Cavemen in Connecticut, Liars at Langley
The strangest type of patriotism.
It’s not the crisis of conscience that kills us, but the confidence of faith. Alas, we have nothing else.
Once again I have stepped into a bog at the hands of a brilliant author. Robert Harris is, for the third time in recent memory, the man with a grip on my imagination. Firstly it was for his Precipice, then I watched the film version of Conclave and now I have just finished Act of Oblivion. Having also just finished the most hair-raising spy novel ever, David McCloskey’s The Seventh Floor, I have suffered some of the most disconcerting fiction I have ever read. While the authors have quite distinct styles, put together these offer a left uppercut and an overhand right to my psyche, and I’m still wobbly.
Being a victim of my own curiosity, these past months of unemployment have shown me something fundamental about the nature of work, obsession, habit and treachery. When I lived for several months in Houston many years ago I learned the lesson that “An enemy is someone who doesn’t care if you fail”, but in that I overstated the assumptions of our common causes in the workplace. This is America, and we are more peasants than gentlemen - our infatuations with meritocracy belie our catty reptilian instincts and we really don’t have an upper class with class who might properly correct us. I often pretend that the English did, but Harris brought me under British covers and McCloskey has shown me the heart-ripping vengeance of the ruthlessly competent American. This is because there are always traitors among us. We are captured and captivated by our obsessions, by our life goals, by our loves and our ambitions. The more capable we are, the more monstrous we may become.
Regicides
For some of you, especially you denizens of New Haven, the names of Whalley, Goffe and Dixwell are well known. These were but three of many appointed Parliamentary judges who legendarily proclaimed King Charles I an enemy of the people and sentenced him to death. They were the Roundheads and much of their principled treachery echoes in today’s political environment where the question of what can be done in the nation’s interest by executive power is alive. Led by Oliver Cromwell, the king was indeed executed in 1649. A mere 9 years later, Cromwell died at the age of 59 and King Charles II, son of the executed king reacquired the throne. Retribution chased the remaining Roundheads to the very ends of the earth, among which were Whalley, Goffe his son-in-law and Dixwell a third officer in the English Civil Wars against the Royalists. Those three escaped to the colonies of Massachusetts and Connecticut in 1660 where a life of furtive hiding began.
As much as we get a whiff of what it means to be a Puritan, it’s difficult to contemplate the thickness of their Christianity. When we think of Obama’s 2008 admonition against those who would ‘cling to guns or religion’ with ‘antipathy to people who aren’t like them’ most of us Coastal types didn’t know how deeply accurate that was across generations and back to the 17th century. Here were people at the very edge of what they knew to be a civilized world whose worldview of God and Providence were as central to them as television is to us. The power of the Protestant narrative was world-historical and their dedication to it was a matter of civic life and death. In reading Harris, I could taste the weight of their divine disputations and habits of religious faith. There was a clear sense among these ancients that a man must be assayed as completely as possible using nothing but one’s own wits in determining the aims and character of any stranger. The only resonant abstractions were those of military, agricultural or biblical acumen. These were their only educations in the main - only the upper classes had anything more.
Whalley and Goffe were hunted by their antagonist, Richard Nayler, in the novel for nearly 20 years. They most famously lived in caves above New Haven in its West Rock Park. Reduced to near skeletons wearing animal skins and eating nuts, berries and even mountain lion jerky they became mere shadows of the men at the top of Parliament they once were. Aided by this and that household, surviving close calls, abiding years of hiding in basements. Familyless, practically friendless fugitives thousands of miles from home surviving on discipline, faith, anonymity and the skins of their teeth. Only sure among all things in life that God was on their side in their victory against the King and in the Civil Wars. And yet their mortal enemy pursues them against reason, time and distance. They each are bound by their oaths - the oaths of their prior existences.
What resonates with me in this story is that none of the participants fall from grace. They bear up under extreme pressures and humiliations having their life’s purposes disabused by those too young, too powerful or too afraid to care. And thus have everything in their power reduced to their own singular ability to survive, every day reminding them of their unresolved predicament. For Nayler, it is his oath to pursue those responsible for the death of his king. Not like chasing the ghosts of Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby. These men stayed alive, and Nayler knew all of the players in the conspiracy. They escaped him time after time until the world around him decided it mattered no more. For Goffe, even after Whalley was dead and buried, he lived inside the shell of himself unable to even celebrate his Parliamentarian Protestant community, still under British royal rule.
In the end, Nayler, as snide and conniving as one could possibly be forges a letter to Goffe’s long suffering wife whose children have grown to adulthood. She wagers to brave the Atlantic passage, convinced that her long lost husband is found and free. He trails after her, murders the only passenger who sees through his trickery and befriends the woman whose spouse he intends to kill. It comes down to that. Two men. One survives.
Secret Agents
I’ve read two or three versions of the most treacherous betrayals of the American CIA and the British MI6, the latter involving Kim Philby and the former involving Aldrich Ames, someone who has not yet been discovered, or whose discovery may never be told. The latest real story within a fictionalized novel is presented by David McCloskey. Those most closely focused on the actual CIA mole hunt is by Robert Baer, in The Fourth Man, and by Grimes and Vertefeuille the women at the agency who were the sequestered mole hunters painstakingly creating bigot lists and checking every possibility. I have yet to read G&F, but it’s McCloskey’s The Seventh Floor that has me in a spin. I don’t know if I can take any more.
What we know to be true is that the scandal of moles found and/or suspected at the CIA caused the US Congress to remove the business of Counter Terrorism from the CIA and hand it over to the FBI. But what if you were one of those hard headed ground branch operators with a bulldog bite? What if you discovered that one of your closest friends and coworkers, people you trained with, pranked, and had many years of history with had to be in on a plot? What if, amidst political hijinks and your suspicions, through your own fault you get fired? Have you ever been fired and told “It’s not personal. Just take the deal.”? Smiling faces and clenched jaws. Yeah look me in the eye, and nobody blinks.
Artemis Procter, our protagonist, is on that edge where the incompetence and bureaucratic bullshit just makes her want to lose her shit, but she cannot afford and will not lose her shit. She has to get to the bottom of this, but whom can she trust? Several operations have gone pear shaped and tits up. One two three. One of her inner circle, has been kidnapped by the Russians and disappeared to a dungeon - the contact he was working has been murdered. Another of the CIA’s deep assets has committed suicide just before being rolled up. All within a few days. No way that’s a coincidence.
What is it like to know a suspected traitor up close and personal - as personal as a professional gets? Now they are at the top desks of the organization and you work heroically in the silent trenches, officially respected for your actions, but politically exiled for your attitude. Since you work at a business that trains people to knowingly and meticulously lie with the straightest of faces, you have to be brutally, yet subtly even more clever. When the truth means everything and you know people around you have deadly serious reasons to lie, it is pure hell. It’s hell beyond patriotism defied. It’s hell beyond your own career’s destruction. It’s the hell of the personal betrayal. It’s the hell of the itch in your head six months after the fact. It’s the hell of your dedication to being true, not because you’re better, but knowing the stakes are life and death and somebody has to be caught in that lie. She can’t let go. She goes to the wall, quietly with a burning, smoldering ferocity. God knows I’m not perfect, she thinks. I’m a fucking wreck right now, but all this does not add up. There’s something I’m missing. I have got to figure this out, she thinks. Not for me, but for what they did to one of my people who held out half a year counting dust motes in a Moscow torture chamber just to keep his legend straight.
She assembles a plan to smoke out the rat. She has to ask innocent sounding questions among the people she no longer works with. She has to put herself right with all of her circle of friends, scratching that itch but not too loudly. What are you getting at, they ask. Why do you persist? She can’t tell them what she is finding out as her circle of investigation widens and finds buried secrets - the kind whose discovery will put you in a world of hurt. Yesterday you were a secret hero. Today you are a secret felon. Where is the truth?
Reading the travails of Artemis Procter is an excruciating journey into the world of deception. For someone like me whose psyche is wired for high conscientiousness and low neuroticism, its drama stings. It forces me to reckon with not only human frailty but the institutional power that accelerates frailty and nullifies betrayal. When it becomes personal, like it did for Goffe and Nayler there may be no resolution for decades during which all of your personal integrity is wrapped around a single vow for which you have both sworn enemies and hesitant friends.
How it is that our deepest convictions can lead us to the darkest complications is the ultimate expression of our frailty. What we decide with the clearest logic and the most well-considered wisdom can pitch us unalterably off a cliff. If the matter is serious enough, then the cliff is even higher and more sheer. We fly or die. And we always die. At least let us not die for a lie.
Where is our faith? What do we trust beyond what we can prove? What does it matter after we are dead? If our soul is immortal, even if only in the minds and memories of history and myth, how can we tend what we only possess in life? How sure can we be? Perhaps only the punished know. Perhaps only suffering teaches best.