Marco was in charge. His aide, assistant, and constant companion was Louis Amjac. The other side-kick was a round type, with the nerves of a Chicago bellhop, named Jim Lehner. He was there representing the CIA. They worked out of a capacious, many chambered house in the Turtle Bay district of New York, right through the summer of 1959 but they did not get one step further than the alarming conclusions which had been reached originally by Marco. It is questionable whether any definitive conclusions beyond those reached could have been attained if Marco had been able to allow himself to tell the part of his dreams having to do with Raymond’s murders, but he could see no connection, he didn’t think the time had come, he couldn’t keep the thought in his mind, and so on and on into many splinters of reasons why he did not divulge the information. Thousands of man-hours were put in on the project and as time went on the pressure from exalted sources grew and grew. A three-platoon system of surveillance was put around Raymond. The total cost of the project which the doctrinaire romantics in the service classified as Operation Enigma has been estimated at, or in excess of, $634,217 and some change, for travel, salaries, equipment, lease, and leasehold improvements, maintenance and miscellaneous expense—and not a quarter of it was stolen beyond a few hundred rolls of Tri-X and Hydropan film, but even accountants don’t recognize such losses because all photographers everywhere are helpless about film stocks to the point where it is not even considered stealing but is called testing.

The Army flew Alan Melvin, the former corporal turned civilian plumber, from Alaska to the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, then to the house in Turtle Bay in New York, but the interviews with him revealed no more than what had been gleaned from Marco. However, the call to Operation Enigma seemed to have come in time to have saved Melvin’s sanity—even his life. The nightmares had caused a weight loss of seventy-one pounds. He weighed one hundred and three pounds when picked up at Wainwright. He could not be moved for seventeen days, while he received high-caloric feeding, but by that time he had talked to Marco. When he learned that what he had dreamed had reached such a point of credibility that it had become one more terrible anxiety for the President of the United States, it seemed as though all dread was removed instantly, enabling Melvin to sleep and eat, dissolving the concretion of his fears.

Upon his restoration to active duty Colonel Marco requested, and was granted, an informal meeting with representative officers of the Board. They explained that it would not be possible for Colonel Marco to refuse advancement to the rank he held but that it was to his great credit that he felt so strongly about the matter. They explained that such an action could disturb legislative relationships in the present climate, so extraordinary that it had to be considered the far, far better part of valor for government establishments to run with the tide. Colonel Marco asked that he be permitted to register his vociferous distaste for Senator Iselin and be allowed to demonstrate that he rejected any and all implied sponsorship of himself by such an infamous source; he wished the condition to be viewed by the Board as being and having been untenable to him as well as having been unsolicited by him and undesirable in every and any way. He added other stern officialese. He asked that he be allowed to express, in an official manner, his innermost fears that this promotion to the rank of full colonel would inconsiderately prejudice the future against his favor for an optimum Army career.

The Board explained to him, informally and in a most friendly manner, that whereas it was true it would be necessary that his personnel file forever retain Senator Iselin’s stain to explain Colonel Marco’s—uh—unusual—uh, advancement, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, with his own hand, had appended an explanation of the attendant circumstances, absolving the colonel of any threat of shadow.

All in all, because he was human to extreme dimension, Marco secretly felt he had done pretty well out of the Iselin brush, which in no way forgave Iselin or diminished Colonel Marco’s prayers for vengeance. The single negative factor connected with the mess had been the death of General Jorgenson, but that was another matter entirely and one not pertinent to his promotion. Someday, he thought fervently, he would like to see the notation made by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs upon the personnel file of General Jorgenson before it was permitted to pass into Army history. As a soldier, Colonel Marco knew that the general’s death had been a hero’s death, in the sense that a Hindu priest would believe deeply in the right of a widow to burn herself upon her husband’s funeral pyre, becoming a saint and joining Sati. So saved are all those who enable themselves to believe, and therefore was the military mind called a juvenile mind. It was constant; it observed a code of honor in a world where any element of devotion to a rationale summoned scorn; but the world itself knew itself was sick.

Colonel Marco puzzled his past nightmares and decided they could make him a full general yet.

While Raymond toured Europe with his mother, Marco toured the United States with Amjac and Lehner and completed a formal canvass of the survivors of the patrol. This yielded nothing. Nightly, in the manner of a lonely drummer distracted by the boredom of the road, Marco telephoned his girl whom he had not yet had either the time or the opportunity to marry. She comforted him. The three men moved through seven cities from La Jolla, California, to Bay shore, Long Island. Marco and Melvin had been the only two men on the patrol who had ever dreamed of it.

Sixteen

MRS. JOHN ISELIN’S TOUR OF EUROPE IN THE summer of 1959 with her son developed into the most shocking string of occasions, as redolent of that decade as a string of garlic pearls. Mrs. Iselin achieved more for sustained anti-Americanism and drove infected wedges more deeply between America and her allies than any other action by any individual or agency, excepting her husband, of the twentieth century.

It would seem that wherever Mrs. Iselin set down with her personable, strangely expressed son, she gave a different account of why she was traveling. In Paris, she was looking for inefficiency in United States Government offices overseas. In Bonn, she said she was looking for subversives in United States Government offices overseas. In Munich, she said she was looking, actually, for both, because “any concept of efficiency in government must include complete political responsibility. If anyone should favor the Communists, then he cannot be efficient,” Mrs. Iselin explained to the German (and world) press.

Mrs. Iselin’s only brother was, at the time of her visit to Rome in late July, the American ambassador to Italy. He extended an invitation to his sister and his nephew to stay with him and his family, which Mrs. Iselin accepted via the Associated Press. “My brother is so dear to me,” she said for publication in many languages, “and I do so ache to see him again after a long separation, listen to his wisdom, and rejoice in his embrace. Pressure of work for our country has kept us apart too long. We are out of touch.” It was not told that what had put them in direct touch again was a specific coded order from the Secretary of State ordering his ambassador to invite his sister to be his house guest.

Mrs. Iselin moved out of the ambassador’s residence to the Grand Hotel on the afternoon of the second day she had been her brother’s guest and immediately called a press conference to explain her action, saying, according to the transcript which was printed in full in The New York Times for July 29, 1959, “In every sense of that melodramatic word I am standing before you as a torn woman. I love my brother but I must love my country more. My loyalty as a sister of a beloved brother must be moved to serve a greater loyalty to the unborn of the West. My brother’s embassy is wholly directed by American Communists under direct manipulation by the Kremlin, and I pray before you today that this is a result of my brother’s ineptness and ignorance and not of his villainy.”