She fished a loose cigarette from her pocket and then, when he made the error of interpreting this as an encouraging sign, replaced the cigarette in her pocket, ignoring the match he was still fumbling to strike.
“There could be a game in there somewhere,” she had said then. “And I could be in there somewhere.”
“In the plot.”
“In the game.”
The agent said nothing.
“In whatever you want to call it,” she said then. “It’s your movie.”
“Let’s approach this from another angle,” he said after a silence. “You came here from San José. Costa Rica. Yet no record exists showing you ever entered Costa Rica. So let’s start there.”
“You want to know how I got into Costa Rica.” Her voice had again suggested cooperation.
“Exactly.”
“You don’t even need a passport to enter Costa Rica. An American citizen can enter Costa Rica on a tourist card. From a travel agency.”
“But you didn’t.”
There had been another silence.
“I’m going to say something,” she said then. “You’re going to get it or you won’t. I haven’t been here long, but I’ve been here long enough to notice a lot of Americans here. I notice them on the street, I notice them at the hotel, I notice them all over. I don’t know if they have their own passports. I don’t know whose passports they have. I don’t know whose passport I have. All I know is, they aren’t on vacation.”
Again she took the loose cigarette from her pocket and again she put it back.
“So I’d suggest you just think for a while about what they’re doing here,” she had said then. “And I bet you could pretty much figure how I got into Costa Rica.”
Subject “Elise Meyer” acknowledges entering country in possession of apparently inauthentic documentation but provides no further information concerning either the source of said documentation or her purpose in entering said country, the agent’s preliminary report read. Recommendation: continued surveillance and investigation until such time as identity of subject can be verified, as well as subject’s purpose in entering said country.
This initial interview took place on July 10 1984.
A second interview, during which subject and interrogator reiterated their respective points, took place on July 11 1984.
Elena McMahon moved from the Intercon to the Surf rider on July 12.
It was August 14 when Treat Morrison flew down from Washington on the American that landed at ten a.m. and, when he stopped by the Intercon to leave his bag, happened to see her sitting by herself in the Intercon coffee shop.
Sitting by herself at the round table set for eight.
Wearing the white dress.
Eating the chocolate parfait and bacon.
When he got to the embassy later that day he learned from Alex Brokaw’s DCM that the woman he had seen in the Intercon coffee shop had arrived on the island on July 2 on an apparently falsified American passport issued in the name Elise Meyer. At his request the DCM had arranged to have him briefed on the progress of the continuing FBI investigation meant to ascertain who Elise Meyer was and what she was doing there. Later it occurred to him that there would have been at that time in that embassy certain people who already knew who Elise Meyer was and what she was doing there, but it did not occur to him then.
Three
1
I should understand Treat Morrison.
I studied him, I worked him up.
I researched him, I interviewed him, I listened to him, watched him.
I came to recognize his way of speaking, came to know how to read the withheld phrasing, the fast dying fall or diminuendo that would render key words barely audible, the sudden rise and overemphasis on the insignificant part of the sentence (“… and by the way”), the rush or explosion of syllables jammed together (“… and the hell it is …”), the raising of the entirely rhetorical question (“… and … should I have regrets?”), the thoughtful acting out of the entirely rhetorical answer (head tilted up, a gaze into the middle distance, then “I … don’t think … so”), the unconvincingly brisk reiteration: “… and I have no regrets.”
No regrets.
Treat Morrison had no regrets.
Quite early in the course of these dealings with Treat Morrison I came to regard him as fundamentally dishonest. Not dishonest in the sense that he “lied,” or deliberately misrepresented events as he himself construed them (he did not, he never did, he was scrupulous to a fault about reporting exactly what he believed to be true), but dishonest in the more radical sense, dishonest in that he remained incapable of seeing the thing straight. At the outset I viewed this as an idiosyncrasy or a defect of character, in either case singular, peculiar to the individual, a personal eccentricity. I came only later to see that what I viewed as personal was deep in the grain of who he was and where he came from.
Let me give you a paragraph from my notes.
Not interview notes, not raw notes, but early draft notes, notes lacking words and clauses and marked with CH for “check” and TK for “to come,” meaning I didn’t have it then but planned to get it, notes worked up in the attempt to get something on paper that might open a way to a lead:
Treat Austin Morrison was born in San Francisco at a time, 1930, when San Francisco was still remote, isolated, separated physically from the rest of the United States by the ranges of mountains that closed off when the heavy snows came, separated emotionally by the implacable presence of the Pacific, by the???TK and by the???TK and by the fogs that blew in from the Farallons every afternoon at four or five. His father held a minor city sinecure, jury commissioner in the municipal court
There this particular note toward a lead skids to an abrupt stop. Scratched in pencil after the typed words “municipal court” is a comma, then one further penciled clause:
a job he owed to his wife’s well-placed relatives in the Irish wards (??CH “wards”) south of Market Street.
More false starts:
The son of a parochial school teacher and a minor city official in San Francisco, Treat Austin Morrison enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley when it was still offering a free college education to any qualified California high school graduate who could scrape up the $27.50 (??CH) registration fee plus whatever little he or she could live on. The man who would later become America’s man-on-the-spot in the world’s hottest spots, ambassador-at-large with a top-secret portfolio, earned part of his college costs by parking cars at the elite Hotel Claremont in Oakland, the rest by
Treat Austin Morrison may have been Saturday’s hero on the football field (XXX BETTER LINE TK), the University of California’s own All-PAC 8 (??CH) quarterback, but Saturday night would find him back in the kitchen at the exclusive Phi Gamma Delta house, where he paid for his room and board by hashing, washing dishes and waiting table for the affluent party animals who called themselves his fraternity brothers and from whom he borrowed the textbooks he could not afford to buy. The discipline developed in those years stands him in good stead as
T.A.M. was raised an only child
T.A.M., the only son and during most of his formative years the only living child of a