lady wanted to talk. More important, she had questions she wanted answered.'
Bissell took another loud snort from his inhaler and then used the kind of hyperbole that was typical of him.
All presidents are whores,' he declared. They change their policies like panties and sell themselves to whoever will vote for them. The purpose of this meeting, however, is not to determine how much whoring Jack Kennedy has done to get elected, but exactly who he has been whoring with, in his own free time, so to speak. If I may bowdlerise Dorothy Parker, you can lead a whore to the skipper, but she mustn't be a pink. So the question before us is just how much of a pinko the lady is, Colonel Edwards having drawn our attention to the fact that one of the President's ladies, with whom he has been recorded in flagrante delicto, evinces a much greater interest in the President-elect's foreign policy than in his very remarkable sexual prowess. In particular, Jack Kennedy's future policy vis A vis Fidel Castro and Cuba.
Now, if I may generalise for a moment, gentlemen, most people's post-coital small-talk is just a little more routine than that which lies before us. Call me old-fashioned, but I would not expect a B-girl I had just picked up in a Nevada hotel-casino, and who had just pleasured me orally, to sound like Walter Cronkite, viz. page eleven, line six, Do you think it likely that there will be a US invasion of Cuba within the next twelve months?; and page fifteen, line twelve, Why don't you just take Castro out? You know, have him assassinated?; and page sixteen, line nineteen, If the Russians marched into West Berlin, would you really press the button? Could you stand to have that on your conscience? '
Bissell threw the transcript down on the table in front of him and exclaimed, And if all that wasn't bad enough, the dumb sonofabitch goes ahead and answers her, too. Sweet Jesus, if only his suspicions were aroused as easily as his goddamned libido.' Bissell snorted loudly. Well, Sheff? What's the verdict? Who the hell is she, and is she a goddamned spy?'
Edwards answered Bissell quickly. There were some who thought Bissell a cold-blooded person, but Edwards was not one of them. He knew the DD/P to be a warm and courteous person, whose cool demeanour concealed a personal tragedy: one of Bissell's children, Will, was retarded and had been recently institutionalised. Edwards thought that must have been especially hard for someone as intellectually bright as Richard Bissell. If the DD/P did have some faults they were his impatience, and a tendency to high-handedness. Well, sir, her name is Mary Jefferson. Correction, was. Mary Jefferson was found dead just a few days after the election, and although the police were not initially inclined to treat her death as suspicious, it now seems she may actually have been murdered. Until her death, Mary Jefferson was a dedicated Democratic Party campaign worker in Miami, where she lived with her husband, Tom Jefferson. She was half-Chinese, half-coloured, from Jamaica, and, until nineteen fifty- three, she held a British passport. Her maiden name was Swithenbank, and she and Tom Jefferson met in Japan, after his release from a Korean POW camp. She had been working as a hostess in a Tokyo night-club, but prior to that she was doing the same in Hong Kong, and it's possible she was indeed a prostitute. I've checked with the British in Jamaica and Hong Kong, and it would seem that prior to her going to Hong Kong, Mary Swithenbank was quite active politically. She was a member of the Jamaican Labour Party and the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union, but there's no evidence that she was ever a communist. The British say they don't know anything about what she was doing while she was in Hong Kong, but our own station chief, John Horton, says that for a while she was the girlfriend of a guy by the name of Hugh Wilberforce, who worked as a secretary to the British Governor of Hong Kong. In fifty-two Wilberforce suddenly resigned from the foreign service, without any explanation. At least none that was made public, and Horton says that he often suspected that the British may have found something in Mary Swithenbank's background which led them to think that Wilberforce had been compromised. Anyway, it was after this that Mary Swithenbank left Hong Kong altogether and went to Tokyo.'
I'm beginning to smell a rat,' observed Barnes.
The smell gets worse, I'm afraid,' said Edwards. During the war, Tom Jefferson was a highly decorated US Marine sniper. After the war he did the odd job for the Pickle Factory.'
Sweet Jesus,' muttered Bissell. You mean he's one of ours?'
Not exactly. More of a freelance. In nineteen forty-seven he handled a wet job for General Gehlen's Org in Austria, at our recommendation. In forty-eight he did a job for us in Greece. In forty-nine he did another job for us as part of Operation BGFIEND in Albania. Then there was the Korean War, of course. He saw some pretty distinguished service before being captured. After Korea, we continued to use him. The French had him hit someone in Vietnam, I believe. Then, in nineteen fifty-four he carried out an assassination for us in Uruguay. I'm not exactly sure who that was. Some local commie. But in fifty-seven he assassinated Carlos Armas, the President of Guatemala. By then he was also doing work for the FBI's COINTELPRO programme. But mostly, he was working for the mob. There were a couple of hits in Cuba-'
Wait a minute, Sheff,' said Bissell, whose agile mind had already leapfrogged over the back of Edwards's exposition. You're not going to tell me that this Jefferson's the guy that Giancana and Rosselli put up to do the contract on Castro?'
I'm afraid he is, sir.'
Sweet Jesus, Sheff.'
Yes sir,' said Edwards, who had decided not to mention that his own Operations Chief, Jim O'Connell, had met and vetted Tom Jefferson at the Fontainebleu Hotel in Miami, with Maheu and Rosselli. At this particularly delicate stage of his explanation, that one detail seemed a little more than Bissell needed to know.
And this is the guy who's now quit the contract and disappeared, right Sheff?' asked Jim Flannery.
That's the way it looks,' Edwards admitted uncomfortably.
Do you think Tom Jefferson murdered his wife?' asked Bissell.
The Miami police don't seem to think she was murdered,' said Edwards. And that's the way the coroner judged it. He returned a verdict of accidental death. But our friends in TSS will no doubt tell us that there are ways of doing it that won't leave a trace. Jefferson's a professional. My guess is that it is certainly possible he was responsible, sir. But I don't know how. And Rosselli and friends aren't saying. In fact they're not saying anything at all. I think they're a little embarrassed at this turn of events. Rightly concerned about how this will look in our eyes. Just as importantly, I think they're worried how it makes them look in the eyes of their underworld colleagues. I mean, this guy took a hundred thousand dollars from them. That was the kill fee. A part of it, anyway.'
Let's say he did murder her,' suggested Bissell. Did he murder her because he heard the tape, and found out that another guy was screwing her? That other guy just happening to be Kennedy. Or, did he murder her because he heard that tape and maybe thought she was a Russian agent, the same as we did?'
Her background seems to hint as much,' said Bross. There can't be many women in trade unions who decide to become hookers. And then the British thing.'
More likely it was a combination of both those reasons,' said Barnes, who thought he knew women. He was jealous, sure, only I don't think that would be enough of a reason on its own. But if he thought she was a spy, as well.' He shrugged.
There is another possibility, sir,' said Edwards. Suppose Jefferson is a Russian agent himself. Maybe while he was in that Korean POW camp the commies got to work on the guy. And sheep-dipped him.'
Yeah, like in that book,' said Bross. The Manchurian Candidate.'
That's a damned good book,' said Bissell.
Made one of ours into one of theirs,' continued Edwards. He wouldn't be the first. Six months they had him. I checked with the one hundred and eleventh MIG in Miami. Apparently Jefferson was one of the very first prisoners to be released. Within just a few weeks of that he married Mary Swithenbank, and brought her back here to the United States. Maybe she was his controller. Maybe she was supposed to be a sleeper. To get herself deep into the political machine.'
You sure couldn't get deeper than what she was doing with the President of the United States,' remarked Barnes.
While she sleeps with the odd Democratic Party senator, picking up information, here and there,' said Edwards, Tom Jefferson resumes his old trade. He works for us, and for the FBI's anti-communist programme. That must have brought him some good intelligence. Could be that some of the people he killed for us and for the feds were actually people the Russians wanted out of the way themselves.'
I'll buy that,' said Bissell. Wasn't Carlos Armas, the guy we put in power in Guatemala, to replace the commie guy, Jacobo Arbenz?'
