Jack's Widow (12 page)

Since moving to New York she kept herself busy filling her day with routine; always sure to do regular sit-ups, since her riding and water-skiing needed suppleness, she also became a yoga fan. Apart from her regular meetings planning the JFK Presidential Library in Boston and involving herself with the children after school, which might mean a bike ride in Central Park or a trip to the movies, there were still some days when she might bury herself under the bedclothes. Wedding anniversaries, Jack’s birthday, and the birth dates of their dead children would still bludgeon her to misery. But when
she was feeling positive she would often paint or do some drawing at the tall, steel art desk she placed by the window in her study, visit the Fifth Avenue stores, Bonwit Teller and Bergdorf Goodman, or the antique shops on East Fifty-seventh Street. She enjoyed selecting the children’s clothes at Cerrutti on Sixty-eighth and Madison who sold Florence Eisman’s classic cotton outfits for boys and girls, with appliqué details like sailboats or daisies.

She would go for private consultations with Erno Lazslo, the Hungarian skin expert, and became dedicated to the rituals involved with his sea mud soap, dousing her face and then rinsing it many times. When she had been out of the sun for some time she would have the little dark hairs on her arms bleached. Weekends were filled with trips to the countryside where she supervised Caroline’s and John’s riding lessons and continued to go hunting. During the holidays, they traveled extensively but she knew she was just whiling away time and still longed to do something more serious. Reiterating their last conversation, she wrote to Guy to push this message home.

On his next trip he suggested, “Maybe it would help if we put our heads together. Analyze what sort of work you really want and what you think you’ll have time for. After all, both Caroline and John are still very young.”

“I don’t know myself, but there must be something. Sometimes I wish that I hadn’t turned down Lyndon’s offer of an ambassadorship.”

“Very smart of him,” muttered Guy. “He could see that what you have is the status, stature, and knowledge for it. There’s got to be a way we can harness all that.”

She reminded him of when they had first met and her early attempts at spying and how she spoke several languages.

Over the next few weeks, buried deep in his Moscow office, Guy tried to formulate a plan. He knew that she had loved the intrigue of her snatched moments of espionage, but she could hardly join the agency’s payroll.

He had come up with no hard-and-fast ideas by the time he next returned to the U.S.

This time “Her Elegance,” as the fashion trade newspaper
Women’s Wear Daily
was now calling her, had little free time. She made an exception for him and asked him to come and see her later than usual. She promised to telephone him after her predinner invitees had left. When, by eight, she had still not called, he decided to go over to her apartment and wait in the lobby for his cue to go upstairs. As he crossed Fifth Avenue he was surprised when he saw a highflier from Moscow, surrounded by his goonlike retinue, exiting her apartment building.

Guy had never taken much interest in Jackie’s foreign contacts as she had assured him that all her connections were nowadays far less powerful than they had been when she and Jack had got to know them. But Guy, who had recognized the man, knew differently. He waited in the lobby and five minutes later watched as her mother left, before he was shown into Jackie’s private elevator.

Having established that the Russian had been her visitor, Guy filled her in on the man’s new role. True, he had been the number two at the Russian embassy in Washington but he had been promoted. He was now in charge of Soviet counterespionage.

With his CIA hat on, he asked if she would mind giving him some of the other names of her recent foreign visitors. All were men, and while many were has-beens, quite a few had become even more influential in the last few years, and some were from enemy Communist countries.

Again, on behalf of the agency, he asked if she would mind telling him about the conversation she had that evening with the Russian. Jackie, quite taken aback by the ruthless nature of her visitor’s new role, was happy to oblige. Guy discovered that Jackie was a mine of information. Gently he grilled her about the chats that she’d had with some of her other foreign guests.

He was impressed with how much information she had garnered in such a short space of time. It only took one or two cocktails for
some of the most unscrupulous men in the world to lower their defenses to such a beautiful woman.

In the middle of Manhattan she had been discovering the softer side of some of America’s most powerful enemies, the type who would check that their mothers weren’t miked up before visiting them for Christmas. In doing so she had accidentally discovered some factual tidbits that would be highly useful to the agency.

“Sometimes they ask me out for dinner,” she confided.

“Where?” he asked.

“Oh, the usual places, Le Pavillon, La Grenouille, or La Caravelle. One or two of the better-looking ones have suggested that we eat in their suites,” she said, chuckling.

“At their consulate?”

“No, silly, at their hotel!”

Guy was mystified. When he had last been working in the States, admittedly some years ago, senior politicians and diplomats from the Iron Curtain countries never had such freedom. In Washington they would have stayed at their embassy, in New York they would have either had to overnight at their consulate or with their ambassador to the United Nations.

Security was taken so seriously that when any senior personnel went to a reception where both Westerners and alcohol were present, they were obliged to eat a half a pound of butter, on bread or without it, it was up to them to choose, so that they would not get drunk and reveal any secrets.

At all times they were surrounded by an entourage, often swollen with some of the nastier members of their own security service.

Suddenly the role that she, and she alone, could perform for the agency was staring him in the face.

He desperately wanted to share his idea with her, but before he told her, or anyone else, he knew that he had to think it through.

It excited him so much that he was almost too impatient to tuck into the ratatouille, shepherd’s pie, and salad that Jackie had ordered for them.

They chatted away easily but in the back of his mind Guy was beginning to work out how to use Jack’s widow.

That night he put his idea down on paper. Within a week he and his immediate superior were talking to the director general of the agency. Between them they devoted their time to piecing together a scheme and finalizing a proposition.

Two weeks later, having received reports from the undercover men watching her Upper East Side apartment block, Guy had everything in order. The agency was aware that this plan would have to receive approval from the Oval Office. Not only would the president have to agree to using such an iconic figure as the former First Lady, he would also have to arrange for the CIA to operate in the domestic arena. As the situation stood the CIA was only supposed to run operations abroad; any spying or undercover work undertaken on American soil was in the bailiwick of the FBI.

The president himself made minor adjustments to the plan and decreed that nothing could be put into action until all the facts were made known to the person who was now at the top of the CIA hiring list.

“There is no way that you can begin this without giving Mrs. Kennedy all of the facts,” he drawled.

“She has to know what will be happening behind her back, before we can go ahead.

“She must be informed that she may be putting herself in danger and that she may have to deal with more security around her, and so may her children.

“Remember, we are dealing with the most ruthless bastards in the world; if it ever gets out that she was involved, she and we need to be prepared. If she says yes, she will be agreeing to be used as the most glamorous decoy known to man.”

The president wondered if he should be the one to persuade her to take on this task but was advised against it. He was reminded that she had turned him down before, doubtless because of her brother-in-law Bobby. Even though he was now junior senator for New York, he might still try to stifle any offer from Lyndon Johnson.

Magnanimously, the president thought the scheme was so vital that he insisted that Guy, its instigator, still based in Moscow, be especially recalled to put the suggestion to Jackie in person.

“As soon as he gets over here I want him to come and see me. I know Jackie well and I think I can give him some pointers. Jackie is very modern thinking. She transformed the White House in ways you don’t know. Technically improved it, made the kitchens efficient, made it work. So show her our best bits, the cameras, the listening devices. Show her how they work. Explain how a man’s bathroom cabinet can tell you so much about him. Draw her in. Make her part of the team.”

Armed with the latest technology, a nervous Guy went to 1040 Fifth Avenue.

“Jackie, to night I’m acting as the envoy of the president, who, I must tell you, will be very happy to take your call at any time this evening.”

After her initial surprise he spilled his bag of tricks.

“These cameras can be hidden in all kinds of things, a cigarette case or a handbag. Behind the Iron Curtain it is hard to point a lens wherever you want to. These make it easier. The same with these tiny bugs.

“In the future all of these gadgets will get more accurate and even smaller.

“The notion of secrecy is so big behind the Iron Curtain, even things that could be public are kept hidden. Everything from the beet harvest to population growth is secret.”

He filled her in on all the ways that the empire’s system of guards, identity cards, and obsession with security made it almost impossible to spy on them at home. The CIA therefore wanted to take the opportunity to do so when they were traveling.

“When they come over here it’s been hard to get anything out of them, but when you told me that they are being given this little window of freedom to talk to you, I had an idea. But before I tell you that, perhaps it’s best if I explain how and why things have changed.

“It’s all public relations,” Guy explained. “In the old days they could act heavy but this is the sixties. They are never going to sell Communism to the young, always their best recruiting ground, if it looks like Big Brother is watching day and night. They want their system to appear as open as ours and for it to look so great that no one would ever want to leave it. They want to show that they are living as we do, with our freedom, our in dependence, and that their system, their culture, also gives them liberty.

“Nowadays they don’t want people to think that it’s the Berlin Wall, the armed guards, and the miles of barbed wire that keep people behind the Iron Curtain, but good old Communism. They are saying, see, our people can stay where they like and wander around at will.

“But of course, behind your charming diplomat there is a wife, a child, a mother, or a father who is acting as a hostage. They are not being kept in a cell, there’s no need, but make no mistake, your charming guest knows that if he attempts to make a dash for freedom he puts someone he loves at risk.

“And if that is not enough, they have the bloodhounds—that is, KGB men—with them wherever they go, listening to what they say, watching who they talk to, and above all making sure they don’t vanish. The Communists just couldn’t stand to have another Nureyev seeking asylum over here so they simply won’t take the risk of a politician or a diplomat going over the wall.”

“All right,” she interrupted, “but if this has been happening for some time what is so special about when they come here?”

“As I just said, they may be trying to look as free as a bird to the outside world but they are still petrified to leave their politicians alone, because it was the Eastern Europeans who virtually invented the honeypot entrapment scam. You know, where they use a beautiful girl, or sometimes a boy, to seduce one of our people and then blackmail them into revealing classified information.

“So even though they are pretending they are not standing guard over their own people, they are far too cautious to allow them to go
anywhere solo, particularly if it is to see a beautiful woman. But the one place they are allowed to do so…” He paused.

“Is here,” she said, finishing his sentence for him.

“So what could I do?”

To demonstrate how much she could help he showed her his homework.

“You may remember,” he said, smiling, “that not that long ago I was asked if I could do some quiet investigating to trace every female visitor to the White House during the Kennedy presidency, and you may also recall that this request was viewed so sympathetically by the boss of the FBI that even though I worked for the opposition he handed me the complete records.”

Jackie did have the grace to blush when she saw the endless sheets of paper covered with Guy’s notes.

“What you and I didn’t know when we asked for this information was that it would be so complete, so reliable. That there was someone other than White House security personnel who thought it essential that every guest should be monitored.”

“He wasn’t doing it to protect our safety?” asked Jackie.

“No. The little man who dominates the FBI has distrusted politicians for so long that many, many presidents ago, he convinced himself that the nation’s security relied upon his spying on every supreme commander from the moment he was elected. So, you see, although it was always technically possible that someone like the president’s secretary or some other members of his staff might have smuggled one or two others in, it is very unlikely. J. Edgar Hoover had made sure that he had his own methods of checking visitors in and out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”

Guy stopped for a moment. Both he and President Johnson had discussed the fact that Jackie may have never grasped just how few secrets she had when she was married to the most powerful man on earth. The president had counseled him to let her have time to absorb this since in just a few minutes Guy would have to admit that over the last few weeks she had been spied upon once again, this time with the president’s permission.