Sixty times in the years since, the agents at that desk had been confronted with nuclear threats. Most had been the work of cranks or demented ideologues, the “don’t touch the Alaskan tundra or we’ll put a bomb in Chicago” sort of thing. But a significant number of those threats had seemed deadly serious. They had included threats to blow up bundles of radioactive waste in Spokane, Washington, and New York City; warnings of nuclear bombs alleged to be hidden in Boston, Detroit, Washington, D.C., and four other American cities, and in a Long Beach, California, oil refinery. Some had been accompanied by designs of nuclear devices that had also been deemed “nuclear capable” by the weapons analysts of Los Alamos.
The Bureau’s response to those threats had, on occasion, included the deployment of hundreds of agents and technicians to the threatened cities.
Yet no word of their activities had ever reached the public.
Within half an hour of receiving the first alert from the White House, two teams of agents were onto the problem, a Crisis Assessment Team whose task was to determine whether the threat was real or not, and a Crisis Management Team responsible for dealing with it if it was. The fact that the extortion message was in a foreign language had immensely complicated their job. The first rule in an extortion case is to look at the extortion note or telephone call for clues. The Bureau employed a Syracuse University linguistic psychiatrist whose computers had proven to be remarkably accurate in providing a thumbnail description of an extortioner based on the language he had used in his threat note or phone call. In this case, however, his talents had been useless.
As soon as the first warning had come in, a team of agents had gone to the Carriage House Apartments, a four-story yellow stone apartment house at the junction of L and New Hampshire, abutting the building housing the Libyan Embassy. Two of its occupants had been relodged in the Washington Hilton, and listening devices trained on the embassy next door had been placed in the walls of their apartments. The same thing had been done to the Libyan UN embassy in New York. Taps had also been installed on the phones of all Libyan diplomats accredited to either the United States or the United Nations.
That operation had provided its first fruit while the NSC was discussing the consequence of Agnew’s report. Two Libyan diplomats, the ambassador to the United Nations and the first secretary of the Washington embassy, had been located. Both had vehemently denied that their nation could be involved in such an operation.
At 2031, just after Agnew had given his conclusive determination that the design was for a viable thermonuclear device, an “All Bureaus Alert” had been flashed out of the Bureau’s sixth-floor communications center. It ordered every FBI office in the United States and overseas to stand by for “emergency action demanding highest priority and allocation of all available manpower.”
FBI liaison agents to Israel’s Mossad, France’s SDECE, Britain’s MI5 and West Germany’s Landswehr were ordered to go through files, pulling out descriptions and, where available, fingerprint records and photographs of every known Palestinian terrorist in the world.
One floor above the communications center, Quentin Dewing, the FBI assistant director for investigation, was in the midst of organizing the mobilization of five thousand agents. Agents shoeing horses in Fargo, South Dakota, catching the last of the day’s sun on Malibu Beach, walking out of Denver’s Mile High Stadium, washing up the supper dishes in Bangor, Maine, were being ordered to leave immediately for New York, each order accompanied by a vital closing injunction: “Extreme, repeat, extreme discretion must be employed to conceal your movements from the public.”
Dewing concentrated his efforts in three areas. The nation’s bureaus were ordered to locate and take under permanent surveillance every known or suspected Palestinian radical.
In New York and in half a dozen cities on the Atlantic seaboard, FBI agents were in action in every ghetto, every high-crime area, “pulsing” informers, querying pimps, pushers, petty crooks, forgers, fences, hunting for anything on Arabs: Arabs looking for fake papers; Arabs looking for guns.
Arabs trying to borrow somebody’s safe house; anything, just as long as it had an Arab association.
His second effort was to lay the groundwork for a massive search for the device, if it existed, and those who might have brought it into the country. Twenty agents were already installed at the computers of the Immigration and Naturalization Service offices on I Street, methodically going through the 194 forms for every Arab who had entered the United States in the past six months. The U.S. address listed on each card was Telexed to the bureau concerned. The FBI intended to locate, within fortyeight hours, each of these visitors and clear them, one by one, of any suspected involvement in the threat.
Other agents were going through the files of the Maritime Association of the Port of New York looking for ships that had called at Tripoli, Benghazi, Latakia, Beirut, Basra or Aden in the past six months and subsequently dropped off cargo on the Atlantic seaboard. A similar operation was under way at the air freight terminal of every international airport between Maine and Washington, D.C.
Finally, Dewing had ordered a check run on every American who held, or had ever held, a “cosmic top secret” clearance for access to the secret of the hydrogen bomb. It was typical of the thoroughness with which Dewing’s bureau worked that shortly after 8 P.M. Mountain Time an FBI car turned into 1822 Old Santa Fe Trail, a twisting highway leading northeast out of the capital of New Mexico along the route over which the wagon trains of the old Santa Fe trail had once rolled. With its silver RFD mailbox, the yellow metallic newspaper tube with the words New Mexican on its side, the one-story adobe house at the end of the drive was a supremely average American home.
There was nothing average about the Polish-American mathematician who lived inside. Stanley Ulham was the man whose brain had unlocked the secret of the hydrogen bomb. It was one of the supreme ironies in history that on the spring morning in 1951 when he had made his fateful discovery, Stanley Ulham was trying to demonstrate with mathematical certainty that it was impossible to make the bomb based on the premise that had underlain years of scientific effort. He did. But in doing so, he uncovered the glimmering of an alternative approach that just might work.
He could have wiped that terrible knowledge from his blackboard with a swipe of his eraser, but he would not have been the scientist he was if he had. Chain-smoking Pall Malls, flailing feverishly at his blackboard with stubs of chalk, he laid bare the secret of the H bomb in one frantic hour of thought.
The FBI agent did not require even that much time to clear the father of the H bomb of any possible complicity in the threat to New York. Standing in his doorway, watching the agent drive away, Ulham couldn’t help remembering the words he had uttered to his wife on that fateful morning when he had made his discovery: “This will change the world.”
A gray veil of cigarette smoke hung over the National Security Council conference room despite the continuous functioning of the building’s intensive aircirculation system. It was a few minutes past ten; not quite two hours remained before the ultimatum period contained in the threat message was due to begin. Paper cups and plates littered with the remains of the cheese sandwiches and black-bean soup the President had ordered the White House kitchen to send in to the conferees were scattered along the table and by the 15ase of the room’s paneled walls.