All the Houses by Karen Olsson

Author:Karen Olsson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374714192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Although Tim is the one who works on the NSC staff with Lieutenant Colonel North, it’s Dick who befriends North and who later ropes Tim more fully into the operation. It’s Dick who one afternoon sits in the dusk of an unlit government auditorium and watches, from a metal chair, one of North’s slide shows: scenes of war on a pull-down screen. There are the slides of the boys in the jungle, preparing for battle, and then there’s the one of a lone wooden cross planted on a new grave. He listens to North urge in his throaty near-whisper: We’ve got to give them more … than just the chance to die.

Mitchell’s boss, the assistant secretary, lets him help out with some of North’s activities. As an employee of the State Department, Dick is bound by certain rules, but those rules don’t prevent him from learning of the more than $27 million recently deposited in a Credit Suisse account in Geneva for the benefit of the Contras. Nor do they keep him from strategizing about how to take down the Sandinistas’ Soviet helicopters, nor from weighing in on North’s idea to detain or maybe even sink a Nicaraguan merchant vessel suspected to be carrying arms shipments. It’s as though time itself runs faster in room 392, as the rest of the capital plods on, mired in debates about welfare, warnings about drugs, and endless analyses and forecasts in re gas prices or farm subsidies or the interstate highway system.

You ought to come see what we’re up to, Dick brags to Tim, making it sound like they are designing some secret weapon. All but smacking his lips. He tells Tim about the weekly meetings of the Restricted Interagency Group, in which a dozen people assemble on an upper floor at Foggy Bottom to discuss training programs, the southern front, the availability of Maule light aircraft, getting Costa Rica to cooperate. A peculiar, febrile logic prevails in those meetings, and so for example nobody sees any contradiction in enlisting a couple of businessmen to set up a vaguely defined covert operation involving a mesh of shell corporations and that account at Credit Suisse, and calling it “Project Democracy.”

At State, the RIG men are known as the cowboys.

In the middle of the summer, Dick is promoted to a new position. During that same pool party that might or might not have been thrown as part of an ill-conceived and redundant effort to raise money from the Saudis, he tells Tim the news. It’s a special office for aid to Nicaragua, he says, his voice low and burbling. It’s just been funded by Congress to do humanitarian assistance.

Humanitarian assistance? Tim asks.

As far as I’m concerned, everything we’ve been doing is humanitarian, Dick says, as he stares through the patio doors at the girl by the pool, Tim’s oldest.

You’re not kidding, are you.

Not at all.

* * *

Tim himself is not so sure, in the summer of 1985, about everything they’ve been doing. Inside North’s office, people joke that they’re all going to wind up in jail.

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