Catta did not so much sleep there at the base of the pine tree as skate above a black sheet of ice made out of sleep. His dreams were literal, redundant, dry postponements of his waking—Catta sleeps at the base of a pine tree or Catta’s eyes open and see nothing. Not dreams: reportage. He was nevertheless aware, in his half-sleep, of being unable to smell anything. Someday, he thought, he would like to have a dream made up only of smells: biscuits, pine pitch, grass, salt, smoke. And then he dreamt of fire. Torches suspended in the air grew larger, moved closer, and then, from nothing, spoke in meter and rhyme. No—they didn’t speak—he was dreaming a song he already knew. Other voices joined the chorus—It’s a long way … to Tipperary! He woke up, and, now awake, he saw that his dream fire was actually flashlights.
Three voices carried the song. They passed by twenty yards from Catta’s head and moved away much faster than he would have thought possible, given the thickness of the trees and scrub. There must be a path, he thought. He could not turn to follow them—the dry brush rustled even when he breathed—but only one voice sang the verses, so Catta turned and stood up when all three sang the chorus. Then all at once the singing stopped and the lights vanished, as if they were swallowed up by the earth.
After a few moments, Catta moved carefully in their same direction of travel, slithering and sometimes tracking back to go around obstacles, pausing often to listen. At this distance, even if the singers heard him, they would think he was an animal. On Seven, the trails were lower than the surrounding forest floor, so as he walked he dragged one foot lightly behind him, feeling for a difference in grade that might indicate a trail. In front of him a glow emerged, a short arc or a notch, and he began to think he was looking down a sort of chute that passed between two larger bulks, possibly boulders. The Old Man had said there was a ravine. What if, he wondered, I went over a cliff in the dark? How far would I fall? The ground dropped slightly and he lost his balance—he fell—though not onto the leaves and scrubs he had expected, but onto hardpacked, rocky dirt. Feeling the ground, the hardpack was less than a foot across and extended farther than he could reach in two directions. This was the path. It might be a dry gully, he thought, or maybe a small creek, when there was no drought.
The faint glow increased as Catta moved closer. Now he could hear work sounds: shouting, metal on metal, thuds. He tried to climb the left-hand boulder, but it was mossy and his foot slipped. His left arm hit a low-hanging branch. The leaves rattled.
“What’s that?” a sharp voice said below.
“Ghosts,” said another voice.
“All the ghosts are on North,” said a third voice.
There was a long pause, and Catta thought he heard footsteps. Without thinking, he made an owl sound.
Hoot.
There was another pause. Down in the ravine, he could feel the men listening.
Hoot, hoot.
“It’s an owl,” said the first one.
The staccato work began again. Catta found good footing and climbed until he could see down into a small depression with steep sides. Was it possible this was the Old Man’s ravine? At the bottom a single lantern gave very pale light, and he saw a machine with long tubes and coils and glass reservoirs. The three men moved large jugs to a spout at one end. The sarcastic voice that had said ghosts, the one who seemed to be the leader, opened up a wax paper package and took out half a sandwich.
Catta was fantastically hungry.
48
March 1964
Camp Peary, Virginia
Jim Hillsinger had woken up early and driven nearly three hours to southern Virginia to arrive at dangerous ground.
Good morning, Mr. Hillsinger, the functionary said when he checked in. You’re in Room Two.
The CIA Director had summoned him that Wednesday and made an unusual request. Would Hillsinger go to the Farm on Friday to take a look at a defector? It’s a Wise Men panel, the Director had said. Block out the weekend.
The Farm was the CIA training facility at Camp Peary; Wise Men panels were internal tribunals whose stated purpose was to give the Director disinterested, third-party assessments of controversial questions. If a question or issue could not be resolved inside a given department, or if it was so high-profile that broad consensus was necessary for political cover, then at least three senior staff from uninvolved departments were brought in to examine the case from the start. The stakes were high: when a panel’s decision was unanimous, the Director adopted it. The meetings were famously contentious.
Room Two was a windowless space with a small desk. On it Hillsinger found a manila folder that, ominously, had a yellow sticker on its tab—the insignia of Counterintelligence. It was unusual for that particular department to ask for outside opinions, or for that matter to share their files. In theory, Counterintelligence was the agency element responsible for detecting KGB penetrations into the CIA. The head of it was James Angleton. At a very young age, Angleton had had major successes in the old OSS in Italy during the war, and he was considered a prodigy; at the CIA, he became a legend. Angleton approved all defectors, and since one cannot speak about foreign defectors without also speaking about traitors at home, Counterintelligence had also become, in practice, the secret police of the CIA.
The folder on the desk in Room Two held a stack of memoranda from Angleton’s staff, summarizing the take from a KGB operative named Astrakhov. He had defected three summers ago; everyone knew about him, though before today only a lucky few had seen the actual documents. Most surprising to Hillsinger were the specifics in the material—well-sourced facts of the kind that made careers domestically and, if discovered, got agents killed overseas. Missile counts, arming protocols, long-range troop projections. Red Army contingency plans for Berlin in case of a ground war. This level of information was never shared, and certainly not by Counterintelligence.
Angleton was said to rely heavily on Astrakhov for his view of the motives, procedures, and operational capabilities of the KGB, which in turn suggested that Astrakhov’s transcripts were the blueprint for the Counterintelligence view of the world. That being true, Hillsinger could not work out what Angleton was aiming for by sharing all this—was there doubt about Astrakhov’s status?
Now what? Hillsinger said to the functionary outside Room Two when he was through reading.
I’ve been instructed to ask you, the functionary said, if you are now sufficiently familiar with the prepared material.