From Whence The Darkness
 Charles S. Viar
 

Although the Masters had promptly acceded to my request to investigate her, it was almost a month before I received any feedback. I had spent the best part of three weeks dodging her while waiting for their response, and my excuses had begun to wear thin. There was an absolute limit to the number of weekends I could plead overwork; and I was reasonably sure that I had reached it when at last I received their signal. I made the pickup on the way home from work the following day; and decrypted it immediately. Although it was a relatively short communiqué, it took me more than a half hour to puzzle out the words:

NO DEROGATORY REFERENCE SUBJECT LAST COMMUNICATION 
NOW CODENAMED SWALLOW

Sitting cross-legged on the bed, I lit a cigarette and began working my way through the various possibilities. The most obvious solution was that some sort of procedural change had occurred, but the more I thought about it the less likely it seemed. The Navy was a bureaucracy, hidebound and cumbersome, where change came slowly if at all. It seemed more likely that my request had either fallen through the cracks, or that the operation itself had taken an unexpected turn.

Neither possibility was particularly appealing; but as I stubbed out my cigarette in the ashtray, I had to concede that there were others far worse. The Masters could have planted her upon me. Or worse, they could be setting me up. 

I spent the rest of the night weighing the possibilities, concluding in the end that there was no way for me to know.

I was still thinking about it when I awoke the next morning. Although the available evidence was insufficient for any sort of reasoned judgment, I couldn’t escape the suspicion that Lea was a plant. My first reaction was to dump her; but it took only a moment's reflection to dispel the notion. I had no idea who she worked for, or what her purpose might be - but I had no doubt that her handlers had other women at least as alluring, and certainly more practiced. If I broke contact, it would be only a matter of time before they replaced her with someone else; and there was a substantial risk I might not perceive it. And so on the theory that the Devil I knew - or at least suspected - was preferable to the Devil unknown, I decided to continue seeing her. I would enjoy her company and companionship; and I would watch and wait. But I would never trust her. 

I called her later that afternoon; and after apologizing, asked her out for he following Friday. Despite my misgivings, the date went well; and I started seeing her on a more regular basis. After a few months we were going out once or twice a week; and when we did, she generally stayed the night. Due to the irregular schedule imposed upon her by the retail trade, I saw her as often as not on during the week. 

We had gone out the night before, and after late dinner we had gone back to my place. She had spent the night again; and in a moment of passion she had sunk her teeth deep into my shoulder. Although she hadn’t quite broken the skin, her bite had bruised me badly. My shoulder had ached intermittently through the night; and by morning it had begun to throb. I couldn’t tell whether she had pinched a nerve or merely bruised a muscle; but the pain was so intense that I had difficulty putting my shirt on.  After dropping her off at work at Tyson's Corner, I stopped at a 7-11 for aspirin. After washing a half-dozen tablets down with a cup of badly burnt coffee, I proceeded on my way. But even after the half-hour drive through the morning's rush hour traffic, my shoulder still ached badly. Every turn of the steering wheel had been punished with searing bolts of pain; and so I was deeply relieved when I finally found a parking place on the bottom level of the underground garage. 

Although my relief was understandable, I realized that it was ill advised. With my left arm rendered all but useless, and the parking garage had become suddenly more dangerous. Extending three levels below ground, it held perhaps 250 cars. Most of the patrons were monthly customers; and save for mornings and evenings it was generally deserted. Dark, dank, and staffed by only one or two custodians, it was the perfect place for an ambush. So before I got out and locked the door, I reached beneath my blazer to make sure the razor knife I carried was free and accessible.
 

[  EDITOR’S NOTE: DUE TO MATURE CONTENT UNSUITABLE FOR YOUTHFUL READERS, THE FOLLOWING TWO PARAGRAPHS HAVE BEEN OMMITTED FROM THIS ONLINE PRESENTATION    ]
 
 

My personal safety had been a constant concern; and since my third or fourth seminar with Angleton, it had weighed even more heavily upon me. For if Angleton was right, the KGB wasn’t my only problem. Deception operations presuppose a feedback loop between the attacking intelligence service and the targeted state; and the mere fact that the Soviets were engaged in a such an operation provided deductive proof that they had successfully penetrated the upper reaches of the U.S. government. 

This conclusion was obvious, inescapable and widely shared throughout official Washington. Both the CIA and the FBI had publicly expressed their concern about the Soviet offensive, and bi-partisan majorities of both the House and Senate intelligence committees had concurred. The problem however was immensely complicated, for the Soviet disinformation campaign had been carefully designed to take advantage of the increasingly large gray-area that separated honest dissent from subversion. For the penetration agents aiding and abetting the Soviet offensive were not technically spies, but rather agents-of-influence. They provided the Soviets with insight into the policy-making process, and from time to time specific information regarding the U.S. government's response to the fraudulent data that the KGB was inserting into the intelligence stream. 

Under our system of government, such reportage was not strictly unlawful; and it rarely involved the sort of covert contact that would have made it so. Agents-of-influence met their case officers quite openly at diplomatic functions, on government exchanges, or at private parties in the salons of Georgetown; and since such face-to-face public meetings were either required or expected of individuals in their positions, they provided a perfect cover for treachery. Smoking them out had been among Angleton's major concerns as Chief of Counterintelligence; and for that he had been anathematized. 

After his fall from grace, the Soviets and their local allies had made a determined effort to destroy his name and reputation; but they had not been able to move against him directly, for he was rich, socially prominent and exceptionally well connected. Perhaps more importantly, Angleton had been quietly rehabilitated after being recalled to Langley, and the Agency was protective of its own. In contrast, I was relatively poor, socially obscure, and without official sanction. There was a great deal at stake in terms of lives, careers, and reputations; and I had no doubt that those who were collaborating with the Soviets would whatever they deemed necessary to protect themselves. And in this, they would have the support of powerful interests. 

Angleton had first touched upon this in the context of intelligence gathering. In seminars, he frequently employed the case study approach; and on the night in question, he was using the U.S. Army Air Corp's strategic bombing campaign during the Second World War. 

Although the United States had entered the war poorly prepared, Angleton had noted that it nonetheless possessed certain technological advantages. One of these was the Norden Bombsight, which was so accurate that the Army Air Corps was convinced they could win the war through strategic bombing alone.

Military aviation had been its infancy when the First World War abruptly ended in November of 1918; and for that reason, it remained unproven throughout the inter-war years. And yet its potential was so enormous that many military strategists were convinced that it would revolutionize warfare. The most influential of these was the Italian Gen. Giulio Douhet.

An artilleryman by training, Douhet apparently never learned to fly. He was nonetheless placed in command of Italy's fledgling air force during World War One; and after his theoretical predictions were proven true in aerial combat, he was promoted to the rank of general. An outspoken advocate of air power, he published a seminal work entitled Command of the Air in 1921. 

The First World War had been a catastrophe for all involved, including the generals that had waged it. An estimated an estimated 10,000,000 men had been killed in combat, and another 21,000,000 had been wounded; and after adjusting for inflation, the total monetary costs approached $377,000,000,000. This staggering loss of blood and treasure was compounded by the influenza epidemic, which claimed an additional 21,000,000 lives around the world and nearly wrecked the already tattered world economy. 

The long-term political consequences had been even more severe. Russia fell to Communism in 1917, and a year later ancient dynasties toppled across Central and Eastern Europe. More importantly, the publics of France and Britain demanded that their wartime sacrifices be salved by an act of savagery; and their democratic governments proved too weak to resist their demands. The result was the Treaty of Versailles, the terms of which were so harsh that they guaranteed another war. Amongst the British and the French, only Lord Curzon had the courage to stand against it. It was, he said, no more than a twenty-year truce. 

Unfortunately, only the generals had listened. Douhet and his disciples were among them - they were realists; and given the inevitability of another war, they were determined to win a fast and decisive victory. 

During the Great War well-trained troops had demonstrated their ability to withstand sustained bombardment, but civilians proved far less capable. Although there were only a handful of aerial attacks against civilian population centers in the later stages of the conflict, their impact upon moral had been significant. The German Zeppelin raids upon London were a case in point, for even though they failed to inflict any serious damage upon their targets they nonetheless succeeded in provoking a series of minor panics. Many civilians had fled the city for the safety of the surrounding countryside, and the British government's inability to stop the raids had shaken the public's faith and confidence. On the basis of that experience, Douhet concluded that systematic aerial bombardment would prove decisive in the next war. A sustained attack upon civilian population centers would shatter the structure of ordinary life and produce chaos in the enemy's homeland. Enraged civilians would riot against their government for failing to protect them from the continuous rain of gas and incendiary bombs, and the resultant looting and lawlessness would cripple industrial production. It would be only a matter of time before the civilian populace rose up against their government, and forced it to sue for peace.

Although Douhet's intention was to place a practical limitation upon modern warfare, his proposed strategy trampled upon the Western tradition. The Western states were formally Christian; and as such they were bound by the Just War Doctrine, which specifically prohibited military action against innocent civilians. Although the emergent dictatorships in Italy, Germany and Russia might wage war upon civilians, the democratic governments in France, Britain and America could not. For if they did, they would forfeit their claim to moral superiority. 

This was especially true in the United States, where American military planners labored under even greater constraints than their counterparts in France and England. For almost immediately after the armistice in 1918, a profound disillusionment took hold of the American public. Americans had entered the conflict with the firm belief that they were fighting war itself. The Wilson Administration had declared it "a war to end all wars," but our allies did not share that conviction. The British and the French had betrayed their commitments to the United States at Versailles; and subsequent revelations of domestic manipulation and deceit had added to the general disillusion. Congressional investigators claimed to have uncovered a conspiracy among financial and industrial interests to entangle the United States in the war, and this claim was widely believed. Thus, "The Merchants of Death."

The American public remained deeply pacific throughout the 1920's and far into the 1930's. Isolationism was the order of the day; and even after the European War resumed in September of 1939 - precisely as Lord Curzon  had predicted  - an overwhelming majority of Americans opposed U.S. involvement in the conflict. 

For American advocates of strategic bombing - notably, General Billy Mitchell - the general atmosphere in the years leading up to Pearl Harbor had been profoundly hostile. Until the moment of the attack upon December 7, 1941, the American public opposed military action against the Axis Powers; and even then, they were not prepared to support unrestricted warfare against their civilian population centers.
The Army Air Corps believed that the Norden bombsight could square the circle, by providing a morally acceptable means for strategic bombing. The bombsight actually an analogue computer; and when provided with the key variables of airspeed, wind speed, wind direction, and angle of drift, it could guide an aircraft to the precise point of release required to strike the target. Under simulated combat conditions, American aviators using the Norden bombsight had been able to consistently place their bombs within 100 feet of their targets from an altitude of 20,000 feet; and on the basis of these tests, the Air Corps believe it could systematically destroy the enemy's military industrial base without inflicting massive civilian casualties. For that reason, U.S. military intelligence had spent much of the 1930's quietly mapping the military-industrial sites of Germany and Japan. 

Unfortunately, they did not anticipate the possibility that the Nazis would successfully overrun Western Europe, and capture most of the continent's industrial plant intact. During the blitzkrieg that began in April of 1940, the Germans destroyed the Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, Belgian and French armies, and mauled the British Expeditionary Force. But with the exception of Rotterdam, they inflicted remarkably little damage upon the major cities of Western Europe; and as a result, they were able to incorporate the military industrial capabilities of the conquered countries into their own. 

When the United States entered the European war on December 11, 1941, the Army Air Corps faced a very different situation than they had envisioned. Although they had reasonably accurate and complete targeting data for German military industrial plants, the captured factories in Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg and France had not been catalogued. Because these plants effectively doubled German war production, locating and identifying them became an urgent military priority; and the newly created Office of Strategic Services was given the task.

Despite the apparent difficulties involved, Angleton explained that it had been a relatively simple matter to chart the captured industrial plants. For most of the large industrial corporations in Western Europe had purchased insurance policies from American firms, on the theory that American insurance companies were more likely to remain solvent in the event of world war. Because these policies contained not only the precise location of the insured facilities, but also critically important data concerning their physical characteristics - such as the precise machine tool inventories contained within, the thickness of the roofs and walls, and the firefighting equipment on hand - the insurance certificates were a veritable goldmine of intelligence data. A combination of threats and well-placed bribes persuaded the insurance companies to sell them to the OSS; and as a result, the Army Air Corps had been able to create a quick and accurate inventory of military industrial targets in Occupied Europe. 

At that point Angleton had paused, and lit another Virginia Slim. After drawing upon it in silence for a long moment, he had leaned forward and looked at me intently. Finally, he asked for my reaction. 

I had been impressed, and I told him so. Obtaining the insurance policies had been a stroke of genius; and in my opinion, the operation provided a remarkable example of inspired intelligence collection.

Angleton had nodded, and looked down at the floor. "I thought so too, at the time."

Then he looked up at me, and fixed his eyes upon mine. "Imagine my surprise when we captured the Luftwaffe's archives, and found that the Germans had obtained the same targeting data in precisely the same way…"

He cleared his throat and looked away. "In fact, they had not only obtained copies of the insurance policies for Western European firms, but American firms as well. They had the precise locations and specifications for American military industrial plants up and down the Eastern Seabord, and had they developed a four engine bomber comparable to our B-29, the intelligence data obtained from American insurers would have enabled them to attack targets here in the United States."

I was incredulous. "American insurance companies sold American targeting data to the Nazis?"

Angleton nodded.

Jabbing my own cigarette out in the ashtray before me, I objected. "That’s treason!"

Angleton shrugged. "That’s business."

He leaned back in his chair, and gazed at me impassively. Then he picked up his drink; and after swishing it around in the glass, he drained it. After looking at the empty glass, he told me there was a moral to the story. "Never, ever trust international business…

He pointed his finger at me, as if to emphasize the point. "When it comes to international commerce, profit takes precedence to patriotism."

I was aghast. I could understand isolated acts of treachery, but what Angleton had described was treason writ large. 

Fumbling for words, I asked him what had been done about it. Surely the responsible parties had been punished.

Angleton shook his head. In our society some people are more equal than others; and the corporate rich are the most equal of all. The insurance policies had been merely the tip of the iceberg, for America's largest corporations had conducted a brisk and profitable trade with both Germany and Japan throughout the war. Some of it had in fact been sanctioned by law, which provided certain exceptions for trading with the enemy. Most of the rest had been quietly swept under the rug.

Angleton leaned forward again, placing his clasped hands between his knees. Trading with the enemy was par for the course, he said. In 1930, a special bank had even been established by international treaty to facilitate wartime commerce; and the bank and its officers had been granted diplomatic standing. It was called the Bank of International Settlements, and it was owned by a consortium of financial institutions that included the German Reichsbank, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the First National Bank of New York, the Bank of England, the Bank of France, and the Bank of Italy among others. The great corporations and cartels had been inconvenienced by limitations placed upon capital transfers and travel during the First World War, and BIS had been specifically designed to avoid such difficulties in the future. 

Angleton lit another Virginia Slim, and leaned back in his chair. The Bank of International Settlements was still in existence, he explained, and so were its major customers. The same corporations that had done business with the Nazis during the Second World War were now doing a brisk trade with the Soviets; and whenever that trade involved prohibited goods - weapons perhaps, or high speed computers - their payments were laundered through the BIS. Since the Bank had retained its diplomatic standing, its books were immune from search and seizure by inquisitive governments, including that of the United States.

I had shaken my head in disgust. But after a moment's reflection, I laughed softly. "That must have been a tempting target for the Agency." 

Suppressing a thin smile, Angleton continued. "There is a book I would recommend, a recent publication.  It's called Trading With the Enemy."

I pulled a pen from my shirt pocket, and scribbled the title in the back of my checkbook. "Do you recall the author?"

Angleton shook his head. "A British journalist. Naturalized citizen, I believe."

He stood up, signaling the end of the lesson. "The book suffers from inadequate documentation, but it is generally accurate."

Suppressing another wry smile, he told me that he had found only a few insignificant errors when he had read it. 

I nodded, and shook his hand; and told him I would order a copy in the morning.

The book arrived a couple of days later.  Although it contained only two hundred and twenty three pages of text, it was dense and often difficult to read. But despite the complexity of the subject matter, I had been unable to put it down. I spent most of the day at my desk, reading; and business, I had taken it home with me. By the time I turned the last page, it was almost 2 AM.

I had set the book aside, shocked and deeply disillusioned. Throughout the 1930's, American banks and industrial corporations had invested heavily in Hitler's Germany; and many of them had supported his cause. They had made huge profits building the German war machine; and when war came, they made even more. They sold their wares to both sides - oil, ore, pharmaceuticals, automobiles, trucks, and even blueprints, designs and specifications for weapons systems - and in doing so, they had reaped astronomical profits. The companies involved were primarily family owned, and they counted amongst them the most prominent members of high society - the Rockefellers, the Du Ponts, the Fords and others. And until the outbreak of hostilities, they had been ably represented by the foremost attorney's of the time. James Forrestal had been one, Allen Dulles another. 

It was an appalling tale of greed, corruption, and treason, interspersed with occasional and often convenient fatalities. Most of those that had died had been suicides - relatively low level executives that had been set up and sacrificed to Congressional investigations or, more rarely, the Justice Department. From other sources I knew that a handful had been assassinated by Allied intelligence services; and the rest had died under mysterious circumstances. Although there was only one proven instance, it seemed that several had been murdered by their fellow conspirators. They had known too much, or perhaps they had become a liability.

Propped up by pillows, I leaned back against the wall and wondered how far the rot had spread. The fact that a substantial minority of America's financial and industrial elite had collaborated with the enemy in time of war was appalling; and their apparent ability to kill with impunity was deeply alarming. For it implied an unimaginable degree of political corruption. 

The author of the book had attributed their unpunished treason to the Roosevelt Administration's fear of scandal, stating in the preface that a public disclosure of widespread and well-connected treachery would have undermined the war effort by provoking strikes, riots and perhaps even mutinies in the armed forces. The simple fact of the matter was the captains of finance and industry that were trading with Hitler were also providing America with the planes, tanks and ships that were necessary to win the war. They were indispensable; and in the face of that fact, the Roosevelt Administration had acceded to their crimes. 

There was a certain logic to the argument, but it failed to persuade me. The tale told in Trading With the Enemy had ended in 1945, but I knew from Angleton's testimony that the same people who had sold war material to Hitler were now selling similar goods to the Soviet Union. The clear implication was that America's financial and industrial elite had forsaken democracy for profit and power. They were willing to dance with the Devil, and I wondered how long it would be before the political class followed suit. 

All this was in the back of my mind as I made my up the darkened ramp of the parking garage to the street, three stories above. I paused at the exit to light a cigarette, and let my eyes adjust to the bright sunlight. After buying a newspaper and a cup of coffee from a street vendor, I crossed over Vermont Avenue to the office.

The Foundation had grown substantially over the past several months; and partly in response to that, Gen. Graham had moved us to a separate suite five floors below. At the time the building was only partially filled, and SIF was then the only tenant on the Fifth floor. We were isolated, but the new office was larger - and nicer - than the one we had had before; and I found the absence of strange faces assuring. Aside from myself and Pam, only the generals ever trod the hallway.

Pam had called me at home the night before, to let me know that she would be running late.  Normally I would have been irritated, but on this particular morning I was pleased. I was in a foul disposition due to the pain in my shoulder; and so the simple pleasure of reading the newspaper in peace and quite appealed to me. I was looking forward to it when I turned the key and pushed the door open.