The general did so, but not quite as early as he had intended.
Because of the heightened tension in the country the Secret Service and the CIA were working together like a dream.
When Harry Blackstone placed a second call to Texas, within nine hours of the first, all he said was: “We have been advised by the Secret Service that the lady has informed them that she has decided to go to Greece in June.”
It was enough.
T
he moment the plane soared above Dallas, Fort Worth, the general began to run through the Skorpios matter in his head.
He had done so a hundred times since Harry Blackstone had suggested they meet at the usual place in New York. Just before he left home he put a call in to the White House.
Both of the Texans, Lyndon and Mo Dodsworth, had been in marriages of long-standing so they were fascinated by the dating pattern of Jackie and the Greek. Neither of them could work out what was happening between the pair.
The president said, “Must be the modern way. Maybe she just called Onassis up and invited herself over there. Or more likely they’ve been seeing each other all the time and we’ve missed it.”
To Mo, his friend sounded tired and irritated.
Trying to cheer him up, the general continued: “Anyway, if you want to go ahead with this thing I am happy to do so. Let’s face it, there couldn’t be a better time.”
The two of them went over everything again with Lyndon Johnson standing in for Jackie.
The general assured him that the map would now have a fourth crimson cross with a question mark beside it, marking the place where the missing agent was stationed, and the president said that he had been shown replicas of the drawings that the general was taking to show Jackie.
“They’re brilliant, I can almost smell the Mediterranean. Very true to life. At first I couldn’t make out our secret hideaway but I can see that making the hole in the rocks a little bigger works.”
“Apparently they’ve discovered a place where a small motorboat can get inside,” added the general.
“The listening apparatus works best there?”
“Who knows, but at least footprints show up less on the shale and pebbles while any other signs of human life can be buried at sea,” replied the general.
“Please call me as soon as you’ve seen her and let me know how you got on.”
The president then called Blackstone.
“Harry, I’ve had a healthy respect for Guy Steavenson ever since he and I inducted Jackie into the CIA. Isn’t it time for him to be involved?”
Blackstone had also thought that when they reached this stage, Guy’s inclusion would make sense. Now that the moment was at hand he counseled against it.
He couldn’t tell the president that the Guy he had seen when the man had returned from New York had worried him. At dinner he had been different in some indefinable way. It was not simply his depression about his wife’s decision to return home. Blackstone noted that the only time the younger man became enthusiastic was when he talked about Jackie. Admittedly, Guy’s report of the evening that he had shared with the CIA’s most famous, most secret spy was correct in every way, but there was something about it that made Harry suspect that getting Guy to persuade Jackie to marry Onassis might not be his strong suit.
He wasn’t going to tell the president of his presentiment. Instead
he relied on simple psychology; he would play on the man’s understandable nervous ness.
“Sir, I feel that we don’t need him with us at this time, it would be overkill, he would be wasted. The place we need him is in the fallback position. Realistically, even though we have always found her to be good at keeping secrets, this is different, it’s very personal.
“Of course, we will say that it is vital that she does not discuss the problems we have in the Med with anyone but us, but the whole suggestion is so off-the-wall. You remember, sir, your first reaction to it? She is quite likely to want to discuss parts of it with someone.”
“That’s true,” said the president, “so your thinking is…who would we rather she discussed this with?”
“Do we want her to ask her brother-in-law? Or her sister, who, it is said, had her own hopes in that area?” continued Blackstone.
“No, we want it to be one of us, someone who will encourage her, who will tell her that this is the perfect solution to keep her family safe. Someone we can guide her toward, someone whom she can take totally into her confidence, because he is one of us.”
“Exactly,” said the president. “You’ll brief Guy; that’s if she doesn’t throw you and the whole idea out…” he continued.
Blackstone, still worried about his young colleague, comforted himself with the thought that when he did talk to Guy he would take the precaution of making the whole thing highly official. The charming Mr. Steavenson would have no option. He would be under orders to back them up.
Twenty-four hours later the general and Blackstone were doing their spiel, for real.
Jackie had been delighted to hear from the general. As usual she arranged to meet him at the New Jersey house, right after the hunt. Assuming that he was also seeing other customers of the Dodsworth stud in the vicinity, she suggested that he come by for predinner drinks.
Exhausted but exhilarated by the jumps and spills of the day, she
found that some of her depression had lifted. After watching the two children show off their latest horse back skills, she bathed, fluffed up her hair, slipped into a pair of cyclamen-pink tapered trousers and a dyed-to-match cashmere crewneck.
The general barely had time to introduce Harry Blackstone before Jackie vanished upstairs to bid her children good night. The wait made them doubly edgy. When she returned, Mo broached the difficult subject.
He explained who Harry Blackstone really was and Harry took the moment to put into words his admiration for her work for the agency. The general could see that her surprise had turned to pleasure with Harry’s paean of praise. Keen to retain this atmosphere, he began explaining that he was not in New Jersey on four-legged business.
By nonchalantly expressing the view that as all three of them were, he was sure, fully conversant with the Cold War struggle between submarines of the U.S.S.R. and the United States, he gently drew the former First Lady in. He began with a thumbnail sketch of the new U.S. sonar equipment and continued with the problems of installing it. At this stage he produced the map of Greece and the three moved into the adjoining dining room to see it better. Pointing to the crosses and the dates beside them, he itemized just how deadly this technology had been for three, possibly four, of their agents.
Harry Blackstone progressed to America’s need for a safe place for some new oceanic listening paraphernalia and for the scientists and others involved with its utilization. He also mentioned the sunken Russian sub in the Pacific and the possibility that there was another in the Med. Interested and flattered to have been included in such a heavyweight discussion about the wider role of the CIA, Jackie much enjoyed his performance.
There was some further talk about the covert activities of the Russians in the area, the discovery of a plot to assassinate some of the Colonels. This took them back to the map and the various spots that the Americans had scoped since the loss of their spies.
Then the drawings were produced. Immediately she recognized the landscape; it was Ari’s island, Skorpios. She had loved it when she had been his guest nearly five years ago when she’d been convalescing after little Patrick’s death.
The artist had made the place look perfect.
At first she failed to see the narrow harbor that had been gouged from rocks by the seashore but after a minute or two she found it.
Within no time she assumed that all this was leading toward a request for her to ask Ari if the agency could make temporary use of his island. The next two drawings blew that notion apart.
In the first there was a full-scale party down one side of the island while on the dark, uninhabited side two men in a small motorboat were headed for the mooring inside the rocks.
The final sketch was a close-up view of the celebrations. She could see, among the white-gloved waiters, the decorated marquee, and the many well-dressed dinner tables, figures looking much like her cook, her hairdresser, various relatives and their children, her own two children, and Ari himself, all of them much older than they were now.
With a shock she realized that the agency didn’t want the island for just a few weeks to deal with current difficulties, they wanted to use it for months, for years.
In that moment the conversation slipped from the political to the personal.
The general and his accomplice were quiet, keeping their eyes on the sketches as if their lives depended on it.
Slowly Jackie looked at all of the drawings again. The silence seemed endless to her, but she did not fill it, especially as she wasn’t sure of her response.
She was thinking how alluring Ari’s island was without realizing that the general and Harry Blackstone had silently got to their feet and were preparing to leave.
Harry Blackstone was murmuring what a plea sure it had all been.
At the door the general turned to look at her.
“Just take your time, there’s no pressure, Harry and I are here for you, whenever you want us.
“Please keep all this to yourself, please talk to no one, absolutely no one, about it.”
“Except Guy,” Blackstone interjected. “Naturally he knows about it, you could always talk to him.”
Once again she was alone.
Only the map and the drawings reminded her that the meeting had been real, that she hadn’t imagined it.
Slowly she replayed it in her mind.
The dead men, the Colonels, the lost sub, the rig that could find Russian ships and submarines, and the scientists who wanted to operate it.
Could it be, that in their acute need, the general, and who knows who else, were attempting to make her mistress of Skorpios?
That night she dreamed of bougainvillea and eucalyptus, of cypresses and olive trees.
Was this perhaps the escape she dreamed of?
Harry and the general drove back to New York. Full of nervous relief, the general asked Harry when he would call and warn Guy.
The senior CIA man told him that he had taken the precaution of finding out how the former First Lady usually contacted the man. Apparently, using trade craft Guy had taught her, she always left a prearranged message via a switchboard that was only available to the CIA.
She never called him at home. Blackstone told the general that every agent was trained to keep their families and friends as much in the dark as possible about their secret life.
Harry knew he had time; nine
P.M.
Eastern Standard Time would mean that in Moscow it was still early morning.
“If it was another agent I wouldn’t have to worry about him being in the office on a Sunday,” Blackstone told the general. “But now that he’s alone at home, I imagine it might be likely that he goes in. I checked. He did two hours’ work in there today.”
“Do you think she will call him?”
“Don’t know, she was so calm, even when she got the message about Skorpios.”
The general rhetorically asked: “You don’t think she will do anything silly?”
“No, I don’t. She was enjoying our talk, she liked being included. I guess, once you’ve lived in the White House, there is an excitement, a buzz that, however detached you are from current events, you miss,” said Harry.
“I never thought she was that disinterested anyway,” drawled the general. “Jack Kennedy encouraged her to be that way so as to give himself some space.”
Harry set his alarm. He must speak to Guy at dawn.
Guy’s response needed virtually no help from the telephone company. He erupted: “That is the most preposterous thing I have ever heard! How could you do this without talking to me? He’s a crook, a liar, a bastard, and heaven knows what else. Does the president know about this?”
Guy, normally so careful, so clipped, so in control, could not stop. Mentally Harry Blackstone congratulated himself. His instincts about Guy had been correct.
Putting on his most authoritarian voice, Harry interrupted Guy’s flow.
“Guy, I want you to keep away from the embassy today. That’s an order. It’s Sunday, you don’t have to go in, and I can hear from your tone that it is not advisable that you speak to Mrs. Kennedy yet. I also forbid you to call her. I want you to calm down and think of all the plusses of a relationship like this for her, and I want you to leave your own feelings out of it.
“When she does call you, I want you to be supportive to the idea. That’s another order.”
Guy’s foul-tempered farewell left his boss in no doubt that he thought the idea was a bad one.
On Monday Guy was ready for the call but Jackie was on the move, she was traveling to pay her respects to Coretta King. By the time Martin Luther King’s funeral took place on April 9 there had
been riots in more than one hundred American cities and the president had declared that from now on the civil rights leader would have his own national holiday, an annual memorial to the man’s work for equality.
Jackie, once again feeling isolated and nervous, returned to the city from the South.
She left a message for Guy and he returned her call within minutes.
He suggested that she begin by describing the meeting in New Jersey. He was interested to hear how this ticklish subject had been dealt with from her point of view.
When she finished she put it to him bluntly: “Well, Guy, first, do you think the island really is so important?”
“I imagine they would not have made this suggestion lightly,” he quite fairly replied. “One of the guys who was killed, the one living in Corfu, he was a great friend of mine.”
“And what do you think of Aristotle Onassis?”
He waited a moment and when he spoke his voice was distant, dull. “You must do what you believe is right for you.”
When she tried to push him on the subject he became even less animated.
“Never met the man, but I suppose chatting to you, of all people, I should not be influenced by what I’ve read in the newspapers.”
He then changed the subject and talked about his family and his progress without them. When she attempted to return to the subject of Skorpios he would not be drawn any further.
After he put the telephone down he couldn’t help feeling that he had obeyed orders, just barely.
And, of course, the jealousy growing inside him.