“The Hatchet Man doesn’t play the Establishment game. We just report the news, we don’t make it. Answer the question! The public has a right to know!”

The light had finally changed. I sprinted across the street. He ran after me, still shouting his questions.

“When did you first start working for the CIA? It was in Paris, wasn’t it?”

“Rupert, how can you do this? It’s inhuman.” I was running harder now, up the slope of Connecticut Avenue, but he was still behind, microphone in hand.

“How could you betray your profession? The Hatchet Man wants to know! The Hatchet Man wants to know …”

I ran for a long while. When I stopped, no one was behind me.

V: SANTA ROSA, CALIFORNIA (OCTOBER 1996)

V

SANTA ROSA, CALIFORNIA

OCTOBER 1996

43

43

I left Washington late that summer. There was nothing left in that city that mattered to me. Inevitably, the details of my secret activity began to trickle out. Rupert Cohen’s ambush interview ran on Hard Copy, but nobody paid much attention to that. The serious problems began after the media reporter at The Wall Street Journal got wind of the informal understanding between Ed Weiss and his counterpart at the Times to suppress details of my case. Then all the dogs began to bark. Nothing excites the news media like transgressions involving the church elders. For nearly a week, various publications took turns speculating about the nature of my dealings with the Central Intelligence Agency. The only thing that saved me from total destruction was that Weiss steadfastly refused to comment. My departure from the paper was a personnel matter, he said, and as such, the paper wouldn’t discuss it. Period. Reporters could badger him as much as they liked, but he wasn’t budging.

As I said, you had to love Weiss. He was probably the last captain who would ever sail a journalistic ship as grand as The New York Mirror, and in that sense he had it easier than the people who would follow him. But still, he knew how to stand up there on the bridge and make the damn thing run.