“What gold?”
He shook his head in exasperation. “Look, as soon as you calm down and quit lying to me we’ll have a conversation.”
I said, “I find you amusing up to a point, Ritter, but you’ve passed it. I still don’t know what you’re talking about and I can only conclude that you’ve been making assumptions based on assumptions and you’ve reached some wild answers.”
But it wasn’t getting me anywhere and I saw I was going to have to put it so bluntly that he could not go on evading it without exposing the truth. I said: “You don’t seem to get this yet. I have no way of knowing who or what you are.”
“I told you. Just a civil servant trying to earn my gold watch.”
“All right, but whose civil servant?”
Suddenly he got it. Recognition was mirrored transparently in his eyes and his face dropped a foot. “Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
“I’ve got to see some credentials.”
“I haven’t got any. I couldn’t very well, could I?”
“Then we’re at an impasse, aren’t we?”
I had only his word for it that he represented American interests. He could have been one of Zandor’s people trying to trip me up—testing me. Nothing he had said or done precluded that possibility. It would serve the interests of Zandor and his superior, Bizenkev in Moscow (who had opposed my visit from the beginning), to toll me into a trap by encouraging me to confess my anti-Soviet sins to a Soviet agent in the guise of an American.
He pushed his chair back against the little piece of wall beside the door; he sat with one knee bent, foot against the table, the other foot on the floor and his head resting back against the wall. He took a drink and then spoke in a voice made breathless by the vodka:
“What would it take to convince you?”
“I don’t know. That’s up to you.”
“The business about the Romanov gold reserves. I got that from Evan MacIver. The Russians don’t know about it yet.”
“Assuming we both know what you’re talking about, how would I have any way of being sure the Russians didn’t know about it?”
“If they did you’d be sweating out a torture cell right now.”
“And what am I doing right now?”
He smiled. “Your daddy must have been a lawyer.”
“What are you really doing here?”
“MacIver told me to bail you out.”
“What’s your title?”
“I’m a programming officer.”
“In the field?”
“Sometimes we work in the field.”
“What’s MacIver’s title?”
“Assistant Deputy Director of Programming.” He hacked out a dry smoker’s cough. MacIver was a heavy smoker too. “None of that proves anything, does it. I could have got all that from one of your books. Or if I was a KGB agent I’d know it. Look, I’d better spell it out for you.”
It was about bloody time.
Ritter was forty-nine years old. His parents had emigrated from Germany in 1937 when he was thirteen; they had settled in Boston and joined the German-American Bund, which he thought ridiculous. He broke openly with his parents at the beginning of 1942 when he was eighteen; he had not yet received his draft notice but he volunteered and was taken into the army.
According to what he told me, he was approached by OSS recruiters in 1943 but was turned down after an FBI security check revealed his parents’ affiliations. Ritter went into army intelligence instead and spent two years in Italy, France and Germany, mainly spying out soldiers who profiteered on the black market.
When the Central Intelligence Agency was formed in 1947 out of ragtag remnants of OSS, MI and other security groups he went in as a legman and was used extensively thereafter in foreign postings because with his German appearance and accent he was not likely to be taken for an American agent. But the fact that he was not a native American militated against his being promoted to any office of administrative importance within the excessively chauvinist agency.
In the sixties he got another black mark against him because he was one of Cord Meyer’s people engaged in recruiting for the CIA on U.S. campuses and when these activities were made public the pressure from the liberal wing had truncated several promising careers, Ritter’s among them. He had found himself doing tours of duty in Iceland, Chile and Thailand.
Then in late 1971 he had been recalled to Washington by Evan MacIver, whose protégé Ritter had become, when MacIver was promoted to the post of Assistant Deputy Director of Programming.
In the Washington area one out of nine federal employees works for the Central Intelligence Agency. It is funded by vouchered but confidential Class “A” funds audited only within the Agency itself; the budget is hidden within various federal programs including the Defense Department, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and various executive departments. Called the Agency by outsiders and The Firm by insiders, CIA has its headquarters in the midst of four hundred acres of trees near the Memorial Parkway inside the belt Interstate Highway 495 near Langley, Virginia; the building is modern, imposing, suitably enormous (it rivals the Pentagon in size) and shaped rather like a gigantic Louis XVI palace with two vast courtyards and endless interior corridors. A significant part of its square footage is below ground level. It is an enormous satrapy under the director who controls the operations of some two hundred thousand employees who are engaged in espionage, deception, insurgency, dissemination of propaganda, analysis of intelligence, counterintelligence, “black propaganda” (the publication of forged documents to embarrass the enemy), “black documentation” (the preparation of false facts to be fed to enemy agents), and “political action”—the euphemistic term for disintegrating or overthrowing a nation’s government while leaving the appearance that the government collapsed from natural causes. The Programming Division is known informally as the department of dirty tricks and it receives the largest share of CIA’s budget and personnel.
The operations of such an organization are complex because it is not enough merely to attain an objective; in order to succeed, the Agency must also conceal the fact that the objective has been attained. Ideally the Agency should be able to conceal the fact that it has even tried to attain the objective.
Unfortunately these ideals are rarely met in practice.*
Ritter’s explanation—his “spelling it out”—was rambling and anecdotal. In substance what he said was that Evan MacIver had become concerned about me after my affair with a known Mossad agent ripened; that the Mossad connection began to worry the Agency when it became clear I was going to Russia; and that because of these things and the gold, the Agency took a bet on me—so they “ran” me in a sense, with MacIver serving as a sort of Control. (I recalled that lunch in Washington when MacIver had said, “I think you get your nocturnal emissions from dreaming you’ll find that gold of Admiral Kolchak’s.”) Ritter revealed that in November 1972 the Agency had assigned “a warm body, full time” to retrace my steps through the files of the National Archives, to find out what I’d found.
“Also,” Ritter said, “you were pretty specific about what you’d found, in your letters to Mrs. Eisen.”
I stared at him.
He said, “We didn’t get it from her.”
“Then you opened my mail.”
“Inside this room I’ll admit that. Outside I’d have to deny it.”
“How?”
“A man on your house in Lambertville. Raided your mailbox every morning. Look, we had to.”
My house in Lambertville is on a dirt road that serves half a dozen farms. It was my habit to go to the post office only to buy stamps; I mailed everything from my own mailbox, where the rural-route carrier picked it up.