Those works — plus a few columns by my future muckraking boss Jack Anderson and cryptic conversations with friends who’d come back from the Vietnam war having “seen some things”—constituted the only reporting I did on the CIA.
My imagination was thus luckily unencumbered by much reality.
Fiction in that era treated the CIA like a ghost, a giant presence authors tiptoed around and barely touched. CIA agents made appearances in hundreds of novels, but they were usually somber creatures of unquestioned monomania and solid competence. What and how and why they did what they did went unexamined.
Four notable exceptions were Richard Condon, whose The Manchurian Candidate military intelligence nightmare blew me away in adolescence as both a novel and a movie; the noir and cynicism-drenched novel by Noel Behn and its John Huston-directed movie The Kremlin Letter (which focused on “off the books” spy groups, not the CIA); Charles McCarry, who, until I graduated from high school in 1967, worked as a deep cover CIA operative and whose novels started coming out as I was writing Condor (novels I didn’t see then); and another CIA agent named Victor Marchetti, who in post-Condor 1974 co-authored The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, a classic exposé that a First Amendment-loving U.S. Supreme Court censored on a word-by-word basis. In a 1971 novel called The Rope Dancer (that I read only after writing Condor), Marchetti followed a then-frequent but today absurd-sounding practice: he changed the name of the CIA to the NIA, further distancing fiction from reality.
Hollywood treated the CIA with an awestruck touch: on movie and TV screens, the CIA meant impossible mission gadgets and trenchcoated knights in righteous pursuit of a Holy Grail. An engrossing exception that few people, including me, saw at the box office was the 1972 movie Scorpio, starring Burt Lancaster as a CIA executive who may or may not deserve the French assassin the Agency forces to hunt him. Ironically, Scorpio’s cast sometimes stayed at the same hotel and crossed paths with the team of Nixon “plumbers” who were surveilling the Watergate complex across the street for their soon-to-be world’s-most-famous burglary. Two great movies of the era’s paranoia—The Parallax View and The Killer Elite—did not come out until after I’d long finished my novel. I was a fan of the TV show I Spy from my high school days, starring Bill Cosby and Robert Culp, but TV in the sixties was broadcast in the shackles of rigorous, censorious standards, and those two American agents too often came off like super spies.
Of course there was Alfred Hitchcock, the master of cinematic suspense. His great movies often unfolded in worlds of espionage and international intrigue — most notably North by Northwest. But for Hitchcock, spies were merely agents of the great term he created: the MacGuffin — that thing or force that throws characters together and provides the motivation that drives the story, the “what it’s about” for suspense and action.
Of all the creative lessons I absorbed from Hitchcock, perhaps his most important influence on me was that the best suspense stories are believably personaclass="underline" real people hit with life or death choices, whether generated by strangers they met on a train or geo-political covert wars fought beyond the characters’ ordinary lives. Hitchcock’s often regular, or even bland, characters, once triggered into action, battled to save their lives, to reclaim control that had been destroyed by the story’s MacGuffin.
Such was the cradle of Condor.
Many of my credited revelations about the CIA came from Wise and Ross. They’d stressed how much the agency depended on analysts sifting often mostly public records, so I pushed that concept.
I invented a job I’d love (if I couldn’t be a writer): reading novels for espionage tidbits — including Nero Wolfe mysteries by Rex Stout (a favorite of mine).
Wise and Ross provided a skeletal outline of the CIA’s structure.
After my experiences in the U.S. Senate, plus working on Montana civic road crews and in the octopus, state-run, federally funded small office, I decided that even a secret national security agency like the CIA was still a government bureaucracy powered by the same forces and foibles I witnessed every day.
So, I thought, knowing all that, how would I organize the CIA?
And I projected the answers to my questions in my fiction, including creating such (to me) obvious things as a panic line for agents in trouble, an entity that I proved to be true in my future muckraking days with Jack Anderson.
Because I definitely knew that, whatever my plot was, my hero had to panic and had to be the kind of guy who needed all the help he could get. My image of him meant he could only do things that an ordinary guy could do. He could be clever, but not magically super-competent, and most of his training would come from the kind of fiction in which he was being created. I chose his name to reflect what American slang refers to as a “nerd.” No cool-monikered Hemingway Nick or Hawaii Five-O Steve for my guy: he became Ronald Malcolm, a name perfect for playground mockery. Like me, somehow even his friends called him by his last name.
I came at my first novel like a journalist, reporting the what-if questions in the lean, sparse, straight-ahead prose in which I’d been schooled. Nights and weekends for four months, I sat in that yellow kitchen nook in Helena, Montana, and let my imagination command my fingertips on that battered green Royal manual typewriter. I had no idea what I was going to call the book until I’d finished it and realized I had a straight line chronology that, with a slight re-organization, fit into six days: our culture had already absorbed a week of a thriller with Seven Days in May. I’d spent a Saturday afternoon coming up with Malcolm’s codename, settling on “condor” because it connoted death and sounded much cooler than “vulture.”
I’d never considered writing Condor as just a learning exercise. Of course, I was an aging twenty-three-year-old nobody living thousands of literal and cultural miles from the publishing world of New York. I had not a single connection, no one to advise me, make a phone, or write a letter or knock on a door in my behalf.
Such absolute isolation gave me a so what attitude that inspired hustle.
I went to the local library, roamed the stacks to find which publishers published any kind of fiction remotely resembling the rough draft manuscript sitting in my garret. In late 1972, I came up with close to thirty firms that published at least some fiction. I used my work’s “high tech” IBM Selectric typewriter and Xerox machine, crafted a synopsis that did not reveal the novel’s ending, a sample chapter, and a biography that, while true, hinted at mystery. One day I dropped thirty packets of hope in the U.S. mail, then went back to ordinary life that included abusing my job’s facilities to type the final manuscript of Condor. Of the thirty publishers, half responded in my pitch packet’s self-addressed, stamped envelopes; of that half, six said yes. I picked one at random, sent the then-finished manuscript off.
Four months later, still having heard nothing, I was about to leave my job in Helena for a starving-author’s life in Missoula, then a more cosmopolitan Montana city. But I’d still heard nothing, so I called publisher number one, got through to the editor, who politely told me they were rejecting my novel. I waited a few days until I had my new apartment and phone number in Missoula, then dropped the manuscript in the mail to W.W. Norton, and moved.