High Jinx Read online

  He would think about that; and so he resumed his walk, wandering distractedly past the commandos’ barracks, past the playing field and the mess, past the armoury. Having come to the boundary of the compound he could go no further aimlessly, and so he followed the large barbed-wire fence in a lazy counterclockwise direction back towards his own quarters, for one final attempt at what would now be time for a mere catnap before reveille.

  It was windy, and the grey British cold fingered his neck, and so he fastened the top button of his coat and thrust his hands in his pockets and asked himself—for the first time, oddly—whether he was glad or sorry that he had not been asked to participate in Operation Tirana itself.

  If it worked, Tirana would be a most emancipating spiritual event, with infinite strategic implications for the Cold War: a fitting celebration of the first anniversary of Stalin’s death, if indeed it should happen that the commandos would set out on March 5. And those who participated in it? Why, they would qualify for King Henry’s most celebrated gallery of the gallants (‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers …’). If it didn’t work, they would perhaps qualify as the century’s Charge of the Light Brigade—except for the important distinction that the overseers of this operation were not lunatics, like the Earl of Cardigan. Moreover, when he arrived at Camp Cromwell three weeks ago his spirits had been low, after those long months in Germany. Would he have been revived by joining this expedition?

  Would he, if asked, have volunteered? He could not give himself an answer that seemed absolutely reliable.

  He was back now by the radio shed, and looked over at the window. The light he had seen was off. He approached the window. No sound. The telegrapher’s roll had stopped. Well. Probably something Sergeant Esperanto had forgotten to do the night before and was catching up on.

  Like what?

  Something. Who knows.

  But the question remained on his mind when, back in bed, he finally drifted off to sleep.

  The following day, at breakfast, Henry and his squad leaders were informed by Colonel Mac: ‘Today is D-Day.’

  2

  It was just after dark when the three buses arrived for the forty-one men and their equipment. They were ready, in camouflage gear, their faces and wrists blackened. ‘You won’t need this’—Joe Louis took the charcoal from Isaac Abraham and tossed it under the barracks. He put his huge arm around the younger man’s shoulder and, their heads tilted slightly toward each other as if they were off to the ballroom to dance cheek to cheek, the brothers walked to the waiting bus, the young gladiator and his older trainer escorting him to the arena.

  They had all mounted the buses except for Henry, who stood for a few moments alongside the lead vehicle talking with Colonel Mac and Joe Louis. Henry signalled to Blackford to join them. Henry was at once calm and discernibly excited: Blackford knew the feeling. It had come to him on all three of his missions in France ten years ago, before mounting his fighter plane on the way to what could always prove the terminal engagement.

  The colonel and the major now extended their hands and Henry took them, his cigarette between his lips, his beret tilted over his abundant black hair. He reached out then for Blackford’s hand and gripped it tightly, his brown squinty eyes alive with excitement. He turned and got into the bus. The convoy moved out of the gate slowly, as to a funeral, and headed the thirty miles to the military airfield where the C-54 transport was waiting for them.

  It had previously been disclosed to the eighteen-man training staff at Cromwell that no one would be permitted to leave the compound until the all-clear signal was given. Of the cadre, all but the two cooks and four orderlies knew the nature of the mission for which they had been training the Special Platoon. Knew, then, that if Operation Tirana succeeded, word would come quickly of its success: there could hardly be anything enduringly secret about a coup d’état in a communist country effected by democratic forces. If word did not come, then the mission had failed. In that event it would be a matter of days, perhaps weeks, before they would learn what had happened, the extent of the failure. Knew, concretely, how many of the commandos had escaped, how many had died.

  ‘Figure twenty-four hours if the news is overwhelmingly good. No news in forty-eight hours, the mission has failed. It’s that simple,’ Colonel Mac had said as the buses pulled out.

  It had been difficult to sleep that night. The officers, in their section of the bar, speculated endlessly on the variables that might affect the exact time of the commandos’ landings. If the planes took off exactly at 2300 as planned, and if the March winds were at the prevailing force and from the prevailing direction—and this the meteorologist had predicted for that night—then they would begin to land at 0322—about five-thirty in the morning, Albanian local time.

  ‘But hell, Colonel, they’re not going to leave at 2300. It will be maybe 2315, who the hell knows?’ the adjutant said.

  ‘Who the hell knows?’ Colonel Mac repeated. And then, forcing a change in his portentous manner, he turned to his second in command. ‘Joe Louis. You got any voodoo ancestors? Any witch doctors back there? If so, ask them.’

  The major closed his eyes and with exaggerated introspection bowed his large head slightly. Then lifted it and, with a voice of great gravity, said, ‘The first commando will reach the ground outside Tirana at exactly 0329.

  ‘Now my voodoo ancestor wants to be paid for that piece of information. That will cost you a rum, Colonel Mac.’

  ‘Make that a double rum,’ the colonel grinned.

  And so it had gone until, tacitly acknowledging their helpless remoteness from the scene—there was nothing left to do, save to pray—they gradually disbanded. And went to bed, if not to sleep.

  If the plan had worked from the first with optimal success, the triumphant radio declaration would have flashed out of Tirana at 1200 local time, 1100 British time.

  Sergeant Esperanto stood by the shortwave set in the radio shed. But at the officers’ club there was also a good strong radio. ‘If they beam out of Tirana, the BBC will pick it up in ten seconds,’ Colonel Mac had said, twiddling with the dial to get the best signal. ‘We’ll get it right here.’

  And that had been the longest afternoon.

  At five Blackford could stand it no longer and went out for a solitary walk, again passing the radio shed where, through the glass panel door at the entrance, he could see into the room where the light had come from two nights earlier. Sergeant Esperanto was sitting at his desk, the shortwave receiver on; Blackford could hear muffled voices and even the sound of static. He resumed his walk.

  That night at the officers’ mess, and later at their club, conversation was forced, and mostly the men were silent, playing cards and drinking beer. At one point Joe Louis spoke.

  ‘Remember, they could be regrouping; any number of things could, actually, have just slowed them down.’ No one commented. If Colonel Mac had been correct in his projections then the mission had—failed.

  The following morning after breakfast the physical training director, Master Sergeant ‘Newt,’ announced in an imperious voice that there would be a handball game at 1100 for ‘all’ the enlisted men, a game at 1400 for ‘all’ the officers. The winning enlisted team would play the winning officers’ team at a Grand Encounter at 1600. The losers would stand the winners drinks after dinner, ‘all they bloody well can drink!’

  It was a welcome diversion.

  Blackford didn’t know when the idea had come to him, but without hesitation—after observing from his window in his quarters Sergeant Esperanto lope off to the court at five minutes before eleven—he walked out and across the yard to the radio shed.

  He entered it, and went through the open door to the room whence the light had shone.

  He did not know what to look for, but instinctively he opened the drawers of the sergeant’s desk. He knew something of radios, and discovered nothing in the logs of the past few days to arouse his attention. But he did note that although the exact time of al
l transmissions was carefully noted, there was no entry in the logbook for the early morning hours of two days ago. Or indeed—he flipped the pages back—any record of any transmission at any time later than ten at night, or earlier than eight in the morning.

  He spotted the sergeant’s jacket, hanging on a hook on the door, and reached into its pockets. From one he drew out a small cardboard-bound telephone directory. He flipped through it: there were perhaps thirty numbers. He studied them alphabetically. Adams, J … POR 4377. He looked at each entry, noting nothing more than that most of them were London numbers. His eyes paused over ‘Claus, R … KEN 21881.’

  Why five digits?

  He examined the other numbers, all of them the conventional British three letters followed by four digits.

  He took a leaf from the scratch pad on the desk and wrote down, ‘Claus, R KEN 21881,’ put the paper in his pocket, and walked out.

  Three days later Colonel Mac left a handwritten notice on the bulletin board.

  ‘The gates of the compound will be open at 0700. The staff is at liberty. Make the usual arrangements.’ He scrawled out his name. And then he added at the bottom of the page, ‘R.I.P.’

  3

  It was the Albanian affair that finally decided the question for Rufus. He was not by temperament an advocate, but he had to make himself exactly that, an advocate of radical intervention in London.

  The Agency had only just begun its postmortem. It would take months and months—these investigations always took months and months—to assemble all the data. And under the circumstances surrounding Operation Tirana, some of the data would never be assembled. What was now—ahead of any such investigation—gruesomely plain was this: there were five different sites where the British-American-Albanian team landed. At every one of those sites, ‘they’ had been there. Ready and waiting. Not only that, they had evidently known at which of the five sites Agent One had been scheduled to land. Because Agent One, unlike the others, hadn’t been executed right away. The deadly cool Albanian military, no doubt under specific supervision of the KGB, had taken their time in dealing with Agent One. Perhaps a week, or even two—it was a full month before The Album, as they now uniformly referred to it, had come in (‘one of the best examples of exhibitionistic sadism I’ve ever seen,’ the Director had muttered on closing its gory covers). The second to last photograph in that album had shown Agent One seated on a chair, an Albanian newspaper in his hands, the glaring eight-column headline clearly visible. His upper body and head showed bruises and lacerations. His chest was bound by a strap to the back of the chair, but his arms were obviously under his own control as he held up the newspaper dated March 20, 1954.

  That was the first of the two final photographs in The Album.

  The second picture, the final picture, showed a small hole through the newspaper, which had dipped down from eye level toward the floor. Agent One was slumped forward, a large bullet wound on his forehead. It had been the moment of his execution.

  The balance of The Album was devoted to full-face photographs of forty men. Thirty of them were hanging from a gibbet. The others had been shot, some in the head, some in the chest. The Albanian asset, a native of Tirana, had finally been heard from—a full twenty-six days after D-Day. His radio message was remarkably languid in rhythm, given what he had to communicate and the hazardous circumstances under which the transmitter must have operated. The message, delivered in near-pastoral tones, was that Operation Tirana had been ‘a great disappointment,’ that ‘as far as your contact can establish,’ all forty-one of the operation’s agents that had parachuted into the five points about the city had been ‘awaited by the indigenous military’ which had ‘banded them together.’ Some had been shot on being captured. The balance had been driven to the People’s Jail and ‘there, one at a time, they were hanged on the gallows in the courtyard.’

  ‘Who is this character we got out there?’ the Deputy had growled. ‘Sounds like he was covering a fucking sports event—sorry about that,’ he muttered. (People did not use obscenities around Rufus.)

  The Album, unadorned in the brown-paper wrapping posted in London, had been addressed to the U.S. Ambassador by name. His deputy had opened the package, alone in his office, and, examining it, had no idea what it was all about. He summoned an aide from the Eastern European division and asked if he was familiar with the language in which the headlines were written.

  Yes. ‘It is Albanian.’

  ‘What does the headline say?’

  ‘It says, “COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY PLOT FOILED/INVADERS AND TRAITORS FOUND, EXECUTED.”’

  The deputy knew nothing about the operation the epitaph of which had been sent to him in this cheap leather album. He rose and went to the ambassador’s office—Ambassador Joseph Abercrombie Little, a portly man of late middle age. It had once been written in the Hershey (Pa.) Chronicle that J. A. Little knew more about the manufacture of chocolates than any single other living being outside Switzerland. He had been made ambassador in recognition of his devotion to the Republican ideal of worldwide nourishment. He was reluctant, on surveying The Album, to betray ignorance similar to his deputy’s of what it was all about. He turned then to his deputy and told him, in knowing accents, that he would discuss the entire matter (‘It is deeply confidential, Reginald’) with the CIA station head, Anthony Trust, whom he summoned by leaning over and depressing the switch that put him in telephonic contact with his secretary. He nodded to the DCM, who knew the meaning of that particular nod and excused himself from the room.

  Anthony Trust—tall, slim, young, dark, sharp-eyed, well groomed, almost playfully cheerful in expression—came in. Wordlessly the ambassador handed him The Album.

  ‘What do you make of this, Anthony?’

  Trust opened The Album. After turning a few pages, the cheer drained from his face. He sat down and continued, slowly, to turn the pages. He dwelled at some length on the final two pages. The ambassador waited impatiently.

  ‘Sir, who else knows about this?’

  ‘Only Reginald. Oh yes—and the Eastern language specialist, What’shisname.’

  ‘You will need’—Trust’s demeanor had evolved, inoffensively, to that of the senior, addressing a subordinate—‘to instruct them most forcefully not to mention to anyone what they have seen.’

  ‘Are you familiar with the … operation?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, sir.’

  ‘What do you propose to do with’—Joseph Abercrombie Little pointed to The Album—‘that?’

  ‘I shall need to cable Washington from the Code Room.’

  ‘Well, go ahead. And,’ the ambassador turned his head down as if to survey other, perhaps more urgent matters appealing on his desk for his attention, ‘if you have an opportunity to do so, you might suggest to your superiors in Washington that I am more useful as ambassador if I have some idea of what is going on around here.’

  Anthony Trust said nothing, forced out a routine smile, and walked out.

  It was six in the morning in Washington when the Director took Trust’s call. He had specified that any development concerning Operation Tirana was to be reported directly to him. When, on D-Day plus 1, nothing had come in, the gloom among the officials who had planned it displaced any other concern. The Director, during those agonising first few days of total silence, very nearly gave up even attempting to concentrate on anything else. He had even had to pinch himself to listen to a discursive soliloquy by the President of the United States in the Oval Office on the subject of the communist penetration of Guatemala. What was difficult in the Oval Office proved very nearly impossible when talking with his brother, the Secretary of State, who desired from the Director ‘input,’ as they were then beginning to call it, for a speech he was preparing to deliver to the Council on Foreign Relations on the subject of ‘The United States and Spain: A Fresh Appraisal.’ And, following those first few days … still nothing. Nothing, nothing at all, about an operation involving forty-one men. Until now. The call from L
ondon. The report on The Album.

  The Director reached his office before seven. The three designated officials he had had summoned were there waiting for him.

  Rufus spoke. ‘The very first question, Allen, is: Do we show The Album to the Brits right away or do we bring it over and examine it ourselves first?’

  ‘Attwood’—the reference was to the head of the British MI5—‘already knows about the transmission from our asset. All that The Album does it add concrete proof that what we suspected turned out to be so. Gruesomely so. We shall have to let him know—let him examine The Album—right away.’

  ‘Yes of course. You’re quite right.’ It was unusual for Rufus—the most experienced, the least impulsive man the Director had ever known, in public life or private—to pose a question as involving serious alternatives and then instantly to acquiesce in the implication that it was a silly question to begin with. The Director made a mental note to probe the matter (what did Rufus have in mind in questioning whether the British should be shown The Album?) when the two were alone.

  And so it was resolved. Trust would take The Album to Attwood at MI5, have it copied, and then fly directly, whether on commercial or military aircraft, to Washington with the original.

  ‘I can’t pretend I am looking forward to examining the album described by Trust,’ Allen Dulles said, rising. ‘I’m going to have a little breakfast.’ He nodded at his colleagues, motioning to Rufus to stay as the other two left. ‘Sweet roll with your coffee?’ Rufus allowed his eyes to skim his own paunch, resolved that it was not inordinate in a man sixty years old, and nodded. The Director came right to the point.

  ‘You’ve got something heavy on your mind, Rufus.’

  ‘We all do, Allen.’ Rufus was appropriately dressed for someone who had something heavy on his mind. But then he was always dressed as if on his way to a funeral. Or, for that matter, to a wedding: dark three-piece suit, grey tie, white shirt. Somehow it was right for him, and in any event, no one ever burlesqued Rufus. He had hair only above the ears and at the back of his head. His brown eyes were either sound asleep (that was when Rufus was given over to analysis, parting company with his surroundings as though hermetically insulated from them) or fiercely active, concentrating on what was being said or on what he was saying; analysing, dissecting, probing.