Marlene assented immediately. It took Karp longer. At last, he nodded his head, feeling miserable, as his urge to know triumphed over whatever trace of responsibility to the House committee remained in him.
"Well, then," Blaine began, "you might trace my involvement way back to the year 1947. The CIA was a new agency, full of piss and vinegar. It was formed, you'll recall, in the wake of the worst intelligence catastrophe in U.S. history, the penetration of the Manhattan Project by Soviet agents. That the Soviets could, with relative ease, break into the most secret project of all, was on everyone's mind. Counterintelligence on domestic soil was supposed to be the province of the FBI, but we considered them a bunch of clowns, chasing parlor pinks and harmless socialists under the command of a megalomanic fraud. Putting J. Edgar Hoover up against Lavrenty Beria and his men-it was preposterous! And, of course, we feared even worse penetrations. What if they had a mole in the heart of our political process itself? Such a person, in public office, could do far worse damage than a mere cipher clerk or some such, the sort of people the FBI seemed competent to tackle. So we set up an… informal study group, let's say, to discuss the issue. I was a member, and my task was to design a program for the elimination by extreme measures of a prominent American politician known to be in the service of the Soviets: assassination, to be blunt. This was all theoretical, mind; we were just playing safe.
"I therefore studied assassinations with great vigor, and came to the conclusion that in the domestic context, there were only three major approaches: one, the feigned accident; two, the sacrificial attentat at close range; and three, the attack at long range, with the assassin escaping. There are problems with all of these. As I'm sure you know, with recent advances in forensic techniques, it is nearly impossible to successfully feign an accident, especially if the victim is important enough to warrant an exhaustive investigation. And the FBI, despite their shortcomings in other areas, are superb in this narrow field. For the sacrificial attack, one needs a madman. Madmen are easy to come by, but difficult to point at the desired target. We tried some… experiments. They were unsuccessful, both with natural and induced mania. The third method has many advantages, both in terms of control, and as a way of sending a message to our adversaries that we are onto their plot. But it shares the disadvantage of the first method. It is hard to get away with it. As I pondered this problem, it occurred to me that a melding, so to speak, of the second two methods might offer a solution. That is, if one committed the actual assassination with a trained professional, and was afterward able to blame it on a madman, one might have the best of both. The work would be efficiently done, and the hue and cry and the subsequent investigation would be truncated by the existence of a plausible dupe. I wrote a paper on this, which was quite well received. That was the origin of PXK. It was quite irregular and so secret that it did not bear a standard code name. As far as the CIA proper is concerned, no such project ever existed.
"To understand the next phase, you have to know that every intelligence agency is plagued by volunteers-individuals who wish to become spies. Virtually all of them are useless for real intelligence work, unstable, maniacal, lazy, or criminal types for the most part, but some of them can be used as pigeons, that is, as false members of a spy network who can distract the attention of counterintelligence operatives, and can be betrayed to them with misleading or damaging information in their heads. Lists are kept of such potential pigeons at foreign CIA stations; I began to keep such a list of American citizens for PXK."
"Oswald," said Karp.
"Indeed, Oswald was precisely the type, but of course, I was long gone from the CIA by the time Oswald entered its purview, during his time as a marine in Japan, in 1958. Nevertheless, PXK was still alive. Lists were still maintained, and a marine spouting Marxist propaganda at a top-secret radar base could not have escaped the attention of those who maintained them. Bureaucracy, even invisible bureaucracy, has considerable inertia. The man you know as Maurice Bishop found Oswald's name and looked him up in Texas in 1962, and cultivated him, using some of our old assets in the White Russian community."
"Okay, we know you knew Bishop from way back," Marlene said. "How did he suddenly surface with reference to Oswald and PXK?"
"Oh, Bishop was quite ready to kill Kennedy from the moment the Bay of Pigs invasion was betrayed. He simply didn't know how to carry it off. He came to me and I told him about the PXK plan and how to find out who was on the current list. There were several potential candidates, but Oswald was by far the best: the infantile Marxism, the megalomania, the propensity for violence, the Soviet defection, even the family link to organized crime. He was perfect. The final joy was when Bishop met Oswald and realized that the man bore a close resemblance to… I believe you know him as William Caballo. It was obvious that we had the germ of a perfect PXK operation.
"The next step was to get Oswald deep into the Cuban exile orbit. He was told that he was being prepared to assassinate Fidel Castro, then we switched him to Kennedy. In fact, he did not care at all whom he was going to shoot. He was in it for the thrill. At last he was being taken seriously by important people and embarking on large undertakings. He was told, of course, to maintain his leftist connections, which he did to the extent he was capable of performing any assigned task. The story Bishop gave him was that as a good leftist, it would be easy for him to get close to Castro, as if even the most incompetent Communist counterintelligence apparat would have taken more than three minutes to see through him. And the Cubans, as poor Bishop learned, are far from incompetent.
"Bishop assembled the other members of the team and gave them the operational names by which you know them. A romantic, Bishop, like so many of the people who entered the CIA just after the war. Of course, PXK gave him the chess theme, so I suppose I am responsible for that bit of fun. The assassination was planned and the necessary arrangements were made, and then everything fell apart. A complete failure."
"What!" Marlene and Karp spoke in unison.
"I mean, of course, the first attempt. In Miami, 1961. Oswald had wandered off somewhere, and missed the pickup. Bishop was in a rare state. He wanted to scratch Oswald and start afresh with somebody else, but I dissuaded him. I recall telling him that we would never again find somebody with so many of the characteristics we wanted in a lone, deranged assassin. Except the ability to fire a rifle accurately, of course, which we did not in this case require. I suggested Dallas as the next venue. This was in June of sixty-three, just after the Dallas speech was scheduled."
"But Oswald only got his job in the book depository in October," said Karp.
"That's right. The book depository wasn't part of the original plan. We were exploring ways to work the thing at the airport, or the Trade Mart where he was giving the speech. I had the group up here for a couple of weeks in late August, early September, to work out alternate plans. It was quite professional, with little models of the various buildings and escape routes. Oswald was very impressed. He stayed on for some special training, we called it, in which drinking and willing ladies figured prominently. During that period, Caballo went to Mexico City. We cut Oswald loose on October third, and he went back to Dallas. He wanted money, which we refused to give him. He had to fit into his background we said, he had to get a regular job. He didn't like that much, but we knew that with serious money in his pocket, he might decide to do anything-go to China, or Australia, or God knows what. As I said, an extremely unstable young man. During the next month, of course, Caballo was also in Dallas, being Oswald, shooting his rifle, for example, buying ammunition for it, making himself memorable, as he had on the bus trip and at the Communist embassies in Mexico."