“No, sir,” said the Deputy, stuffing papers into his briefcase. “I think we’ve covered everything. You have all the information we do. Thank you all for coming.”
As the men stood to leave, the old man turned to a colleague and said quietly, “I wonder why.” Then with a smile and a shake of his head he left the room.
Malcolm woke up only when Wendy’s caresses became impossible for even a sick man to ignore. Her hands and mouth moved all over his body, and almost before he knew what was happening she mounted him and again he felt her fluttering warmth turn to fire. Afterwards, she looked at him for a long time, lightly touching his body as if exploring an unseen land. She touched his forehead and frowned.
“Malcolm, do you feel OK?”
Malcolm had no intention of being brave. He shook his head and forced a raspy “No” from his throat. The one word seemed to fuel the hot vise closing around his throat. Talking was out for the day.
“You’re sick!” Wendy grabbed his lower jaw. “Let me see!” she ordered, and forced his mouth open. “My God, it’s red down there!” She let go of Malcolm and started to climb out of bed. “I’m going to call a doctor.”
Malcolm caught her arm. She turned to him with a fearful look, then smiled. “It’s OK. I have a friend whose husband is a doctor. He drives by here every day on his way to a clinic in D.C. I don’t think he’s left yet. If he hasn’t, I’ll ask him to stop by to see my sick friend.” She giggled. “You don’t have to worry. He won’t tell a soul because he’ll think he’s keeping another kind of secret. OK?”
Malcolm looked at her for a second, then let go of her arm and nodded. He didn’t care if the doctor brought Sparrow IV’s friend with him. All he wanted was relief.
The doctor turned out to be a paunchy middle-aged man who spoke little. He poked and prodded Malcolm, took his temperature, and looked down his throat so long Malcolm thought he would throw up. The doctor finally looked up and said, “You’ve got a mild case of strep throat, my boy.” He looked at an anxious Wendy hovering nearby. “Nothing to worry about, really. We’ll fix him up.” Malcolm watched the doctor fiddle with something in his bag. When he turned toward Malcolm there was a hypodermic needle in his hand. “Roll over and pull your shorts down.”
A picture of a limp, cold arm with a tiny puncture flashed through Malcolm’s mind. He froze.
“For Christ’s sake, it won’t hurt that much. It’s only penicillin.”
After giving Malcolm his shot, the doctor turned to Wendy. “Here,” he said, handing her a slip of paper. “Get this filled and see that he takes them. He’ll need at least a day’s rest.” The doctor smiled as he leaned close to Wendy. He whispered, “And Wendy, I do mean total rest.” He laughed all the way to the door. On the porch, he turned to her and slyly said, “Whom do I bill?”
Wendy smiled shyly and handed him twenty dollars. The doctor started to speak, but Wendy cut his protest short. “He can afford it. He — we — really appreciate you coming over.”
“Hmph,” snorted the doctor sarcastically, “he should. I’m late for my coffee break.” He paused to look at her. “You know, he’s the kind of prescription I’ve thought you needed for a long time.” With a wave of his hand he was gone.
By the time Wendy got upstairs, Malcolm was asleep. She quietly left the apartment. She spent the morning shopping with the list Malcolm and she had composed while waiting for the doctor. Besides filling the prescription, she bought Malcolm several pairs of underwear, socks, some shirts and pants, a jacket, and four different paperbacks, since she didn’t know what he liked to read. She carted her bundles home in time to make lunch. She spent a quiet afternoon and evening, occasionally checking on her charge. She smiled all day long.
Supervision of America’s large and sometimes cumbersome intelligence community has classically posed the problem of sed quis custodiet ipsos Custodes: who guards the guardians? In addition to the internal checks existing independently in each agency, the National Security Act of 1947 created the National Security Council, a group whose composition varies with each change of presidential administration. The Council always includes the President and Vice-President and usually includes major cabinet members. The Council’s basic duty is to oversee the activities of the intelligence agencies and to make policy decisions guiding those activities.
But the members of the National Security Council are very busy men with demanding duties besides overseeing a huge intelligence network. Council members by and large do not have the time to devote to intelligence matters, so most decisions about the intelligence community are made by a smaller Council “subcommittee” known as the Special Group. Insiders often refer to the Special Group as the “54/12 Group,” so called because it was created by Secret Order 54/12 early in the Eisenhower years. The 54/12 Group is virtually unknown outside the intelligence community, and even there only a handful of men are aware of its existence.
Composition of the 54/12 Group also varies with each administration. Its membership generally includes the director of the CIA, the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs or his deputy, and the Secretary and Deputy Secretary of Defense. In the Kennedy and early Johnson administrations the presidential representative and key man on the 54/12 Group was McGeorge Bundy. The other members were McCone, McNamara, Roswell Gilpatric (Deputy Secretary of Defense), and U. Alexis Johnson (Deputy Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs).
Overseeing the American intelligence community poses problems for even a small, full-time group of professionals. One is that the overseers must depend on those they oversee for much of the information necessary for regulation. Such a situation is naturally a delicate perplexity.
There is also the problem of fragmented authority. For example, if an American scientist spies on the country while employed by NASA, then defects to Russia and continues his spying but does it from France, which American agency is responsible for his neutralization? The FBI, since he began his activities under their jurisdiction, or the CIA, since he shifted to activities under their purview? With the possibility of bureaucratic jealousies escalating into open rivalry, such questions take on major import.
Shortly after it was formed, the 54/12 Group tried to solve the problems of internal information and fragmented authority. The 54/12 Group established a small special security section, a section with no identity save that of staff for the 54/12 Group. The special section’s duties included liaison work. The head of the special section serves on a board composed of leading staff members from all intelligence agencies. He has the power to arbitrate jurisdictional disputes. The special section also has the responsibility of independently evaluating all the information given to the 54/12 Group by the intelligence community. But most important, the special section is given the power to perform “such necessary security functions as extraordinary circumstances might dictate, subject to Group [the 54/12 Group] regulation.”
To help the special section perform its duties, the 54/12 Group assigned a small staff to the section chief and allowed him to draw on other major security and intelligence groups for needed staff and authority.
The 54/12 Group knows it has created a potential problem. The special section could follow the natural tendency of most government organizations and grow in size and awkwardness, thereby becoming a part of the problem it was created to solve. The special section, small though it is, has tremendous power as well as tremendous potential. A small mistake by the section could be a lever of great magnitude. The 54/12 Group supervises its creation cautiously. They keep a firm check on any bureaucratic growth potentials in the section, they carefully review its activities, keeping the operational work of the section at a bare minimum, and they place only extraordinary men in charge of the section.