In the sixties he got another black mark against him because he was one of Cord Meyer’s people engaged in recruiting for the CIA on U.S. campuses and when these activities were made public the pressure from the liberal wing had truncated several promising careers, Ritter’s among them. He had found himself doing tours of duty in Iceland, Chile and Thailand.
Then in late 1971 he had been recalled to Washington by Evan MacIver, whose protege Ritter had become, when MacIver was promoted to the post of Assistant Deputy Director of Programming.
In the Washington area one out of nine federal employees works for the Central Intelligence Agency. It is funded by vouchered but confidential Class “A” funds audited only within the Agency itself; the budget is hidden within various federal programs including the Defense Department, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and various executive departments. Called the Agency by outsiders and The Firm by insiders, CIA has its headquarters in the midst of four hundred acres of trees near the Memorial Parkway inside the belt Interstate Highway 495 near Langley, Virginia; the building is modern, imposing, suitably enormous (it rivals the Pentagon in size) and shaped rather like a gigantic Louis XVI palace with two vast courtyards and endless interior corridors. A significant part of its square footage is below ground level. It is an enormous satrapy under the director who controls the operations of some two hundred thousand employees who are engaged in espionage, deception, insurgency, dissemination of propaganda, analysis of intelligence, counterintelligence, “black propaganda” (the publication of forged documents to embarrass the enemy), “black documentation” (the preparation of false facts to be fed to enemy agents), and “political action”-the euphemistic term for disintegrating or overthrowing a nation’s government while leaving the appearance that the government collapsed from natural causes. The Programming Division is known informally as the department of dirty tricks and it receives the largest share of CIA’s budget and personnel.
The operations of such an organization are complex because it is not enough merely to attain an objective; in order to succeed, the Agency must also conceal the fact that the objective has been attained. Ideally the Agency should be able to conceal the fact that it has even tried to attain the objective.
Unfortunately these ideals are rarely met in practice.*
Ritter’s explanation-his “spelling it out”-was rambling and anecdotal. In substance what he said was that Evan MacIver had become concerned about me after my affair with a known Mossad agent ripened; that the Mossad connection began to worry the Agency when it became clear I was going to Russia; and that because of these things and the gold, the Agency took a bet on me-so they “ran” me in a sense, with MacIver serving as a sort of Control. (I recalled that lunch in Washington when MacIver had said, “I think you get your nocturnal emissions from dreaming you’ll find that gold of Admiral Kolchak’s.”) Ritter revealed that in November 1972 the Agency had assigned “a warm body, full time” to retrace my steps through the files of the National Archives, to find out what I’d found.
“Also,” Ritter said, “you were pretty specific about what you’d found, in your letters to Mrs. Eisen.”
I stared at him.
He said, “We didn’t get it from her.”
“Then you opened my mail.”
“Inside this room I’ll admit that. Outside I’d have to deny it.”
“How?”
“A man on your house in Lambertville. Raided your mailbox every morning. Look, we had to.”
My house in Lambertville is on a dirt road that serves half a dozen farms. It was my habit to go to the post office only to buy stamps; I mailed everything from my own mailbox, where the rural-route carrier picked it up.
I’d written about some of my discoveries to other friends as well, and to my agent and editor; I presume MacIver’s “warm bodies” prowled those as well.
I said, “Then you took this gold thing seriously.”
“Five hundred tons of raw bullion. How many dollars on the open market? Five billion? Maybe it sounds far-fetched to you, Harry, but we couldn’t afford not to take it seriously. Especially with you bedding down with an Israeli agent.”
I felt a hot suffusion of angry blood in my face and I was tempted to tip the table right over against his ballooning belly.
He must have begun to see cracks in my composure long before that but he hadn’t let on; now he said, keeping most of the sarcasm out of his voice, “You begin to get the picture. We can keep tabs on you. We can read everything you read in the free-world collections. We can even follow you right into the Sebastopol archives. But we can’t see the same stuff they’re letting you see. There’s just no way for us to get to that stuff, not with anybody who’d know what to look for.”
He stabbed a long cigarette at me as though it were a pistol. “But you know what to look for, Harry.”
I didn’t tell him I had destroyed the documents which could put “Paid” to the whole thing; I didn’t tell him much of anything. He was doing the talking. I was too stunned to do much more than absorb his revelations.
He said, “That’s about the size of it. You believe I’m who I say I am?”
“I do now.”
“Then why don’t you work for us?”
“I’m not that hungry.”
“I find that hard to believe, Harry. We know your financial picture. You had to stretch things to come over here at all. You’re going to have to sweat like a coolie when you get home, just to pay your back bills. Now, you can’t touch that treasure and you know it. What are you going to do, carry five hundred tons of gold bricks in a false compartment in the bottom of your suitcase?”
“You don’t really think I came over here to steal five hundred tons of gold?”
“No. But I think you came over here to find it. Now about working for us-there’d be a fat finder’s fee. A real fat one,” he said obliviously. “We’ll get you a Panama bankbook-Panama banks ask even fewer questions than Swiss ones.”
“You’d be buying a pig in a poke. I haven’t got any gold.”
“You can’t afford to stick to that line, Harry. It’s inoperative. The Organs* knows you talked to Bukov. They’re just biding their time, waiting until they get you pinned like a butterfly on a board where you can’t even keep flapping your wings. They mean to cancel your ticket, Harry, and here you’re trying to climb a greasy pole all by yourself. You’re just hastening toward doom, you know, and I can assure you you’ll catch something you weren’t chasing.”
“You mix a mean metaphor.”
“Sooner or later you’ll tell me where it is.”
“Sooner or later you’ll tell me why I should know where it is.”
“Because if you hadn’t found it,” he purred, “you wouldn’t deny you were looking for it.” And he beamed at me in triumph.
I am not expert at thinking on my feet. I do my best work at a typewriter when there’s time to reflect and to compose and to polish. This is one reason why I never would have made the grade as one of Fitzpatrick’s favored round-table wits.
What I said, with literal truth, was, “I haven’t found an ounce of gold, let alone five hundred tons of it. But let’s assume I did find it. What then?”
“Then you tell us where it is and you’re off the hook.”
“What do you mean off the hook?”
“Harry, at this moment in time you’re the only human being alive who’s had access to the records on both sides of the Iron Curtain.”
“So?”
“You’re the only human being alive who’s in a position to find that gold.”
“Suppose I couldn’t find any records over here to support my investigation.”
“You’d have said so a long time ago.”