An Honorable Man Read Free

homburg, hands shoved in the pockets of a long trench coat. There was something suspicious about the figure. Mueller read into every stranger the possibility the person was tailing him, and this man got his attention. Mueller stood there thirty feet away on the other side of the street, staring at the motionless figure, who stared back. Mueller couldn’t make out the man’s face, or the shape of his jawline in the hat’s deep shadow.
    â€œHey, you,” Mueller yelled.
    He went to cross the street, but a garbage truck fitted with a snowplow lumbered by in a riot of noise. When the truck passed, Mueller looked for the man, but he was gone.

2
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    THE DIRECTOR
    G EORGE MUELLER understood that he was at a turning point in his career in the CIA, but it still haunted him that he hadn’t seen, or chose to ignore, the obvious markers of disengagement along the way. His wishful thinking had blinded him to the Agency’s troubles, and it was only when he realized it was too late to recover his enthusiasm for the job that he woke up one morning and thought to himself: It’s over. This is the end.
    Things had always come easy to him, so he didn’t have the lessons of failure to help him navigate the crisis. Public school in the Midwest and then Yale on scholarship, where he’d met Roger Altman, a year older, who introduced him to crew, dry martinis, and the gentle fun of a cappella singing. Mueller studied political history, read Hemingway like everyone else, and discovered a love for Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. He took up with a smart crowd of young men who affected a calculated weariness toward the world.
    Mueller left Yale early to fight against Hitler’s Germany, caught up in the great patriotism that drove America’s young men into the armed forces. Through friends of friends of earlier graduates, he found himself in Texas training for the OSS. He parachuted behind enemy lines to help French Resistance sabotage rail lines and then played a small but dangerous role in occupied Norway that earned him a Purple Heart. He completed his undergraduate degree after the war and through a series of happenstances—choices presented to him—he worked on Wall Street, became bored, drank, and was recruited by his friend Altman to join the urgent battle in Europe against the Soviet Union. Mueller wanted to believe that he could make a difference in the world.
    When things started going wrong they went very wrong. He was caught unprepared. It didn’t happen all at once, though. Disappointment came in the slow accretion of small setbacks and his sense of powerlessness grew along the way. In ’48 he was newly married, a father, stationed in the occupied city of Vienna running paramilitary operations from a cramped, unheated office across the Second Bezirk, the Russian zone, where the old Vienna with its prancing statues lay crumbling and desolate with burned-out tanks pushed to the side of the Danube. The girl he’d married worked in the office and their long hours together led to a romance. She was on the team that recruited disenchanted citizens of Soviet satellites for the Allies and organized them to be air dropped into the Carpathian Mountains, or inserted by fast boat on the Albanian coast under cover of darkness. Johana was just twenty-two when she joined the team working as a translator. She was beautiful, in a most Austrian way, with alabaster skin, wavy chestnut hair, and large brown eyes. She had all the English she needed with her wartime education in London, and on returning to her hometown she’d been deemed suitable for a job with the Americans, where she was in the thick of things. Their child wasn’t planned.
    They watched in dismay as missions failed. A few radio transmitters were turned on by teams inserted behind the Iron Curtain, but in most cases there was only radio silence. Ambushed. Coordinates were known to the Soviets in advance. No one wanted to admit