Executive Times
		2005 Book Reviews
		Last Call for Blackford Oakes by William F. Buckley, Jr.
		Rating: ••• (Recommended)
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	Finale The title of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s latest novel, Last Call for Blackford Oakes, lets fans know that one of our favorite spies has been called for a final assignment. It seems that Buckley is preparing himself for his own farewell. He’s sold his sailboat, and now he’s delivering the last episode in a fine collection of spy novels. Set in 1987, Oakes is sent to Russia by President Reagan to investigate another assassination attempt on Gorbachev. While there, he finds both love and Kim Philby, and the novel describes how Oakes responds to each. Here’s an excerpt, all of Chapter 13, pp. 62-70: In preparing for this trip to Moscow, Blackford Oakes elected to become “Henry Doubleday.” The assignment was very different from the one of a year ago. Then, the planned assassination of Gorbachev was set for a few days ahead. This time, such a plot was not by any means set, it was gestating. Blackford had told the director he would be away perhaps for several weeks. “It’s your call,” Bill Webster had replied. Blackford’s seniority shielded him from bureaucratic interference, and having given up the post of chief of covert operations, he had no managerial responsibilities. The facilities of the agency, on the other hand, were entirely at his disposal. So he went to the shed and checked in with Andrew. They were contemporaries, and Blackford had, over the years, relied on this close-mouthed, bald-headed specialist in disguises and identification paraphernalia. “Andrew, if anybody in Moscow knows anything at all about U.S. book-publishing history, they’ll know the name Doubleday. If anybody approaches me and says, ‘Are you a Doubleday?’ I can answer, ‘Well, in a way.” He winked. “I’m named Doubleday, but I’m not a Doubleday.” Gus Windels had, of course, diplomatic immunity. And the KGB had not taken note of his phony mission of the year before, looking for a lost “aunt.” But Blackford needed cover. There were CIA in the Soviet Union, and KGB in the United States. Their mobility—and sometimes their safety— depended on not being noticed. It was for this reason that the most valuable Soviet agents in the West were natives of the countries they worked in. It was so, too, in the Soviet Union: U.S. assets were mostly Russian-born. But Americans in the Soviet Union, doing covert duty for Washington, needed plausible cover. Thanks to Andrew, Oakes would have this. Andrew went to work preparing his documents. Meanwhile, two letters went out to counterparts at the Soviet end of the planned cultural exhibit. Preliminary letters from Henry Doubleday, advising that he would soon be on the scene, and giving a preview of the books he hoped might be made available to Soviet students and readers—which meant getting clearance for them from the censors. Not a bad idea to plead for more books in connection with the scheduled two-nation exhibits. These were a part of a decades-old agreement, reached by President Eisenhower and Premier Khrushchev in 1958, with the exalted title, “Agreement between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on Exchanges in the Cultural, Technical, and Educational Fields.” The first exhibit, in Moscow, had been the scene of the legendary “kitchen debate” between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev. Nixon, the young vice president, seemed overpowered by the massive presence of the Soviet premier. But Nixon had been a debater in college, and a strenuous advocate in his days as congressman and senator. When Khrushchev made reference to the great achievements of the Soviet economy, Nixon replied by showing off kitchen equipment—refrigerators, toasters, blenders— that was routine in the United States, mouth-watering to Soviet citizens. The exhibits were to be open for three months, the one in Russia devised by Americans, the one in the United States devised by Soviets. They were conceived as giving expression to life and culture in the two countries. “I’m glad I don’t have to design the USSR’s exhibit,” Blackford said to Andrew. “What will they come up with? The ballet and missile-producing factories? Never mind, that’s their problem.” The United States leaned heavily on the universal appetite for American cars and movies and popular music. The exhibit at Gorky would show off eight 1988-model cars, including the flashy Chevrolet Camaro and the solid new Plymouth Reliant. There would be a snowland of refrigerators and freezers, long tables of word processors and tape recorders, stacks of music CDs and movies on videotape—and libraries of books. That was the division of the exhibit Henry Doubleday would be paying special attention to. From the Russian desk he got a listing of U.S. books that had been approved for circulation in the Soviet Union. The Communists, the covering CIA memo said, were especially concerned to forbid any book that dealt with internal USSR quarrels. There was an ethnic division among the cultural advisers to the Kremlin—Great Russians vs. Georgians, Central Asians, and so on. There was also division over Gorbachev’s glasnost, his declared policy of openness. Some were enthusiastic about the general secretary’s reforms, some cautious, some actively opposed. On the matter of what books to promote, some called for a return to “classic Russian writers,” others to “proletarian populism.” Blackford looked over the long memo, then put it down. He booked the clear phone line for a call to Gus. “What made you think I’d still be in the office, Dad?” It was endlessly amusing to Gus—and, actually, also to Blackford—to hark back, when in private, to the father—son relationship they had feigned the first time they worked together. “Gus, I’m going to steer clear of the glasnost maelstrom, but here’s something I need advice about. The people I’ll be dealing with on the Gorky exhibit—which way do they lean? Toward glasnost, or against? I’m preparing a pitch, and that would be useful to know.” “I’ll dig into that.” Gus agreed that Blackford would do best to concentrate on Western masterworks of composition, “like Hemingway,” or collections, “like the Great Books.” They talked about other American authors. Gus had a list of individual books that had been vetoed in the past. “I’ll send those to you on the wire. Wouldn’t be a bad idea to tell the Gorky people I’ll be following you around while you’re in Moscow.” Using USIA facilities, Blackford sent letters to the U.S. head of the Gorky exhibit and to his counterpart in the Soviet cultural-affairs office. The letters advised these officials that Mr. Gus Windels of the U.S. Embassy, who was fluent in Russian, had been detached to assist him with the exhibit, and that he, Henry Doubleday, would be using as his office a suite at the Metropol Hotel, and would receive mail and messages there. He hoped to arrive in the next few days, he said, and to stay in touch with the operation until after the exhibit was opened in June. A few days later Henry Doubleday arrived at the Sheremetevo Airport. The activity there had begun to reflect the more open policies of glasnost and perestroika. It was twice as busy, Blackford Oakes reflected, as just one year ago. He had brought with him two crates of books, and he supervised, unhurriedly, the unloading of these, carefully labeling them for the official exhibit, before he got into a cab to go to the Metropol. The next, snowy morning, he met for breakfast with the U.S. head of the Gorky exhibit and his Soviet counterpart. They discoursed at some length on the subject of the exhibit, staying away from the heat of political concern over cultural relations. He would go the following day, he told them, to Gorky, traveling by rail with his assistant from the embassy, Mr. Windels. There was plenty of time to talk during the three-hour train ride over sparsely populated farmlands. The railroad car was of European design (“These cars were designed in Germany, built in France, and transported to Russia by the Nazis,” Gus informed him). Arrived in Gorky, they spent hours surveying the buildings in which U.S. technology would be featured and then the movie auditorium. The USIA guide took them to the area being prepared for American books. “It’s here, Dad, that you’ll be displaying The Federalist Papers and inciting the counterrevolution.” “Quiet, Gus.” Blackford looked about. He measured some distances within the U.S. quarters by taking his yard-long steps, while Gus smoked a cigarette. Back on the train that afternoon, Blackford asked about friction at the Politburo level. “Is the division between Dmitriev and Gorbachev completely healed? What about Dmitriev? And what have you pulled together on ‘the general’? We’re talking about Leonid Baranov, we have to assume. The single bit of hard evidence we have of the whore’s credibility is her use of the name Singleton. Since our talk on Monday, what have you been able to find out about how many of our friends were in on the Singleton episode?” “I’ve run,” Gus Windels said, frowning deeply, “into the solidest stone wall I’ve ever butted up against.” He tried to lean back in the unyielding railroad seat, finally lifting his hips and stretching out his legs. “Let’s go over the story. Yeah, we know it, but doing it this way, I think, we can lay it out like a computer folder, see how it looks. To us—and to them. “Two American characters come to Moscow, Harry Singleton—that’s you, Dad—and Jerry Singleton, that’s me, your son. They are pretending to be here to look for an old Ukrainian aunt, thought long dead, but there was that sign of life in a letter to her sister that arrived just before—Mom’s death. So the Singletons, father and son, are determined to discover whether Aunt Avrani is alive, and, if she is, to arrange to give her a little material comfort. “But actually—” Gus stretched open his arms as if addressing not a solitary colleague, but a tearful wake of mourners. “But actually”—Gus spoke now in a stage whisper— “Dad’s mission is to communicate with his old antagonist, the retired spy Boris Bolgin, to instruct him that he has to abort the plot to assassinate Gorbachev. “Any corrections?” “Go on, Gus.” “I will. Maybe my real vocation is for the theater. “Anyway, the senior Singleton contacts the KGB defector, who is conniving in the assassination of the premier, and says: Boris, you can’t do that! The United States would not like it at all. And if you don’t break up the conspiracy, Harry Singleton, acting for the president of the United States, will. “So what happens? The bomb goes off and kills not Gorby, but an aide. The KGB swoop down and get one of the four conspirators. Now—pay rapt attention, Dad—none of the conspirators knew you were in town under the name Singleton. So how did Galina get to talk to me about ‘Mr. Singleton’?” Blackford looked over from his seat, opposite. “You forgot a little detail.” “Oh well, er—” “Oh no you don’t. You wanted to play Laurence Olivier. Well, I can do that, too. What you left out is that young Jerry Singleton, although he had been told not to take any chances, couldn’t refrain from accompanying a young lady from the embassy home to her apartment and screwing her just in time for the KGB to come in, photograph him, and haul his ass off to jail. They were looking for drugs—they said—and they didn’t hold you for very long. But they had plenty of time to stare at your passport, and to record the name.” “Which was Singleton,” Gus nodded, soberly. “Which was Singleton.” “All right. But how did an American guy called Singleton, shacking up with an American girl, held overnight on drug suspicion, get to be known by Galina, a prostitute, as involved in an operation to assassinate Gorbachev? An operation in which, as we both know, the only role the U.S. did play was to get there and try to abort the whole thing.” Blackford said he could not come up with an answer to the question. None of the assassins had brushed up against either of the Singletons. The senior Singleton had returned to duty in Washington. Gus, the junior Singleton, had also returned, but was quickly reassigned to Moscow under his own name. His superior had consulted the Moscow embassy and learned that Gus did not appear to have been listed on any active Soviet ledgers as persona non grata. If he was later identified, he would simply be recalled, pursuant to Moscow— Washington standard practice when spies were detected under diplomatic cover. So how might Galina’s friend have known there was an American called Singleton in the picture? “Odd stuff. Almost”—Gus hesitated—” unbelievable.” “Did you study any logic at the University of Iowa?” “Well, sort of.” “We have here a prime example of a posteriori reasoning. (i) We know that Galina’s friend mentioned the name ‘Singleton.’ (z) We reason back to the conclusion: that somebody gave him the name. Who?” “What if his brother, the conspirator . . . “—Gus’s hand was over his head—”what if he tailed you, Black, coming away from your meeting with Boris?” Blackford paused. He spoke as if to himself. “And then passed on the name to his brother, who passed it on to the prostitute . . .” “Maybe he thought Boris had called in a U.S. contact— Singleton—who would relay to Washington that the scheduled assassination was by anti-Communists.” “Yes. We will need to track the conspirator’s brother to the general. But our own investigations give us some idea on the matter of the likelihood of a coup. There is an anti-Gorbachev faction in the Politburo. But Gorbachev strikes me as very much in command.” “Well, he isn’t, actually, Dad. There is a lot of opposition to his whole perestroika approach. A lot of people up there in the high world he inhabits think he is an ideological wimp.” “Do we think that?” “I don’t. But maybe you will.” They arrived back in Moscow ready for a little distraction. They would have it at the cocktail party Gus had planned for that evening, in a private room at the Metropol. Buckley remains true to the character he created in Blackford Oakes, ensuring that Oakes’ behavior resonates with readers. Reading Last Call for Blackford Oakes provides ideal summer entertainment. Steve Hopkins, June 25, 2005
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