Stephen Hunter - The Third Bullet

The worse he was, the better for me. It took no genius to see the path by which he could be manipulated into anything, and such a ploy was easily within my capabilities. The plan formed perfectly, with no need of revision and only a little required preparation. It would be so simple – like giving candy to a baby.

To make certain of my own intentions, I applied the New Criticism to my plan, laboring intensely to occlude personality, opinion, immaterial knowledge, or rogue or random feeling from consideration and concentrate entirely on the text that was Oswald, understand its dynamics and dimensions without regard to outcome or hope or past indignities or whatever it was that formed the twisted creature he was. I must say, although this sounds egotistical, I felt somewhat like a great white hunter with many tusks in his lodge on the track of a titmouse. I was so overgunned for this safari, it seemed a little obscene, so I made a pledge to myself that though I would use Oswald, even as I loathed and despised him, I would make a tiny effort to see the humanity that lurked underneath, to understand what forces had so warped him, and try to reach somehow the soul in him, and touch it with a gesture that, in whatever larger context of manipulation and betrayal it arrived, had a whisper of authentic human feeling.

I had tasks to be done. First I had to conjure up a fantasy operation and code name so I could liberate black funds to pay for my instantly conceived Oswald-Walker operation, which involved selling Cord on a fiction. Sure, I had enough money from Uncle Colt and his co-uncles Winchester, Smith, Wesson, and Remington, to say nothing of the Du-Ponts, the five marques of General Motors, and the whole industrial cash box that sustained my portfolio, to pay the limited expenses this thing would cost on my own, but in case it ever came back to me, any investigator would go to finances on the first day and learn that I had spent a hundred grand of my own dough on a mystery project in November 1963. I could swindle the money from the Agency far more easily than I could swindle it from myself, and it would be protected in perpetuity by our Agency’s larger mandate to keep all things secret. (It has not been uncovered to this day, nearly fifty years after the fact!) Generations of case officers enjoyed this privilege, some corrupt and for their own benefit, some pure at heart and laboring in the hope that they were helping win the war. As for my pitch, it would not be difficult; I enjoyed high status in Clandestine Services, as the recent removal of Mr. Diem from both presidency of the Republic of South Vietnam and occupancy of Planet Earth was conspicuously viewed as a victory for our side and had found its origins in a classified report I authored entitled “U.S. Interests in RSV: An Assessment for the Future,” which made me a star in factions of the Agency far beyond my own. (More on this later.) Second, I had to secure the Oswald master file, as indicated on the transcript, an assignment any third-rate secret-agent-man pretender ought to be able to bring off.

For the record, I will summarize, with apologies to any of you reading this account who haven’t a taste for sober explication and prefer the rush of narrative; I cannot, however, let the narrative rush without satisfying myself that I have fulfilled the expositional requisites, if only for the one reader in a hundred who requires such a thing.

As for the fictional operation, I named it PEACOCK and sold it to Cord without a hitch, establishing a hundred-thousand-dollar budget out of the Bank of New York, shielded by accounting ploys so subtle that only a few men, none of whom worked for the government, were capable of penetrating them. PEACOCK, I claimed, was meant to look at the possibilities of identifying young Harvard-Yale-Princeton-Stanford-Brown-UChicago-and-other-elite graduates who had writing talent and seemed headed for the powerful Luce publications or the New York Times or the upstart Post properties that had just acquired Newsweek (Cord’s wife’s sister was married to a prominent Newsweek fellow, to show you how small and cozy the world was in those days), with an idea to nurse them in their careers with secret deposits of information, not money (they would be offended by money), so as to accelerate their climb and at the same time make them indebted to us, although they’d never know who “us” really was. PEACOCK was named for vanity, as I assumed such fools would be morally vain and easily manipulated. I would write Cord a monthly report on what scouts I had befriended in the thickets of academe and what I had offered them and what we could expect from them. It was wonderful, as it was entirely unsubstantiable. No actual journalist would know he was being manipulated by us and could never squeal, and no one could look at a particular piece and say, Yes, the tip came from us or No, it didn’t. That’s how the old Agency was: it worked on a trust I was only too happy to betray in search of a larger contribution.

As for acquiring the Oswald paperwork, again, not terribly difficult. I memorized the master file number as referred to on the transcript jacket, then went to Records at a particularly busy time – Monday, 1030, when all the girls were overworked with juniors who had been requested to pull files for this or that Invasion of Italy or Nuclear Detonation over Moscow scenario. The place was chaos and anguish, as I expected, the girls overtaxed and bitter because they were too smart for their jobs and too connected to be treated this way by Mrs. Reniger, head of files, in one of her perpetual menstrual flare-ups. The wheels were definitely off the cart, so I pulled Liz Jeffries aside. She was Peggy’s older sister’s daughter and my niece by marriage. I said, “Liz, Cord’s on a tear, I need this fast.”

“Oh, Hugh,” the wan beauty replied, distress making her more lovable than usual, “we are so behind.”

“Liz, it’s my tail on the line.”

She knew who had gotten her the job, with its glamour opportunity to marry a spy, a much better catch socially than a diplomat or a legislator, so she said, “Look, you know the system, just duck back there and pinch it; don’t let Reniger see you.”

“Thanks, sweetie,” I said, and gave the child – she was a few years younger than I, but she seemed from a different generation – a peck. It was a common enough thing, so no eyebrows were raised. I slipped back, sliding by a busty young thing in one of the aisles and being careful to make no “accidental” contact with her breasts so that she wouldn’t remember me, found the file, opened it – the files were controlled by a series of master locks that old bitch Reniger, an OSS London vet, opened each morning at 9 and closed each evening at 5 – and slipped out the Oswald file and the one I had requested, hid Mr. O’s inside the covering one, and dropped my file request slip in the box for recording.

That night I made further contact with LHO. I will not bore readers with intricate accounts of one of the most overbiographized men in the world. The details are depressingly familiar. A chaotic childhood ensued upon the too-early death of the father; the strange, domineering, and slightly crazy mother, Marguerite, hauling the family all over America in hopes of finding a place to stay, marrying twice, wrecking both marriages, hauling Lee and the other two boys from school to school, state to state, poverty to prosperity and back to poverty in a single year sometimes. No wonder he was so screwed up: he was always the new kid.

In New York, his growing malfunction was spotted by an alert social worker who wrote perhaps the most penetrating prose ever – little did she know three thousand authors would eventually come into competition with her, yet never best her – and alone in the world seemed to worry about where this sad bean would end up. She was underwhelmed by the narcissist Marguerite as mom and the incoherent wandering as lifestyle, and thought the boy had it in him to do great harm if not put into some kind of treatment quickly. In the whole mad circus that was the life of Lee Harvey Oswald – and I am speaking as his recruiter, his betrayer, and indirectly his murderer – this brave lady alone did a job we can take pride in as Americans. Too bad for LHO and JFK nobody listened; Marguerite snatched him away from the do-gooders and hauled him back to Texas or was it New Orleans before anything official could be done.