A Clear and Present Danger Read online

  The message left behind in the Hurgett murder had been classified, of course. Which meant that another warning would go unheeded, would be stashed away on some shelf somewhere.

  And the same message in the death of Senator Richard Samuels, only telegraphed. Winship had taken it from Samuels’ widow, Dorothy, and kept it in his own private files.

  What would he do with his files? His suspicions?

  He thought back to the days of his prime as a T-man, back to the specific day which had begun Winship’s long nightmare… .

  It was the twenty-second of November, 1963. Hamilton Winship, a high-level operative in the intelligence unit of the Secret Service, was at work in his Treasury Building office. His friend, the young President John F. Kennedy, was flying today to Dallas, Texas, along with Vice President Johnson. Winship had been meeting frequently with Kennedy over the past week. The President had confided to Winship and certain others in the intelligence community that he was dissatisfied with John McCone, his head of C.I.A., and with the C.I.A. itself. Both McCone and the agency were “insubordinate bordering on treasonous,” the young President said, though in a different way. McCone was simply unable to bring into line the C.I.A., the “Company,” as it was called in Washington officialdom.

  The old-guard covert operatives, the men who worked with Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano and various other hoodlums and mafiosi during World War II, especially during the Allied invasion of Sicily, had managed to see their Office of Strategic Services become the C.I.A. The independence enjoyed by the Company was insufferable to men like Winship, whose own Treasury Department had long been in the intelligence business, long before either the C.I.A. or the F.B.I. To President Kennedy, the C.I.A. was more than insufferable. It was a menace.

  That day in his office, as the President was flying to the southwest, Winship was working up the report he would have to give to Kennedy upon his return from Texas. The President had asked him to offer suggestions for a major housecleaning in the C.I.A. His exact words had been, “The Company has to be dealt with.”

  Yet today, as he worked on his report, Winship discovered that in defiance of direct Presidential orders, the C.I.A. had placed operatives in Havana, Cuba, for the purpose of assassinating Fidel Castro. It was a second assassination plot, actually, the first one having failed and resulting in President Kennedy’s very specific orders to leave Cuba alone, to leave Castro alone.

  The C.I.A.’s defiance was particularly irksome in view of the fact that President Kennedy’s emissaries to the Castro government had this very day met with Havana’s representatives to open talks toward normalization of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba. Winship was on the telephone shouting to his counterpart at the Company when an aide burst into his office, red-faced, his arms waving, his face a study in fright.

  Winship thought the C.I.A. goons had carried it off this time, that Castro had just gotten it. But he was wrong.

  John F. Kennedy had been shot down in Dallas.

  By some perverse instinct, Hamilton Winship decided at that moment to conduct his own investigation, to keep his own counsel. He cleared his desk of the report he was putting together for President Kennedy. Would he ever file it with President Johnson? He couldn’t know, at that moment. It was more important to follow the events immediately following the assassination.

  As the world mourned, as the world reeled in the shock of the Kennedy assassination, Hamilton Winship used his access to classified documents and his matchless abilities as an investigator to assemble a disturbing set of facts surrounding the case.

  Winship found, for instance, that Lee Harvey Oswald, the man arrested for Kennedy’s assassination and in a matter of days gunned down by Jack Ruby, a low-level member of a Chicago crime syndicate, had in the late 1950s been given a top security clearance by the U.S. Marine Corps to work at a C.I.A.-sponsored U-2 air base in Japan.

  Shortly after winning his top security status, Winship discovered, Oswald defected to the Soviet Union, somehow paying a $1,500 travel fare when his personal bank account held only $203.

  In Moscow, Oswald claimed to be a Marxist and said publicly that he intended to give the Kremlin all the military secrets to which he was privy.

  However, the Kremlin was convinced that Oswald was a double agent for the C.I.A. Winship learned this from a friend of his who had defected to the United States as a K.G.B. agent.

  And so, two years later, in 1962, Oswald returned to the United States a humbled man. Despite his prior admissions of treason, Lee Harvey Oswald was routinely handed back his American citizenship papers.

  Furthermore, Winship found that the pro-Castro leaflets which Oswald had been distributing in New Orleans in September of 1963 were stamped with the address of a building used by a C.I.A. front group called the “Cuban Revolutionary Council,” an anti-Castro organization established during the Bay of Pigs invasion by E. Howard Hunt.

  Several cartons full of Oswald’s leaflets were discovered in Washington, in the home of Robert Maheu, a former F.B.I, agent who had opened a private detective agency in Washington with the C.I.A. as his principal client. Other of Maheu’s clientele included Carlos Marcello, the capo de tutti capo of New Orleans’ Mafia; and the ubiquitous E. Howard Hunt.

  Winship could come to no other conclusion but that Lee Oswald was a C.I.A. operative, probably low-level, who had acted in conspiracy with many others—namely, certain renegade C.I.A. agents and mafiosi in New Orleans, Havana and Chicago—to assassinate President Kennedy.

  But his conclusions only raised far more pervasive and cancerous questions. How, for instance, had such an outlaw element been allowed to grow in the American intelligence community? Exactly why was Kennedy murdered? Because of his repeated threats to the dangerous insubordination of the C.I.A. and certain high-level F.B.I, officials? Because of his brother Bobby’s, the Attorney General’s, aggressive prosecution of mafiosi in big business and big labor?

  Winship requested and received private audience with the new President, Lyndon Johnson. He laid out his horrible preliminary findings and urged Johnson to arrange with Senate leaders to use committee subpoena powers to probe the American intelligence network and its cooperative ties with overseas terrorists—namely, in Havana—and with organized crime.

  Johnson heard him out, congratulated him for his diligent patriotism, professed shock and outrage, privately, and never again spoke to Winship.

  When the President appointed a blue-ribbon investigatory commission to report on the Kennedy assassination, Winship requested, and received, private audience with its chairman, then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren.

  Warren expressed more private shock and outrage, and then his commission declared that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone and deranged assassin of John F. Kennedy. The national press gleefully cooperated in this fiction by portraying anyone who thought differently—most especially anyone who suggested conspiracy—as members of the Flat Earth Society.

  But Winship continued his agitations, discreetly, well within the Washington confidence circles he had so carefully cultivated all his life. For his efforts, he ceased to be a full member of those circles, and his power and authority dwindled, gradually at first, then mightily toward the end of the first Nixon administration.

  Though Watergate was merely a gleam in the strange eyes of G. Gordon Liddy et al, Winship was already on to numerous “black bag” jobs of a highly suspicious political nature being carried out by former or present C.I.A. operatives, including, incredibly, E. Howard Hunt. With little to lose, Winship reported his concerns about the renewed illegal conduct of intelligence agents, and the roof fell in, as it were.

  One afternoon, a delegation of top-level C.I.A. officials met with Winship in his office at Treasury. They urged him to keep his “undue fears” to himself. Or else. National security and all that, they explained. Understand?

  The threat was accompanied by the next day’s promotion to oblivion. Winship’s new title was to b
e “Special Deputy Secretary of the Treasury” with responsibility for recruitment needs. He told Edith that it meant he was head janitor. She cried, then composed herself, and told him, “Hamilton, you have two choices: you can either resign and try to get your story before the public, or you can stick with it, on the inside, and wait for the right combination of circumstances for the truth to triumph.”

  Good old girl. She was absolutely correct. In fact, Winship had decided on the latter course just before his wife verbalized it.

  And he kept dutifully quiet, through it all. A member of the Warren Commission named Gerald R. Ford became President and a two-time assassination target, and Winship kept quiet. In 1979, during the Carter administration, a Congressional committee found that a conspiracy “appeared” to have been involved in the Kennedy assassination; Winship kept quiet, knowing that despite this extraordinary acknowledgement by the government, nothing would be done to bring any of the co-conspirators to justice. He was right.

  As a result of his good grace and quietude, Winship was readmitted to his circles, though not to any position of power. He could hear all of the confidential business of the nation once more, but he would forever be barred from doing anything about it.

  It wasn’t entirely difficult for Hamilton Winship to keep himself discreet, for he himself began to wonder, about once a month, whether he was a full-blown paranoid, when all about him his friends and colleagues and countrymen remained underwhelmed by the treachery of so much that he saw in government. Could all those people be wrong? Could he alone be right? Winship developed ulcers. And he waited.

  While he waited—for what?—he enjoyed the comforts of socializing with those who controlled Washington and the federal establishment, including the C.I.A., year in and year out, as Presidents came and went. Those were the people just like himself. Eastern-educated and/or bred, discreet, well-married, old boy and old girl.

  Winship was a Yale man through and through, born and raised in Westchester County as the scion of an old planter family whose money had long ago been wisely set to work in Wall Street. Edith was his perfect accompaniment—Bucks County, Lord & Taylor, and Wellesley. The two of them were soft-spoken, elegantly witty, cultured, and Georgetown fixtures. Their sedate appearance masked the fact that the two of them held an abiding and passionate affection for one another that had intensified every year of their thirty-five years together. They had always wished for children, even now, in their sixties; their inability to produce children was the tenderest of their sorrows.

  In physical appearance, Winship resembled a plump British peer, with a bulky chest and belly requiring a waistcoat at all times, a ruddy tone of skin that proved an enormous fondness for vintage wines, a shock of silver hair brushed straight back from his forehead, and a mustache to match, kept in immaculate trim. In outlook, too, he was pure peerage, someone whose noblesse oblige lay in overseeing the government bureaucracy. Someone, after all, had to be born to manage the civil servants.

  He liked himself, and he liked the people like him. And yet it pained Hamilton Winship to know, as he had but no choice knowing, that it was his sort who benignly neglected the conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy, his sort of people who were ultimately responsible for the excesses of the F.B.I, and the C.I.A.

  His sort of people were men like George Bush.

  Again he thought of Bush en route to England, as he strolled the Potomac walkway.

  And this prompted him to think of Hurgett and Samuels, the messages left at their deaths… .

  Winship stopped dead in his tracks. His face paled. He whirled around, searching out a telephone booth. Then he clutched the collar of his topcoat around his throat to keep out the wind from the river, and ran at top speed.

  He nearly stumbled when his foot hit an ice-covered pothole. He paid no heed to his water-covered pantleg and shoe. Winship kept running.

  He finally reached the booth and tried to get his breathing under control while he fished through his pockets for coins. He would need all the authority in his voice that he could muster.

  And then maybe that wouldn’t be enough.

  Seven

  LONDON, 7:16 p.m., 25 January 1981

  A soft mist swirled through amber washes of light from the street lamps. People moved briskly through the dusk, with Burberry coats drawn tight and black umbrellas unfurled. The echo of the last peel from Big Ben, announcing one-quarter past the hour, was a wet muffled sound. London was one of those few cities, along with San Francisco, Brussels, and Paris, made all the more picturesque by gentle rain. All the more mysterious as well.

  Ben Slayton picked his way through Dover Street, careful to step around the puddles that had quickly formed on the fashionable but badly chipped and rutted walkway. He didn’t wish to spot his formal shoes. He held a newspaper over his head to keep dry. He was on his way to the Embassy at Grosvenor Square, a ten-minute walk from Brown’s, the hotel used by Secret Service agents assigned to advance work.

  When he reached the Embassy and walked inside, he shook himself, almost as a dog would after a swim in a river. He hung his overcoat in the nearest closet and disposed of the sodden newspaper that had kept his head dry. He checked the Baume & Mercier watch on his left wrist. Plenty of time before the guests would begin arriving.

  Slayton nodded greetings to his fellow agents, slouched against the walls, waiting for the place to fill up with notables and the time they would have to snap to.

  “The Veep in yet?” Slayton asked one of them.

  “Naw, Sir Prep’s plane hasn’t even landed.”

  Slayton laughed quietly. It was the first time he’d heard the appellation “Sir Prep.” Of course, every President and Vice President was nicknamed by Secret Service agents. Jimmy Carter was “Mr. Peanut,” naturally; Walter Mondale was known as “Fritzy”; Gerald Ford had been “Bozo”; and Nixon was “Tricky” up until the time he left the White House, was pardoned of Watergate crimes, and became “Sir Richard of San Clemency.”

  Slayton repaired to the men’s room on the main floor to check his appearance.

  Appearance was important to Slayton. Vital, in many cases, especially when he was assigned to the A.T.F. A man’s dress and carriage, be knew, could signal all manner of impressions. It was helpful to control those impressions.

  Tonight he was in black tie for the state affair. He examined himself in a mirror. He looked every bit the up-and-coming young diplomat, every bit a man of the world involved in far more intrigue than he would or could let on. Women loved it. Only the tiny earphone and the bright green metallic lapel button betrayed him as a Secret Service agent. Women loved that, too, as he had discovered on more than one occasion.

  The point was, he looked as if he belonged. Ben Slayton could just as easily blend in with a gang of Puerto Ricans shooting craps in the South Bronx.

  “Is anybody in this outfit besides me ever going to see how fucking good I am at my job?” he thought to himself.

  Slayton left the men’s room, satisfied finally that his dark red tuft of handkerchief in his breast coat pocket and the pearl studs of his snowy shirt were properly aligned. He wondered if he would have to sleep alone tonight.

  To his right, down the corridor, was the entrance to the ballroom, where the reception would take place in an hour or so.

  “Through with the check list?” Slayton asked of a Secret Service agent named Nelson who stood by the door filing his nails.

  “Yeah,” Nelson said, not looking up. “You want to go over it yourself? Help yourself.”

  Slayton picked up the day’s duty sheet from a table. On it were the various Secret Service functions prescribed for that period beginning at 0:00 hours and ending at 24:5999 hours. Each segment of time had to be accounted for, signed and countersigned. Radar sweeps, food inspections, kitchen searches, outside personnel checks, press affiliation verifications, identification tag distribution, and detailed furnishings examination.

  All seemed to be in order.

  Slayton nex
t perused the check-list column marked “guard watch.” He didn’t see the customary signatures attesting for a proper guard at the reception room door from 7:30 to 8:30 that morning.

  “Look at this, Nelson.”

  Slayton roused Nelson’s attention by shoving the duty sheet below his nose.

  “Where’s the signatures here?” Slayton was pointing to the sixty-minute morning period.

  “Beats me,” Nelson said. “We’d better check with Artie.”

  “Wait here,” Slayton said when Nelson started to join him in leaving the reception room doorway to find Arthur Posten, the Secret Service supervising agent. “If there really has been an interruption in guard detail, we don’t want to be responsible for another one.”

  “Yeah,” Nelson said. A scribble of worry played across his face.

  “It’s probably nothing,” Slayton said. “But let’s play by the book.”

  “Yeah.”

  Slayton walked briskly down the corridor to the main lobby of the Embassy building, where he knew he would find Posten. He presented the check list, pointing to the one-hour gap.

  “Could this be a mistake, or was the reception room door actually unguarded this morning?” Slayton asked.

  Agent Posten studied the paper, made a telephone call to a subordinate, and slammed down the receiver angrily. His face went red.

  “Crocker, my counterpart on the morning watch!” he spat. “Know him?”

  Slayton shook his head no.

  “Should have retired that old man long ago. Seems he excused one of the agents who called in complaining of the runs, and he forgot to replace him at the post in question. Crocker forgot! Can you believe it? He ought to have his armpits set on fire.”

  “Where’s the visitors list for today?” Slayton asked, ignoring Posten’s laughing at his own joke.

  “I don’t know,” Posten finally said, drying his eyes.

  “Find it.” Slayton’s tone was firm, even commanding.