“I can’t believe that.”
“Should I stop now?”
“Not until you’ve told me something I can make sense out of.”
“All right. Maybe this will help. You wouldn’t stand torture and you wouldn’t kill yourself for a very good reason. You would work it out in your mind, and you would realize that it just wasn’t worth it, that it wouldn’t make sense. Why die to keep the Chinese from learning a minor bit of data that probably wouldn’t do them a dime’s worth of good anyway? Why lose an arm or an eye or a night’s sleep and ultimately tell them anyway? And, to take it a half step further, why get killed when you could preserve yourself by turning double agent? Ten years ago you wouldn’t have thought those things out Ten years ago you could have reasoned that a man really could get himself killed jumping out of planes, and that chunk of insight would have kept you out of the paratroops.”
“I’d jump tomorrow. Today, if you want.”
“Because you’re not afraid of heights anymore.”
“So?”
“So you’re not afraid of heights. So at the same time you’ve gone through an emotional change. In a sense you’ve lost something, but there’s another way to look at it. You might well say that you’ve gained something, that you’ve grown up and learned how to think for yourself.”
“And that’s bad?”
“It may be good for you. It’s bad for us.”
“Because I’ve learned to look out for Number One? That’s what we did in those jungles, friend. We were a batch of mercenary soldiers doing a job.”
“You re-enlisted and stayed there.”
“I enjoyed it.”
“And then, after ten years, you came back.”
“I stopped enjoying it.”
“Think about it and you’ll see there’s more to it than that. Oh, hell. You’ve become a man we can’t count on, that’s all. Forget the torture bit, forget the black pill you wouldn’t take. It goes deeper. It touches points that would be more apt to come up than self-destruction. Suppose we ordered you to go to a hostile country and assassinate a political leader.”
“I’d do it.”
“Agreed — you would do it. Now take it a step further. Suppose we ordered you to go to a neutral country and assassinate a pro-western politician so that the government would launch reprisals against the communists. Your role would be to join the man’s staff, become friendly with him, then murder him and frame the communists for it”
“You people don’t do things like that.”
He looked at the ceiling. “Let’s say we don’t. But suppose we decided to one day, and we picked you for the job. And you met the man, and liked him, and decided he was important to the future of his country. Then what?”
I felt trapped. “It’s a stupid question,” I said.
“Answer it.”
“I’d think it over, I’d—”
“You’d think it over. Stop right there. When they told you to mop up a band of Laotian guerrillas, did you stop to figure out just who they were and what they were doing?”
“That’s not the same—”
“The hell it’s not!” The words came out in what was almost a shout, and he had to force his voice down to its normal volume. This amused me. I was the one who should be flying off the handle. “Sorry,” he said. “But it is the same. An effective agent is like an effective soldier. He does what he’s told, no more and no less.”
“Sometimes a soldier has to use his judgment.”
“But only when he’s told to. The rest of the time he doesn’t have any judgment. He follows orders.”
“Like a good German soldier.”
“Precisely”
“Like the Light Brigade.”
“That’s the idea.”
“And I wouldn’t do that.”
“No, Paul. You’d think about it. You’d do a Hamlet, you’d think it over, you’d work it out in your mind. On the most basic level, this would make you inefficient. You’d be too slow, and you’d boggle some assignments. That’s serious enough, but you’d do worse than that sooner or later. You’d question policy. You’d reason it out, and there would come a time when you disagreed with a policy, and then you’d either purposely bungle it or else refuse to execute it. You might even come to the careful, rational conclusion that the world would work out better if you helped the other side—”
“Treason, in other words.”
“If you like. If I called you a potential traitor ten years ago, you couldn’t have taken it so calmly. The word itself, the concept, would have infuriated you. A man who’s capable of hearing a word calmly is capable of performing the deed.”
“Wait a minute.”
“What?”
“Well, I’m not a psychologist either, damn it but isn’t this a little too theoretical? What you’re saying is that you can’t use anybody with a brain—”
“Wrong. We need intelligence.”
“Then what?”
“It’s the way the brain is used. We need a man with a short circuit in his brain so that the process of independent thought is bypassed. That sounds ridiculous, but—”
“It does,” I agreed. “But the whole thing sounds as though it was worked out by a computer. I don’t buy it”
He was smiling, but it was a new smile. “Yes, you do,” he said. “You’ve already bought it. You know what I’m getting at, you accept it, and the only argument you can raise is that it’s theoretical, that it doesn’t work that way in practice. But you really know better. You poor bastard.”
This time he lit the cigarette. “We interview a great many men in your position, men with your track record. We reject a hell of a lot of them, because we’ve backtracked our failures over the years until we’ve proved what you’ve just described as theory. We’ve analyzed the fuckups and the defectors, we’ve typed them, and we know how to test our prospects. Know what else we do? We give periodic checks to our own field men. I don’t have the figures, but a high percentage of them fail sooner or later. They turn that corner, they conquer the force that made them good to begin with, and somewhere along the line they learn to think. Then we put them on desks in Washington, or retire them altogether.”
“Because they can think.”
“Yes.”
“Because they’ve grown up, maybe.”
“Something like that.” The smile again. “They grow up, Paul. They grow up, and they can’t tag along with Peter Pan anymore. They stop believing in fairies. And then they can’t fly. They can’t fly.”
I went over to the bureau and got out the bottle of scotch. He didn’t bother to remind me that I had denied possession of it a little while ago. I poured two drinks, added water. I asked if he wanted me to call down for ice, but he said it wasn’t necessary. I gave him his drink. I took a sip of my own, and I thought that a year or so ago I would have reacted to a conversation like this one by getting very drunk indeed. I thought about getting drunk now, and I realized that there was really no point to it. And it was about then that I began to understand that he was right.
He broke the silence by asking me what I thought about it now. Did I believe him?
“I’ll have to think about it”
“Sure. There are two answers — No and I’ll have to think about it. Which means yes.”
“Maybe.”
And after a while I said, “So what do I do now? Isn’t there any slot open with you people where an old philosopher would come in handy?”
“No. First of all, you’re not particularly qualified for desk stuff. And whatever you did, you’d want to dictate policy. One way or another.”