Chapter Two Thousand Five Hundred Eighty-Five
8th October 1976
Dublin, Ireland
“You actually got into the office of the Tigress herself?” Was the question that Walt Johnson the Legal Attaché had for Ed as soon as he made it back to the Embassy in Dublin. There had been jokes for ages comparing Walt to the Baseball player he shared a name with. The funny part was that Walt was as far from an athlete as one could possibly be by being short, overweight, and bespectacled. After a long career working in the US Justice Department, getting assigned overseas to the tricky work of managing the Legal Mission in a place like Dublin was a reward of sorts. What surprised Ed was how he seemed to come alive when the subject of Prefect Katherine von Mischner came up.
Ed had been expecting to receive a formal reprimand at best. Instead there were questions. He had been in the house that had been the source of endless trouble for the CIA’s Berlin Station. There had been attempts of infiltrate that house, but the presence of the Katherine von Mischner’s family had made that difficult. The last time had been when the Tigress had been in Canada to cheer on her foster daughter. They had discovered that the family dog, an extremely territorial terrier mix, going nuts and the Housekeeper grabbing a meat cleaver to see what was going on had resulted in two CIA Agents fleeing into the night. The point of planting listening devices was that the subject wasn’t supposed to know that you had been there.
Ed was forced to tell the truth. He had found the Tigress to be extremely intimidating like a force of nature. The trip to Berlin had been to interview a suspect and she had sent her goons after him. Ed had been a bit reluctant to admit that the suspect in question had been Tatiana von Mischner-Blackwood who he suspected of fraudulently entering the United States having run across that in a related investigation.
“You are quite lucky that she didn’t order her goons break your legs” Walt said, “We have run across rumors that she has done that or far worse in the past to those who cross certain lines.”
“I got the impression that she was pumping me for information” Ed replied.
“Interesting” Walt said, “Did you find what you were looking for in Berlin?”
“No” Ed said, “I think that the daughter knows more than she is saying and while Katherine is exactly the sort who might order what happened to Greyson to be carried out, she wanted to know what happened.”
“Afraid that blame might get shifted on to her” Walt said, relishing every word.
“What is that to us Sir?” Ed asked.
“You don’t know, do you?” Walt asked in reply.
Ed sat there for a long moment wondering what Walt was getting at.
“The Justice Department and the FBI have had a score to settle with Kat Mischner for a long time” Walt said, “We suspect her of a lot of things that we have never been able to prove and of the things that we know about, that woman has been remarkably capable of slipping the noose.”
“Just how capable?” Ed asked.
“J. Edgar Hoover backed by two dozen Agents and an entire Company of Marines were waiting for her after she did a number on a pair of Naval Intelligence Officers” Walt said.
“Still, what does that have to do with us?” Ed repeated.
“You weren’t read in on how we keep an eye on that woman and the GS from here, Paris, and Copenhagen” Walt replied, “You were also partnered with Greyson, who couldn’t keep a secret if his life depended on it. Which as it turned out, it did.”
“Why not in Berlin?” Ed asked.
“Are you kidding?” Walt replied, “Every time they sweep for bugs in the Berlin Embassy they find bugs on the bugs. If you sneeze in there you’ll have a good portion of the BND and BII telling you gesundheit.”
Washington D.C.
It had been expected to be a bruising fight being so close to the election, but the nomination of Charles “Buddy” Holly as the newest Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court after three years on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals had muted much of the opposition. The South, which had been a sore on the side of America since time out of mind, had initially stood as a block in opposition to anyone who Nixon might have nominated. Bud Holly being from Texas and being perfectly capable of speaking like any one of the good ol’ boys had shifted the entire conversation.
Nixon knew that would victory positioned him well going into the 1976 General Election. A lesser man might be tempted to rest on his laurels, Governor Ford of Michigan had waged a good campaign and had nearly caught up with Nixon a few times. Now that they were entering the final stretch, Nixon knew that it was time for the coup de grâce and it was going to completely blindside the Ford Campaign.
At that very moment, the one of the largest counterintelligence sweeps ever with the intent to cripple the BND NAA was about to start and the front page of every newspaper in America would have the details splashed across it that Sunday. Nixon had been planning this for months, with Justice and the FBI preparing to sweep up the entire network in one go.
There was an element of dirty pool involved with Nixon having to save several members of his own party from their own arrogance and stupidity without revealing his own involvement. The Republicans though, they wouldn’t see it coming until they realized too late that some of their own members were compromised seven ways from Sunday. Good luck going into an election with that on the voter’s minds.