1
Not, of course, that all of them felt that way.
Certainly he did not, Secretary of State Raymond Cass Stanley reminded himself as he stood on the terrace outside his seventh-floor office atop the department’s Main Building at 2201 C Street, N.W., in Foggy Bottom.
Across the Potomac he could see, on this spring-bright day, the equally enormous domain of his principal domestic antagonist, Secretary of Defense Arlie McGregor.
Arlie and the Pentagon, though bitterly upset, greatly alarmed, and considerably diminished by the headlong, unilateral American disarmament of the Clinton years, still thought they ran the world. Ray Stanley knew he didn’t. In fact, despite his forty years of steady advancement up the ladder of the Foreign Service, the world’s incorrigible intransigence continued to surprise him every day. No sensible man could afford to be arrogant in the face of its myriad insane uncertainties.
If Arlie and his sidekick, Gen. Wilson Rathbun, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had an ounce of humility, Ray Stanley thought tartly now, they would be as startled, dismayed, and flabbergasted as he was by the news just conveyed to him by the Deputy Secretary of State, Eula Lee Montgomery.
Eula Lee (“Eulie,” as she was universally known throughout the beehive of busy offices beneath his feet, and “Lulie” to him after four decades together in the Foreign Service) was not one to be overly taken aback by events. Yet even she, six feet two and 235 pounds of outwardly monumental black calm, had been a little perturbed when she brought him the just-decoded message from the embassy in Greater Lolómé, fifteen minutes ago.
“That bastard,” she said, not bothering to identify which of the many bastards the United States had to face these days—nor did she need to, there was one who for years had indisputably been first among equals—“is doing it again. When are we going to kick that smug ape’s butt once and for all?”
The question hung in the air, almost visibly dripping with the icicles of her contempt. People in Washington—people everywhere—had been asking the question for years. Each new administration took office secretly determined to do it. Each found endless reasons why it could not be done.
Eulie, who talked like a trooper in the privacy of top-level offices no matter how much she sounded like a Baptist preacher on the public platform, repeated her exasperated query:
“When are we going to kick that smug ape’s butt once and for all?”
Raymond Cass Stanley sighed and resorted to his standard gesture in moments of stress, removing his glasses from their usual perch atop his leonine head and cleaning them on the underside of his tie.
“Now, Lulie,” he said mildly, “you know very well we can’t do anything without the support of our friends across the river”—he nodded toward the Pentagon—“and his support”—his nod swung back in the general direction of the White House, hidden from them by the trees and buildings of Pennsylvania Avenue—“and we haven’t got either. Furthermore, I don’t think, myself, that we should move too hastily to—”
“Ray,” she interrupted with the familiarity born of three joint posts in the Middle East and many years together in the department, “you wouldn’t touch a fly in Arabia if you had your druthers, let alone that murderous thug, and you know it. He knows it, everybody in the Middle East knows it, everybody in this town knows it. Why else do they think they can push State around the way they do? It’s a disgrace.”
“Sometimes,” he said, still mildly, though as always with Eulie, tempted to respond as bluntly as she, “State does the pushing and sometimes we get pushed. I think it balances out pretty well in the long run.”
She uttered the famous disgusted “Tsssk!” through her teeth which encompassed everything from mild annoyance to all-out expletive, depending on her tone, and shook her head angrily.
“Don’t be a pantywaist, Ray,” she advised. “Stand up to ’em. Stand up to ’em! I suppose there’ll be a National Security Council meeting about it. I want you to take me with you.”
“That will upset Arlie and Bill Rathbun,” he said with a smile. “And maybe the President as well. Are you sure you want to barge in?”
“Will they kick me out?” she demanded.
“I doubt it,” he said, smile broadening. “They know you.”
“All right,” she said with satisfaction. “Let me know as soon as you get the word.”
“I will,” he promised. “How’s Herbie?”
At this reference to her quiet little husband, retired after many years as a leading lawyer in the office of the counsel of the department and now suffering from pancreatic cancer in their beautiful Federal-era home in Georgetown, her stern expression suddenly crumpled.
“Not good, Ray,” she said soberly. “Pray for him.”
“I do, Lulie,” he said softly. “I do.”
“Thank you,” she said, turning away, but not before he caught the glint of tears. “You’re a good man, Ray. Now,” she said, suddenly brisk again as she sailed grandly out the door, “let’s see some action on Lolómé.”
But action on Lolómé, he reflected now as he turned away from the terrace and returned to his desk, was easier said than done. And Eulie symbolized exactly why. So did many others who, on this day as on almost every other day in the calendar as the twentieth century hurtled toward its close, carried the possibility of disaster for the world and the certainty of confusion—political, diplomatic, ethical, and moral—for the great Republic.
Not in Jaime Serrano’s mind, however, Ray Stanley told himself with some annoyance as he waited for the national security adviser’s call from the White House. This sort of thing was tailor-made for Jaime, who loved nothing so much as a crisis he could manage—or at least stage-manage, the Secretary of State thought scornfully.
Jaime Serrano was a naturalized Cuban American who had come over in the first wave of Castro escapees and, aided by his wife’s fortune, had promptly made a killing in Florida real estate by bilking his fellow countrymen in ways that by now were buried deep, or lost, in the records and legends of Dade County. Out of it he had emerged as owner of a sizable section of the city of Miami, half a dozen suburban throwaway advertising newspapers, and a great desire, hitherto undisclosed, to be a mover and shaker in international affairs. The ultimate objective, never expressed and always denied, was of course to return to Cuba as President.
How he had progressed from Dade County to the powerful post of national security adviser was one of those Washington stories that rarely made any sense in any context outside Washington but could easily be understood there. It began with a $200,000 campaign contribution and wound up with Jaime as Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs.
Jaime’s small, dark, bustling figure and the considerably larger figure of his wife, the former Maria Christina Delgado, scion of a wealthy family whose members had also fled Cuba in the first wave on the eve of the downfall of Fulgencio Batista, soon became fixtures on the Washington social scene. Jaime also emerged as one of the most articulate witnesses before the Senate and House committees dealing with the development, oversight, and funding of international policies and actions.
And, much to the not-always-concealed surprise of his friends and supporters, one of the most intelligent and farsighted, too.
“You see?” he had once whispered to Raymond Cass Stanley when they were appearing together before the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee to testify on the foreign aid bill, “It ees not jus’ Maria’s money! I make sense for me, too!”
“That’s right, Jaime,” Ray Stanley conceded with a smile. “That you do.”
And that he did, until suddenly one day the previous national security adviser ran afoul of the First Lady in some still unclear fashion and, for reasons known only to the frequently unknowable gentleman who sat in the Oval Office, a finger reached down as in a Michelangelo painting and touched the finger of Assistant Secretary Serrano and suddenly, presto-chango, he was national security adviser.
He had now been in office almost a year, and his record, Ray Stanley had to concede, was really quite good. As a personality he was inclined to be interfering, aggressive, sometimes explosive, and more often than not inclined to be dictatorial toward State—“a real pain in the you-know-what,” as Eulie sometimes remarked, although his basic good nature usually came to his rescue. Like most people, she too had to concede that he did his job with competence and some really genuine insights into the complex international situations that confronted his employer.
As such, he was apparently set to remain in office as long as the President did; which, according to whatever poll you read over morning coffee, might or might not be another four years.
The only thing he really found a little annoying about Jaime, Ray Stanley often thought, was the fact that he had risen to his present eminence without the sort of profoundly valuable preparation which he, Ray Stanley, felt he himself had gone through. Not that he would have willingly given up the office of SecState, of course, that was the cap all Foreign Service regulars dreamed of for their outwardly glamorous but often rather bleak and boring careers; he did not envy the national security adviser’s headaches, though he sometimes envied him the power that was able to give Ray Stanley headaches. But it did seem that sometimes people who didn’t deserve influence in foreign affairs acquired it by means far from the patient service and diligent loyalty to US interests that had characterized his and Mary’s careers, Eulie’s, and that of many thousands in the Foreign Service and in the civil service categories that worked with, and for, the F.S.
When he had emerged from the University of Michigan, which he had attended as a very young World War II veteran under the G.I. Bill of Rights, Raymond Cass Stanley had at first thought he would go into law, at that time still a well-thought-of profession not yet sullied by the burst of wildly irresponsible, lawyer-encouraged litigation that would come later. Quite by accident—he was to learn later that many and many a career in the Foreign Service had begun “quite by accident”—he had been “dragged,” as he put it humorously in many of his public speeches over the years—to a lecture by the then Secretary of State. Since the dragging was done by the girl he hoped to marry, Ray Stanley went along.
Mary Porter was very pretty, very bright, and very determined; and long, lean, lanky Ray soon realized that he was going to have to pay considerable attention to her ambitions if he wanted to blend them with his own. He had never been particularly interested in foreign affairs except as everyone was involved in them in those days simply by the sheer overwhelming impact of the war, but that was Mary’s field of study, and that was what she wanted him to go into. It was what she intended to do herself, and if he wanted to come along and be a part of her life, he had better get moving. She was leaving for Washington within a week after graduation to apply for the Foreign Service.
That precipitated everything. A hitherto shy Ray proposed, Mary accepted instantly, they wired her parents in Chicago and his in Indiana, appeared before a judge three days later, and as the week expired, were on a train en route to DC. Today, Mary was still very pretty, very bright, and very determined; and Ray, still long and lanky, if no longer quite so lean, was Secretary of State, after the recent three-year period, so well publicized in the media, during which they had simultaneously been ambassadors, she to Egypt and he to Greece. After that, she had retired but was still credited in Washington gossip with “running the department”; and he was sometimes dismissed patronizingly by the media as a “nice, mild, rather dull, and not very forceful Secretary”—except for two things.
The first was that, more successfully than anyone since Dean Acheson had managed to do, he looked the part.
The second was that he possessed a flint-like honesty and integrity that some found “unyielding and difficult” but others, more perceptive, valued in a capital city where these qualities were not always found in public servants.
Standing six feet four, holding himself always erect and commanding, kindly and courtly of manner, possessed of almost fluorescently white hair, deep-set dark eyes, high cheekbones, a generous, almost-always-smiling mouth, and a charm that could turn suddenly and disconcertingly into a forbiddingly reserved disapproval when crossed, he was to many a formidable but heartening father figure on the international scene.
“He just looks like a Secretary of State,” one of his most persistent critics, the columnist James Van Rensselaer Burden (As I See It, 323 newspapers, TV talk shows, books, lectures, etc.) put it.
“If Jimmy Van says so,” Ray Stanley remarked with a chuckle when the remark was passed along to him by the inevitable Georgetown gossip, “it must be true.”
And it was; and the disturbing and sometimes rather sad thing about it was that looking the part was even more important, in this television age, than it had been back in Acheson’s heyday in the late 1940s.
The quality of secretaries of state had fluctuated a good deal in recent decades, and so had the sometimes wildly skewed perceptions of them in other countries. It did help, as another of his media critics, Able Montague (anchorman and creator of the popular shows Washington Wrangle and WorldView), had remarked recently, to “look like God on a Sunday afternoon.”
(Again, Ray Stanley had responded with amusement, “Able really does run on, doesn’t he?”)
But it was true. When he embarked, as secretaries of state had become expected to do these days on every possible image-making pretext for the President, on “shuttle diplomacy,” it did help when the plane door opened and out stepped “dignified, white-haired, commanding,” etc., etc. Raymond Cass Stanley.
(“Don’t let it go to your head,” Mary often prompted. “It’s the substance that counts.”)
Well, he thought now as his secretary entered to inform him that what they referred to humorously between themselves as “the usual suspects” were waiting in the outer office to see him, he did have the substance and it did count. Harassed at times by Jaime, thwarted at times by the Pentagon, annoyed at times by the pontifical pinpricks of media types such as Jimmy Van and Able Montague, frustrated and impatient at times with the committees on the Hill, he nonetheless managed to maintain a basically unruffled approach to his demanding and tiring job. Substance was what he had, and substance was what he brought to the task. If some didn’t like it, they had the chance to overrule him. He was determined it wouldn’t happen this time.
Perhaps he was “an Arabist,” as they were called in the department; perhaps he did tend to favor the desert peoples, now so wealthy and arrogant, whose modest beginnings he could associate with his own in their desert capitals so long ago; perhaps the department’s “Israelites” did consider him too pro-Arab. The great schism between Arabists and Israelites had dominated policy toward the Middle East in the department for many decades.
He supposed his position in the unceasing and sometimes exceedingly bitter push-and-shove had been inevitable ever since he, Mary, and a tall, dramatic (and then almost hawk-thin) black girl named Eula Lee had been assigned together to the embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, thirty-five years ago. From that point on, their careers had roughly paralleled one another. It was some considerable tribute, Ray thought, to the present occupant of the White House that he had turned to the ranks of the professional Foreign Service when he chose both his Secretary and Deputy Secretary of State.
Brilliant minds—or not so brilliant, depending on the issues they had to face and the particular periods of unrest in which they had to face them—had filled the offices before, but not often were either drawn from the professional ranks. Academic laurels—business achievements—campaign contributions—the he-feels-comfortable-with-him syndrome—there were many standards for picking a Secretary of State and his immediate subordinates. Some secretaries had been adequate, a few outstanding, a tiny handful brilliant; many bore out the dry French aphorism, “There are no great men, only great occasions and the men who happen to be there at the time.”
Without being immodest, Ray Stanley thought he might well qualify in the “outstanding” category. Not the best of the best but certainly very far from the worst; a good, moderate, toward-the-top-of-the-rankings Secretary, determined to serve his country and his President as the times might dictate, fully equipped by age and experience to do so.
On the floors below, the life of the department flowed on, sometimes, he thought, almost irrespective of who sat in the impressive office on the seventh floor. He looked around now at its many antiques, carefully collected over recent decades in the great rehabilitation that had gone on under the prodding of department officials and others who felt that the Secretary’s office should look as portentous and important as many in the department felt the department to be.
The office exuded, he had to admit, a most impressive atmosphere, rich, luxurious, hushed, deliberately overwhelming. He hoped, as he had before on the eve of such interdepartmental conferences as the one about to begin, that it would impose some restraints of order and comity on the participants; but he knew this was probably a vain hope. His office might cow heads of state, intimidate kings and princes and lords of the desert, but it did not often slow down the usual suspects; not when, as on this lovely spring day about to heat up into another crisis, each had his or her ax to grind in the labyrinthine, Machiavellian, and often exquisitely bloody battles over foreign policy that went on all the time in Foggy Bottom.
* * *
Elsewhere in Washington, and in many places far from Washington, various people as convinced as Sidi bin Sidi bin Sidi and Sheikh Mustafa of the righteousness of their causes and the importance of their countries’ interests, were also about to become part of what the President of the United States would refer to later as “the ungluing of Lolómé.” That it came close to ungluing the rest of the world was something the President preferred not to dwell upon; or upon his own part in an episode which, he also remarked, “was either a watershed in international affairs…or just more of the same.”
That he could dismiss it so lightly in view of his own performance was typical of the curiously detached spirit in which he approached his great responsibilities; an apparent lightheartedness that infuriated his critics and made even his most partisan supporters uneasy.
“I can’t understand him,” Ray Stanley often confided to Mary. “He just doesn’t seem to care.”
They marveled that a mind “so ironic and so removed,” as Mary put it, should have achieved the apex of the American political system with such a seemingly almost frivolous attitude; yet there he was. Among the Secretary of State’s many other problems was that of having to deal with this rather strange individual who had, after all, crowned Ray’s career with the high office he now held, and presumably depended upon him in many areas of foreign policy that he himself sometimes seemed too remote to care about.
All Presidents, Ray Stanley had concluded after many years of observing politics and serving in the government, were “rather strange” people; it took a certain larger-than-life ego and ambition, an unusual and ruthless ability to balance ethics with necessity, a personality that in the last analysis defied analysis, to achieve residency at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. All this, plus an aptitude for public performance which, in the television age, was perhaps the most important single ingredient. “The camera doesn’t lie”—but it did; it did. It was no more capable of penetrating the bland and exterior shell of Presidents than any other medium. It only transmitted an impression. If the impression was skillfully enough devised and shrewdly enough presented, there were only superficial clues to what lay beneath.
So it was with the present incumbent, risen to power, first through the governorship of his native Minnesota, and then through the Senate, where he served a single, rather perfunctory term before seeking the White House. But even in that collegial body, where members were usually appraised accurately by their fellow members, he had remained something of an enigma, essentially withdrawn and unknowable, so bent upon his own ultimate purposes that he often gave the impression of just making a pit stop on his way to more important matters. The quick smile was there, the easy grin, the joke, the backslap, the hearty guffaw, the seemingly complete candor of mind and emotion, the carefully managed public image; but always, as Jaime Serrano had confided to Ray not long ago in a moment of candid frustration, “sometheeng ees held back.” With it, the President performed such domestic and foreign miracles as he deigned to involve himself in. The last go-round with the two Lolómés had also been the last time he had really exerted himself; and that, the Secretary felt, was not a particularly good omen for the new crisis now brewing in the desert sands.
On that occasion Seedy Sidi, as the chief executive soon took to calling him in the privacy of the Oval Office, had launched an impulsive, but for a couple of weeks overwhelming, attack on the ill-trained and virtually helpless “army” of Lesser Lolómé. The President had reacted like a prior outwardly involved and inwardly curiously detached occupant of the White House: he had slapped together a hasty international “coalition” and gone to war.
His coalition was much flimsier, much shakier, much more reluctant; but given the flimsy nature of Sidi’s forces, equally effective in restoring the status quo.
Interestingly—but equally ominous for the future, Ray Stanley thought—“the second Gulf War” had ended in the same undecided fashion as the first—“the half-assed conclusion of a half-assed concept,” as the President’s principal critic on the Hill, Senator “Willie” Wilson, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, acidly described it. “The second Gulf War” had turned out to be essentially “nothing more than a skirmish in the sand,” to quote the chairman again—except that, facing a crisis, a President of the United States had once again deliberately taken refuge behind the United Nations to flaunt his courage and conceal his hesitations. In what had increasingly become the pattern since the first Gulf War, a President had again made his country hostage to the 110—or 120—or was it 250, so fast was the world disintegrating into impossible political bits—ancient states, new states, city-states, island states, and tiny-dot-of-land states that comprised the international organization.
The United States, its options for decisive leadership increasingly tied like Gulliver by the thousand silken threads of UN weakness and obfuscation, was by deliberate choice of its Presidents crippled down even further in the exercise of that leadership which its position as “the world’s sole remaining superpower” (for the time being—China, Japan, Germany, and the increasingly insistent Second Soviet Republic were coming up fast on the turn) imposed upon it.
In recent years, as Ray Stanley saw it, America’s chief executives had deliberately ducked this responsibility and, in so doing, had thrown away their ability to lead the world. They had done so, Ray thought, because they had no real idea what else to do. They did not want to lead, because that would expose to the world their lack of ideas and their inability to formulate fundamental policy. It was no wonder the United Nations was such an eagerly sought shield for them. It made their weaknesses easy to hide, respectable, politically quite safe. The convenient myth of “United Nations unity” made life simple for them. If they got it, fine; if they didn’t, well, what was a poor President to do? Be a real leader? Perish the thought!
“I’ll be damned,” the chairman had also said, “if putting the American horse behind the United Nations cart, instead of in front of it where it ought to be, is any way to climb the mountain.”
But that was how it was being done in the final years of the topsy-turvy twentieth century.
At the same time, with the most bland inconsistency, American Presidents, through their Secretaries of State, were always lecturing the world from a stance of high moral righteousness about the ills of this government here, that government there, a frowned-upon internal development in some country, a defiant refusal to live up to American standards in some other.
“You have set yourself up,” the Russian ambassador had remarked bitterly to Ray Stanley not long ago, “as the moral preachers to the world. You’re as bad as the Pope, but at least he has almost two thousand years of history behind him. What gives the United States this right, we all wonder?”
To which, the Secretary had to admit, he had found only the lamest and most inadequate of answers. His reply, in fact, had deteriorated into an almost inaudible mumble, to which the Russian had listened with his characteristic, beady-bright, skeptical look. It had not been, Ray reflected uncomfortably later, one of his own better moments.
But, he thought with a long-suffering sigh as the usual suspects came in, life had to go on. What, in their combined wisdom, should State suggest at the NSC meeting to avoid another slide into the international La Brea tar pit of “United Nations unity”? He watched them enter—all, as usual, prepared to do battle for their particular point of view.
* * *
First came the most aggressive and, as always, probably the best informed and best prepared: Joan Cohn-Bourassa, Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs; chosen by the President for her job because, as a Jew married to “Boo” Bourassa from Syria, she was a famous and highly touted “fair-minded” expert on her particular area of interest, “the Arab-Jewish Dilemma,” on which she had been teaching and holding graduate seminars for the past two decades at Yale University. It was at Yale that she had met Boo, then a graduate student in atomic physics, and after defying her parents and his, had virtually demanded that he marry her. Boo was an amiable soul whose ultimate purposes, whatever they might be, were successfully concealed by his easygoing nature and silly nickname, which he had acquired in undergraduate days when his fraternity brothers had started calling him “Abu ben Adam” instead of his real name, which was Achmed. Soon shortened to “Abu” and then to “Boo,” the nickname had stuck and would be with him for life. He didn’t mind. Boo Bourassa—that plump, amiable, always smiling, everybody’s friend—had his own agenda and didn’t mind playing the gentle buffoon if that would conceal it. Not even Joan, steel-trap mind, severe hairdo, and combative manner notwithstanding, suspected what it was. Hers was so obvious and vocal that she quite overshadowed him. Which was fine with him.
“I’m the Bourassa of Cohn-Bourassa,” he always told new acquaintances with a grin. “My wife is that dramatic lady over there.”
And so she was, Ray Stanley thought with a rather tired amusement: small, dark, driving, and intense, intense, intense. And so famous, because Joan Cohn-Bourassa was a highly publicized Arabist; and mighty, therefore, were her words in the land.
After her came Eulie Montgomery, again holding in her hand the decoded dispatch from the American embassy in Greater Lolómé. She winked at Ray as she took her seat along the big oval table at which he held top department conferences. Eulie always enjoyed these tussles, in which she quite often crossed swords with Joanie Bourassa. Honors were usually pretty well divided when the smoke of battle cleared.
“I like the Ay-rabs,” Eulie often said with a humorously exaggerated pronunciation, “but I can’t say I’m really partisan toward either side. I’m in the middle of the muddled Middle East.”
This attitude did not please Joanie, who wanted everybody, as she said, “to stand up and be counted,” which meant that she wanted them to fit themselves into the neat little boxes where she put people in her mind. Eulie didn’t fit, nor did Gage McGregor, director of the policy planning staff, who now came “swanning in,” as the British ambassador to Washington, no friend, described him: tall, thin, slick, and trim, giving an impression of being somewhat willowy but with a whim of iron underneath, as the ambassador had discovered on more than one occasion; sometimes an Arabist, sometimes an Israelite, more often off on some tangent entirely and uniquely his own.
Basil Rifkin, counsel of the department, was also tall, thin, not at all willowy, but rather an iron rail with little flexibility and a legal brilliance that had put him at the top of his class at Harvard Law School. In due time he became attorney general of New York. Now he was one of Washington’s shrewdest operators, stopping through, Ray Stanley always felt, on his way somewhere else, presumably the Supreme Court. He and his equally shrewd little wife, Effie, were close friends of the President and First Lady, which, Ray supposed, was one of the better ways to go about it. There was no doubt where Basil stood. He made no bones about being adamantly pro-Israel. “And why shouldn’t I be?” he demanded bluntly. Nobody had a good counter for that one.
Brad Temple and Hugo Mallerbie came in together, completing the usual suspects the Secretary wanted for this particular brainstorming session. Brad, Undersecretary for Political Affairs, was a former congressman from California and former member of the House International Affairs Committee who had done a yeoman job of helping the President carry his difficult state in the last election. He was generally considered in the department to be an excellent choice for dealing with what most department employees regarded as the major bane of their existence, namely, the Congress of the United States—“those windy bastards…those interfering bastards…those bastards.”
Brad was short, dumpy, gone to fat, given to loud, boisterous, and seemingly quite open and direct approaches to people and events. Behind the tousled and rumpled outward appearance lurked, as Basil Rifkin often remarked, a mind as devious as Machiavelli’s and a purpose as tenacious as a cat’s. He had the departmental reputation of “knowing where all the bodies are buried on the Hill.” He didn’t, but he knew about enough of them to give him considerable clout when it came to the formulation and successful conduct of policy.
Hugo Mallerbie, Undersecretary for International Security Affairs, was an almost complete contrast: small, quiet, deliberately inconspicuous, faceless, and gray, fading as much as possible into the background, from which position he sopped up information like a sponge and processed it back out again in a close-to-the-vest operation that missed few things that threatened the US position around the world or his own position in the department. A veteran of both the FBI and the CIA, in which he had served consecutively for approximately a decade each before coming to the State Department, he really did know where a lot of the bodies were buried, just as he knew now what the Deputy Secretary of State was about to announce, having learned of it through his own channels within ten minutes after she did. That his own channels included a secretary in her office was something she didn’t know about and he wasn’t going to tell her; the girl was only one of many lower-ranking employees in the department who reported interesting things from time to time to Hugo Mallerbie. They, along with many similar contacts in US ambassadorial and consular offices overseas, gave Hugo, as he often reflected with considerable satisfaction, “quite a handle” on what was going on.
“Lulie,” the Secretary suggested when they were all seated and looking at him expectantly from around the table, “why don’t you tell us what you have?”
“Yes, I will,” she said, putting on her glasses and peering down her nose at the papers she held. “This comes in from two sources. One is Creed Moncrief, who is officially ‘assistant to the ambassador’ in Greater Lolómé, off-record CIA, and the other is Regina Gates, officially deputy chief of mission in the embassy in Lesser Lolómé, also CIA. The messages were received by the Agency via satellite an hour ago within five minutes of each other. The substance is the same. Creed reports that Sidi has received four or five atomic bombs over the course of the last five months. He says Sidi has also received a total of ten long-range missiles in the past year, sneaked in piecemeal and assembled in the underground chambers beneath the Pink House on Point Sinistre, where secret launching facilities have also been constructed.” She paused and shook her head in amazement. “How this could all go on without anybody catching it sooner is beyond me, but then, Hugo, a lot of things in the intelligence community, including its frequent stupidity, are beyond me. Anyway,” she went on firmly as Hugo Mallerbie shifted in his seat, obviously prepared to do battle, “there it is. Regina reports this same information has been received by what she refers to as Sheikh Mustafa’s ‘desert intelligence network,’ as she calls it, which, like all these countries, is pretty damned good even though it exists without visible means of communication and seems to run on camel dung. Regina says The Mouse is terrified of an immediate attack by Sidi, and Israel is also highly alarmed, as they are afraid they may be next, or maybe even head the list of Sidi’s priorities. That may have been the real reason for his being given the weapons. We don’t know yet.” She paused, peered over her glasses.
“That’s it,” she concluded crisply. “There’ll probably be a National Security Council meeting on it soon, maybe as early as this afternoon. What’s State’s position?”
The signals, as the Secretary expected, were mixed, but the final decision—as much as any decision was ever “final” at State, policy was constantly shifting on all fronts—was exactly what he foresaw. After the usual suspects had their say and dispersed to their offices below, Eulie told him with some asperity that it was exactly what she had foreseen, too. He liked it. She didn’t.
“Too much like State,” she said. “The same old story. Confusion, confliction, caution. Endless, endless caution. One more clear, uncomplicated shining beacon of resolve from Foggy Bottom.”
“We need more like that,” he responded, unruffled.
“God help us!” she exclaimed with a snort. “Isn’t he”—that universal he of the bureaucracy which only meant one man—“indecisive enough without us encouraging him?”
“He’s doing very comfortably in the polls,” Ray Stanley pointed out.
She snorted again. “‘Polls!’ That’s government?”
“It passes for it, in our times.”
“Yes,” she conceded. “Well. Not for me, Ray. Not for me.”
“Well, Lulie,” he said with his charming smile, “everybody knows you’re the toughest man on the payroll. There has to be room for a little give and take.”
“We’ll give,” she said bluntly, “and Sidi and his friend will take. They’ve all got our number, overseas.”
Nonetheless, he had felt, as Joanie Bourassa fired the first salvo, that it was going to be a good discussion, “getting our ducks in a row,” as Brad Temple was wont to say on almost every occasion, for the much tougher discussion they all anticipated in the NSC.
“I must say,” Joan said, looking even more intense than she usually did, which was saying a lot, “that I think we definitely need more detailed information before we can recommend that this government take any stand that might lead to renewed military involvement in the Middle East. You know how opposed the media are to it. To say nothing of the Hill.”
“That’s getting your priorities straight,” Basil Rifkin said dryly. “Particularly with this President.”
“We can’t ignore them,” she said sharply. “Either of them.”
“And we can’t ignore the threat of another marauder’s expedition over there, either,” Basil retorted.
“Do you want us to threaten military action?” Joan demanded. “That’s your solution to everything, Basil.”
“No, it’s not,” he said with equal sharpness. “That’s nonsense. You’re so involved with your precious Arabs that you don’t want us to say anything remotely harsh to anybody, including your precious Sidi.”
“He isn’t my precious Sidi,” she said. “And anyway, he has considerable justification on his side. The Lolómés didn’t ask the British to split them in two, you know. He has a right to want to reunify the country.”
“Oh, that’s the excuse,” Basil Rifkin said, again in the tone of slightly amused disbelief that could always provoke an annoyed response from the naturally indignant, which Joan Cohn-Bourassa was. “Sixty years ago on such a matter, and it’s still the excuse.”
“Israel uses the excuse of thousands of years for everything,” she said.
“You really don’t like the Jews, do you?” Basil inquired blandly. “What soured you on your heritage, Joanie?”
“Oh, stop it,” she said angrily. “Just stop it! I can get along without your smart-aleck type of argument very well, thank you! I’m just as—just as—”
“This really isn’t getting us anywhere, you know,” the Secretary remarked in the mild tone that Brad Temple referred to as “velvet-clad iron.” “If you want to put this on a personal level, Basil, we won’t make much progress. I take it, Joanie, that you are opposed to warning Sidi against attacking Lesser Lolómé or doing anything else that might upset the equilibrium over there.”
“I certainly don’t think a public warning is necessary,” she said. “Get old Big Balls Bullock to get on his horse and go riding up to the Pink House door with all guns blazing. He can do it off the record, if it has to be done. I don’t think this department needs to go out on a limb.”
“And if Sidi doesn’t behave?” Hugo Mallerbie interjected quietly. “Then what?”
“Then we make it a little more public,” Gage McGregor said with his disconcerting little giggle that often undercut serious discussion.
“And too late,” Basil Rifkin said.
“Too late,” Gage agreed, giggling again. “We’ve got to be tougher with him than that.”
“We ought to get at the source,” Eula Lee Montgomery said flatly. “We ought to use this as the final excuse to go after the bastard who is probably the principal one behind all this and get him.”
“Maybe that can be arranged, too,” Brad Temple suggested. “Get ’em both with one fell swoop.”
“A clichéd expression and a clichéd idea,” Joan Cohn-Bourassa snapped. “That’s typical of your profound thinking, Brad. We can tell you’ve been around the Hill a long time.”
“I hear,” Hugo Mallerbie said in the same soft, quiet tone, “that you have a few malcontents in the Near East division who might want us to take a really strong stand this time. Any signs of revolt in the ranks, Joanie?”
“Not that I know of,” she said calmly. “Anyway, what difference does it make? The final decision is mine.”
“Not with the media around,” Eulie said. “Don’t get too big for your britches, girl.”
“Don’t ‘girl’ me, Eulie!” Joan Bourassa snapped.
“Why, no, ma’am,” Eulie said with a big smile. “I know how touchy you folks are about being patronized.”
“Oh—!” Joanie exclaimed, exasperated, as they all laughed. “Can’t we please have a serious discussion of this? It is, after all, a serious matter.”
“It is,” the Deputy Secretary agreed, more soberly. “So far, Joanie’s obviously against a strong public reaction at this time. Basil’s for it, Gage is having his usual giggle, Brad’s skittering over the surface of things as befits a good ex-congressman, and Hugo, as always, is being a mystery man. Can we get a little nearer to a clarification on this? Ray?”
“I hear you,” the Secretary said with a smile. “Shall I poll the precincts?”
Brad held up his hand.
“More discussion first, if you please,” he said. “We’ve got a tough situation on the Hill, as you know.”
“All right,” the Secretary said. “Give us the Hill in ten well-chosen words.”
“The Hill, as always, is full of many voices,” Brad said. “The key players, as always these days, are Willie Wilson in the Senate and Johnny Jones in the House. You know Willie; he’s pushing eighty and into his dotage—”
“That will be the day,” the Secretary interrupted. “Willie pushing eighty is ten times men half his age.”
“You are right,” Brad conceded with a cheerful grin. “He is still one smart cookie. But he is chairman of Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and that makes him a problem. He’s always been a hawk.”
“Or always so characterized by the media,” Eulie suggested. “That doesn’t mean it’s so.”
“It ain’t necessarily so!” Gage sang out. It startled them all.
“All right,” Brad Temple said sternly. “Be serious for once, please, Gage. As for that son of a bitch Johnny Jones in the House—”
“Chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on the State Department,” Joan Cohn-Bourassa said, “and my principal cross. An absolutely charming fellow. I’m still getting reports on the way he terrorized the natives on his last trip to Asia. Not only all the sexual skullduggery we’ve come to expect from him, but things like buying up antiques against local law, smuggling them in his official luggage, cheating customs, and then reselling them through an antiques shop in his district operated by a cousin. To say nothing of all the privileges of housing and transportation and temporary girlfriends he demands as chairman from our embassy and consular people. Oh, he’s a first-rate citizen, is Johnny Jones of Alabama.”
“Leak it to the Post and the Times,” Basil Rifkin suggested. “They’ll get him.”
“We tried,” Joan said, “but there’s something there, we don’t know what. We didn’t get very far. Up to this moment, he’s led a charmed life.”
“He’s a dove on the Middle East just like you are,” Basil pointed out dryly. “Maybe that protects him with folks who agree. You, for instance. You ought to get along like a house afire.”
“He’ll support me on this, I’m sure,” Joan said calmly. “Willie Wilson, I’m not so sure.”
“How about the House International Affairs Committee?”
“As long as Henry Slattery is chairman,” Joan said with the scorn most observers reserved for that amicable and virtually senile gentleman from Wyoming, “Johnny Jones will continue to be the key House player on foreign affairs. That’s just the way it is.”
“You’re so right,” Brad Temple agreed. “I would think,” he added thoughtfully, “that it might be better, as you say, to refrain from recommending any official position on this latest business with Sidi, at least until we get more information.”
“How much information do we want?” Basil Rifkin demanded. “The CIA is pretty sure of its facts, isn’t it, Eulie?”
She nodded.
“I called the director as soon as I received the report, and he thinks the information is probably essentially correct. They’re pursuing it further, however. You may have a point, Brad.”
“I think, before we do anything else,” Gage said, “that it’s about time for another general statement warning against further nuclear proliferation among nontreaty states.”
“That’ll shrivel ’em,” Basil said. “That would be, what, the three thousandth—or is it the four thousandth—time that we have viewed with alarm on that subject?”
“Nonetheless,” Gage said, getting the stubborn tone they all knew, “we on the policy planning staff would much prefer to keep this as vague and general as possible, for the time being. If we have to do anything at all, that is. Why do we have to do anything at all?”
“Maybe we won’t,” Ray Stanley said. “Maybe the NSC will prefer to put a damper on the whole thing. For the moment, at least.”
“And what will you recommend, as a member of the NSC?” Basil inquired.
“How do you all vote?” the Secretary responded.
“I’m for a strong warning,” Basil said flatly.
“I’m against it,” Joan Cohn-Bourassa said.
“I’m against it, I think, at the moment,” Brad Temple said.
“I’m against it,” Hugo Mallerbie said.
“So am I,” Gage McGregor said.
“I’m for it,” Eula Lee Montgomery said bluntly. “This is one more chance for State to muck up. We’re always wishy-washing. We’re always dillydallying. I would like us just for once to say flat-out no.”
“Do you think that will really stop Sidi?” Gage inquired.
“Or his friend?” Joan agreed. “Or friends? I think not. We have to give diplomacy a chance.”
“Four against a warning,” the Secretary said, “two for.” He smiled, removing any sting of arrogance. “The head of the table doesn’t need your votes to prevail, but he thanks you for them. Sorry, Lulie, and sorry, Basil, but I’m going to NSC with State’s recommendation that we sit tight for the moment and do nothing.”
“So typical,” the Deputy Secretary said vehemently. “So damned typical. I don’t think we can possibly gain any respect in the world by this sort of—”
The Secretary held up a hand and stopped her.
“You and I have already agreed that you’re going with me, Lulie, so you’ll have plenty of chance to take your views right to headquarters, okay?”
“Well,” she said, not entirely mollified, “Okay. In the meantime, I’d suggest that we play this thing damned close to our vests. I don’t want to hear it on the evening news, so watch yourself with staff, please.”
“Tight as a drum,” Gage said with another giggle.
“That’s Washington,” Eulie said, “for sure. Tight as a drum. I don’t think.”
“Eulie is of course entirely right,” the Secretary said as they stood and prepared to leave. “Mum’s the word, right down the line. Okay?”
And, agreeing solemnly, they all bade him farewell and went off to their respective offices below. He turned to the Deputy Secretary.
“Want to bet, Lulie?” he inquired with a wry smile.
“No,” she said in a tired tone, “I don’t want to bet. I just wish somebody in this town had the sense to keep his—or her—damned mouth shut about anything, that’s all. But I’m not putting any money on it.”
“Me neither,” he agreed ruefully. “Somebody always spills the beans.”
But as they were to find out later, the news, when it finally came, was not revealed by anyone at State, NSC, the White House, the Hill, or any other home of those industrious blabbers-to-the-media who had become such a standard feature of Washington life in recent years.
Nor was it the typical indirect, semi-anonymous, designed-to-be-denied-if-the-rumpus-is-too-great trial balloon at which recent administrations had become so adept.
It could not even be classified as a leak. It was an announcement.
The arrogance with which it was presented to the world—“the sheer, bold effrontery of it,” to quote Willie Wilson—indicated that it was a far more serious matter than they had all anticipated, and accelerated it at once into a major confrontation that would soon test everyone involved to the limit of their abilities for diplomacy, forcefulness, effectiveness, and skill.