The Company: A Novel of the CIA by Robert Littell

news?"
    "Difficult not to hear it. People who generally clam up in elevators were holding a seminar on whether Truman's going to take the country to war."
    Carrying their drinks, the two men made their way to one of the tall windows that offered a breathtaking view of Manhattan's grid-like streets and the two rivers bracketing the island. Ebby waved at the smog swirling across their line of sight as if he expected to dispel it. "Hudson's out there somewhere. On a clear day you can see across those parklands trailing off to the horizon behind the Palisades. Eleonora and I used to picnic there before we could afford restaurants."
    "How is Eleonora? How's Immanuel?"
    "They're both fine." Ebby touched his glass against Colby's. "Good to see you again, Bill. What's the word from the District of Columbia?"
    Colby glanced around to make sure they couldn't be overheard. "We're going to war, Eb, that's what the Wiz told me and he ought to know." The pale eyes behind Colby's military-issue spectacles were, as always, imperturbable. The half smile that appeared on his face was the expression of a poker player who didn't want to give away his cards, or his lack of them. "Let the Communists get away with this," he added, "they're only going to test us somewhere else. And that somewhere else could be the Iranian oil fields or the English Channel."
    Ebby knew the imperturbable eyes and the poker players smile well. He and Colby and another young American named Stewart Alsop had studied Morse from the same instructor at an English manor house before being parachuted into France as part of three-man Jedburgh teams (the name came from the Scottish town near the secret OSS training camp). Long after he'd returned to the states and married, Ebby would come awake in the early hours of the morning convinced he could hear the throttled-back drone of the Liberator banking toward England and the snap of the parachute spilling and catching the air as he drifted down toward the triangle of fires the maquis had ignited in a field. Ebby and Colby, assigned to different Jedburgh teams, had crossed paths as they scurried around the French countryside, blowing up bridges to protect Patton's exposed right flank as his tanks raced north of the Yonne for the Rhine. Ebby's Jedburgh mission had ended with him inching his way through the jammed, jubilant streets of the newly liberated Paris in a shiny black Cadillac that had once belonged to Vichy Premier Pierre Laval. After the German surrender Ebby had tried to talk the OSS into transferring him to the Pacific theater but had wound up at a debriefing center the Americans had set up in a German Champagne factory outside Wiesbaden, trying to piece together the Soviet order of battle from Russian defectors. He might have stayed on in the postwar OSS if there had been a postwar OSS. When the Japanese capitulated, Truman decided America didn't need a central intelligence organization and disbanded it. The Presidential ax sent the OSS's analysts to the State Department (where they were as welcome as fleas in a rug), the cowboys to the War Department and Ebby, by then married to his pre-war sweetheart, back to Columbia Law School. And who did he come across there but his old sidekick from the Jedburgh days, Berkshire, one year ahead of him but already talking vaguely of abandoning law when the Cold War intensified and Truman reckoned, in 1947, that America could use a central intelligence agency after all.
    "I heard on the grapevine that Truman's flipped his lid at the CIA," Colby said. "He blames them for not providing early warning of the North Korean attack. He's right, of course. But with the nickel-and-dime budget Congress provides, they're lucky if they can predict anything beside Truman's moods. Heads are going to roll, you can believe it. The buzz on Capitol Hill is that the Admiral"—he was referring to the current DCI, Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter—"will be job hunting before the year's out. The Wiz