A Very Private Plot (2 page)

“Shee-yit,” the senator from South Carolina muttered. “Excuse me, Roberta. Shee-yit, Hugh, he got away with it? I don't remember anything in the press about it.”

“It was one meeting of the Rockefeller panel not leaked to the press.”

“So what do we do if he treats us the same way?”

“I recommend, with your permission”—Blanton usually knew when the score called for a caesura of courtesy—“that we face that problem if we need to. If you are ready, we will call in the witness.”

He turned to his junior aide. “Bring in Mr. Oakes.”

CHAPTER 2

APRIL 1995

Already there was talk that Hugh Blanton might be a presidential candidate in the year 2000. It was characteristic of him that although he dismissed his nomination as all but impossible (“By the year two thousand,” he commented to his wife, “most Americans will either hate me or fear me—but my reforms will be law”), he had only one thing to say when asked by reporters for a reaction: “No comment.” It did not injure him at all, he reasoned, to be thought of as a presidential possibility, and he knew that as long as he continued with the formulaic “No comment,” he was thought to be a candidate. He had very much enjoyed his exchange with William Buckley on
Firing Line
. It had gone, “Senator Blanton, your anxiety to press your position on covert action seems to me as at odds with your personal predilection for clandestine political activity. Are you against the public knowing whether you want to be President?”

To this, Senator Blanton had responded, “My concerns become public when I decide to make them public. My point is as easy to understand as that you journalists have no right to spy on me or feed me truth drugs or torture me, which is the kind of thing the CIA has engaged in.”

And anyway, why shouldn't he think in terms of the possibility of going on to the White House? Just exactly, why not? In the first place, by the highest criteria, such criteria as would have commended themselves to Aristotle (
had
commended themselves to Aristotle), he was supremely well qualified to be President.

But he acknowledged two strikes against him. The first was that he lacked that distinguishing touch of vulgarity necessary to bring in the voters in huge numbers. Adlai Stevenson, he knew from his reading and from seeing old film clips in the library, had had a little of that same problem, though given the popularity of General Eisenhower, Adlai hadn't done all that badly in 1952. But he, Hugh Blanton, would have trouble emulating even Stevenson's come-on-into-my-tent moments.

“I am more like George Kennan,” he said now to Alice, after the guests had left the little fifteenth wedding anniversary party she had given him. It had featured her husband's diet food—his beloved Maine lobster, crepes suzette, and Moët champagne. He was stretched out on a chaise longue, she beside him, stroking the back of his head. He seldom, almost never, spoke about himself, and Alice was alert and excited when he did. She pressed her luck.

“You are every bit as bright as George Kennan.” She thought this a measured compliment—he would not have liked it if it were hyperbolic, if she had likened him, say, to Aristotle.

“Probably. Kennan had special strengths, of course, and his knowledge of diplomatic history was greater than mine. And he was capable of aphoristic thought. He greatly moved me by that one sentence—I think you remember, Alice, which one I am talking about?”

“Tell me again, darling.”

“He said in the eighties that if covert action could be kept secret, we might countenance it, but inasmuch as it can't be kept secret, it should be abolished.”

“Do you really think, dear, that all our covert actions are no longer secret?”

“No. But all of them will eventually be exposed and much of it will be nationally embarrassing. You do remember, Alice, that in an attempt to murder Castro, the CIA devised a cigar that was supposed to explode and a diving costume that would poison him? I say: The sooner we get it all out the better; and, meanwhile, put an end to any more of it.”

Alice did not reply.

“You agree, of course.”

“Not entirely, Hugh.”

“Why not?”

“If somebody was planning to assassinate you, I'd hope that some FBI agent posing as, oh, a member of the Mafia, or whoever the killer was associated with—I'd hope the FBI agent would be allowed to, well, pretend he's a friend of the killer in time to keep him from killing you.”

Hugh Blanton's impatience showed, ever so slightly—he was very careful with Alice, whose health was frail. He was much more careful with her than with Rodney, their fourteen-year-old son, or Minerva, their daughter, now ten. When they were denser than at their age they had any right to be, he would tell them so in as many words, and occasionally he would whip Rodney, if he thought him insolent, or lazy.

“The kind of covert activity I am seeking to eliminate is done against foreign governments with which we have diplomatic relations. At home, we do not have diplomatic relations with potential assassins, and the FBI is encouraged to penetrate their designs.”

“Well, that is very good to hear, dear Hugh. And it is nice that, on our anniversary, the
Washington Post
devoted that lovely editorial to your work. Who wrote it?”

“I don't know. There are a lot of bright, well-informed people on the
Post
.”

Alice continued to stroke him on the back of his head, and Hugh Blanton allowed himself to nod gradually, and then to allow sleepiness to overtake him. Alice pinched him lightly on the back of the neck, rousing him. “It's been a long day. A wonderful day. Let's get some sleep.”

On the same evening, in their country house in Virginia, Blackford Oakes was celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of his wedding to Sally Partridge Morales. Sally's son, Anthony, was not there. Anthony Morales de Guzmán was himself married. With his wedding certificate came formally the title to the ancestral mansion in Coyoacán, the old colonial section in the heart of Mexico City where his mother had brought him up during his early boyhood.

Anthony had never coexisted with his father, who was shot down by a Castro agent months before Anthony was born. Blackford Oakes, his stepfather, brought him up, and although from time to time his Mexican relatives formally reminded him that he, Anthony—Antonio—Morales was not an Oakes, Anthony thought of Blackford as his father, while acknowledging the biological point. He could not remember when he had begun referring to Blackford as Papabile. (Could he have been witty enough, at age six, to take the measure of his stepfather and decide that he was fit to be his father?) Anthony could dimly remember the great domestic disruption in 1968 when his Papabile left Mexico to perform a special assignment for what in due course he knew to be the Central Intelligence Agency. And then, after what was to have been only a single mission, the father remained absent from home in Mexico. Anthony had learned that his father was back in Washington, so to speak working full-time for his old employer. Even so, his mother stayed doggedly on in Coyoacán. Papabile visited Mexico four or five times every year, staying sometimes as long as a month, but then sometimes his absences were for as long as four or five months. His mother told the boy that these absences were the result of the secret profession in which his father was involved, that he did very important work, but that she wished he would leave that work and settle down permanently in Mexico.

It was she, measuring the need of her eight-year-old boy to be with his father, who finally relented. She and Anthony left the handsome old estate in Coyoacán, letting go or retiring one half the staff, and went to Washington. In Virginia, Sally bought a large and comfortable farmhouse. (“
Tu mamá es muy rica
,” Anthony was startled to be advised by a Mexican schoolmate when he was seven. His mother's wealth was exaggerated, Anthony would eventually discover, but not greatly: The Morales trust had left her wealthy.)

In rural Virginia, in what Mexicans would call an hacienda, Blackford, Sally, and Anthony were surrounded by six hundred acres of redolent Kentucky bluegrass. Sally superintended the raising of cattle and the maintenance of a stable of five horses. Anthony and his mother and his Papabile rode together on their saddle horses when they could. When Blackford was away, his mother went out several times every week with Anthony, who breathed with pleasure the scents of the seasons: the hot humid summers, the little tang of autumn, the blustery chill of mid-winter, the sensual budding of spring. If Sally was unavailable, Anthony was accompanied by the groom until he was ten, after which he would ride on his own. Sometimes he rode with a companion from school who was himself an accomplished young horseman. When he was twelve his mother built an outside course with six varieties of hurdles winding in and out over the area where the junior hunt now convened. And there Anthony learned to jump and competed regularly in the horse shows in Virginia and Maryland.

Anthony loved his life, his mother, his Papabile, and Ed Turpin, the groom. But in his senior year at St. Albans he made his solemn decision. It was to go to college and law school, as his father and grandfather had done, at the University of Mexico, with the view eventually to occupying the spot that had been held for him ever since his father's death, in the ancestral firm of Morales y Morales.

There were just six guests at the anniversary party, one of them the sister of Sally's late husband, who came with the Mexican ambassador, her husband. “Do you know something, Sally,” Blackford said in the presence of the one remaining guest, his old friend and professional colleague Singer Callaway, “I hate to say it, but Consuela has become rather pompous. You think?”

Sally looked up at him with a half smile, in answer. She dissolved in Blackford's eyes to the serious young graduate student who on that crowded afternoon at the fraternity when they first bumped into each other had an effect on Blackford he was forced to think of as hypnotic, delirious, because nothing else at Yale mattered to him after that, other than Sally, for ever so long, until she herself brought him down to earth. He neglected his studies in engineering, twice forgot a rendezvous to take the controls of the newest jet fighter his disorganized father was trying to sell to foreign governments.… How strikingly beautiful she still was, forty-five years after they first met. He could not believe that he had allowed fifteen years to go by before marrying her.

But the happy day had finally come. It was after his disillusionment with his role in Vietnam, thirty years ago, at the little chapel on the family property in Coyoacán. Sally had now been widowed for a year, and had done the traditional one year of mourning, mourning a husband she had deeply loved. In Blackford's imagination she now flashed forward from college girl to the thirty-five-year-old woman he had married—an adjunct professor of English literature at the University of Mexico, a scholar of standing, and the dueña of her late husband's large home, a woman of bearing and refinement, whom he had seduced (actually, there was a trace of a smile in his memory,
she
had seduced
him
) ten nights after that fraternity party. There would always be a strain of independence in her, as there was in him: that was what had kept them apart and, very possibly, what kept them so devotedly together.

The separations would no longer need to happen, he thought, sipping the end of the wine, now that he, Blackford Oakes, was discharged from his post at the CIA, along with most of his friends, including Anthony Trust and Singer Callaway. Granted they were all in their late sixties; but age had never really mattered, not within the CIA. “Mr. Dulles,” as Blackford always thought of him, had been in his seventies. And Rufus, the master spy, had still been coaxed into delicate missions at eighty.

Rufus! Blackford had heard, just two years ago—it was on the day of President Clinton's inauguration—of the heart attack. He was grateful that it had done its work decisively; flabbergasted to learn, on his return from Beirut, that Rufus, a widower without children or relatives, had left his entire, but not entirely immodest, estate to him, Blackford—with a testamentary note that burst the seams of Rufus's legendary self-restraint:
After the death of Muriel, you became a son, and so it is to my son that I leave what I have, in gratitude. Rufus
.

Rufus
knew the whole story of Nikolai Trimov.
Reagan
knew it. No other American alive, Blackford kept reminding himself, knew it. Sally nudged him back into the conversation.

“My point”—Singer Callaway, made aware that Blackford's mind was elsewhere, repeated what he had just said—“is that we've got a good chance to stop Blanton. The President isn't really on his side—no President wants to be without a covert arm. But he's being cautious on how to handle Blanton. And there are more and more people around who think the congressional investigating committees are going too far. Professor Glasser, granted, is devotedly attached to lost causes, but his paper in
The Harvard Law Review
has had a big impact, and it's only a matter of time, maybe even next week, before we get a cert from the Supreme Court, probably in the Wohlenberg case—”

“What is the Wohlenberg case?” Sally wanted to know.

“Carl Wohlenberg was indicted after the Blanton Committee referred his case to the Justice Department, charging that he had violated Section 1001 of Title 18. That's the law that says that if you don't tell a committee something you have good reason to suppose the committee wants to hear, you are somehow guilty of perjury. There's a countermovement coming up here, Black. Say, Bush was great last week, you agree?”

Blackford said Yes, he agreed. Former President Bush had been invited to appear as a witness before the Blanton Committee, both because he had served as President and because he had served, in the 1970s, as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Bush had answered Blanton with a polite letter, leaked politely to the
Washington Times
, saying he would be glad to make his views on executive authority and clandestine activity known to the committee, but that he declined to testify in a closed session: his views were for all the American people to hear. Senator Blanton concluded that he did not want George Bush solemnly affirming on nationwide television his devout belief in the continuing necessity of covert activity.