“I want to thank you all for being here tonight,” he said in the studied, mannered tone he liked to employ for dramatic effect, “and ask you to pray with me that what’s brought us here is just a hoax because …” his voice trailed off “… because if it’s not, we’ve got a long, long night ahead of us.”
He took his place in one of the inexpensive chairs upholstered in rust fabric ringing the oval conference table. The room was as unprepossessing, as unimaginative a place as the board room of a medium-sized Middle Western manufacturer of cardboard containers. Yet it was here that the thermonuclear Armageddon had been envisaged during the Cuban Missile Crisis; that the decisions which sent half a million Americans to fight and die in Vietnam had been debated; the plight of the fifty U.S. hostages seized by followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini pondered.
Its banal appearance was deceptive. At the touch of a button a massive screen came down from one wall. Another button swept aside a set of curtains to reveal an electronic mapboard. Beside each seat was a drawer containing a secure red telephone. Most important were the facilities of the White House Communications Center just beyond, holding the room in an Ifshaped embrace. There, banks of communications consoles with television-like screens linked the room and the White House to every vital nerve center of the U.S. government: the Pentagon, the CIA, State, the National Security Agency, the Strategic Air Command, NORAD’s National Command Center in Colorado Springs. A call coming out of that conference room could be dispatched to any U.S. military base in the world, to the gunnery officer of a guided-missile destroyer cruising off GuantAanamo Bay in Cuba, to most U.S. military aircraft in flight.
The President glanced at the two dozen people filling the room. The principals, seated at the conference table itself, constituted the inner core of the U.S. government, the same kind of ad-hoc emergency committee that had guided the government debates in the Iranian hostage crisis: the directors of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Secretaries of Defense and Energy and the Deputy Secretary of State, sitting in for the Secretary, who was on a tour of Latin America.
The President turned first to William Webster, the soft-spoken Missouri jurist who led the 8,400 agents of the FBI. Since the Boston incident, his Bureau had had the primary responsibility for handling nuclear extortion threats. “Bill,” he asked, “what have you got on this?”
“We’ve reason to believe, Mr. President, the extortion package was assembled outside the United States,” Webster began. “Our lab has established that the typewriter used for the note was Swiss made. An Olympic. Manufactured between 1965 and 1970 and never sold, as far as we’ve been able to determine, in this country. The blueprint paper is French.
Available only over there. The cassette was a standard thirtyminute West German BASF. The complete lack of background noise would indicate it was made in a studio under at least semiprofessional conditions. Unfortunately, there were no identifiable fingerprints on any of the material.”
The President’s next question was to a lean, bald man in a Harris tweed sports jacket and gray flannels sucking a pipe, on his right. Gardiner “Tap” Bennington, the heir to a Massachusetts textile fortune, had replaced Bill Casey as the head of the CIA six months earlier. The Yankee patrician was one of the last of the Agency’s old boys, a veteran of the OSS days when “Wild Bill” Donovan had plucked the nice young men off the playing field of Yale and Harvard and inspired them with the unseemly vocation of spying for their country.
“Do we have any intelligence to indicate a Palestinian terrorist group might be ready to try something like this, Tap?”
“Not really,ţsir. It’s something they’ve talked about for years. But it’s always sounded more like hashish talk to us than anything else. We did have one report in the intelligence community in 1978 that a bunch of them were being trained by the Libyans to pull an armed raid on a nuclear power plant. Hijack it, so to speak. But we were never able to confirm it.
“We’ve been pulsing all our Palestinian assets since this came in. There are people out there capable of making a nuclear device. And there’s material around. But so far we’ve had no indication that any of the groups we’re watching have married the two up.”
“How about the Israelis?” the President queried. “Have you been onto them?”
“Not yet, sir. It’s our feeling it’s still a bit early for that. For the moment we recommend holding this as tight as possible.”
“And the Libyans?” The President turned to address his question to Bob Fundseth, the Deputy Secretary of State. “Have we had any answer from Tripoli?”
“No, sir. The charge went personally to the army barracks at Bab Azizza where Qaddafi and most of his ministers live, saying he had an urgent communication from the government of the United States. The guards wouldn’t give him the time of day. Told him they had orders not to admit anyone before eight A.M.” Christopher glanced at the clock on the conference room wall. “That’s five hours from now.”
The President drummed the tabletop with his fingertips. That would seem to confirm his suspicion there was little likelihood that Qaddafi was behind this. “fell me, Tap,” he said to his CIA director, “would Qaddafi even have the capacity to do something like this? Where’s his nuclear program at these days?”
Bennington struck a match and noisily lit his pipe, a play he had learned from his second boss, Allan Dulles. “Well, sir, as you know, he’s never made any secret of his intention to get atomic bombs.” Bennington picked up a file stamped “Top Secret” from the table in front of him.
“We’ve been keeping a close eye on him and he’s done a number of things that concern us very much. He’s been literally flooding this country with students taking nuclear courses. Over a fifth of the Libyans who’ve studied here since 1973 have been enrolled in some kind of nuclear program or another.”
The President shook his head. If Qaddafi gave away his oil as cheaply as we give away our knowledge, he reflected, we wouldn’t have an energy crisis on our hands.
“All that, of course is ostensibly for peaceful purposes,” Bennington continued. “What really worries us are the secret initiatives he’s undertaken to get hold of plutonium or uranium for military purposes, the business in Chad, the link with the Paks which you’re aware of.”
The President was growing impatient. “Okay, Tap, but where is he right now?
Can he or can he not make a bomb?”
Bennington leaned back in his chair. “In our judgment, he’s at least five years away from it. He still has only one source of potential fissile material on Libyan soil, and that’s that nine-hundred-megawatt light-water reactor the French have just set up for him.”
The director of intelligence’s words struck a responsive note around the room. Pressed by the staggering deficits left in France’s balance of payments by the oil price rises of 1979, President Giscard d’Estaing had finally agreed to sell Libya a nuclear reactor, ostensibly to be employed to desalinize water.
Bennington leaned toward the President. “The reactor, as you know, is under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards. They have inspectors down there regularly from Vienna. We’ve seen their reports and we see no evidence the Libyans have diverted fuel from the reactor.”