“What do you think I’ve been trying to tell you all afternoon?”
“It’s a little late to ask me to believe it now,” he said, “but let’s get back to the original question-what happens now.…”
He was right. If I’d opened the conversation by admitting I’d been looking for the gold, but adding that I hadn’t been able to find it, he might have believed me. As it was I’d put my foot in it with too many palpably false denials.
“We’re onto you,” he went on, “and I rely on your own knowledge of the intelligence apparatus to tell you what happens next-or if not next, at least soon. How long does a secret stay secret, Harry?”
“Don’t play cat and mouse. I’m tired of it.”
“We have people in The Organs. Not higher-ups, but people. Double agents. That goes without saying, right?”
“Go on.”
“From extrinsic evidence”-he pronounced the phrase with a precise Germanic inflection that made it sinister-“we can assume they have people on our side. Once in a while, you know-a piece of fact gets into their hands that they couldn’t have obtained if they didn’t have double agents in our gang. I mean, a couple of hundred thousand employees, Harry, I don’t care what kind of security clearance you run, you’re bound to turn up a few rotten apples, aren’t you?”
“In other words if the CIA thinks I’ve found five hundred tons of gold, then it won’t be long before the KGB will think it too.”
“That’s the size of it.”
“You’re saying if I don’t play ball with you, you’ll turn it over to the KGB.”
“That’s unfair.”
“The hell it is. If the gold exists at all it’s in Russia. There’s no way for you to touch it anyway. If you knew where it was, you could only use that knowledge as a bargaining point. Trade it to the Russians for whatever you happen to need from them this month. So that’s the threat, isn’t it? — either I find the gold for you or you trade me to the KGB and let them get it out of me. That way your hands stay clean.”
He brooded at me; I said, “It doesn’t matter to you. You’ll trade them the gold or Harris Bristow, whichever’s easier. That’s what we’re really talking about, isn’t it?”
“You’ve got a low opinion of your country.”
“The CIA isn’t my country.”
“Is Nicole Eisen your country, then?”
“If I had that information do you really think I’d give it to the Israelis?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time a citizen betrayed his country for the love of a woman.”
“It’s not America’s gold,” I said. “Whose country would I be betraying?”
He was shaking his head in feigned exasperation. “You’ve got a hole in your argument. What makes you think the only thing we could do with that gold would be to turn it over to the Russians?”
“I suppose you’d just send in a fleet of trucks under the cultural exchange program and cart it off to Washington?”
Ritter said, “Well there might be ways. Didn’t the Germans almost succeed? If you forge proper-looking papers you can get away with all sorts of things. If we did it right and did it fast enough they wouldn’t even get curious until it was gone. Then all they’d find out is they should have got curious a lot earlier.”
“Is that what MacIver thinks? You people are incredible.”
“Just tell us where to look, Harry.”
“Even if I knew, why should I tell you?”
An insidious assumption hid behind Ritter’s coaxing. It was the same flummery used by the witch-hunters who insist that if you don’t cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee, you are perforce a traitor. Such illogical reasoning ridicules the democratic concepts of liberty: it denies any right to privacy-the essential freedom without which there are no others.
I was no longer prepared to accept my-country-right-or-wrong simplifications. To study and write the history of CIA blunders and atrocities is to put an end to innocence.…
In January 1942, a month after Pearl Harbor, the American freighter Absaroka was torpedoed just outside the harbor of Los Angeles. A month later a submarine shelled an oil refinery near Santa Barbara. In one of my books* I reported that the two attacks, as well as several other incidents along the West Coast of the United States and Alaska, were perpetrated by Japanese I-class submarines. As a result of these shellings the California Hearst press began a banner campaign against the “yellow peril” on our beaches and not only was the reality of war brought home to American soil, but thousands of Japanese-born American citizens were rounded up and herded into concentration camps in the Southwestern desert for the duration of the war. Subsequently I learned that the Japanese navy had no fleet submarines in American waters at that time; and recently declassified Pentagon files prove that the attacks on the West Coast were ordered by Washington and that the high-explosive shells were fired by American ships. At the time, Harold Ickes privately justified these cynical acts as being necessary to morale. (They have a Watergate ring to them: there is nothing new under the sun.)
Then of course there was the incident of the American shipload of mustard gas which blew up in an Italian harbor and killed a thousand people. And the OSS-Mafia alliance in Sicily. And then the overthrow of the Guatemalan regime by the CIA in behalf of an American corporation. And the Bay of Pigs, the Powers U-2 fiasco, the Dominican Republic, the abortive CIA attempts to bomb Duvalier’s palace in Port-au-Prince, the Agency’s overthrow of Prince Sihanouk in Cambodia, the Air America bomb-runs over four nations in Indochina, the CIA-IT amp;T attempt to overthrow the elected government of Chile, all the chilling secret maneuvers designed to make Latin America safe for the United Fruit Company, the Bolivian and Venezuelan fiefdoms of American oil companies, the massive CIA support of feudal despots in Arab oil basins while the right hand of the Administration gave lip service and jet planes to Israel.…
I knew that Haim had been right after all. In South Russia squatted a motionless pile of metal which in its way could be as destructive as fissionable uranium: on the open market, several billions’ worth of gold bullion-enough to topple governments, enough to decide wars.
In November 1968 the Western monetary system depended for survival on the strength of the West German Deutschmark which was backed by a gold treasury no greater than Kolchak’s.
Put it in CIA hands and who could be sure what use it might be put to? Or allow the CIA to put it in Soviet hands: same question. Or perhaps more so: Russia has always been, and still is, a nation in which all policy is controlled by a small band of totalitarian leaders who are restrained by no law, answerable to no one, and educated abysmally in the realities of the outside world.
My question put Ritter at a loss: evidently it hadn’t occurred to him that I wouldn’t recognize my obligation to prove my patriotism by handing over the gold to the CIA. He tried to conceal his indignant outrage; he tried to act contemptuous: “I’m empowered to offer you a sizable finder’s fee.”
He said it too loudly.
I must have been in a state of emotional idiocy-an aberration from which I would soon recover in terror-but just then I was acting far more professional than he was and that was another thing he couldn’t take. He’d been prepared to deal with a garden-variety scholar and we both knew what that was: probably gutless and naive, certainly eager to bow before the whim of Authority. He found himself dealing with a self-assured lunatic who wouldn’t knuckle under. It had to be disconcerting; had I been in his position I’d have burst a blood vessel.
“Listen to me, Harry. I’m making you a hell of an offer. Millions. If you turn it down there’s nothing I can do for you. You understand what I’m saying?”
“I understand threats. You’re very handy with the rack and thumbscrew, aren’t you? You use bribes and blackmail and threats, and then you tell me I ought to do it because it’s the right thing to do. Good God, Ritter, you can’t preach patriotism and morality at gunpoint.”