“I don’t follow this. How does it relate to Paris, to these war games?” The president’s frankly perplexed look was shared by others at the table.
“Sir, we have all relied on our computers for analysis of the information we feed into them. But as Mrs. Neumann always told me, ‘Garbage in and garbage out.’ We had been too clever. We had tapped into the Russians, we had agents everywhere. So the Russians decided to let us get a lot of information from them. Garbage. False information. And then they had a plant at Tinkertoy — this Margaret Andrews — and she began to change around the real information we had so that the garbage tended to be supported by what we had previously thought was solid stuff.”
“How long did this go on?”
“More than a year.”
“And no one suspected.”
Hanley stared straight at Galloway. “No, sir. Until our agent was killed in Paris. Everything was unraveling, I thought. November was out of the Section, he had been let go, so I undertook to call him in.”
“You didn’t clear this with anyone.”
“No, sir.”
“Why? Admiral Galloway was your superior officer.”
“Yes, sir.”
The adviser stared at him for a long time and then at Galloway. When he spoke, his voice shattered the silence like a window breaking in the night. “And what did your November man find?”
“The terrorists. And the man behind them. The reason we never learned about La Compagnie Rouge was that this Simeon was with the Deuxième Bureau in the capacity of chief of counterintelligence operations for the interior zone, in the antiterror bureau. Now and then he would scoop up a fish, but he was actually the man who permitted the terror cells to operate. And he, in turn, is run by Moscow.”
“But how could he find out all that?”
“He was abducted by the terrorists twelve hours ago. He escaped, and he helped save the life of…the government liaison who had been working on the same mission for the Mitterand government.”
“And if the assassinations part of it is right,” the director of Central Intelligence said, “then the rest of this Shattered Eye plan must be right as well. If we can trust November.”
“We have no reason not to,” Hanley said calmly. “He doesn’t know anything about the Shattered Eye. He’s only passing along the information he obtained.”
“The third leg of the tripod,” the national security adviser said. “But how can they expect to lure us into a war position, then have us step down from it?”
“Sir, perhaps it was a calculation. A computer risk proposition. As we do with the Board of National Estimates.”
“My God,” the president said. “Are they mad?”
Hanley stared from face to face at the table. No one spoke but their morning faces, red-eyed and sallow, with dry lips and shaking hands, contemplated the nature of the Soviet risk.
“They thought we would walk away from Western Europe,” the president said.
“They intended to use November and other agents to place the blame of the assassinations on the CIA and on us,” Hanley said.
“Now wait—” the CIA director began.
“Do you have agents traveling with the president of France now?”
“Yes. Well, we always—”
“That’s the way it was going to work,” Hanley said. “You see, Simeon — this person from the Deuxième Bureau — was in the position to make the arrests. He could feed into the investigation and put the finger on the Langley operatives inside the French government.”
“It’s so complicated, but it would have worked,” the adviser said. “Who do you suppose put us on to this Soviet plan? Inside Moscow, I mean?”
“I don’t know. It was just a computer, just something we picked up that we never expected to pick up.”
“And if Hanley hadn’t sent this November to Paris, we wouldn’t have believed it,” the adviser said.
For a moment, the last remark of the adviser sank into silence. No one looked at the others. It was absurd but it was perfectly true: Hanley had broken the rules and taken an outside man and contracted a little job because he didn’t trust the security of his Section anymore. And at the last minute, the outside man had gotten the truth. And somewhere in the paranoid heart of Moscow someone had anonymously transmitted a copy of the plan called Shattered Eye in the vague hope that it would signal the West to step back from the brink of war.
“Everything depended on that computer,” the chairman of the Joint Chiefs said at last.
“No,” Hanley replied with a quiet voice. “It all depended on the human factor in the end.”
34
The world did not take unusual notice of the events of June 6 because there was nothing unusual in them. In a hundred places across Europe and in the British Isles, a dwindling number of those who remembered the war gathered at little celebrations to mark another anniversary of D day of 1944, the invasion of Europe by the Allies.
At the American facilities in the east of England, an open house was held and local residents of the villages of Suffolk were invited to share American beer and American coffee and American cakes and listen to American speeches on the long-standing friendship and alliance between the peoples of Britain and the United States. Because it rained that day in Anglia, attendance at the American festivities was not as high as the public information office had predicted; it was all to be blamed on the rain finally.
An unusual meeting of the National Security Council held in the situations room of the White House was not noted by the press for the simple reason that the press was never told of it.
The president of France decided, at the last minute, not to attend the ceremonies that had been planned to honor the fighters of the Résistance in the little Normandy Village des Deux Églises. Nor was anyone aware of the arrest of a Basque terrorist named Mano Calle, who was in a hotel in that village. Only the concierge in the hotel noticed the exit of Monsieur Calle, surrounded by four security men from the Deuxième Bureau; she noted to her husband that the men, who had shown the proper identification, appeared to be nothing more than Corsicans. She did not like Corsicans at all and did not consider them French.
The Deuxième Bureau had no reason to publicize the roundup of several suspected terrorists operating in Paris or in the château country outside of Tours; it certainly had no reason to reveal that a plastic bomb had been found in the sewer beneath the main street of the Village des Deux Églises.
And despite an examination of the terrorists that was both brutal and efficient, no evidence could be found to link their activities except through the man who was known as “Three” but whom none of them had ever seen. And so there was no reason at all to charge Jules Simeon, a respected veteran officer of the antiterror bureau who had performed brilliantly in arranging the arrests of the terror gangs.
In fact, nothing happened on the sixth of June or on the days that followed.
In the Soviet Union, it was noted in Pravda that a respected member of the inner circle of the party named V. I. Belushka had succumbed to the ravages of cancer and that his body would be buried in the little cemetery outside the walls of the Kremlin. But it was not noted in Pravda that Lieutenant General A. R. Warnov had been arrested and tried in secret court on charges of espionage and treason. Or that General Alexei Ilyich Garishenko, after a long night of excessive drinking, had apparently committed suicide by flinging himself out of the ninth-floor window of his apartment on October Revolution Street.
Slowly, in the weeks that followed the extraordinary, mundane events of the sixth of June, a gradual shake-up in the staffing of R Section was completed. It included a stripping and reprogramming of Tinkertoy as well as the administration of new loyalty test background checks on the staff of the computer analysis division of the Section. As part of the shake-up of the Section, the president reluctantly accepted the resignation of Admiral Thomas M. Galloway, the director of the intelligence division.