Snap Shot Page 3

  Duff had been curiously complacent about this success. His ambition, he told her, was to be a fully-fledged combat photographer and this was an excellent stepping-stone.

  But first he had to upgrade his amateur status and soon after graduating they were separated for the first time when he went to Los Angeles to attend a six-month course in advanced photography.

  It had been Duff s first major ‘omission’ to her. Yes, he was going to be a combat photographer. The omission was that he was still going to be working in the Foreign Service of his government but not exactly in the way she had foreseen.

  His time of graduation had coincided with a major policy initiative within the U.S. Intelligence community. Someone had finally realised that it was incompatible for a so-called secret organisation to have a pronounced public image.

  It had come about when a senior C.I.A. analyst at Langley had been browsing through a U.S.I.S. hand-out about various U.S. embassies in Europe. Several pages were filled with head and shoulders photographs of embassy staffs ranging from Ambassadors down to secretaries. In each case there were blank spaces, captioned ‘photograph not available’. These blank spaces usually coincided with the spaces reserved for Assistant Military Attaches or Cultural Attaches. The analyst hardly needed to reach for the computer to know that every single blank space represented a C.I.A. ‘in-house’ agent.

  It was, of course, a typical bureaucratic fumble but it set into train a whole new spectrum of thought. A four-month study revealed to the nation’s senior intelligence officials what everyone else had known all along: the C.LA. was patently too public, from its ‘sore thumb’ edifice at Langley to its Brooks Brothers suited agents in all corners of the world.

  The recommendation of the report was simple: if the C.I. A. was akin to an inverted iceberg with nine-tenths exposed above the surface, it must simply be tipped back the right way up - and fast.

  But here the original analyst came into his own by suggesting that the exposure should, to all intents, remain highly visible. In the meantime a substrata should be created away from the spotlights and deep in the subterranean shadows of the sea. All eyes would be drawn to the gleaming iceberg and the snide comments of competing agencies would continue while an ultra secret section would be set up, using ex-officio agents who had never set foot in Langley or the company’s training ‘farms’.

  So it was that the C.I. A. ‘Equine’ section came into being.

  The original analyst was rewarded by being made its first Director and it was he who had coined its name. He was something of a classicist and a crossword fanatic. Hence equine equals horse equals Trojan. He was rather pleased with it. One of his guiding principles was that all ‘Equine’ agents must have genuine ‘cover’, totally divorced from official institutions. A short list was drawn up of likely professions. It included import-export agents, construction and geophysical engineers, travel agents, financial and trade consultants, university lecturers, translators, charity workers, missionaries and so on. In effect, any profession which allowed scope for innocent travel and overseas work assignments. At the top of the list were foreign correspondents and photographers. It was not wildly original. Most European intelligence services had infiltrated agents into the media long before even Marconi was born.

  In selecting agents the ‘Equine’ section dipped into the same reservoir as the other C.I.A. sections: white, right-of-centre, college-educated men and women, preferably of good Protestant stock. There was, however, one additional requirement. Every agent had to have a natural talent - even a vocation for his ‘cover’ career.

  A new and ‘virgin’ computer was acquired by ‘Equine’ and set up in its new headquarters which were housed in a company on the outskirts of Gary, Indiana. The assumption being that no self-respecting spy would be seen dead in Gary Indiana. The genuine ‘cover’ of the company was that it manufactured aerosol cans of insecticide for the do-it-yourself gardener. The analyst-turned-Director, whose name was Ray Sherman, called the company Pterygota Inc., from the Latin name for all species of winged insects. For reasons that would baffle any advertising copy writer, the name caught on among gardeners and from its first year it showed a profit.

  The first thing Sherman did was to feed his computer with all the names of promising final year students at good colleges who might have both avocation for a career in a profession contained on his short list and a desire to serve his country. He also fed the computer with the names of the recent applicants to the Foreign Service. The computer was programmed to correlate the two lists and to give priority to any names with bionic categorisation. It programmed the name ‘Duff Paget’ straight into the first batch. Hence at his second interview in Washington he was deftly led away and confronted with an entirely new selection panel, the chairman of which coyly enquired whether he might like to become a spy. From there on his romantic and restless nature made it all easy. He explained that he was engaged to be married. The panel nodded enthusiastically. They had checked his fiancée’s background and found it impeccable; a good and discreet wife after all added to an agent’s ‘cover’. He pointed out that he was a keen but very amateur photographer. No problem, he was assured. He would be very adequately trained and what is more a job would be ‘arranged’ for him, as would his future photographic assignments. For the next three days he was put through a variety of mental and physical tests, and passed them all with flying colours. He was particularly gratified by his success in the obligatory lie-detector test.

  So he went off to Los Angeles to take an intensive course in photography, but every alternate week was spent in a high security complex near Long Pine in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. There he was taught the ‘trade craft’ of his concurrent profession.

  Before leaving for California he and Ruth had a long and serious discussion. They decided to get married only after he was settled in his career. They would then wait at least three years before starting a family. Secretly she hoped that by that time he would have changed course again and be headed down a more conventional road. She was patient as well as practical.

  However, only eighteen months after starting his job with the magazine they suddenly offered him an overseas assignment. It was to cover South East Asia from a base in Hong Kong. At the time South East Asia meant Vietnam and the convoluted war. So abruptly he was presented with the opportunity of satisfying his desire to be a combat photographer.

  He was also abruptly presented with the question of what to do about Ruth. The assignment was for a minimum of two years and she thought such a separation was too long. So inevitably they married. From the practical point of view the marriage was a definite success. She had taken in her stride the culture shock of moving from America to the Orient. Knowing that he would be frequently away she had immersed herself in the expatriate social routine. Apart from her cooking lessons she went to Ikebana classes on Tuesdays and Yoga on Thursdays. Unlike her new friends she decided not to have an amah. The apartment was small and compact, but keeping it clean helped pass the time. She continued to view Duff s assignment as a mere temporary ripple on a smooth and conventional married life.

  She looked at him now as he shovelled the last of his chow fan into his mouth and, catching her eye, burped gently and smiled. She knew that after a Chinese meal it was a sign of approval. He was, she decided yet again, the handsomest man in creation. He had a slender, angular face, almost beautiful in its features, large limpid eyes, a straight nose, a wide, mobile mouth but with the lower lip broad and masculine, above a cleft chin. The whole face set off by black, straight, lustrous hair. He was, she knew, very conscious of his looks, sometimes irritated with them, because, like a very beautiful woman, people at first tended not to take him seriously.

  ‘It’s why I like photography,’ he once told her. ‘I will be judged solely by my pictures - not by my looks.’ She could understand his feelings for she herself was arrestingly beautiful and they were known among the media-fraternity as the ‘Hollywood Duet’.

/>   As she stood up to clear the dishes she noticed that he appeared serious and preoccupied.

  ‘Was the food all right, Duff?’ she asked, and then had to repeat her question. He looked up with a start.

  ‘It was perfect. Just perfect. Sorry, my mind was wandering. I’m going to have to go out in an hour-to the F.C.C. There’s to be an auction of camera gear.’

  Her face turned serious and she put a stack of dishes back on the table and sat down again.

  ‘Whose?’

  He noted her expression and smiled and shook his head. ‘Don’t worry, no one’s dead. Apparently Dave Munger is selling his equipment. I can’t think why.’

  Munger. The name evoked conflicting emotions in her. She had met him once at a farewell party for a Newsweek correspondent, who had been reassigned to the Middle East. It had been a drunken party and Munger had been drunker than most, but less boisterous. He had sat alone and quiet at the bar relentlessly consuming one vodka soda after another. Duff had explained to her that he had been in the war zone for seven months without a break and that he always found it hard to readjust to what people called ‘sanity’. She had been surprised by his appearance, seeming small and slight and undistinguished, with untidy fair hair and a pinched look to his narrow face. His eyes were his most distinct feature: wide and deep and a startling clear blue in colour, a blue that changed in intensity with his mood. She had heard the gossip from other wives about his reputation with women. Apparently they were his only other interest apart from what he called his ‘snaps’. Also, apparently, they fell at his feet with monotonous regularity. She had not seen it herself at first, could not understand what it was about him that would attract any woman. But later, while she was dancing, she had looked up and seen those eyes watching her - absorbing her image, and in a heartbeat she had felt the shock of physical attraction.

  Another aspect was Duff’s regard for the man which amounted almost to hero worship. She did not like to see her man so influenced by a third party. Even one whom he hardly knew and only seldom met.

  She stood again and picked up the dishes and headed for the door, saying over her shoulder: ‘Maybe he finally decided that his work was getting in the way of his drinking and women.’

  Duff looked after her and shrugged. He could never explain to her the emotions that Dave Munger evoked in other photographers. In truth she could never understand Duffs own feelings because something had once happened - something which he could never tell her about. It was another of his “omissions’. It had happened two months after Duff had arrived. Two months which had been highly frustrating.

  On his arrival in Saigon Duff had first checked in with the local ‘Equine’ station chief whose cover was Vietnam manager for a U.S. computer company. He was told that for the first year at least his priority was to lay the foundation of his cover ‘career’. In essence he was required to build a reputation as a combat photographer.

  The secret of good combat photography is to be at the right place at the right time and then to keep a cool head.

  Duff had launched himself into it. He criss-crossed the country, ‘Cameras at the ready, but his timing and luck were lamentable. He either left a zone just before a fight started or arrived just after it finished. He was reduced to photographing the wounded and the plastic bags containing the dead, and on one occasion a pathetic group of Vietcong prisoners who looked as though they were half-starved truants from school.

  At first he took his lack of success lightly. He was, after all, getting to know the country, and making contacts among the military, both American and Vietnamese. But, as the weeks went by, his frustration grew. After each sortie he would return to Saigon, go up to his room in the Continental Hotel and; using the makeshift darkroom he had built in a wardrobe, develop contact prints from his rolls of exposed film. Time after time he would look at those prints and know, with depressing certainty, that they were not interesting enough to be used by his magazine.

  Then the others began to rib him about it. ‘Got any good snaps lately?’ they would call out jocularly in the bar or on the verandah overlooking Tu Do Street. He appeared to take it well, grinning and wisecracking back, but inside acid gnawed at his guts. He even had a note from his editor containing a mild rebuke. They were still having to use wire service photographs he pointed out, and keeping a house photographer on location was an expensive proposition.

  After two months it all came to a head. An impromptu party had erupted in the bar of the L’Ange Restaurant. Some correspondents were leaving on R. & R. to Hong Kong and Bangkok, others had just returned. They were a good natured but competitive bunch and again Duff was the butt of some pointed bantering. Dave Munger was one of the group but he remained silent, sitting at the bar, listening and watching and drinking his inevitable vodka sodas.

  To Duff it was all damned unfair. Here was a man who was a legend. Instead of having to go out looking for war he merely had to take a stroll and the war came right to him. It was not for nothing that he was known as ‘Mohamet’. Of course, Duff knew that there was more to it. Dave Munger was the pure professional.

  Over the years he had assiduously built up contacts among the military, not so much with the top brass but among the senior N.C.O.s who really controlled things. Especially those in Transport Commands. It was said that Munger could whistle up a helicopter faster than a three star general. He had done the same at civilian airports. From Saigon’s Ton San Nut, to Hong Kong’s Kai Tak, to Tokyo’s Haneda, Munger knew the station managers of most airlines. Others might flatter and bring gifts for managing directors or flight directors, but Munger knew where the real power lay. While the others would be frantically ringing the home of a director at midnight to try to get onto an overbooked flight, that airline’s station manager would be showing Munger to his seat - usually surreptitiously upgraded to first class.

  Another aspect of Munger’s professionalism was his ‘conjuring’. He had taught himself the art of sleight of hand for the single purpose of being able to conceal a roll of film. The recurring nightmare of any combat photographer was to shoot a breath-taking series of ‘snaps’ only to have the film confiscated or exposed. There had been many policemen, security men and customs officials who had caught Munger either in the act of taking photographs in a ‘forbidden’ zone or shortly afterwards. They had seen the consternation on his face as the offending film had been appropriated and unrolled in the light. But they had never seen the inner smile-or the original roll secreted on his body while they destroyed his ‘decoy’.

  Finally there were the steps that Munger had taken to protect his person. Some photographers and correspondents carried weapons on hazardous assignments - a small concealed handgun, a knife or even a can of ‘Mace’. Occasionally bodyguards were hired, not so much on combat missions but during sojourns in the seamier cities of the Orient. One famous New York television commentator was known as ‘Sinatra’ after the phalanx of ‘heavies’ that accompanied him day and night.

  Munger, however, had taken a different track. Very early in his career he had studied most of the Orient’s martial arts: Judo, Karate, Tae kwon do, Kung Fu and several of the lesser known varieties. From each he had selected techniques which suited himself and his purpose. So he could, like a cat when cornered, expose and use lethal claws.

  As Duff stood, bellied up to the other end of the bar and starting on his third large Scotch, he had faced the daunting prospect of preparing himself to a similar extent. He had been on the job just two months. Munger, although only thirty, had been at it for over ten years. He had covered the troubles in Cyprus and the wars in Biafra, North Borneo, Angola and now Vietnam. With a sunken feeling Duff had also acknowledged that it was not just a question of preparation. There was another intangible requirement. Not a question of being a technically good photographer or even an artistic one. Munger only worked in black and white and his photographs contained no startling or innovative aspects. It was all a question of ‘feel’ and either you had it or you
did not. Again Duff felt a stab of resentment. He had never really had a chance to discover whether he had it, and he was already coming under pressure both from his colleagues and his editor. He thought wryly that he should have been born a limey, like Munger, It was curious how the British dominated the field. Sure, there were good photographers from the States and the Continent - French and German and a brilliant Spaniard. Even the Japanese were well represented by Hasagawa and others, but the British were the cream: the compassionate Larry Burrows, the dispassionate Don McCullin and the young and wild Tim Page. Above all there was Dave Munger, who could photograph the stark features of a young, tired and frightened soldier and stamp the face of war onto a million minds.

  As Duff drank more Scotch his despair deepened. The noise and laughter around him seemed to come through a long tunnel. He drained the glass and looked up for the bartender but instead found himself looking at Munger in the mirror behind the bar. For a long moment they stared at each other. It was as though Munger’s clear blue eyes were peering right into his head, even into his soul. Seeing everything there - and seeing nothing. He had a half smile on his dark, lean face - a mocking smile? Suddenly Duff cracked. His fingers tightened on the empty glass and, with a cry as if in pain, he hurled it at the image in the mirror.

  The splintering crash brought instant silence to the room. Duff stood still, his hands quivering, adrenalin pumping through his veins. He slowly turned, taking in all the eyes watching him, the bemused faces looking as though they had been frozen in a strobe light. Moving with painful deliberation he reached into his back pocket, pulled out a roll of money, blindly ripped off several bills and threw them onto the bar. Then he pushed his way through to the door and passed out into the muggy night air. Behind him the buzz of conversation started again. Someone laughed loudly.