Eisenhower's Spy Page 2

  There were only two tables going. One with the three nurses that Larry had seen from his window. They were laughing up a storm. Larry could overhear them. Something funny had happened on their ward with a bedpan, then something even more hilarious with a botched injection. The other occupied table was in the far corner. It was a plainclothes cop in out of the cold, keeping an eye on the criminal element, hoping to finish his shift without having to book anyone. There was a four-part foxtrot pace to the cop’s surveillance. A bite of a doughnut. A glance. A sip of coffee. A glance. Then repeat. Larry knew the cop: Nick Barzini.

  A waitress named Pearl arrived at Larry’s table. She knew him and took his order. Black coffee and two doughnuts. One hundred and fifty seconds passed. She came back with the food, drink, and a check. Twenty-eight cents including tax. He set down a fifty-cent piece on the table and told her to keep the change. He always carried fifty-cent pieces. When his dad had come to America in 1926, he disembarked from the boat with one suitcase and nine fifty-cent pieces.

  In the middle of doughnut number one, Larry looked out through the plate glass. A big checker cab pulled up and a man in an overcoat got out. He paid the driver at the driver’s window, turned, looked at the Nedick’s sign, and started toward it. He came through the door.

  Larry knew: this was “Kovacs.” He was big and thick, wearing dark attire but with a bold red and yellow scarf. He came to the table and offered a hand. Polite but not friendly. Well dressed. He wore a two hundred dollar coat, then opened the coat to reveal a wool suit and silk tie. He spoke with an accent that Larry could not place.

  Hungarian or not? Who knew?

  Kovacs sat down with his back to the door and the avenue. Larry tried some small talk first. Kovacs was having none of it. Pearl returned. Kovacs ordered coffee only. When it arrived he did not touch it. He put down a dime and a nickel to cover his transaction.

  Kovacs turned back to Larry. “So?” he asked.

  Larry hunched his shoulders. “So what?”

  “Where’s the girl?” he asked.

  “What girl?”

  “You know what girl. My girl.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Kovacs’s eyes hardened. “Where’s my goddamned money?”

  “What money, man?”

  “Don’t play games with me, you goddamned, left-wing queer! Where’s my two hundred thousand dollars?”

  “Hate to disappoint you, pal,” Larry said. “But I don’t know anything about you, your unsuccessful love life, or your missing two hundred thousand dollars. Okay? So cut me a break and go stuff it!”

  But Kovacs was furious. He wasn’t cutting anything or going anywhere, and he wasn’t planning to stuff anything anywhere. And he was disinclined to shut up. His woman, he said, had become swept up in far-left politics in the last few months and he knew who was to blame.

  “Who might that be?” Larry asked.

  “You, you faggot!”

  “Bullshit, man.”

  “She listens to your show.”

  “So do several hundred thousand other people.” Larry shrugged and finished doughnut number one. “Not much I can do about that,” he answered. “If she’s your wife, tell her not to listen.”

  “I do tell her. She listens anyway.”

  “This sounds like your problem, not mine,” Larry said.

  It got zero-to-sixty-ugly fast. “You’re a Communist, right?” accused Kovacs. “My opinion: Communists shouldn’t be on the radio.”

  Larry sighed. “I’m not a Communist. I am a radio host. I talk to people of all views. My own views are of little importance. ”

  Outside, a cold pink dawn was breaking. It was possible to see people heading to their early jobs. The door of Nedick’s opened and closed several times as working people came in to order coffee, orange drinks, and doughnuts, bringing blasts of the New York winter with them.

  “She calls in. You talk to her. You give her ideas.”

  Piqued, “Which caller is she?” Larry asked. “I get a hundred or more every week.”

  “Lauren. She calls about Cuba.”

  The name connected loud and clear.

  “Ah, yeah. I know her. She’s been a semi-regular recently. She has a good phone voice. Very smart and articulate. Usually calls in the two AM to two-thirty slot. She doesn’t sound Spanish if you don’t mind my stating the obvious. Charming lady. She speaks English very well. Better than you. No funny accent.”

  “She’s American,” Kovacs said. “Her old man was an important army officer.”

  “U.S. Army?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then, that’s the starting point of your problem, isn’t it?” Goodnight replied. “Your wife is from a country where we believe in free speech. Why don’t you buy a fifteen-cent copy of the U.S. Constitution and read it? Maybe just for fun, or maybe to learn something. Get my message, muttonhead?”

  Larry’s gaze drifted over Kovacs’s shoulder to the door that was constantly opening and closing, blasts of icy air entering each time. Then his gaze traveled further. Out on the street, a battered blue De Soto had pulled into one of the parking spots. Two men jumped out, hands in their pockets, winter fedoras with brims turned low. They hustled toward the door to Nedick’s on the Sixth Avenue side. Another man remained at the wheel.

  “I want you to hang up on her if she calls again,” Kovacs continued. “Insult her. Be rude if you like. Crude. Talk dirty at her. Swear at her!”

  Larry Goodnight’s patience was quickly evaporating.

  “It doesn’t work that way,” he answered. “When I tap a button on the phone I have no idea who’s there. If they are civil and entertaining, I talk. Check that. If they are entertaining I talk. I can do anything I want except bore my listeners. It begins there and ends there.”

  “How would you like two broken legs?”

  “How would you like to be arrested for threatening me, you big dumb thug? That’s the heat over there in the corner,” Larry said, a slight nod of the head toward the plainclothes cop.

  “’Heat’?”

  “A cop. I could have you arrested.”

  “Stop taking her calls! I warn you! You stop talking to her!” Kovacs said, loud enough for other patrons to hear, turn around and look. Even the hookers were amused. The nurses stopped yakking. The undercover gave him a wary eye.

  The two men from the car pushed hard through the glass door. They forged past other customers and abruptly rushed to the radio man’s table. Goodnight’s eyes widened. He expected top-drawer trouble and now he saw it coming. Kovacs read Larry’s gaze about something going on behind his back and concluded the same thing.

  Kovacs turned and saw the men coming. They wore the brims of their winter fedoras low over their faces to shield their identity from potential witnesses. They each had a hand in a coat pocket. Kovacs had seen enough mid-century horror in Europe to know something was not right.

  He whirled and scrambled to his feet.

  The two assailants had not expected such a savvy reaction from their intended victim. As soon as Kovacs saw what was coming together, he picked up his steaming coffee and threw it at the two men. He threw it in a wide, sweeping motion, intending the scalding liquid to hit their faces.

  He scored a partial hit. The hit bought him an extra two seconds to get his balance and bolt from the table.

  The two men drew pistols. They began to fire at Larry’s guest. One bullet hit the man in the shoulder and another in the chest. Still, Kovacs was a bull. He staggered, lurched, punched wildly at them, and missed. Momentum carried him toward the big door that led to Sixth Avenue.

  Larry crashed down under the table. The night girls and nurses screamed. They scattered toward the door that opened to the side street. Pearl dived down under the counter with the soda jerk. The undercover cop in the corner suddenly shouted, “Hey! Stop!” but without much conviction.

  He must have also pulled his weapon, Larry thought at the time, because there
were more shots from a different direction.

  From where he wisely cowered under the Formica tabletop, Larry could see one of the gunmen turn toward the plainclothes man and fire two rounds. Larry heard a violent profanity from him as a wild third shot hit the ceiling. Then there was a crash that he knew to be a heavy body hitting the ground.

  Somehow Kovacs bulled his way out the door and into the street. The assailants followed. The faster of the two gunmen fired two shots point-blank into Kovacs’s upper back, putting him on the pavement. Pandemonium broke out on the street, even with so few people passing. But within the chaos, was a measured madness.

  The two gunmen followed their victim and emptied their pistols into him as panicked passersby scattered and screamed. One of the killers pressed a pistol to the top of Kovacs’s back just below his neck and fired twice. Then the assassins disappeared into the waiting blue De Soto, which screeched out of its parking spot before the car’s doors closed.

  By that time, however, Larry Goodnight was in shock.

  He was collecting his thoughts and getting to his feet, looking at the huge body sprawled on the street on the other side of the plate-glass window. He went to the door, stood in it, and saw the man who had been threatening him lying dead in the street, half of his skull missing, a pool of blood enlarging by the second. Larry turned and looked back into the corner where the undercover cop had been sitting. The policeman was huddled under one of the plastic tables. Somehow the shots in his direction had missed, shattering the plastic and mirrors above where he sat. He was moving, there was no blood, and he was alive and oddly calm.

  Larry Goodnight had seen enough. He panicked and fled the scene.

  Chapter 3

  Washington, D.C. & Langley, Virginia – Late summer 1950

  The Central Intelligence Agency was less than three years old when Thomas Buchanan started work there during the summer of 1950. But it was already an agency under fire, frequently criticized, and in almost everyone’s crosshairs.

  Republicans said it did not do enough and was inefficient. Democrats said a spy agency was not what the United States of America needed and would have loved to have put it out of business. J. Edgar Hoover’s face would get red any time anyone mentioned the agency to him. He hated the fact that there was a rival intelligence agency in Washington. Hoover did whatever he could to sabotage it or cast aspersions upon it whenever he had the opportunity.

  Worse, the blabbermouth alcoholic Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin had initiated a series of investigations into what he alleged was a potential Communist subversion of the Agency. Although the accusations were fabrications, the hearings that followed were damaging, not only to the CIA's reputation but also to the security of sensitive information and national security. Groundless as the accusations were, many Americans believed them.

  It was not surprising, then, that the postwar CIA had gotten off to a rocky start. Or as some said, a miserable start.

  The original Director of the Central Intelligence Agency had been Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, a graduate of the United States Naval Academy, who had served several tours in naval intelligence, including as assistant naval attaché to France, Spain, and Portugal. During the Spanish Civil War, he coordinated the evacuation of Americans from the country. After the German invasion of France, Hillenkoetter had entered Vichy France and aided the Free French underground. As executive officer of the USS West Virginia, he had been wounded during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Later, Hillenkoetter was the chief intelligence officer on Chester W. Nimitz's Pacific Fleet staff until 1943.

  When he arrived in Washington to take charge of the new Central Intelligence Agency in 1947, the luster of his naval career quickly diminished. Hillenkoetter expressed doubt that the same agency could be effective at both covert action and intelligence analysis. He soon presided over an agency that was effective at neither. The CIA had failed to predict the development of the Soviet atomic bomb, first detonated in August of 1949. Worse, for weeks after the bomb’s detonation, the CIA had not even known about it.

  Hillenkoetter was called before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy to explain how the CIA not only failed to predict the test but also how they did not even detect it after it occurred.

  “We knew that they were working on it,” he explained in garbled testimony that left friends and foes scratching their heads. “And we started there. The CIA was set up after the war and we started in the middle and we didn't know when they had started and it had to be picked up from what we could get along there.”

  Hillenkoetter’s public testimony raised institutionalized doublespeak to an art form. JCAE members were steaming that the CIA could be taken by such surprise. If Hillenkoetter hadn’t lost anyone yet, he definitely did as he continued with testimony that might have reminded some of Casey Stengel, who was by then embarked on a more successful career as manager of the New York Yankees.

  “That is what I say,” Admiral Hillenkoetter said to the congressmen. “This thing of getting a fact that you definitely have on the exploding of this bomb has helped us in going back and looking over what we had before, and it will help us in what we get in the future. But you picked up in the mid-air on the thing, and we did not know when they started, sir.”

  Heads were still spinning in the American capital on the Soviet bomb controversy on June 23, 1950, when Hillenkoetter sat in the House Foreign Affairs Committee and addressed another problem: Korea. Hillenkoetter testified that the CIA had “good sources in Korea.”

  “So we would have good advance warning if North Korea planned to invade the South, sir?” asked Representative Emanuel Celler of New York.

  “In my view, we would have an accurate warning before any invasion.”

  “And has there been any such warning?”

  “To date, no, sir.”

  “So no invasion is imminent?”

  “No, sir.”

  Two days later on June 25, 1950 North Korea invaded the South, backed by Soviet and Chinese Communist military hardware.

  A month later, Buchanan arrived at the CIA on July 25, 1950. His new boss was a career intelligence guy with OSS credentials named Brian Stoneman. Stoneman was a starchy, humorless, fifty-six-year-old Nebraskan, whose idea of a good joke was lying about his age. He was the head of Buchanan’s department and spent much of his time shuttling around the capital trying to keep an uneasy peace. Stoneman was calm, but the overall atmosphere was turbulent.

  “The Director’s sorry ass is in a sling,” said Mike Edelstein, a fellow agent in intelligence analysis who worked two doors away. Edelstein quickly became one of Buchanan’s best new friends at the agency. They spoke over drinks at a bar in Arlington, Virginia, called The Home Plate. The bar usually had the Washington Senators baseball on the television. Several CIA guys often met there after work, knocking back booze and revealing secrets to each other. Edelstein, who had also been in Operation Torch during World War Two, same as Buchanan, had a wife and young daughter. Like Buchanan, he also lived in the District of Columbia.

  “It’s a matter of time,” Edelstein pronounced easily over a second round of drinks that evening, “before Uncle Roscoe is relieved of command here and sent back out to sea in a leaky dingy.”

  Uncle Roscoe. Here was the belittling behind-the-back term that the staff had for the boss. Many did not care for him. The rest actively did not like him.

  “I suppose Allen Dulles is always lurking for the top job,” Buchanan said. “I know Dulles is out of the government now and practicing law, but -”

  With a free hand, Edelstein waved away Buchanan’s words. “Don’t believe any of that crap,” he said.

  “I know. I hear rumors, too. You probably hear the same ones.”

  “Of course I do. I probably hear them before you do since you’re the new kid on our floor. And, lurking? Sure. But there’s the leadership equation at the top, you know. One of the top two dogs has to be military and the other civilian. With the activity of the Reds around
the world, my money would be on Dulles landing in some new number two spot as deputy director, with a military guy in the top office.”

  “We’ll see,” Buchanan said.

  “We’ll see soon,” Edelstein said. “In any case, it’s up to your pal in the White House.”

  “Who’s my pal in the White House?”

  “Harry S., the Missouri jackass,” Edelstein said. “The in-house rumor mill says you did a special assignment for him and Hoover. They sent you to us as a reward.”

  Buchanan played it close. “That’s what you hear?”

  “Don’t be obtuse, buddy. This is the CIA. No one can keep a secret here. And don’t worry. It might make some people skittish about you but it does you no harm. Truman and Hoover hate each other but they both like you. Your otherwise-exposed ass is covered.”

  Buchanan laughed. “May I issue a non-denial denial?”

  “You just did, brother.”

  Edelstein had been correct about everything.

  Almost.

  President Truman soon thereafter replaced Admiral Hillenkoetter with General Walter Bedell Smith. But Allen Dulles remained invisible. And instead of being sent to sea in a dingy, here was another point that Mike Edelstein got wrong: Admiral Hillenkoetter returned to the Pacific Fleet, commanding Cruiser Division 1 of the Cruiser-Destroyer Force. From this position in Southeast Asia, he would monitor the Korean War, which his CIA had failed to predict on his watch.

  Bedell’s nickname was “Beetle,” a nickname that had been thrust upon him in childhood, a play on his middle name. “Beetle” Smith had served as General Dwight D. Eisenhower's chief of staff at Allied Forces Headquarters during the Tunisia Campaign and the Allied invasion of Italy in 1943 during World War Two. He had later been Eisenhower's chief of staff at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force in the campaign in Western Europe from 1944 through 1945.