‘I don’t give a damn whether I live or die,’ he told Lev at their first meeting. ‘We’re all going to die. It’s the when that I’m concerned about. I have to stay alive for another year or two. That’s all the time I need to drive Ionescu out of my country.’ He ran his hand absently across a livid scar on his cheek. ‘No man has the right to enslave a country. We have to free Romania and let the people decide their own fate.’
Lev Pasternak went to work on the security system at the villa in Neuilly. He used some of his own men, and the outsiders he hired were checked out thoroughly. Every single piece of equipment was state-of-the-art.
Pasternak saw the Romanian rebel leader every day, and the more time he spent with him, the more he came to admire him. When Marin Groza asked Pasternak to stay on as his security chief, Pasternak did not hesitate.
‘I’ll do it,’ he said, ‘until you’re ready to make your move. Then I will return to Israel.’
They struck a deal.
At irregular intervals, Pasternak staged surprise attacks on the villa, testing its security. Now, he thought: Some of the guards are getting careless. I’ll have to replace them.
He walked through the hallways, carefully checking the heat sensors, the electronic warning systems, and the infrared beams at the sill of each door. As he reached Marin Groza’s bedroom, he heard a loud crash, and a moment later Groza began screaming out in agony.
Lev Pasternak passed Groza’s room and kept walking.
Headquarters for the Central Intelligence Agency is located in Langley, Virginia, seven miles southwest of Washington, D.C. At the approach road to the Agency is a flashing red beacon on top of a gate. The gatehouse is guarded twenty-four hours a day, and authorized visitors are issued coloured badges giving them access only to the particular department with which they have business. Outside the grey seven-storey headquarters building, whimsically called the ‘Toy Factory’, is a large statue of Nathan Hale. Inside, on the ground floor, a glass corridor wall faces an inner courtyard with a landscaped garden dotted with magnolia trees. Above the reception desk a verse is carved in marble:
And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set ye free.
The public is never admitted inside the building, and there are no facilities for visitors. For those who wish to enter the compound ‘black’ – unseen – there is a tunnel that emerges onto a foyer facing a mahogany elevator door, watched around the clock by a squad of grey-flannelled sentries.
In the seventh-floor conference room, guarded by security aides armed with snub-nosed .38 revolvers under their business suits, the Monday morning executive staff meeting was under way. Seated around the large, oak table were Ned Tillingast, Director of the CIA; General Oliver Brooks, Army Chief of Staff; Secretary of State Floyd Baker; Pete Connors, Chief of Counterintelligence; and Stanton Rogers.
Ned Tillingast, the CIA Director, was in his sixties, a cold, taciturn man, burdened with maleficent secrets. There is a light branch and a dark branch of the CIA. The dark branch handles clandestine operations, and for the past seven years, Tillingast had been in charge of the 4500 employees working in that section.
General Oliver Brooks was a West Point soldier who conducted his personal and professional life by the book. He was a company man, and the company he worked for was the United States Army.
Floyd Baker, the Secretary of State, was an anachronism, a throw-back to an earlier era. He was of southern vintage, tall, silver-haired and distinguished-looking, with an old-fashioned gallantry. He was a man who wore mental spats. He owned a chain of influential newspapers around the country, and was reputed to be enormously wealthy. There was no one in Washington with a keener political sense, and Baker’s antennae were constantly tuned to the changing signals around the halls of Congress.
Pete Connors was black-Irish, a stubborn, bulldog of a man, hard-drinking and fearless. This was his last year with the CIA. He faced compulsory retirement in June. Connors was Chief of the Counterintelligence staff, the most secret, highly compartmentalized branch of the CIA. He had worked his way up through the various intelligence divisions, and had been around in the good old days when CIA agents were the golden boys. Pete Connors had been a golden boy himself. He had taken part in the coup that restored the Shah to the Peacock Throne in Iran, and he had been involved in Operation Mongoose, the attempt to topple Castro’s government, in 1961.
‘After the Bay of Pigs, everything changed,’ Pete mourned. The length of his diatribe usually depended upon how drunk he was. ‘The bleeding hearts attacked us on the front pages of every newspaper in the world. They called us a bunch of lying, sneaking clowns who couldn’t get out of our own way. Some anti-CIA bastard published the names of our agents, and Dick Welch, our Chief of Station in Athens, was murdered.’
Pete Connors had gone through three miserable marriages because of the pressures and secrecy of his work, but as far as he was concerned, no sacrifice was too great to make for his country.
Now, in the middle of the meeting, his face was red with anger. ‘If we let the President get away with his fucking people-to-people programme, he’s going to give the country away. It has to be stopped. We can’t allow –’
Floyd Baker interrupted. ‘The President has been in office less than a week. We’re all here to carry out his policies and –’
‘I’m not here to hand over my country to the damned commies, Mister. The President never even mentioned his plan before his speech. He sprang it on all of us. We didn’t have a chance to get together a rebuttal.’
‘Perhaps that’s what he had in mind,’ Baker suggested.
Pete Connors stared at him. ‘By God, you agree with it!’
‘He’s my President,’ Floyd Baker said firmly. ‘Just as he’s yours.’
Ned Tillingast turned to Stanton Rogers. ‘Connors has a point. The President is actually planning to invite Romania, Albania, Bulgaria, and the other communist countries to send their spies here posing as cultural attachés and chauffeurs and secretaries and maids. We’re spending billions of dollars to guard the back door, and the President wants to throw open the front door.’
General Brooks nodded agreement. ‘I wasn’t consulted, either. In my opinion, the President’s plan could damn well destroy this country.’
Stanton Rogers said, ‘Gentlemen, some of us may disagree with the President, but let’s not forget that the people voted for Paul Ellison to run this country.’ His eyes flicked across the men seated around him. ‘We’re all part of the President’s team and we have to follow his lead and support him in every way we can.’ His words were followed by a reluctant silence. ‘All right, then. The President wants an immediate update on the current situation in Romania. Everything you have.’
‘Including our covert stuff?’ Pete Connors asked.
‘Everything. Give it to me straight. What’s the situation in Romania with Alexandros Ionescu?’
‘Ionescu’s riding high in the saddle,’ Ned Tillingast replied. ‘Once he got rid of the Ceausescu family, all of Ceausescu’s allies were assassinated, jailed, or exiled. Since he seized power, Ionescu’s been bleeding the country dry. The people hate his guts.’
‘What about the prospects for a revolution?’
Tillingast said, ‘Ah. That’s rather interesting. Remember a couple of years back when Marin Groza almost toppled the Ionescu government?’
‘Yes. Groza got out of the country by the skin of his butt.’
‘With our help. Our information is that there’s a popular groundswell