“deaf’ ultrasonically; there was no way to test for that.
What happened was not hypnosis. I’m not sure it’s even related, except that Valerie had to be in a hypnagogic state to trigger the runaway biofeedback phenomenon that isolated the frequency. You can’t hypnotize someone and tell him to jump off a cliff. I can turn on my machine and ask you to jump off a cliff
smiling
, and you’ll do it.
CHAPTER THREE:
JACOB
The CIA had been keeping an eye on Professor Nicholas Foley since the fall of ’78, when a low-echelon American Officer KCB agent came over to our side with an interesting list—thirty men and women who had graduated from “Rivertown,” an ersatz American village/training camp in the middle of Azerbaijan. A few of them we’d long since arrested and deported (they’d come to America in the fifties), but a baker’s dozen were still here, apparently living out normal American lives. All of them at least middle-aged.
Foley was an interesting case in that he was a fairly prominent person, well respected in his field, which was the intersection of linguistics, psychology, and education. That’s not as narrow as it might seem at first: Foreign language is the classic huge failure of modern American education, and anybody who’s working on ways to make language learning easier or faster or more palatable to students does get attention.Foley was working on it at a very basic level, trying to psych out patterns of resistance to language learning among older children and young adults.
And in his spare time he was a Soviet spy.
We tailed him and bugged him for a couple of years without getting anything. In fact, we were about to double back—find out how an innocent man’s name had gotten on the list—when he accidentally played right into our hands. He did a dead drop of a list of people who might be “turned,” and the pickup was one of our own double agents. (The only one, actually, attached to this small office.) There was nothing on the list to identify him, of course, but she’d staked out the pickup site with a hidden video camera.
She made a Xerox copy of the list and passed it on to her KGB higher-up. In some best-of-all-possible worlds, we would have assigned tails to everybody on that list. But there are too few agents and too many lists.
Lists. My life is hemmed in by lists and charts, piles of dusty journals and stacks of computer disks. I’m John Jacob Bailey, a senior analyst for the CIA, head of a very small section that covers Boston and its environs. Cambridge is pretty much home to me, since I got my first Russian degree at Harvard. I should have kept at it to the doctorate; now I’d be living a fairly exciting life as an academic. Instead I quit after the master’s (Soviet Affairs, Georgetown, ’68) and went straight into the State Department and the CIA. Where I
didn’t
go was Vietnam, which claimed many of my contemporaries.
It wasn’t just draft-dodging. I guess I was caught up in the Allen Dulles/Kennedy-era romantic notions about espionage. Envisioned myself going to exotic places, doing mysterious things, risking life and personalhonor to keep the Big Dominos from dropping. I didn’t foresee spending the rest of my life immured in the Harvard and MIT libraries, translating and summarizing Soviet journals and magazines. Soviet academese is just as opaque and boring as the American variety, and their journalism makes
U.S. News & World Report
look positively effervescent.
So when we do find an actual spy, everybody in the section gets somewhat wired. It would have been fun just to keep watching him, maybe push him a little bit, but we don’t really have any autonomy in such matters. We had to send a report to the Foreign Resources Division at Langley, and they sent back the expected reply: Wait.
It turned out to be a fruitful wait, though. A couple of months later I got a padded envelope through Federal Express. It contained one sheet of paper, which was just
What happened was not hypnosis. I’m not sure it’s even related, except that Valerie had to be in a hypnagogic state to trigger the runaway biofeedback phenomenon that isolated the frequency. You can’t hypnotize someone and tell him to jump off a cliff. I can turn on my machine and ask you to jump off a cliff
smiling
, and you’ll do it.
CHAPTER THREE:
JACOB
The CIA had been keeping an eye on Professor Nicholas Foley since the fall of ’78, when a low-echelon American Officer KCB agent came over to our side with an interesting list—thirty men and women who had graduated from “Rivertown,” an ersatz American village/training camp in the middle of Azerbaijan. A few of them we’d long since arrested and deported (they’d come to America in the fifties), but a baker’s dozen were still here, apparently living out normal American lives. All of them at least middle-aged.
Foley was an interesting case in that he was a fairly prominent person, well respected in his field, which was the intersection of linguistics, psychology, and education. That’s not as narrow as it might seem at first: Foreign language is the classic huge failure of modern American education, and anybody who’s working on ways to make language learning easier or faster or more palatable to students does get attention.Foley was working on it at a very basic level, trying to psych out patterns of resistance to language learning among older children and young adults.
And in his spare time he was a Soviet spy.
We tailed him and bugged him for a couple of years without getting anything. In fact, we were about to double back—find out how an innocent man’s name had gotten on the list—when he accidentally played right into our hands. He did a dead drop of a list of people who might be “turned,” and the pickup was one of our own double agents. (The only one, actually, attached to this small office.) There was nothing on the list to identify him, of course, but she’d staked out the pickup site with a hidden video camera.
She made a Xerox copy of the list and passed it on to her KGB higher-up. In some best-of-all-possible worlds, we would have assigned tails to everybody on that list. But there are too few agents and too many lists.
Lists. My life is hemmed in by lists and charts, piles of dusty journals and stacks of computer disks. I’m John Jacob Bailey, a senior analyst for the CIA, head of a very small section that covers Boston and its environs. Cambridge is pretty much home to me, since I got my first Russian degree at Harvard. I should have kept at it to the doctorate; now I’d be living a fairly exciting life as an academic. Instead I quit after the master’s (Soviet Affairs, Georgetown, ’68) and went straight into the State Department and the CIA. Where I
didn’t
go was Vietnam, which claimed many of my contemporaries.
It wasn’t just draft-dodging. I guess I was caught up in the Allen Dulles/Kennedy-era romantic notions about espionage. Envisioned myself going to exotic places, doing mysterious things, risking life and personalhonor to keep the Big Dominos from dropping. I didn’t foresee spending the rest of my life immured in the Harvard and MIT libraries, translating and summarizing Soviet journals and magazines. Soviet academese is just as opaque and boring as the American variety, and their journalism makes
U.S. News & World Report
look positively effervescent.
So when we do find an actual spy, everybody in the section gets somewhat wired. It would have been fun just to keep watching him, maybe push him a little bit, but we don’t really have any autonomy in such matters. We had to send a report to the Foreign Resources Division at Langley, and they sent back the expected reply: Wait.
It turned out to be a fruitful wait, though. A couple of months later I got a padded envelope through Federal Express. It contained one sheet of paper, which was just
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