“Aren’t they already good?” I asked.
“Yeah, sure,” said Paul as he buttoned his pants. “But I think the assumption is always that we’ve got something to hide.”
“So, wait, I’m confused. It comes out that this data’s been forged, and we get kicked out, even though we’re not the ones who forged the data?”
“Japan wants time to do more independent testing. And the government’s convinced we’re trying to exert undue influence on them, which is obviously bullshit.”
My understanding of U.S.–Japanese diplomatic relations was completely inadequate for this conversation. I could have told you that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor and that a few years later the United States had dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But I had no idea what the postwar years had looked like in Japan. I couldn’t have told you that the U.S. had occupied Japan until 1952; that we’d written their new constitution, which included a clause specifically forbidding them from making war; or that in 1960, when we’d signed the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security, resuming official diplomatic relations, we’d granted ourselves the inalienable right to keep U.S. troops in the country until the end of time. If I’d had even a fraction of that background knowledge, I’d have known that Paul was wrong and this idea that the U.S. government might exert undue influence on the Japanese government… well, it wasn’t bullshit.
“Is it possible the subs really were leaking something?” I asked.
Paul had been checking out his reflection in the narrow mirror affixed to the wardrobe door, but he turned around to face me. “Absolutely not.”
“But that’s why the Italians are up in arms? Because they think they’ve got proof that the subs are dangerous and the U.S. is covering it up?”
He shrugged. “I couldn’t say.”
Couldn’t or wouldn’t? With his security clearance, I never knew for sure.
Every couple of years, Paul got hooked up to a polygraph and asked questions likeHave you ever disclosed classified information to an unauthorized person?The only way to guarantee he passed the test—and got to keep his job—was to be able to answer each and every question with a definiteno, which meant giving me these intentionally evasive answers to questions that, at least on the surface, seemed totally benign.
“Well, can I ask this?” I said. “And I’m really not trying to be dense here.”
He was repocketing his wallet and keys. “You can ask, doesn’t mean I’ll answer.”
“Why are we on this island?”
“Like you and me?”
“No, like the U.S. Navy. TheGilmore. Whatever.”
“I told you,” he said, not impatiently. “The tender’s here to repair and resupply subs.”
“Yeah, but why do it here if we’re pissing everyone off? Aren’t we already set up to do this kind of thing in Naples?”
Paul gave me another shrug. “It’s strategically advantageous.”
See what I mean?
19.
PAUL COULD TALK IN CIRCLES,particularly when he didn’t want to part with information, so I’ll save you some of our back-and-forth and tell you why I think we were really in La Maddalena.
In 1968 and again in 1972, the Italian Communist Party—Il Partito Comunista Italiano, or the PCI—garnered about twenty-seven percent of the vote in the country’s general election. This may not sound so bad, but in 1972 the winning party—La Democrazia Cristiana, otherwise known as the DC—won thirty-eight percent of the vote. So it was kind of close. A difference of only about three million votes.
The United States panicked. America had worked hard to liberate Italy, establish NATO, and keep the peace in postwar Europe, and no one was about to watch a bunch of communists seize control of the country. Now, you could argue that Italian communists and Russian communists were two very different kinds of communists, but the U.S. wasn’t interested in drawing that distinction, particularly after we’d spent the better part of two decades attempting to root out communists in a host of other countries, most notably Vietnam.
The assumption was that, if the PCI was in charge, NATO and the U.S. would be shown the door, and all the American military bases scattered across Italy would be shuttered. This mattered because it was from Italy that the U.S. was keeping tabs on Egypt, Lebanon, Greece, and—most especially—the Soviet Union.
I’d grown up thinking of the Cold War as little more than an arms race. The USSR tests an atomic bomb, we roll out a hydrogen bomb. The USSR sends a dog to space, we put a man on the moon. But what was happening in the Med was more tactical. American subs were spying on Soviet military installations, and Soviet subs were spying on us. Both countries got off on surreptitiously tailing the other, trying to intercept communications and test the other’s military capabilities, and it wasn’t unusual for the substo get into small skirmishes. In fact, it was often encouraged, so long as no one took things too far.
President Nixon traveled to Rome in 1969 and again in 1970 to meet with President Saragat and try to figure out how to deal with Italy’s communist problem. It was a tricky business because Italian communists didn’t think they were a problem. Many of them had been resistance fighters during the war, and when they’d put down their pistols, they’d looked around for the political party that was, like them, championing the underdog. The Italian Communist Party was for higher wages and safer working conditions, improved education and better access to health care, but I think what a lot of young Italians cared most about was that it was the party at the farthest end of the political spectrum from the country’s neo-fascists, who weren’t allowed to call themselves fascists anymore but voted for the Movimento Sociale Italiano, or MSI. I suppose it’s possible President Nixon was worried about these guys, too, but the MSI had won only eight percent of the vote in the ’72 election, so they were on America’s proverbial back burner.
Ultimately, the U.S. State Department developed a multipronged approach to stem the growth of communism in Italy:
First, they decided they’d throw even more money and resources behind the Christian Democrats. The U.S. had been propping up DC candidates since the end of the war, sometimes with suitcases full of cash, and they’d continue to do what they could to help this centrist party—the party of the Catholic Church—hold on to power.
Second, they’d send more American forces into Italy’s Red Belt, or to places like Sardinia, that were on the cusp of turning red. The U.S.S.Fulton, which was theGilmore’s predecessor, arrived in La Maddalena just months after the ’72 election. The timing was not a coincidence.
