee power. "Someday," Vivian had once told his wife, "the Soviets will have a super mole in place. And he will be a second-generation Catholic from a state college who has just cracked his head on the low Establishment ceiling."
" … I mean exactly what are we being asked to do?"
Korcuska also had a knack for sensing trouble, and he'd been sensing it for one full year now. Since 1969 he had been a regular, silent observer at the meetings of the 40 Committee and his suspi-cions had crystallized. The committee was a sort of fig leaf of legitimacy that could not cover the secret agenda of sabotage and assassination that Nixon's top aides and the Clandestine Section at CIA had concocted. His boss, the DCI, Vivian T. J. Prescott, looked like the other Old Boys at the top of covert actions, talked like them, but in his fashion was actually at war with them. Kor-cuska respected the DCI, admired the losing battle he was fighting against his own—the adenoidal supergrades from Groton and St. Mark's and Andover—and all the breeding grounds of the killer hawks with the perfect manners that he despised and feared. He wished that the DCI would confide in him more. Prescott was a man caught in the middle, between Nixon heavies led by "Fullback," and the hawks at his own Central Intelligence. But who was watching the watchers? Korcuska planned to quit if … as soon as … his boss got the ax, which at least would please his wife and kids, not to mention Dr. Stein, the ulcer man.
"Later," said the Director. He looked out the window at the historic architecture of the republic sliding by as T. T. picked up speed. He was not inclined to tell his deputy that he read Dr. Kissinger's message loud and clear … Since the U.S. overthrow of the duly elected government of Chile would shock an already war-torn America, he, as DCI, was instructed by the President to go, laterally, outside the Agency to private corporations with vital interests in Chile, such as Anaconda or ITT, and to use that corpo-ration's Latin American assets as cover for your overthrow. A former DCI now on the board of ITT would probably be waiting for his call … How long is the list of those who must be "terminated," the Director wondered as the automobile picked up speed.
The black limousine was heading west toward the Potomac under a leaden sky. Through a short tunnel, across the Roosevelt bridge and over to the Virginia side, then onto the parkway head-ing north toward Langley. How many times had Vivian Prescott passed the sign—FAIRBANK HIGHWAY RESEARCH STATION—known to the secret services of all the world as the cover sign for the United States Central Intelligence Agency.
The long Cadillac sped through the wire-mesh fence and past the heavily armed guard gate, the man with the automatic weapon waving the DCI on. The asphalt drive turned into a thickly wooded compound in the middle of which was a huge parking area. On a Saturday, only a small fraction of the Agency's 18,000 employees were parked, and the limousine swung directly toward the gray stone mass of the seven-storied building. "We'll go in black," the Director told the driver, meaning through a secret entrance.
Vivian had always intensely disliked the aesthetics of the regular entrance at Central Intelligence. The first story of the building curved deeply in and out around a series of rectangular sections. A concrete canopy loomed over the double row of glass doors. Every building material chosen seemed to consist of some mixture of the properties of glass, stone and marble. Modern with narrow windows and plastic guard disks set in a frozen sea of marble. In the center of the polished entrance sat the insignia: a sixteen-point compass rose, squared into the great eagle-headed shield of the United States. Just to the left of the shield, on the wall, in flowing script was the official inscription:
And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.
John 8:32
The inscription had always seemed gallows humor to Viv Pres-cott, coming upon it, as the visitor did, after driving through the electrified fence and past the attack dogs, into the eerie silence of the wooded redoubt in which the gray-white concrete modern fortress was set. This was the castle of secrecy, not truth; they all knew that, from the trainees who signed a series of secrecy oaths to the DCI who presided over the unremitting intramural spying between competitive branches of the agency. Here each intelli-gence officer with his laminated badge was a separate bundle of secrets. Here medals, even sports trophies, were awarded in secret. So DCI Prescott very seldom walked past the barred ground floor windows into "Moby Dick," as he often referred to the massive structure, and the cult of the clandestine of which he was the current high priest. He preferred to go in "black."
The Agency had dug a tunnel a quarter-mile long under its own grounds to provide a secret entrance for the supergrades, the Agency's highest officials—civilian equivalent of generals.
The DCI and his deputy walked into the private foyer, across the thick carpet, past the armed agents in gray flannels and through the open mahogany doors of the elevator. The elevator rose soundlessly to an unnumbered floor and they emerged, turning toward the executive diningroom.
The DCI was drained, as always, by the 40 meeting and needed something to drink. The corridor appeared to be totally empty and silent. As they passed an office suite marked "Project Records," the Director paused and inclined his head. He motioned to his deputy with long, tapered fingers. Behind the meaningless sign was a replica—not a stage set—an exact simulacrum of the interior of a miniature Swiss hunting lodge: high, slanted ceiling, exposed beam rafters, German water paintings. Here, behind these doors, the Director's enemies, the "animals," as he called them, could be found—day or night, Saturday or Sunday, Christmas Day and Easter Sunday—planning and plotting against him, at least that's how it appeared to Vic Korcuska as he paused dutifully while the Director angled his head toward what might have been the low sound of voices within.
The executive diningroom was white linen and sparkling Lenox china and black waiters in starched white coats. Here one could order an alcoholic beverage. Here, both waiters and gourmet chefs were regular CIA employees. Their service was impeccable, their lips sealed. This was the dark marble tower of secrecy for those scions of Yankee power and great wealth who commanded the heights of America's invisible power structure. The Ivy League Brahmins, the supergrades who saw themselves proudly serving the nation as field marshals on the ramparts of Freedom in the cold and secret and endless war against the Communist conspiracy.
"Scotch," said the Director. "Tea, please" murmured his dep-uty.
"Vic, will you please call Newsweek and ask them to reschedule the interview for Tuesday?" CIA had "assets" swimming all through the major media, and it was time, now, for the periodic magazine layout of the "New Central Intelligence Agency." The process disgusted Director Prescott, who, the press always pointed out, was considered an accomplished author in his own right. The aim was always the same: no more "dirty tricks—technology and surveillance overflights, the better to achieve disarmament, Mr. and Mrs. America. "Better yet," the DCI added in a low voice, "we'll do the damn boiler-plate and send it over. Spare me the boozers and spies masquerading as members of the Fourth Es-tate." Korcuska nodded. It worried him that the DCI seemed, these days, to be functioning in a constant state of low-grade fury, like a man who suffers from a virus for which there is no vaccine.
After a moment, an aide entered. The signal, "The DCI is in the building," had been flashed through the complex the moment the limousine had sped by the Outer guard gate. The Director studied the message sheet: "Please call: your wife; your father; Miss Buchanan."
"Vic, go on home. You can still catch the last half of the USC game. Regards to Hilda and the family. Oh, have a very pleasant Thanksgiving, won't you?"
The Director then walked alone from the executive elevator toward his seventh floor suite, past the always manned glass room where agents with snub-nosed .38 revolvers under their conserva-tive flannels scrutinized all those who passed.
The Director strode through the cluster of empty secretarial desks and into his office. Fifty feet long, with a desk at the far end, expensive decorator furniture, the walls studded with framed photographs, the office could have belonged to the chairman of the board of any giant corporation.
The light was failing. Soon it would be night. The Director sat at the oversized desk that had been cleared on the previous day of all current work. On the empty smooth mahogany surface he placed the message list so that it sat there in isolation, fading into the thickening November light. Vivian forced himself to try to unwind and sit back in the reclining chair.
Out of the dimness the photographs on the walls stared down at him. Even in the dark, especially in the dark, he knew them all by heart. By heart.
Presidents and shahs, generals and war heroes from all the wars of his time. Faces that he knew were there in the dark: "Wild Bill" Donovan, Intrepid ("Little Bill" Stephenson), Leopold Trepper (the "Big Chief"), General Gehlen (the "Gray Fox"), H. A. R. "Kim" Philby, Allen Dulles: the pantheon of legends. These were the almost mythic secret warriors and master spies of the armies of the night. This was the iconography of Vivian T. J. Prescott, the spymaster.
The Director's wide gray eyes sank from the dim penumbra of the perimeter where the old photographs seemed to hang, disem-bodied and timeless. His gaze rested with something approaching pain—was it from pity or terror?—on a connecting set of four photos framed in silver at the top of his desk.
The first pictured a tall young man with the brow and head of one of Michelangelo's godlike youths. The supple, lean figure stood posed in the photograph against the ground of what could have been a park-or a cemetery, since the stone arch under which the young man stood bore the legend, "THE DEAD SHALL RISE."
The young man was, of course, himself' Vivian Prescott at age twenty.
But he did not recognize him.
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