James Grady
Six Days of the Condor
For a lot of people, including the folks,
Shirley, who helped,
Preface
The events described in this novel are fictitious, at least to the author’s best knowledge. Whether these events might take place is another question, for the structure and operations of the intelligence community are based on fact. Malcolm’s branch of the CIA and the 54/12 Group do indeed exist, though perhaps no longer under the designations given to them here.
For the factual background to this story, the author is indebted to the following sources: Jack Anderson, “Washington Merry-Go-Round” (various dates); Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (1972); Andrew Tully, CIA: The Inside Story (1962); David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, The Invisible Government (1964) and The Espionage Establishment (1967).
Confession
In 1975, generals in the KGB — the former Soviet Union’s chief spy and secret police agency — got their hands on a copy of a new Robert Redford movie called Three Days of the Condor.
In that movie — produced by Dino De Laurentiis, directed by Sidney Pollack, also starring stunning Faye Dunaway, Academy Award-winner Cliff Robertson, international icon Max von Sydow, and heartthrob Tina Chen — screenwriters Lorenzo Semple, Jr., and David Rayfiel adapted a slim first novel by a totally unknown, then-twenty-four-year-old Montanan into a ticking-clock cinematic masterpiece of political intrigue, conscience, and consequence propelled by Redford’s character of a bookish intelligence analyst who comes back from lunch to the New York office of his obscure secret CIA research department and finds all his co-workers murdered.
Redford’s movie CIA codename was Condor.
As Redford/Condor insists to the Faye Dunaway character he kidnaps:
“Listen, I work for the CIA. I’m not a spy. I just read books. We read everything published in the world, and we… we feed the plots — dirty tricks, codes — into a computer, and the computer checks against actual CIA plans and operations. I look for leaks, I look for new ideas. We read adventures and novels and journals… I… I… Who’d invent a job like that?”
An exposé published in 2008 by Pulitzer Prize-nominated Pete Earley — a story sanctioned by America’s FBI and CIA — revealed that the movie stunned the KGB generals and convinced them they had fallen behind their CIA foes in what had to be a critical espionage endeavor: the work they saw Redford/Condor doing in the movie.
So — according to former Washington Post reporter Earley in Comrade J: The Untold Secrets of Russia’s Master Spy in America After the End of the Cold War—the KGB created their own top secret unit dedicated to the kind of analytical work they’d seen Redford/Condor perform.
As in the movie and the novel from which it was drawn, the KGB headquartered their new secret division in a quiet neighborhood — Flotskaya Street in Moscow, not a street in the movie’s New York or the novel’s Washington, D.C. Soviet spymasters created a false cover identity for their spy section, and even — as in the movie and novel — stuck a phony brass plaque by its front door proclaiming that place to be the headquarters for the “All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Systems Analysis”—a nonsense name instead of the real title of the “Scientific Research Institute of Intelligence Problems of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB”—known by its Russian initials of NIIRP.
Both the movie and the novel projected Condor’s secret department as a small bureaucratic entity with fewer employees than the fingers of your two hands.
The KGB’s Condor-inspired NIIRP employed 2,000 Soviet citizens.
Doing a job “invented” by a twenty-three-year-old Montana wannabe novelist.
Me.
Picture a snow-dusted January, 2008 night inside D.C.’s Beltway.
Call it 10:00 p.m.
Our dog Jack and not-quite-sixty me are shuffling downhill back toward my middle-class suburban home when through the dark night, I hear my wife Bonnie Goldstein calling my name and: “You’ve got a phone call!”
That phone call came from Jeff Stein, an old friend, a former U.S. Army wartime covert Intelligence Operative — a true undercover spy — but then a respected international journalist for Congressional Quarterly covering all things espionage. Jeff had gotten his hands on an advance copy of Earley’s book, barely contained his excitement as he told me about Condor and the KGB, and asked author-of-the-novel me for my reaction.
I was blown away.
And by the time our interview was over, what kept running through my head was a rock ’n’ roll lyric from The Grateful Dead: “What a long strange trip it’s been.”
Now, thanks to Otto Penzler and The Mysterious Press, I get to share that trip and the novel that triggered it with you.
Call this my confession.
And as noted by crime author Mark Terry in his 2010 essay about Condor for Thrillers: 100 Must Reads, master novelist John le Carré says: “If you write one book that, for whatever reason, becomes iconic, it’s an extraordinary blessing.”
So call me Mr. Blessed and come back with me on that long strange trip to its beginning in Washington, D.C.’s blustery January of 1971.
I was a senior from the University of Montana, a Sears Congressional Journalism Intern, one of twenty Woodstock (generation) warriors brought from America’s hinterland colleges to Washington, there to work on Congressional staffs and be night-schooled by a scrappy, street-stalking genre of journalists called investigative reporters. I lived on A Street, Southeast, six blocks from the white-icing Capitol dome that looked even grander than on my high school civics textbook. I rented a third-floor garret in a massive row house. A seldom-seen man rented the other unit on my floor. We shared a bathroom. At night, through the thin walls, I heard him coughing and wheezing. I showered standing on my tiptoes and tried to touch nothing that might have brushed him.
Every weekday, I brushed my recently barbered, conservatively short for the era hair, put on my new and only suit with one of three garish, hand-wide ties, struggled into a box-shaped tan overcoat, and walked through residential streets to my wondrous internship on the staff of Montana’s cantankerous but brilliant populist Senator Lee Metcalf — who, according to the internship directors, I’d been “matched with” even though unlike any other intern, he represented my home state.
And every workday, I walked past a flat-fronted, white stucco townhouse set back from the corner of A and Fourth Street, Southeast. A short, black-iron fence marked the border between the public sidewalk and that building’s domain. Shades obscured the windows. A bronze plaque by the solid door proclaimed the building as the headquarters of the eminently respectable American Historical Association.
But I never saw anyone go in or out of that building.
Fiction creates alternative realities.
And most fiction is born from a what-if question.
Two history-altering what-if questions hit me as I studied that townhouse:
What if it’s a CIA front?
What if I came back to work from lunch and everybody in my office was dead?
Questions anyone would imagine — right?
Especially considering those times.