He is smiling crookedly at me, eyebrows arched, a look I know well. Professorial, my paternal interlocutor. I am supposed to puzzle out the line.
Ah? he says and dips his chin so that those misty blue eyes peer over the tops of his black frames.
His arsenal is the kitchen shelf, I say.
He whispers it back to me slowly, his hand pressing the rhythm into the skin of my forearm. His ARE senal IS the KIT chen SHELF.
Iambs, I say.
Good, he says, squeezing. The meter?
I repeat it in my head. Tetrameter.
Now, isn’t that nice? he says. And the alliteration—do you hear the snake and the silence? S, s, tch, sh. Subversive, dangerous silence. You understand the attention lavished on every letter? All this care for a manual, a tool for outlining principles and objectives, a military booklet. Then “the trash pile.” Bacchius, a trisyllable. Drops like a brick through the skylight. The trash pile, rank and smelly. Not “refuse heap.” Too soft. Hard t. Hard p. It’s jammed in there like a wrong note. And then back to iambs at the end. Great thought went into every line. I spent the better part of six months watching them work, and they worked urgently, these men and women. Before the war they’d been screenwriters, poets, journalists—published writers. They’d argue over a paragraph break for half a day, resolve the issue, then pick it up again the next morning because one of them was foolish enough to say, “Confirming the break in section B of paragraph two, page fifteen.” Back at each other’s throats. We worked until midnight and they went home to their screenplays and their stalled novels. They drank so much they had gills. By the winter of ’44 you couldn’t find whiskey anywhere, so they were on terrible stuff, bathtub hooch. Mornings were unpleasant. Those who drank at night were hungover, and those who drank in the daylight hadn’t gotten warmed up yet. The couriers knew better than to knock before lunch.
I suppose I contributed in small ways. My job was to take notes, mark changes on the working document, and at night to type up fresh pages for the morning. I followed every peregrination, every line change, every rearrangement of the steps a field agent was to take in disseminating the sabotage message. It became a part of my existence—it’s not unusual for the apprentice to know the form of the work better than the master, who has to create the form and is therefore occupied with all sorts of thorny questions of philosophy and craft. He’s in argument with the medium most of the time. But I was free to absorb the manual’s deeper questions and internalize its precepts.
A state of mind should be encouraged that anything can be sabotaged. That’s from the introduction, and I took it to heart. It was an ideology and I was an idealist.
When it was finished, they ran a thousand copies and off it went to the field agents … the field agents—we tended to go a little slack-jawed when the field agents came through. They were mysterious, sublimely aloof creatures. The administrative officers were always at their wits’ ends over the agents’ behavior. They’d go tearing off through the French countryside, drop out of communication for weeks, sometimes months, with no regard for their orders, and back in D.C., command would be irate—smashing furniture, threatening to shut down entire operations—until lo and behold one day in waltzes the field man for debriefing and here’s the admin officer, the CEO of Ohio Steel out in the real world, suddenly quiet as a mouse, fetching coffee for this twenty-year-old in full beard who hadn’t even bothered to salute. We’d hear reports from China or Afghanistan about field officers marrying multiple women or running liquor, spending money like water, but did anyone raise a finger? Necessary evils of deep cover. An unholy mess, the whole thing. Donovan kept it all together by the force of his personality. He was very close to Roosevelt.
OSS did have a reputation—one we cultivated, I suppose—of being a New Haven social club where waiters in bow ties and waistcoats served sidecars on silver platters. But our agents’ survival odds were abysmal. And if they did survive a mission, they were redeployed quickly, usually into a more dangerous scenario than the last. It was almost as if command was simply trying to see what it would take to kill you. So it took the edge off to pretend that we were a poetry discussion group, I suppose. A number of the field officers were foreign-born—liberated prisoners of Gestapo prisons, Spanish Republicans who’d landed in French refugee camps, what have you. The recruiting pitch was, We’ll get you out of this dungeon, but you have to go back in for us, deal? Those boys and girls, let me tell you. They’d kill you as soon as look at you. They’d been to the white-hot center of hell and escaped Satan himself.
I didn’t meet many field agents during my time at headquarters. That came later. Just fleeting glimpses of them in Washington. They were ghosts. They trained in Canada or on the Chesapeake, and then sailed to England for deployment. Most were captured by the Nazis, who classified them as terrorists, which according to the laws of war allowed them to carry out on-the-spot executions, but in most cases it was torture and interrogation first, then execution. We were aware of this, of course. No one who went over actually expected to return.
That was a grisly business, field operations. When OSS officers did the killing, they killed intimately, in darkness. You were trained to creep through the brush, clinging to the shadows, emerge behind a sentry, embrace him, slit his throat. You felt the struggle of the life draining out of the man when you killed that way, pulling him back into your body, your hand over his mouth, his blood pouring out over
