Derek Lambert - I, Said the Spy

‘Send him in.’

Danby picked up the green dossier. Anderson had been his personal choice for Bilderberg. Like Danby himself, Anderson represented change.

Danby wasn’t an Ivy Leaguer like so many of his predecessors: he was a non-political professional who had learned his trade posing as a diplomat in Guatemala, Moscow and Saigon.

Anderson’s claim to represent change was his colour. He had risen meteorically through the ranks since the CIA had been accused of racial prejudice. (In 1967 fewer than twenty blacks had been employed in intelligence work for the Agency.)

A knock at the door.

‘Come in.’

Anderson, big, black and handsome, loomed in front of him.

‘Sit down.’ Anderson sat in the chair opposite Danby: occupied it, Danby thought. ‘So they all survived, huh?’

‘No casualties, sir,’ Anderson said.

Ostensibly Anderson worked for the Secret Service. He had been put in charge of Bilderberg security. The perfect cover, thought Danby, who had arranged it.

‘Any trouble?’

‘Only what I expected. Other agencies tripping over each other’s big feet. British, French, German, Feds….’

‘Anything personal?’

‘How do you mean, sir?’

They both knew that Danby meant his colour.

‘Any resentment?’ forcing Anderson to concede.

‘You’ll always find prejudice, sir,’ smiling at Danby. There was about Anderson the faintest suspicion of cynical amusement: it had gone against him when he had been put up for the job, but Danby’s views had prevailed. They always did.

‘Your colour’s your greatest ally,’ Danby said. ‘Coffee?’ as he pressed the button on the intercom and, as Anderson nodded, ‘Two coffees, please…. With milk?’ to Anderson. ‘Yes, and sugar,’ Anderson told him.

Danby released the button. ‘Who the hell would suspect that a black security officer worked for the Company?’

‘I guess you’re right, sir, I’m too conspicuous in all-white company.’

‘Precisely.’ Danby picked up one of the blue Bilderberg dossiers and extracted the guest list. ‘You were in exalted company.’ He ran a finger down the list. ‘Chairman, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands….’

‘Riding for a fall,’ Anderson interrupted him.

‘Lockheed?’

‘It’s got to come out,’ Anderson said.

Danby took off his spectacles and stared at Anderson. If Danby had a weakness, it was his admiration for American big business. He had been on intimate terms with corruption for most of his professional life, but he still found it difficult to distinguish between business practice and bribery. It didn’t bother him that the smiling extrovert husband of the Queen of Holland might take a fall, as Anderson put it; it bothered him that those who had paid him money might be hurt. And the American image with them.

His finger moved on down the list. ‘Rockefellers, Rothschilds… British members of Parliament… financiers from Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Switzerland…. You seem to have concentrated your attentions on the Swiss, Mr Anderson.’

They were interrupted by a knock on the door. A grey-haired woman wearing a pink knitted cardigan placed two plastic cups of coffee on the desk and retired. Danby and Anderson sipped their coffee and regarded each other through the steam.

Danby picked up Anderson’s preliminary report. ‘Have you anything to substantiate your suspicions about Herr Danzer? If you’re right, it’s a considerable coup considering it was your first Bilderberg.’

Anderson put his cup down on the desk. He opened his jacket and stuck his thumbs in the pocket of his waistcoat, where the gold watch and the cigar-cutter resided. An assertive gesture, Danby decided. Or was it defensive?

Anderson said: ‘We put a tail on him in New York.’

‘And?’

‘He made a drop. A Soviet agent picked up his briefcase.’

‘I see. How—’

‘The agent was followed to the Soviet Mission at 136, East 67th Street.’

‘Then there doesn’t seem to be much doubt about it.’

‘No, sir.’

‘I’m glad for your sake,’ Danby remarked. ‘The coffee,’ he said, ‘gets worse,’ but he finished it.

Danby stood up and walked round the spacious office. He ran his fingers along the bookshelves of weighty volumes, spun the globe in the corner – the world in which his 12,000-strong army fought daily for American interests. Against enemies outside and inside the States. Danby envied Anderson’s lack of appreciation of the canker within.

As the world spun beneath his fingers he said: ‘You may smoke if you wish.’

‘I don’t smoke, sir.’

‘Of course, I forgot.’

Danby moved to the desk and picked up the green dossier on Anderson. ‘One of your economies to enable you to live in the style to which you are accustomed.’

Danby opened the dossier.

Here we go, Anderson thought.

By style he knew that Danby referred to his apartment. It wasn’t the first time the apartment had cropped up during interrogation.

And what was about to follow would be a form of interrogation. A tactic to quell over-confidence, to hone the blade of Anderson’s perception. A man such as Danby was incapable of conducting an analytical conversation without employing psychological stratagem.

Anderson admired him for it. And it worked! He felt the assurance ebb from him as Danby turned the pages of the dossier. There in between green cardboard covers is my life.

The adolescent years in the hovel in Harlem when he was a runner in a numbers racket. (A lot of question marks there, a lot of heavy underlining.)

The street brawls re-directed by an unusually enlightened social worker into the boxing ring. Showed promise…. But who wants to make money with his fists when he has brain?

Night school resented by his parents, ridiculed by his friends. Long solitary hours with a second-hand speech-training course on a phonograph – ‘Now repeat after me….’ the invisible tutor’s plummy voice scratched by a score of needles.

Danby said: ‘I see you play chess.’

‘Sir?’

‘I see you’re a chess-player.’

‘Pretty low grade, sir.’

‘It’s good training,’ Danby said, turning a couple of years of Anderson’s life.

And then a scholarship to Columbia. (Exclamation marks here probably. Black, street-fighter, ambitious, educated. Possibilities.)

Perhaps he had been ear-marked as early as that.

The Army. Military Intelligence. Vietnam with the U.S. Military Assistance Command in 1962. And then the approach (names, assessments, cross references here) by the CIA, followed by another two years in Vietnam, two years in Washington and then New York in a sub-division of the Secret Service.

‘Do you know what finally swayed us in your favour for the Bilderberg job?’ Danby asked.

‘No, sir.’

‘French,’ Danby said. ‘You speak excellent French.’

‘I learned it in Vietnam. I believe I have a slight colonial accent.’

‘And I see you shoot straight’ (Anderson was Army Reserve pistol champion, having scored 2581 points in the 1970 championships.)

‘I’m not popular in amusement parks.’ Instinctively Anderson felt for the gun he normally wore in a shoulder-holster; but it wasn’t there; you didn’t arm yourself to meet the DCI.

‘How do you manage to live, Mr Anderson?’

Anderson sighed. ‘I believe it’s all there, sir,’ pointing at the dossier.

‘Refresh my memory.’

‘You mean the apartment?’

‘And that suit you’re wearing.’

Blue with a silky sheen to it, lapels beautifully rolled.

‘I buy one suit a year,’ Anderson told him, ‘The apartment is mine. I didn’t blow my money in Saigon.’