Kolchak's gold

“If I had that information do you really think I’d give it to the Israelis?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time a citizen betrayed his country for the love of a woman.”

“It’s not America’s gold,” I said. “Whose country would I be betraying?”

He was shaking his head in feigned exasperation. “You’ve got a hole in your argument. What makes you think the only thing we could do with that gold would be to turn it over to the Russians?”

“I suppose you’d just send in a fleet of trucks under the cultural exchange program and cart it off to Washington?”

Ritter said, “Well there might be ways. Didn’t the Germans almost succeed? If you forge proper-looking papers you can get away with all sorts of things. If we did it right and did it fast enough they wouldn’t even get curious until it was gone. Then all they’d find out is they should have got curious a lot earlier.”

“Is that what MacIver thinks? You people are incredible.”

“Just tell us where to look, Harry.”

“Even if I knew, why should I tell you?”

An insidious assumption hid behind Ritter’s coaxing. It was the same flummery used by the witch-hunters who insist that if you don’t cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee, you are perforce a traitor. Such illogical reasoning ridicules the democratic concepts of liberty: it denies any right to privacy-the essential freedom without which there are no others.

I was no longer prepared to accept my-country-right-or-wrong simplifications. To study and write the history of CIA blunders and atrocities is to put an end to innocence.…

In January 1942, a month after Pearl Harbor, the American freighter Absaroka was torpedoed just outside the harbor of Los Angeles. A month later a submarine shelled an oil refinery near Santa Barbara. In one of my books* I reported that the two attacks, as well as several other incidents along the West Coast of the United States and Alaska, were perpetrated by Japanese I-class submarines. As a result of these shellings the California Hearst press began a banner campaign against the “yellow peril” on our beaches and not only was the reality of war brought home to American soil, but thousands of Japanese-born American citizens were rounded up and herded into concentration camps in the Southwestern desert for the duration of the war. Subsequently I learned that the Japanese navy had no fleet submarines in American waters at that time; and recently declassified Pentagon files prove that the attacks on the West Coast were ordered by Washington and that the high-explosive shells were fired by American ships. At the time, Harold Ickes privately justified these cynical acts as being necessary to morale. (They have a Watergate ring to them: there is nothing new under the sun.)

Then of course there was the incident of the American shipload of mustard gas which blew up in an Italian harbor and killed a thousand people. And the OSS-Mafia alliance in Sicily. And then the overthrow of the Guatemalan regime by the CIA in behalf of an American corporation. And the Bay of Pigs, the Powers U-2 fiasco, the Dominican Republic, the abortive CIA attempts to bomb Duvalier’s palace in Port-au-Prince, the Agency’s overthrow of Prince Sihanouk in Cambodia, the Air America bomb-runs over four nations in Indochina, the CIA-IT amp;T attempt to overthrow the elected government of Chile, all the chilling secret maneuvers designed to make Latin America safe for the United Fruit Company, the Bolivian and Venezuelan fiefdoms of American oil companies, the massive CIA support of feudal despots in Arab oil basins while the right hand of the Administration gave lip service and jet planes to Israel.…

I knew that Haim had been right after all. In South Russia squatted a motionless pile of metal which in its way could be as destructive as fissionable uranium: on the open market, several billions’ worth of gold bullion- enough to topple governments, enough to decide wars.

In November 1968 the Western monetary system depended for survival on the strength of the West German Deutschmark which was backed by a gold treasury no greater than Kolchak’s.

Put it in CIA hands and who could be sure what use it might be put to? Or allow the CIA to put it in Soviet hands: same question. Or perhaps more so: Russia has always been, and still is, a nation in which all policy is controlled by a small band of totalitarian leaders who are restrained by no law, answerable to no one, and educated abysmally in the realities of the outside world.

My question put Ritter at a loss: evidently it hadn’t occurred to him that I wouldn’t recognize my obligation to prove my patriotism by handing over the gold to the CIA. He tried to conceal his indignant outrage; he tried to act contemptuous: “I’m empowered to offer you a sizable finder’s fee.”

He said it too loudly.

I must have been in a state of emotional idiocy-an aberration from which I would soon recover in terror-but just then I was acting far more professional than he was and that was another thing he couldn’t take. He’d been prepared to deal with a garden-variety scholar and we both knew what that was: probably gutless and naive, certainly eager to bow before the whim of Authority. He found himself dealing with a self-assured lunatic who wouldn’t knuckle under. It had to be disconcerting; had I been in his position I’d have burst a blood vessel.

“Listen to me, Harry. I’m making you a hell of an offer. Millions. If you turn it down there’s nothing I can do for you. You understand what I’m saying?”

“I understand threats. You’re very handy with the rack and thumbscrew, aren’t you? You use bribes and blackmail and threats, and then you tell me I ought to do it because it’s the right thing to do. Good God, Ritter, you can’t preach patriotism and morality at gunpoint.”

He became very sibilant and German again. “I would suggest you consider the fact that you are in no position to dictate to me concerning such things as morality and patriotism.” I waited for him to call me Herr Bristow but of course he didn’t, that was only the black comedy inside me.

“I don’t know where your gold is. You may believe that or not-I don’t much care. But you can’t trade me to the Russians if I haven’t got anything they could use. You can’t turn me over to them if I’m worthless-all that would do is destroy your credibility with them.”

Of course I was bluffing but he couldn’t know that.

I stood up. “They’re going to wonder where I’ve been. It’s almost five.”

“You went for a walk to soak up the atmosphere of the city. After all you’re writing a book about it. It isn’t your fault they lost sight of you.”

He hadn’t risen from his chair; the back of it was against part of the door and he had my way blocked. I said, “If the way you handled my getaway this afternoon is an example, you’d never get near that gold-even if I found it for you.”

“It must have been the first day they used the car and the third man on you. I’ve had them under the eye for forty-eight hours. The plan would have worked perfectly well if they’d followed yesterday’s pattern.”

That began to bring me back to earth. I put both palms flat on the table and leaned toward him. “Ritter, what made them change the operation today?”

“You must have done something to alert them.”

“I did nothing. It had to be you. They spotted you, you clumsy bastard.”

“Don’t be an idiot. I’ve been in this game long enough to know when I’ve been blown.”

“Sure you have.”

“You’re rattled after all.” He was pleased. “It wasn’t me, you know. Probably they observed your little ballet of indecision around the telephone kiosk last night. That might have been enough to make them increase their suspicions.”

“And just who set up that charade?”

“I did. I was mistaken. I’m to blame, I accept the responsibility, and I apologize.”

“I don’t want your apology,” I said. “I want your absence.”

“I’m afraid that wouldn’t conform with my orders.”

“And you’re a good German, aren’t you.”

He tried to ignore that. He said, “You opened a door a moment ago. You said, ‘Even if I found the gold for you.’ “

“Figure of speech. An army of searchers might find it, if they had twenty years to search for it.”

He levered himself to his feet, grunting, one hand against the table for support. “I don’t believe you.”

“Ritter, I’m not responsible for your speculations.”

“Think about this, Harry. In their country the incumbents get to count the votes. In their country ten million of you may get purged out of existence any minute, at the whim of some fool with red stars on his epaulets. You can’t publish what you want to. You can’t even think if your thoughts don’t conform to the party line. You can’t go where