Sometimes it was brazen or nothing in this business.
I spread the items across the bed. The size of the archive was astonishing. Cabot’s trove could be roughly divided into four categories, one for each of the plastic bags. The largest was the contents of a fat folder marked “Nethercutt.” Most of its holdings were stamped with an H for Project Honetol, the name Angleton gave to his ruinous mole hunt when he began it in 1964.
Nethercutt, being one of Angleton’s most zealous disciples, had spirited away quite a haul, and I’m sure that if I’d known as much as a historian about all the contacts and ops, then I would have been able to make sense of everything. As it was, the only Nethercutt materials I could put into context pertained to either Lemaster (“Headlight”), his Soviet source Nijinsky, or Headlight’s communications network.
Among the most relevant items was a summary of an interrogation with Yuri Nosenko, the defector whom Angleton and his own Soviet pet, Anatoly Golitsyn, had never believed, and who had therefore been locked away in a bunker. Nosenko named four KGB “traveler” agents with roaming rights to all of Central and Western Europe. One was code-named Dewey, the longtime recipient of all those goodies from Lemaster.
The Nethercutt file also included material on the Soviet agent Leo, the one Litzi and I knew as Vladimir just before he was murdered. There was a summary of the criminal associations he developed after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which mentioned his relocation to Vienna in the late 1990s. This was the material Cabot must have used to track him down and set up our meeting.
There were also several 1972 Nethercutt memos to Angleton, which outlined Nethercutt’s involvement in quashing the publication of Lothar Heinemann’s novel. Not one of them mentioned the book’s title, or Lothar’s pen name, which helped explain why Cabot hadn’t found it.
The second batch was a collection of Cabot’s own Agency files. The findings of Valerie Humphries’s research were there with regard to the points of intersection for Lemaster and Dewey. There were also records of Cabot’s recent correspondence with Vladimir and with Milan Bobik, my old consular adversary from Belgrade.
At the very back of the Cabot folder was a long list of antiquarian book dealers across Europe. Many had tiny checkmarks by their name. Der Flugel was prominent among them, but obviously when Cabot called he hadn’t known which title to ask for, and I suspected that Lothar had alerted Ziegler to deflect any queries that came in by phone. I’d lucked out.
The third, and smallest, portion of the cache was made up of my own contributions-the negatives of Vladimir’s KGB documents, my one written report, and the copy of Oppenheim’s The Great Impersonation. By the look of it, Cabot had placed the microdot right back on the dust jacket, as if to better preserve it for use in an official proceeding.
The fourth bag was in some ways the most interesting, even though the materials had little or nothing to do with Edwin Lemaster. It was a huge stack of pages from Angleton’s office diary and appointment logs from September 1949 to May 1951, the period when the British mole Kim Philby had been a frequent lunch companion and a regular visitor to his office. Incredible material, in other words, for any CIA historian.
As I flipped through the pages, scanning Angleton’s odd marginalia and notes of his discussions with Philby, all sorts of key operational details jumped out, meaning that he had leaked them directly to the infamous mole, often doing so after a very wet lunch in which he regularly consumed boatloads of martinis. Anything Ed Lemaster would’ve leaked might well have been tiny by comparison. In fact, if Lemaster had truly been a Soviet operative, his main role could have been to help fuel Angleton’s mistrust of people like Nosenko.
I realized then what the CIA desired most from my unofficial mission to Block Island. It was the Angleton stuff-the logbooks, the diaries, and all of the Honetol material that Nethercutt had squirreled away. The more personal game that I’d gotten so caught up in involving Cabot, Lemaster, Preston, Dad, and Litzi was the merest of sidelights, a means to an end.
The idea that a popular author might once have betrayed them was probably worth keeping under wraps, especially if Preston and his new Russian business partner were involved, since he still made millions from the government. But in the bigger picture of the Agency’s legacy, the Angleton stuff carried more weight.
It was nearly midnight by the time I finished going through it all, and I was exhausted. I packed everything back into the folders and slipped the dry bag into my luggage for safekeeping. Then I slept soundly, ready to finish the job once and for all.
41
In the morning I headed to the post office, carrying the documents in a couple of plastic laundry bags from my hotel room. I bought a pair of large flat-rate boxes and stuffed everything inside. I consulted the slip of paper with the CIA address in Herndon, Virginia, considered it one last time as a possible destination, then decided against it.
Where should I send the boxes, then? Not to my townhouse. And not to David, I thought, remembering how I’d been used without my knowledge in so many spy games. My ex-wife, April, probably would have helped if I’d asked nicely, but it was unfair to expect her to take on that kind of responsibility. Enough innocent people had already been harmed in this venture.
Then I remembered that this was the time of year when Marty Ealing went on his annual two-week romp to Las Vegas. Ostensibly it was to touch base with a few clients, but everyone in the office knew it was mostly an excuse for Marty to fool around on his wife. I mailed the box to myself in care of Marty at the office address for Ealing Wharton. I knew I could count on his secretary, Anne, in a way that I could never count on him. Then, once I’d had time to make my own copies, and only then, I’d forward all the originals to that P.O. box in Herndon.
“Will these go out today?” I asked the clerk. He looked at the wall clock.
“Noon ferry. Soon enough?”
“Perfect.”
Just before noon, with plenty of time to kill, I went to a short-order place by the dock to watch the cars load onto the ferry. I ordered a beer and a basket of fried clams just as the postal truck rolled aboard. The clams arrived as the horn sounded. I watched the crew cast off the lines, then toasted myself with the beer as the ferry eased away in a blast of diesel fumes and churning seawater. I bit into a clam. Crunchy-hot on the outside, cool and juicy in the middle, the taste of the sea. Life was sweet. I ordered a second beer and went back to the hotel to pack. Then I snoozed for an hour.
But by the time five o’clock rolled around I was anxious. One more job to do, and it was the riskiest. I got back on the bike, which by now had twigs in the spokes and dried mud on the frame, and pedaled to the nature preserve to take up my usual post. At six p.m. I watched Anderson leave for his coffee break. Then I pedaled toward the house, reaching the paved road just as the Jeep’s taillights disappeared toward town. I rolled up the driveway, stowed the bike out of sight, and knocked loudly at the front door. I checked my watch. I figured I had thirty-five minutes to finish my business and get the hell out of there.
Before long I heard the electric whine of Cabot’s wheelchair, then the bump of the tires against the door. A curtain stirred on the window atop the door. The old man’s eyes flashed in surprise. He backed up the chair and shouted, the voice raspy but stronger than I expected.
“Come in.”
When I opened up he was grinning crookedly, as if he’d been expecting me all along.
“My assistant is away at the moment, but I suppose you already knew that.” He frowned at my rucksack, and waved me back toward the porch. “Leave that outside, if you don’t mind.”
“I do mind. I’ve brought you something special. One last contribution to the cause before I officially resign from your employment.”
He grinned again, but more uneasily this time. I followed him down a hallway toward the back of the house while he spoke over his shoulder.
“The microdot was much appreciated. You practically beat it back across the water. I’m just sorry you never found Lothar’s book.”
“Oh, but I did. An excellent read, too.”
He looked back at me as we reached the end of the hall, and gazed with new appreciation at the rucksack.
