Rogers turned to Stone.
“All I can do is ask you to trust me,” Rogers said. “That may sound unprofessional. But I know this case, and I know what will work with this agent, and I hope you’ll trust my judgment.”
Stone, who had been listening silently to the two younger men, eventually spoke up.
“This isn’t an easy case,” the division chief said. “We all have an enormous regard for Tom’s work, and we also have a pressing need for the intelligence he can provide about the Palestinians. But our need isn’t so pressing that it makes sense for us to launch an insecure operation.”
Marsh nodded.
“I want to take a day or so to consider the issues that we have discussed and talk to a few people who are wiser than I am,” concluded Stone. “I’ll let you know my decision as quickly as possible.”
The meeting ended.
Stone asked Rogers to stay behind a moment.
As Marsh walked out of the conference room, he could hear the division chief inviting Rogers to join him for dinner that night at his club.
Dinner with Stone was a ritual, born of his early days in the officers’ mess of the prewar Army, nurtured in London during the war, sustained in the years since then at dinner meetings around the world with agents, case officers, and friends. Stone regarded dinner as a play in three acts and liked each detail of the production-each dish, drink, and morsel of conversation-to be precisely right.
Rogers arrived at the Athenian Club promptly at seven-thirty. It was a brick building in downtown Washington, squat and solid like a broad-beamed Victorian banker.
“Can I help you?” said the doorman, discreetly stopping Rogers at the foyer. The doorman had memorized several thousand faces. He knew everyone who was a member. More important, he knew everyone who was not, and each person in this latter category was greeted with the same polite but firm query: “Can I help you?” The doorman in this case helped Rogers to the lobby, where Stone was seated in a leather chair by the fire, reading a newspaper.
Stone rose and escorted his guest up a grand stairway to the drawing room on the second floor, where another fire was blazing and two big leather chairs awaited them. An old black waiter in a white coat arrived and took their drink orders.
“A dry gin martini,” said Stone.
Rogers, swept along by the tide of the encounter, ordered the same. They made small talk for forty-five minutes, talking about their respective families, current events, low-level agency gossip.
A waiter brought menus and both men ordered steaks. Stone selected a bottle of Bordeaux from the wine list. At eight-fifteen exactly, the older man rose from his chair and led his guest to the fourth-floor dining room, past acres of starched white linen, to a corner table. Dinner conversation was slightly more focused, touching on events in the Middle East, life in the Beirut station, the agency’s ups and downs.
“How is my old friend Frank Hoffman?” asked Stone after the two had eaten their steaks and drunk most of the wine.
“I didn’t know you were friends,” said Rogers. He found such a friendship hard to imagine.
“Yes indeed,” said Stone. “Frank saved me once from making a very bad mistake in Europe. I am still grateful to him.”
“What was the mistake?” asked Rogers.
“The details are a little fuzzy now,” said Stone. Like many CIA officers, he had a selective memory. He could recall with precision the specific facts that were required to deal with the problem at hand, and forget everything else.
“Tell me,” pressed Rogers. “I’d like to know.”
“We were in Germany together after the war,” explained Stone. “Frank was my security man. He had switched over not long before to CIA from the FBI.”
“So he really was in the FBI.”
“Oh yes. Didn’t you know? That’s why he makes such a point of wearing a gun.”
“He doesn’t talk much about his past, at least not to me,” said Rogers. “What happened in Germany?”
“We were trying to reconstruct some of the Abwehr networks in Eastern Europe. The Germans had had an especially good fellow in Prague. We managed to get him to the West for a chat. Hoffman and I spent an evening with him.
“I came away very impressed. He was an immensely clever man, who had wide contacts and appeared to despise the Russians. He seemed like a good bet to me. But Hoffman didn’t like him.”
“Why?”
“He wouldn’t really say at first. He just kept repeating that the agent didn’t smell right. Finally he explained that he thought the Czech agent was unreliable because he was unpatriotic. Any Czech who had worked for the Nazis was a dubious character, Hoffman claimed. If he had betrayed his own people once, to work for the Germans, then he could just as easily betray us. I disagreed. I thought we could use him for our purposes.”
“Who was right?”
“Hoffman, of course. The Czech was a bad apple. Because of Frank’s concern, we didn’t use him for any sensitive operations. But we kept him on the payroll for a year or so, until we learned from a KGB defector who had served in Prague that this same Czech had made a pass at them. We were very lucky. The whole thing could have been disastrous. Hoffman refused to take any credit. He said it had just been a lucky guess.”
Rogers pondered the story and deliberated a moment before asking his question.
“What would happen today?” Rogers asked cautiously.
“What do you mean?” queried Stone.
“What would happen today if someone objected to an operation because it didn’t smell right?”
“Ahhhh,” said Stone. “A good question. In all probability he would be called home immediately, for consultations.”
Rogers wasn’t sure whether Stone was joking.
“Times have changed,” said Stone. “The small and inexperienced organization that Hoffman and I joined doesn’t really exist anymore. It has been replaced by a bureaucracy, quite a large one, with its own rules and rhythms. In the old days it was possible to trust one’s instincts and hunches, because we didn’t really have anything else to go on. There was no body of cases and experience to draw on. Today there is.
“The sad part,” continued Stone, “is that it doesn’t do any good to regret the changes. It’s like regretting the passing of time. As organizations grow, they change in character. They develop their own systems and routines. A bureaucratic culture emerges, with rewards for people who play by the rules and punishments for those who don’t.”
“Unfortunate,” said Rogers.
“Unfortunate, but inevitable. This is the life cycle of a bureaucracy. Supple in youth. Rigid in middle age. Weak and decaying in old age. Organizations are like any other sort of animal. Their strongest instinct is to survive and reproduce themselves. It may be that the problems are greater in a secret organization like ours, where the bureaucratic culture is sealed off from the outside. But they aren’t fundamentally different.”
“What do you suggest?” asked Rogers.
“Take risks. Lean against the wind,” said Stone. “Listen to correct advice and ignore incorrect advice.”
“How do you know the difference?”
“Let us order dessert, shall we?” said Stone.
When the dessert dishes had been cleared, Stone finally got down to business. He led Rogers to a small private room on the third floor, ordered two brandies from the waiter, and closed the door. He offered Rogers a cigar-a Cohiba, Castro’s brand, smuggled from Cuba-and lit one for himself. It was a signal that the serious part of the evening was about to begin.
“I regard you as the ablest case officer we have in the Middle East at present,” Stone began warmly. “I also regard you as a kindred spirit and an example of what is best in our business. For these reasons, I very much want you to succeed in your current operation.
“The course of action you are proposing is unorthodox, as our friend Mr. Marsh took such pains to demonstrate this morning.”
Stone raised his eyebrow slightly when he mentioned the name, as if to say that he, too, found his operations officer a bit of an ass.