Ben Bradlee had not been the only man in Philadelphia who had done a double take the first time he encountered the new head of Station of the British Secret Intelligence Service — MI6 — mingling in diplomatic circles in the halls of the nation’s temporary capital. However, the woman who now styled herself Rachel Piotrowska was no kind of skeleton in his personal or professional cupboard.
The last time she had been in town — Washington DC before the war — she had been Hannah Ziegler, a German émigré courtesan, way out of his class. She had had burning red hair then, and a reputation for predatory conquests. Practically everybody had suspected that she was spying for somebody; but nobody had known for whom and she had had so many powerful friends and patrons that nobody had been brave enough to ask too many questions.
“Rachel?” Bradlee inquired, risking a smile.
The woman was dressed like an American housewife, her frock straight off the peg at Macy’s or some other big store and her makeup was applied with the garish liberality that seemed in vogue with matronly women approaching a certain age. It was as if she wanted to give every appearance of being mutton dressed up as lamb.
They shook hands.
“Nobody knows I’m here,” she said. “I was born Rachel Angelica Piotrowska in Lodz,” she added. “In nineteen twenty-eight, for what it is worth.”
“Okay… ”
“And before you ask,” she went on pleasantly, her voice wryly accented, “I am not here to implicate you in anything underhand.”
Ben Bradlee took this with a pinch of salt.
The woman’s Newsweek file contained a picture of her on the arm of the Aga Khan, and gossip that she had once been the mistress of the late Shah of Iran. The last time she was in the US she had been the dazzling star of Washington high society for six months in 1961 before like a supernova suddenly winking out, she had disappeared without trace. And now she was back; the one acknowledged spy on the staff of the British Embassy in Philadelphia.
“No, really,” Rachel assured him. “Is it true that the Washington Post has lined you up as its next managing editor, Ben?”
How could she know that?
Ben Bradlee was already starting to think this meeting was a big mistake.
The woman’s eyes roved along the river bank, flicked past the man’s shoulder.
“Yes. I’ve been talking to the Post,” he conceded.
“I think it would be just up your street,” Rachel decided. “Shall we walk?”
Harrisburg had once been the most heavily industrialized — and therefore, polluted — town in the north east; but that was long ago and in the intervening decades nature had reclaimed the abandoned mills and factories, and garden suburbs had spread slowly up into the hills and down almost to the banks of the Susquehanna. Shady trees and idyllic paths lined the sides of the great river which meandered through the old town. That same river which now ran clean had been black with the spoil and effluent of industry only fifty years ago. Harrisburg’s industry had moved north to Pittsburgh and Ohio where it was free to expand, spread its wings and blight new landscapes.
“I didn’t agree to this meeting to talk about me,” Ben Bradlee reminded the woman.
“No,” she agreed, “you agreed to it because it was too good an opportunity to miss and the people at the Post haven’t actually offered you the managing editor job yet, Ben.”
Bradlee did not rise to the bait.
“Do you know what a ‘Head of Station’ like me actually does in a friendly country?” The woman asked.
“Spy?”
“No, we leave that sort of thing to others. There’s a Naval, an RAF and a Military attaché at the Embassy; gathering intelligence is their jobs. My job is to talk to all the people Lord Franks, our Ambassador, cannot speak to. Nobody at the Embassy would dream of actually ‘spying’ on you.”
Ben Bradlee grunted an uneasy laugh.
“Okay. What were you doing here in sixty-one?” He countered, he hoped with a lightness of touch.
“Perhaps, I wasn’t working for the British in those days, Ben,” the woman replied enigmatically.
Washington during the first months of the Kennedy Administration was a party city; Camelot had come to town and overnight DC was no longer the drab, predictable place it had been for the eight long years of the Eisenhower Presidency. In retrospect Bradlee had been swept along by the euphoria like everybody else.
Ben Bradlee’s recent estrangement from the Kennedy circle was common knowledge in Philadelphia. He and Jack Kennedy had been close friends for many years and the cooling of relations between them had coincided with his former contacts within the US intelligence community cold-shouldering the Newsweek Bureau Chief.
“What goes around comes around,” Rachel observed.
To a passerby the couple might be mistaken for a husband and wife strolling on a sunny morning, perhaps on the way to a leisurely lunch, presumably conversing about the practical minutiae of their shared lives.
Privately, Bradlee was asking himself how much the woman knew about his past involvement with the CIA and whether it was about to become a problem. In the early 1950s at the time his friendship with the future President was first blooming, Bradlee was on the staff of the US Information Educational Exchange — the USIE, later known as USIA controlled by the Voice of America — responsible for producing films, speeches, news items, research papers, magazine articles and propaganda materials for the Central Intelligence Agency. Bradlee had worked with the CIA in Europe to ‘spin’ the coverage of the trial and subsequent execution of the spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953. In the mid-1950s Bradlee was not only close to the then Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy, but personally close to James Jesus Angleton. Bradlee’s second wife, Antoinette Pinchot, whom he had married in 1957 was a confidante of Angleton’s wife, Cicely d'Autremont; and the sister of Mary Pinchot Meyer whose husband, Cord Meyer was heavily involved in Operation Mockingbird, a major CIA campaign to subvert and influence the media…
“Is your wife’s sister still one of the President’s mistresses?” Rachel inquired idly. From what she had heard the playboy who had blown up the World in October 1962 had been more or less unmanned by the experience. “Or has Jack passed her on to his little brother?”
Bradlee halted in mid-stride.
He was surprised to be met by a seraphic smile.
“That’s better,” the woman cooed. “I wasn’t sure I had your full and undivided attention.”
“What do you want?”
“Cards on the table?”
“Yes.”
“I want to know if I can trust you, Ben.”
That was ridiculous; they could never trust each other!
“Really?” He retorted with less civility than he meant.
“See, we understand each other perfectly,” Rachel concluded. “Jack Kennedy and Prime Minister Thatcher came to ‘an understanding’ at Hyannis Port a little over a week ago. It was a very one-sided ‘understanding’ but one that we, the British were prepared to go along with. Mrs Thatcher, from what I can understand, was of the view that an agreement which avoided armed conflict between our two countries was a thing worth ‘taking home’. In lieu of reparations a new Marshall Plan, the Fulbright Plan, was agreed and in return we, as an earnest of our good intentions, agreed to share intelligence again with the US, and to do nothing to undermine JFK’s re-election campaign. Incidentally, there are a lot of things we can do to torpedo JFK. If we wanted to, that is. That was probably why he signed up to the Fulbright Plan. The problem is that here we are, not a fortnight later, and the President, or if not the President, then all his men, are communicating their intention to renege on every single one of the undertakings Mrs Thatcher took home from Cape Cod.”