The Defection of A. J. Lewinter, page 15
Martin demonstrated this once again at the start of the session when Harry Dukess, the regular nonvoting representative of the Central Intelligence Agency on 303, had reported on the “fuss” in Bangkok. “We spread a little money around and set things right,” Dukess had explained, trying to gloss over the incident.
“That plain won’t do,” Martin had said, cradling a puffy cheek in the palm of his hand. He rated everyone in government according to his ability to embarrass the President—and the C.I.A. people stood high on the list. “You guys spend more time playing games and toying with disaster than anyone I know
“That’s not quite fair,” Dukess had begun to protest. “If you’re going to bring up the Indonesian affair again—”
But Martin cut him off with a wave: “One of these days you’re going to give us another full-fledged U-2 incident. Well, if anything embarrassing surfaces from the Bangkok business, the first priority is the President, which means we may have to throw one or two of your people to the wolves.”
“Won’t bother him none, a-throwin’ someone to the wolves, long as ’tisn’t him that’s a-bein’ throwed,” chuckled the senior senator from North Carolina, another permanent member of 303. William Jennings Bryan Talmidge was a pearl-handled pistol of a man, courtly and decorative when it suited his mood, but explosive when riled. And at seventy-two, Talmidge was still easily riled, especially by the C.I.A. “God damn, mah subcommittee don’t even know how much money they spend, no less on what,” he often complained. “Time someone took ’em down a peg or two.”
Talmidge looked as if he could do the job too. In the nation’s capitol, he was a power broker par excellence. It wasn’t so much that he knew where the bodies were buried—though he had, as he allowed, “more than an inklin’.” The source of his power was the military and his relationship to it. Arguing passionately that sufficiency was no substitute for sheer overpowering mathematical supremacy, he pressed on the military establishment installations of all sizes and shapes and descriptions. Not surprisingly, more than a share somehow wound up in his home state. “If’n he puts one more thing down here,” one of Talmidge’s Republican opponents privately complained, “the state’s gonna sink.”
On paper, Talmidge and the other members of Committee 303 were equal, but Buzz Martin, being the President’s man, and Senator Talmidge, being his own man, were (as the saying goes) the most equal. It was a state of affairs the other members and the organizations they represented had learned to live with gracefully, if not happily. The only potential dissenter, Lieutenant Colonel Pruchnik, a representative of the Joint Chiefs who combined second-generation drive with third-generation patience, was content to bide his time. The other members—Deputy Undersecretary of State Kenneth Foss, G.O.P. Representative Howard Snell, Deputy Secretary of Defense Richard Kunen—deferred judgments until the big two had reached agreement and then followed along behind.
With the Bangkok business out of the way, Dukess had brought up another matter. The Agency wanted a final go-ahead on Operation 85 Bravo, which had been approved in principle by Committee 303 the previous month. Operation 85 Bravo called for aerial drops over Cuba of arms, ammunition, false documents, and bogus money to espionage teams that didn’t exist. The idea was to gradually make the Cuban authorities aware that the Americans were running phantom drops—an old ploy, used to advantage against North Vietnam—so that if and when Washington put in real espionage teams, they would be much easier to resupply, the Cubans presumably having lowered their guard by then.
“Ah for one think it might be a spankin’ smart idea to hold off on this a tiny bit,” Senator Talmidge had said, and Buzz Martin had chimed in: “As far as the White House is concerned, we have to weigh the possibility that one of the planes will eventually be lost. What then?”
“I thought we’ve been all through that,” Dukess had said. “The planes will be piloted by Cuban exiles, not Americans, and they’ll operate from bases outside the country. And the contractees know that if they’re shot down, they’re on their own.”
“They know that now,” Martin had said. “But when they’re in that Cuban jail, you can bet they’ll spill everything—who paid them, where they trained, who they were working for. Since we have no plans to put in live teams for a while, why don’t we put this one on the back burner.” There had been a general nod of agreement.
“Well, then, if that’s outa the way, let’s move on to this Lewinter business,” said Senator Talmidge. “What d’ya say, Buzz, why don’t you stick your head out the door and get this Diamond fella up heah.”
“Gentlemen,” said Diamond, striding into the room. His eyes flitted over the committee members and came to rest, like a latch locking into place, on Dukess. “Harry, didn’t know you were in on this,” he said evenly—without a trace that he was talking to a man he hated.
“I represent the Agency,” Dukess said flatly.
“I never assumed otherwise,” Diamond answered. He hefted his briefcase onto the table and clicked it open. “Augustus Jerome Lewinter, gentlemen,” he said, introducing a thick file folder as if it were the man in question.
“Ah take it from the fact that y’all are heah that we’re in a mite of trouble, son?” Talmidge squinted across the table at Diamond as if he were blinded by light—or getting ready to pounce.
“You take it correctly, Senator,” Diamond said. And he proceeded to give 303 a detailed account of the defection of A. J. Lewinter.
Diamond had spread the folder on the table in front of him, but he didn’t bother to glance at it. “There you have it,” he wound up. “The Russians trotted him out—you saw all the stories, I take it—and squeezed him dry for internal propaganda value.”
“How did our cover story go over—I mean, did anybody believe it?” This from Kunen, an overeager, overripe political scientist.
“That was handled fairly well,” Diamond said. “We knew what was coming, so we arranged for the Boston police to have a warrant out for Lewinter—exposing himself to some teenage girls. Three witnesses, too. And the Boston courts were after him for back alimony—that was the real thing, by the way. Since the police warrant predated the Soviet press conference, the boys in the press more or less swallowed the story and printed it as a fact.”
“That about brings us to what the folks back home call the core of the apple, the pit of the prune, don’t it?” asked Talmidge.
“You mean, what did Lewinter take with him?” said Diamond.
“Exactly, my boy, what did this heah Lewinter fella stuff into his kit bag when he decided to head for greener, or should I say redder, pastures?” Talmidge folded his hands behind his head and leaned back into the linked palms.
“It isn’t what was in the flight bag, Senator. It’s what was in his head. And we have good reason to believe …”
Leaning forward with his elbows on the table, speaking as if he were taking them into his confidence, Diamond reconstructed his “worst-case” theory: the indications that Lewinter had regained his photo memory lost as a child, the evidence that he had access to a top secret MIRV trajectory file long enough to imprint the heart of it in that photo memory.
“How about motive?” asked Martin. As Diamond spoke, Martin jotted notes on a yellow legal pad. He did it out of habit; before he left for the evening, he would deposit them in the burn bag and brief the President from memory on those matters he thought the President should know about. Martin wrote Motive and put a colon after it and then waited for Diamond to go on.
“You can take your pick,” Diamond said. “The psychiatrist on our C.P.P. decided finally that Lewinter was after status. The defector, our psychiatrist tells us, especially the one that brings some valuable information with him, stands out in a crowd. And Lewinter wanted to stand out in a crowd. I myself am inclined to search for the motive in Lewinter’s leftist—perhaps radical is a more appropriate word—activities. He apparently had become very disillusioned with the United States. Anyhow, we have enough motive for three defections.”
“O.K., let’s go back to the MIRV folder you say he saw. What was in it?” Martin wrote MIRV and a colon and waited for Diamond’s answer.
“The United States, gentlemen, has something like eleven hundred and seventy missiles in its arsenal—the great bulk of them either land-based Minutemen in silos or Polaris missiles in nuclear submarines. You probably know the figures better than I do, but I understand that by the end of this month, almost all of these missiles will have been fitted with MIRVs—Multiple Independently Targetable Reentry Vehicles. Now, MIRV, as I understand it, is basically a nose-cone package or pod which puts three payloads where there used to be one, thereby multiplying our fire power and the chances of penetrating the enemy’s antimissile defense. At a given point from the target, the pod opens and dispatches the payloads toward preselected targets. There are sixteen basic MIRV payloads in the U.S. arsenal; some are actual nuclear bombs, some are decoys designed to look or act like nuclear bombs, and some are antiradar devices designed to jam their antimissile system. So far, so good. Each of the sixteen basic MIRV payloads has a signature trajectory—that is, depending on what it is and what it does, it follows a given trajectory once it leaves the pod. Now obviously, anyone who knew these trajectories could program a computer so that it could tell within seconds, using inputs from tracking devices, which incoming blips were real warheads, which were decoys, which were jamming devices.”
The roof of Diamond’s mouth felt dry. He paused to collect some saliva.
“This is what Lewinter took with him,” Diamond went on. “Or at least this—it seems to me, gentlemen—is what we have to assume Lewinter took with him.”
“In other words,” Martin said grimly, “he gave them the key to our missile system.” It was worse than Martin had expected; he was already weighing the potential consequences to the President—and the options.
“‘Pears to me as if he plain disarmed us,” said Senator Talmidge. An indecipherable smile-frown played on his face.
Across the table, Kunen let out a long, low whistle.
Only Dukess—who had known all along what was coming—took Diamond’s presentation calmly. “I think …” he began tentatively, and when he saw the heads swivel toward him, he began again, this time with more strength. “I think perhaps the Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Security Policy”—Dukess dragged out Diamond’s title until it sounded faintly ridiculous—”has put an unnecessarily grim interpretation on the available facts.”
Dukess had hesitated before joining the conversation; Talmidge and Buzz Martin, sitting on either side of him, looked like Zealots ready to squeeze the nonbeliever between them. But even as he hesitated, he had caught sight of Diamond’s face—the impersonal eyes that looked both liquid and black, like inkwells; the smug mouth turned up at the corners in the beginning of a smile. And so Dukess, drawn in by remembrances of things past, plunged in to deal with the realities of things present.
“The Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary”—this time Dukess put the emphasis on the word acting—“has given us the worst case, which seems to be based largely on his long-standing inclination to believe the worst in any case.” Dukess turned toward Diamond and spoke directly to him: “Is there a single shred of outside evidence you can muster to support this worst case of yours?”
Diamond turned and looked out the window, sorting out his facts. “You want corroboration, that’s fair enough. Tell me, Harry, what would you do if a Russian turned up at the American Embassy in Japan requesting asylum? Unless he were a big fish, like Svetlana, you’d tread carefully, right? You’d think of all the possibilities—you’d think about plants and double agents and a rigged defection designed to explode in your face. Before you gave him the time of day, you’d make him prove that he was worth taking risks for. If he proved it, you’d give him the asylum he asked for. O.K., run this scenario backward—the Russians had Lewinter in their hands a few hours when they whisked him off under escort to Moscow. They took him. Quite obviously, they at least were satisfied that he was worth taking.” Diamond turned to the other members of 303 the way a lawyer turns to a jury. “It seems to me, gentlemen, that all our attempts to understand the significance of Lewinter’s defection must”—Diamond lowered his voice and whispered the word must again—“begin with this simple fact: they took him. There are other pieces of the puzzle that corroborate the worst case. Remember, the Russians stole Lewinter’s personal papers as a part of a background investigation of their own—something they only run on very important defectors. Remember also, they probably murdered the librarian to cover their tracks. And it is of more than passing interest that Avksentiev himself now seems to be involved in the whole affair—”
“How do you know that?” Dukess challenged.
“Our military attaché in Moscow came up with that tidbit,” said Dick Kunen. “Seems like Lewinter had lunch with Avksentiev before the press conference. We got it by pouch today—you’ll probably find it in your interoffice when you get back to the Agency.”
Dukess glanced at Diamond’s impassive face—and returned to the attack. “There’s another side to all this. Let’s assume for the moment that friend Diamond’s worst case holds up. As I understand it, our experts estimate that two hundred nuclear hits could devastate the Soviet Union—in the official lingo, render damage to property and human life that would be unacceptable to any rational Soviet leadership. The experts also say that, given the present state of Soviet antimissile defenses, even if they knew which of the thirty-six hundred incoming payloads were warheads, they still wouldn’t have a hope in hell of sustaining less than eight hundred hits. In other words, even if it’s true, the worst case is a meaningless case. In the end, we can always saturate their antimissile defenses with MIRVs, so our second-strike deterrent retains its essential credibility, Lewinter notwithstanding.”
Kunen rocked back in his chair so that his weight was balanced on its rear legs. “That’s with today’s technology,” he said. “If the Soviets decide to invest some time and money in antimissile research and development, they might develop a better kill ratio. That, combined with the ability to pick out the warheads from their signature trajectories, could keep the hits below the two hundred level. What then, huh?”
“The Soviets have shown no inclination up till now of going all out on antimissile technology,” Dukess shot back.
“The Soviets didn’t have the trajectory formulas up till now,” Kunen retorted.
“There’s no proof they have them now,” Dukess said angrily.
“Gentlemen,” Buzz Martin cut in.
Kunen rocked back, almost lost his balance, regained it. “I’d like to ask Diamond a question,” he said. “Since you’re so close to this affair, you must have some idea on what we might do to neutralize Lewinter’s defection.” Kunen posed the question quietly and casually, without the slightest hint that the script had been written before Diamond walked into the room.
“Wait a second,” Dukess said, cutting off Diamond’s answer. “The Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary was invited here to account for a defection that his department is responsible for—not to tell us what to do about it.”
The oil of Talmidge’s Southern drawl coated the turbulent conversation: “Well, now, surely nobody can object if’n someone as close to the whole business as Mistah Diamond heah gives us the benefit of his thoughts on the subject—always assumin’, of course, that he has some thoughts on the subject.”
“As a matter of fact, Senator, I do have some thoughts on the subject,” Diamond said. And he told the members of Committee 303 how he proposed to neutralize the defection of A. J. Lewinter.
When he finished there was absolute silence in the room.
“I think we’re moving too fast,” Dukess said presently. “We need to slow down, we need to weigh these signals of yours carefully. But the assassination part is out of the question; it’d take our people three to six months to mount an operation like that, and by then it would be pointless.”
“I can do it in ten days,” Diamond said flatly.
“You’d never succeed,” Dukess sneered.
“That’s the beauty of my scheme,” Diamond answered. “I wouldn’t have to succeed—just make a credible attempt.”
Kunen rocked back on his chair again. “As far as the Defense Department is concerned,” he said, “we’d be willing to let Diamond, operating out of the Defense Intelligence Agency, run such an operation, if the committee deems it appropriate to proceed.”
Suddenly Dukess saw more clearly how the lines were drawn.
“I’d be curious to know how you propose to attempt to assassinate Lewinter within ten days,” Dukess said.
Now, ironically, Diamond was at the crossroad. He felt the warmth stored up from the few days with Sarah drain out of his body, to be replaced by the special coldness of chess and Cernú?. Without hesitating he told Dukess the details.
“Sounds pretty ingenious to me,” Talmidge said.
“I’ll take it up with the President,” Buzz Martin said. “Meanwhile, so we don’t lose time, why don’t we let the Game Testing Center put it on the board and see if it plays, huh? After all, we’ll still have all our options.”
Outside the conference room, Dukess found himself alone with Diamond for a moment.
“This’ll never get off the ground,” Dukess said in a low, venomous growl. “Not if I have anything to say about it.”
