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There had been complaints made about his filthy habit, most of them from the female staff but also from those of the opposite and indeterminate genders, but to no avail. Chris Waldron was about the best managing editor around, and management knew it.
Roscoe Danton knocked on Waldron’s door, waited for permission to enter, and, when that came, went in, closing the door behind him.
Chris Waldron reclaimed his cigar from the ashtray in his desk drawer and put it back in his mouth.
He raised his eyebrows to ask the question, Well?
Danton said, “I am fully aware that I am neither Woodward nor Bernstein, but—”
“Thank you for sharing that with me,” Waldron interrupted.
“—but I have a gut feeling I’m onto a big story, maybe as big as Watergate, and I want to follow it wherever it goes.”
“And I had such high hopes that you’d really stopped drinking,” Waldron said, and then made two gestures which meant, Sit down and tell me about it.
“So what do we know about these two disgruntled employee whistleblowers?” Waldron asked.
“The younger one, Wilson, was an agricultural analyst at Langley before she got married to Wilson, who’s a career bureaucrat over there. The gossip, which I haven’t had time to check out, is that he’s light on his feet. He needed to be married, and she needed somebody to push her career. Anyway, she managed to get herself sent through The Farm and into the Clandestine Service. They sent her to Angola, and then she got herself sent back to Langley. A combination of her husband’s influence and her vast experience—eleven months in Angola—got her a job as regional director for Southwest Africa, everything from Nigeria to the South African border. She was where she wanted to be, back in Washington, with her foot on the ladder to greater things. She was not very popular with her peers.”
“What got her fired?”
“According to her, this Colonel Castillo said terrible things about her behind her back about her handling of that 727 that was stolen. Remember that?”
Waldron nodded. “What sort of things?”
“She didn’t tell me, not that she would have told me the truth. But anyway, that got her relieved from the Southwest Africa desk, and assigned to the Southern Cone desk—”
“The what?”
“Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile—otherwise known as the Southern Cone.”
“From which she got fired?” Waldron asked, and when Danton nodded, asked, “Why?”
“I got this from a friend of mine who’s close to the DCI and doesn’t like her. Somebody sent the DCI a tape on which our pal C. Harry Whelan, Jr., proudly referred to her as his ‘personal mole’ in Langley.”
C. Harry Whelan, Jr., was a prominent and powerful Washington-based columnist.
“That would do it, I guess. You check with Harry?”
Danton nodded.
“And did he admit knowing this lady?”
“More or less. When I called him, I said, ‘Harry, I’ve been talking with Patricia Davies Wilson about you.’ To which he replied, ‘Don’t believe a thing that lying bitch says.’ Then I asked, ‘Is it true somebody told the DCI she was your personal mole over there?’ And Harry replied, ‘Go fuck yourself, Roscoe,’ and hung up.”
“I can see where losing one’s personal mole in the CIA might be a trifle annoying,” Waldron said. “But—judging from what you’ve told me about this lady—might one suspect she is what our brothers in the legal profession call ‘an unreliable witness’?”
“Oh, yeah,” Roscoe agreed. “But the other one, Dillworth, is different.”
“How different?”
“Well, for one thing, everybody I talked to liked her, said she was really good at what she did, and was sorry she got screwed.”
“How did she, figuratively speaking of course, ‘get screwed’?”
“She was the CIA station chief in Vienna. She had been working on getting a couple of heavy-hitter Russians to defect. Really heavy hitters, the SVR rezident in Berlin and the SVR rezident in Copenhagen, who happen to be brother and sister. Dillworth was so close to this coming off that she had had Langley send an airplane to Vienna, and had them prepare a safe house for them in Maryland.”
“And it didn’t come off?”
