10
Washington; January 1970
The Director of Central Intelligence had held his job so long and survived so many bureaucratic wars that people simply called him “the Director,” as if there had never been another. He was to the interagency conference room what Fred Astaire was to the ballroom. So smooth, so self-assured, so perfectly right in his role that even if he missed a step, you couldn’t be sure that he had gotten it wrong. Perhaps the choreographer had made a mistake.
Part of the Director’s charm was that he looked so precisely like what he wanted to be. Some people’s appearance is at war with their self-image. Not so the Director’s. He was a tall, patrician-looking figure, with thinning hair and a Roman profile, who had the useful talent of sounding disarmingly frank without saying anything injudicious. After a distinguished career in the agency, he had mastered the survival skills necessary to a DCI. He knew that his first priority was to maintain good relations with the president, the Congress, and the press, in that order. If those tasks were done, he reasoned, running the agency would take care of itself.
Though he was regarded as one of Washington’s most powerful officials, the Director understood the limits of his authority. He served at the pleasure of the president. His job was to do the dirty work and take the blame when things went wrong. And, of course, to keep his mouth shut. These tasks he did to perfection. To some of his colleagues, he seemed like a bureaucratic version of the English butler: more intelligent and better mannered than his master, yet always obedient, respectful, discreet.
What the Director didn’t like were surprises, especially when they came at White House meetings. So he was particularly uncomfortable in late January 1970, when the “cousins” from British intelligence (as they liked to call themselves) threw him a curve ball.
The occasion was a meeting of the National Security Council attended by the British prime minister, who was visiting Washington that week. It was held in the Situation Room, a cramped, windowless crypt in the basement of the West Wing of the White House. The room featured a long teak conference table, polished to a bright shine every morning by a cleaning woman with a top-secret clearance; a dozen well-padded executive chairs that would allow the nation’s leaders to plan World War III in comfort; communications and audio-visual equipment that could provide information instantly from around the world; and along the outer walls, chairs for the aides who were allowed to attend the meetings, and did much of the work, but were not privileged to sit at the big table.
The British prime minister was a large man, whose face and figure had been ravaged over the years by the finest wines of Burgundy and Bordeaux. When it came time for him to speak, he made a brief address about the specialness of the special relationship, in which he managed to quote Winston Churchill three times in less than five minutes.
To the Director’s considerable surprise, the British official then launched into a discussion of the crisis that was looming in Jordan-the otherwise obscure Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan-where the friendly, pro-Western monarchy was threatened by Palestinian guerrillas.
“We feel that a most delicate situation has arisen in Jordan,” said the prime minister.
Americans around the room looked quizzically at each other.
“The King of Jordan has asked our advice, in the most urgent terms. And we are quite frankly at a loss what to tell him.”
The president nodded toward the Director at that point, as if to say: Will you please explain what in the hell this is all about?
The Director spoke up.
“The King is a worrier,” he said. “I have been holding his hand for the better part of a decade, and I don’t mind telling you that he is a worrier.”
“A what?” said the president, who had been distracted by an aide whispering something in his ear.
“A worrier, and I will give you an example to prove it,” said the Director. He loved telling secrets to those who were authorized to hear them.
“We have been working for two years to get the King together with the Israelis. Back and forth, yes and no. You can imagine. We finally succeeded in arranging a meeting aboard a speedboat in the Gulf of Aqaba between the King and the Israeli prime minister. Just the two of them. We provided the boat and, needless to say, we wired it for sound. Do you know what the King talked about most of the time? About how the other Arabs would try to kill him if he ever made a peace agreement. The man, as I say, is a worrier.”
The president cleared his throat. It was a signal that he was impatient.
“Excuse me,” said the president. “But the question is: Does the King have anything to worry about from the Palestinians?”
“Our judgment, at this point, is that he does not,” answered the Director. He summarized in a few sentences the most recent intelligence estimate of the situation in Jordan. The gist was that the Palestinian guerrillas were a rag-tag, irregular group and would be trounced by the Jordanian Army if it ever came to civil war.
The British prime minister broke in again.
“We shared that opinion, until recently, when we obtained a most interesting set of documents.”
The prime minister handed a copy to the president. An aide simultaneously handed a copy to the Director. It was a collection of several internal Fatah documents, translated from Arabic into English, outlining plans for a new government in Jordan. One of them was a handwritten note from the Old Man to a prominent Jordanian politician, offering him, in oblique terms, the post of prime minister in the new regime.
“What about all this?” asked the president, turning to the Director with a reproachful look.
“Our reporting is not dissimilar,” said the Director, stalling for time. “I’m reluctant to go into the details of what we have, for obvious reasons, but I don’t disagree with our British friends that the Palestinians are intent on overthrowing the King of Jordan. That information, if you will forgive me, is hardly a secret. To confirm it, all you need to do is listen to the radio. They proclaim it every day.
“The issue is what we should do about all this.” The Director emphasized the word “ do ” to make clear that this was an area in which the British contribution was likely to be modest.
“Precisely,” said the British prime minister. “Or to be more exact, what you should do, since we are in the process of withdrawing our forces east of Suez.”
The president looked to an aide, looked at his watch, and cleared his throat.
“Stenographer,” whispered the aide. A Navy enlisted man in a corner of the room took out his pad and pencil.
“The King of Jordan is a friend of the United States, and we intend to stand by our friends,” said the president. He nodded his head abruptly, as if that settled the issue once and for all.
The meeting turned to a discussion of NATO strategy in Central Europe that left everyone bored and confused, even the attentive aides sitting along the wall of the Situation Room.
The Director walked out of the White House that day still steaming about the British sneak attack. Obviously the Brits had promised the King of Jordan that they would plead his case. Outrageous. The Director made a mental note to make life unpleasant for the MI6 man in Washington. And he began composing in his mind the tart memo he would send to the Deputy Director for Plans telling him that he had dropped the ball on Jordan.
When he returned to his seventh-floor office at CIA headquarters, the Director called for Edward Stone, the chief of the Near East Division of the clandestine service. He did so partly to snub Stone’s boss, the DDP, and partly because he had grown over the years to trust Stone’s judgment.
Stone was a tough old soldier, a warrior-intellectual in the George Marshall tradition, who had made his name in the 1940s as an intelligence officer in London, working with the British to unravel enemy intelligence networks. So many years of living in London had given Stone a British look: he had a ruddy face and silver-gray hair that was always combed in place; he dressed in heavy wool suits with cuffed trousers; he wore sturdy, well-shined Oxfords that he purchased every few years from a shoemaker on Jermyn Street in London; he carried an umbrella even when it wasn’t raining. In his office, Stone had on the wall a paraphrased quotation from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, mounted in a simple wooden frame. It read: “Gaze not too long into the abyss, lest the abyss gaze back at you.”
