Friday night around eight o’clock, the Round Robin Bar was packed with revelers fortifying themselves for the Fourth of July fireworks display, which we here in Washington were lucky enough to have escaped the wrath of Hurricane Arthur to witness. The Round Robin is located in the Willard Hotel, right across the street from the Treasury building. There has been a hotel there, at Fourteenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, since 1818, and many historic events have occurred at the Willard, under that and several previous names. Julia Ward Howe wrote The Battle Hymn of the Republic at the Willard Hotel, for example, although I’m sure she never set foot in the Round Robin, which is located on the first floor, right off the main lobby, where President Ulysses S. Grant coined the term “lobbyists” to describe the favor-seeking dandies who hung around that very lobby, lurking and scheming to buttonhole him as he drank branch water bourbon mint juleps in the Round Robin. So that branch water bourbon mint julep, a favorite of not only Grant, but Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, Martin Van Buren, Daniel Webster and Mark Twain as well, has become the Round Robin’s signature cocktail, and every Fourth of July, it is always served decorated with red, white and blue sugar stars. It’s a generously portioned and very flavorful drink, and usually one of them is sufficiently potent for most folks to start seeing their own private fireworks display, right there in the Round Robin Bar.
Dick Hundsfott, however, whom I noticed crouching in a corner with two empty mint julep glasses, was working on a third and clearly watching something on the ceiling that more closely resembled the bombardment of Fort McHenry or the D-Day Invasion than a mere couple of million dollars worth of world-class Italian black powder mortar shells with added heavy metal coloring exploding overhead.
“I thought you were in Germany,” I opened as I took a seat next to him. “Haven’t seen you around DC in over five years.”
“Got called back to Langley,” he morosely replied as he took an deep swig from this third mint julep. “Looks like they figure I screwed the pooch over in Kraut-land.”
“Whatever could make them think something like that?” I wondered.
“Well,” he began, “you know how, back in October of last year, that little snot-nosed bastard Edward Snowden let the cat out of the bag about us spying on the Germans?”
“Yes,” I recalled, “apparently, the NSA was even tapping Chancellor Angela Merkel’s private cell phone conversations.”
“And do you know what we found out?” Hundsfott whispered in a conspiratorial tone as he leaned closer and glanced around to see if anyone else was listening.
“Um, yeah,” I admitted, “as a matter of fact I do. She overeats massively, especially potatoes, marzipan, and pastries. And she’s absolutely nuts about truffles and eats all kinds of weird flavors, such as lavender, violet, rose petal, smoked Hungarian paprika, fennel, white pepper, curry and even wasabi. She also pigs out on tubs of Nutella, which she likes to eat on pumpernickel bread with caraway seeds. And as of last October, she was having affairs with a Turk and a Nigerian, and she had been pregnant earlier that year for four months, but because she’s so overweight, she didn’t even notice. She is also obsessed about dogs and mentions her husband so infrequently, you’d think he didn’t exist. Chancellor Merkel can swear with an intensity that would make a sailor blush, and she’s a compulsive gambler, even going so far as to visit casinos in disguise in order to play baccarat and roulette. And she’s a very heavy drinker, even for a German.”
Hundsfott’s eyes widened. “Holy [expletive], Tom,” he exclaimed. “Nobody’s supposed to know all that [expletive] about Merkel! How the hell did you find out about it?”
“John Kerry told me,” I revealed. “While we were discussing the situation back in the fall of 2013, while we were…”
“Jesus [Expletive] Christ!” Hundsfott interrupted. “Kerry goes around telling the likes of you… no offense… about what we found out when we tapped Angela Merkel’s [expletive] cell phone, and here I am, getting the [expletive] shaft!”
“And just what,” I pressed, “are you getting the [expletive] shaft for, might I ask?”
“Well,” he answered, “after that stuff about the NSA spying on the Germans came out, inevitably, the Krauts decided to have a secret parliamentary commission appointed to investigate.”
“Inevitably,” I concurred.
“And, naturally,” he continued, “the Germans’ own spooks, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND, started spying on the parliamentary commission.”
“Naturally,” I confirmed, “that only follows.”
“So, of course, the CIA started spying on the BND agents spying on the secret parliamentary commission investigating the NSA spying on Germany.”
“Of course,” I agreed, “it only makes sense.”
“Yeah,” Hundsfott grumbled, “Up to that point, everything was fine; everything made sense! But then, things got really messed up! One of the BND agents started selling secret parliamentary commission documents to someone at an American intelligence service!”
“Not the CIA?” I sought to confirm.
“I should hope not, God damn it!” Hundsfott spat. “If we’re that [expletive] stupid, I guess we might as well just get it over with and surrender to the [expletive] Taliban.”
“Then… who?” I prodded.
“Good question,” he sighed. “The NSA is an obvious culprit, but who can say? It could have been the the DIA, MI, ONI, OICI, ONSI, AFISRA, DHSIA, TFI, even ODNI. My current favorite suspect is the State Department INR – the Germans claim Parsifal was selling directly to someone at the American Embassy – but we may never know for sure.”
“Parsifal?” I inquired.
“Yeah,” he shrugged. “That was the code name we used for him.”
“Selling what?” I asked.
“Two hundred and eighteen documents,” Hundsfott fumed, “for a lousy twenty-five thousand Euros! And not just parliamentary investigation documents, either. It turns out he had been selling his American contact secret German documents over a period of more than two years! And then, this week, the stupid [expletive] [expletive] turned around and tried to sell the same [expletive] to the [expletive] Russians! As if the Russians haven’t been spying on everything the [expletive] BND’s been doing since 1956! One thing I know for sure, Tom, is the Russkis don’t appreciate being treated like suckers by some second-rate moron. Less than eight hours later, that [expletive] was [expletive] toast! Can you [expletive] believe it? That cretin was trying to become a triple agent! Who did he think he was, [expletive] Sidney Reilly? And hell, Tom, even Sidney Reilly ended up getting shot by Stalin, didn’t he?”
“True,” I agreed. “That fellow’s got some sand in the gears, behaving like that.”
“A death wish is more like it,” Hundsfott huffed.
“This has got to be the biggest fiasco in German-American diplomatic and intelligence relations in decades,” I observed. “It’s like Watergate – sure, the burglary was bad enough, but it was the cover-up that destroyed the Nixon presidency. And it’s a very similar situation here – okay, so the NSA got outed for spying on the Germans, and that’s bad enough. But now, America gone and gotten caught paying German spies to rat out the German government’s investigation of the NSA spying on the Germans. It’s not the crime, it’s the dirty shenanigans afterward, trying to cover it up or fix it, that do the most damage in the end.”
“Damn straight, Tom,” Hundsfott groaned as he pounded down another mouthful of mint julep.
“And the CIA agent who was supposed to be keeping an eye on this ‘Parsifal’ character,” I opined, “that guy must be crying into his beer right now.”
“Actually,” Hundsfott muttered, “I prefer crying into a mint julep.”
“You?” I gasped, astounded.
“Don’t tell anybody,” he somberly nodded, “but… yeah. Parsifal was one of my assignments.”
“Well,” I remarked, “I’m sure you must have had an extensive list of BND operatives to keep tabs on, and they say this guy was just a support technician.”
“Oh, yeah, right, what do you expect?” Hundsfott scoffed with a morose laugh. “That the BND is going admit that the technician job was just a front for his real activities? They’ve got their image to think about, after all.”
“If you say so,” I conceded. “Looks like this BND turkey has put you between a rock and a hard place.”
“The guy was a perfect storm,” Hundsfott groused. “On the one hand, he was good enough at covert activity to escape my detection, and on the other, he was just incompetent enough to get caught in the most embarrassing possible situation for the CIA and the BND.”
“It could be worse,” I pointed out. “Instead of being the American intelligence operative who dropped the ball on watching this guy, what if you were the American intelligence operative who took this bumbling German fool up on his offer and then had to stand by, helpless, while the BND dummkopf got arrested for flogging the same information to the Russians? The fact is, that particular American agent is in much worse shape than you are at the moment, isn’t he?”
“Yeah,” Hundsfott mused as he took another swig. “I guess so.”
“And I bet one really effective way to get back in the good graces of your superiors at the CIA would be if you were the one who ferreted out who it was, at which American intelligence agency, that paid Parsifal those twenty-five thousand Euros,” I suggested.
“Unless it was somebody at the CIA itself,” he fretted. “But no… like I said, that’s impossibly idiotic. It has to be somebody at another agency. And yeah, if I can find out who it was, Langley can pin this whole [expletive] circus on them and the CIA can wash their hands of it entirely!”
“Come to think of it,” I elaborated, “if you were to go into that meeting at CIA Headquarters and drop some hints that you assume they called you back to Washington in order to plan how you could do that for them, and shade your performance in such a way as it looks as though it was their idea…”
“My career would be saved!” Hundsfott exulted. “Tom, that’s [expletive] brilliant! Oh, thank you, thank you! Waiter! Waiter! Over here! Coffee – black – and quick!”
“You have a lot of work to do between now and that meeting,” I encouraged, “but the Dick Hundsfott I know would be up to it.”
“You bet I am!” Hundsfott jubilantly roared. “That’s all I needed – an angle, a plan, a way out of the woods! Damn it all, Tom, this proves it! It’s true what they say – you’re the smartest person inside the Beltway!”
“Which is a lot,” I assured him, “like being the tallest building in Baltimore.”