Six Days of the Condor

Confession

In 1975, generals in the KGB — the former Soviet Union’s chief spy and secret police agency — got their hands on a copy of a new Robert Redford movie called Three Days of the Condor.

In that movie — produced by Dino De Laurentiis, directed by Sidney Pollack, also starring stunning Faye Dunaway, Academy Award-winner Cliff Robertson, international icon Max von Sydow, and heartthrob Tina Chen — screenwriters Lorenzo Semple, Jr., and David Rayfiel adapted a slim first novel by a totally unknown, then-twenty-four-year-old Montanan into a ticking-clock cinematic masterpiece of political intrigue, conscience, and consequence propelled by Redford’s character of a bookish intelligence analyst who comes back from lunch to the New York office of his obscure secret CIA research department and finds all his co-workers murdered.

Redford’s movie CIA codename was Condor.

As Redford/Condor insists to the Faye Dunaway character he kidnaps:

“Listen, I work for the CIA. I’m not a spy. I just read books. We read everything published in the world, and we… we feed the plots — dirty tricks, codes — into a computer, and the computer checks against actual CIA plans and operations. I look for leaks, I look for new ideas. We read adventures and novels and journals… I… I… Who’d invent a job like that?”

An exposé published in 2008 by Pulitzer Prize-nominated Pete Earley — a story sanctioned by America’s FBI and CIA — revealed that the movie stunned the KGB generals and convinced them they had fallen behind their CIA foes in what had to be a critical espionage endeavor: the work they saw Redford/Condor doing in the movie.

So — according to former Washington Post reporter Earley in Comrade J: The Untold Secrets of Russia’s Master Spy in America After the End of the Cold War—the KGB created their own top secret unit dedicated to the kind of analytical work they’d seen Redford/Condor perform.

As in the movie and the novel from which it was drawn, the KGB headquartered their new secret division in a quiet neighborhood — Flotskaya Street in Moscow, not a street in the movie’s New York or the novel’s Washington, D.C. Soviet spymasters created a false cover identity for their spy section, and even — as in the movie and novel — stuck a phony brass plaque by its front door proclaiming that place to be the headquarters for the “All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Systems Analysis”—a nonsense name instead of the real title of the “Scientific Research Institute of Intelligence Problems of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB”—known by its Russian initials of NIIRP.

Both the movie and the novel projected Condor’s secret department as a small bureaucratic entity with fewer employees than the fingers of your two hands.

The KGB’s Condor-inspired NIIRP employed 2,000 Soviet citizens.

Doing a job “invented” by a twenty-three-year-old Montana wannabe novelist.

Me.

Picture a snow-dusted January, 2008 night inside D.C.’s Beltway.

Call it 10:00 p.m.

Our dog Jack and not-quite-sixty me are shuffling downhill back toward my middle-class suburban home when through the dark night, I hear my wife Bonnie Goldstein calling my name and: “You’ve got a phone call!”

That phone call came from Jeff Stein, an old friend, a former U.S. Army wartime covert Intelligence Operative — a true undercover spy — but then a respected international journalist for Congressional Quarterly covering all things espionage. Jeff had gotten his hands on an advance copy of Earley’s book, barely contained his excitement as he told me about Condor and the KGB, and asked author-of-the-novel me for my reaction.

I was blown away.

And by the time our interview was over, what kept running through my head was a rock ’n’ roll lyric from The Grateful Dead: “What a long strange trip it’s been.”

Now, thanks to Otto Penzler and The Mysterious Press, I get to share that trip and the novel that triggered it with you.

Call this my confession.

And as noted by crime author Mark Terry in his 2010 essay about Condor for Thrillers: 100 Must Reads, master novelist John le Carré says: “If you write one book that, for whatever reason, becomes iconic, it’s an extraordinary blessing.”

So call me Mr. Blessed and come back with me on that long strange trip to its beginning in Washington, D.C.’s blustery January of 1971.

I was a senior from the University of Montana, a Sears Congressional Journalism Intern, one of twenty Woodstock (generation) warriors brought from America’s hinterland colleges to Washington, there to work on Congressional staffs and be night-schooled by a scrappy, street-stalking genre of journalists called investigative reporters. I lived on A Street, Southeast, six blocks from the white-icing Capitol dome that looked even grander than on my high school civics textbook. I rented a third-floor garret in a massive row house. A seldom-seen man rented the other unit on my floor. We shared a bathroom. At night, through the thin walls, I heard him coughing and wheezing. I showered standing on my tiptoes and tried to touch nothing that might have brushed him.

Every weekday, I brushed my recently barbered, conservatively short for the era hair, put on my new and only suit with one of three garish, hand-wide ties, struggled into a box-shaped tan overcoat, and walked through residential streets to my wondrous internship on the staff of Montana’s cantankerous but brilliant populist Senator Lee Metcalf — who, according to the internship directors, I’d been “matched with” even though unlike any other intern, he represented my home state.

And every workday, I walked past a flat-fronted, white stucco townhouse set back from the corner of A and Fourth Street, Southeast. A short, black-iron fence marked the border between the public sidewalk and that building’s domain. Shades obscured the windows. A bronze plaque by the solid door proclaimed the building as the headquarters of the eminently respectable American Historical Association.

But I never saw anyone go in or out of that building.

Fiction creates alternative realities.

And most fiction is born from a what-if question.

Two history-altering what-if questions hit me as I studied that townhouse:

What if it’s a CIA front?

What if I came back to work from lunch and everybody in my office was dead?

Questions anyone would imagine — right?

Especially considering those times.

The Cold War ruled. Ghosts of JFK, RFK, MLK, and Lee Harvey Oswald haunted America. Dr. Strangelove and his arsenals of doomsday atomic weapons tick-tocked toward imminent and seemingly inevitable launch. The Soviet Union sprawled as an evil gulag wasteland behind an Iron Curtain, while Communist China coiled like an invisible dragon behind a Bamboo Curtain. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI knew everything about everybody… and might use it against them. Hitler might not be hiding in Paraguay, but former Nazis who escaped after World War II had operatives in Swiss banks and at remote communes. Israeli avengers stalked the globe: they got Eichmann, they could get anybody. Apartheid bedeviled South Africa. South American drug dealers were still “small-time” businessmen, but America’s Mafia had a French connection for heroin. “Terrorists” were often called “revolutionaries,” whether they wore KKK robes, Black Panther berets, the kufiah of the PLO, or the Weather Underground clichéd long hair and love beads from the rainbow daze of the sixties. Cults like the Manson Family were coalescing inside the country’s consciousness. You could feel them out there even if all you heard were whispers. Something enshrouding and protecting our globe called the ozone layer was in jeopardy because of deodorant we sprayed in our armpits. No Superman battling for truth, justice and the American way knew it, but not far from my rented garret, President Richard Nixon’s White House henchmen were formalizing their “dirty tricks” strategies into thuggish crews that would be called “plumbers” created for burglaries and murder. In the jungles and cities of Vietnam, my generation was in that war’s twelfth year of Americans killing and dying.

Only the crazy weren’t paranoid.

You never knew where “they’d” strike, who they’d kill, or, for certain, why.

My what-if fantasy about a covert CIA office on Capitol Hill was not without foundation in reality. In those days, a flat-faced, gray concrete building with an always-lowered garage door and a windowless, locked, unlabeled entrance crouched on Pennsylvania Avenue amidst restaurants, bookstores, and bars just three blocks from the Capitol and the House of Representatives’s office buildings. Hill staffers shared the common knowledge “secret” that the building belonged to the FBI. If you had enough official clout to ask J. Edgar Hoover’s Bureau, you were told that this Capitol Hill office was one of their translation centers.

Sure, but what do they really do? wondered many of us.

Within pistol range of that secretive FBI fortress sat the propaganda-distributing, storefront townhouse headquarters for the Liberty Lobby, a political sect too whacky and extreme to be casually categorized as “right wing,” a group that in coming years would with impunity advertise and sell illegal drugs through the mail — Laetrile, a compound its proponents claim cures cancer, and the core of the drug regimen that the great actor Steve McQueen decamped to Mexico to use in the days before cancer killed him.

Two-plus years after being scarred by the MLK assassination riots, this was the Capitol Hill neighborhood where Condor’s what-if questions were born.

The last lecturer to my 1971 class of Congressional interns was Les Whitten, a novelist, a translator of French poetry, and partner to Jack Anderson, whose syndicated investigative reporting column ran in almost a thousand newspapers delivered to the doorsteps of about twenty million Americans from sea to shining sea. Unbeknownst to them, Jack and Les were under extensive illegal surveillance by the CIA. Les was the epitome of a muckraker — a term of honor. Neither of us imagined that four years later, after Condor, we would be reporting colleagues working together for Anderson’s column. That night in 1971, I was only a college kid.

A kid who was on his way home for spring break after the conclusion of this wondrously lucky three-month Senate internship. I stayed late after class that night to persuade Les to tell me the “great story” about the CIA he’d told the class that he would break the next week when I was back home in Shelby, Montana, where there was no daily newspaper for me to read the column.

Allen Ginsburg is the Beat poet. By 1971, as America rolled toward a narcotics nightmare none of us could imagine, he’d seen the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness, dragging themselves through America’s streets in search of an angry fix. The horrors of heroin screamed too loudly for the man inside the poet to ignore. Cherubic, bald, bearded, homosexual, mantra-chanting Ginsberg, hated by legions of conservative upholders of law and order, did what few of his critics would ever dare to do: Ginsberg declared a personal war on heroin. And he backed his rhetoric with action. His crusade was investigatory as well as proselytory. Les’s upcoming “great story” concerned Ginsberg’s investigations into the CIA’s allies in our Southeast Asian shooting war and their ties to the heroin business.

As Les stood in the nighttime halls of a Congressional office building and whispered his news to me, I felt my world tremble.

But I was just a college kid from Montana, a few weeks shy of my twenty-second birthday, headed home to my frontier tough, “gothic” (my wife’s brilliant characterization) and “noir” (my post-9/11 insight) hometown of Shelby sixty miles east of the Rocky Mountains, thirty miles south of Canada, and a million miles from the kind of “real world” I’d barely glimpsed in my three-month internship in Washington, D.C.

My grandfather had been a cowboy and card shark for saloons, my grandmother was a polio-crippled midwife who’d seen eight of her own children survive, including my mother and her four sisters who all lived in our hometown and who helped raise me like a pack of fun-loving coyotes. My Sicilian uncle had a still-unclear-to-me management role in our local red stucco two-story brothel that was protected by the cops and county health officials, a… confusing civic attitude toward law and morality that also manifested in our frontier doctor/former mayor performing sometimes-botched illegal abortions in his office above Main Street. Judging from the doctor’s steady stream of out-of-town patients, everyone west of the Mississippi River knew that particular secret.

You know the kid I was.

Coke bottle-thick, unfit-for-military-service eyeglasses. Off in the clouds. Mouthy. Nowhere near as smart as I or most of the town thought, surprising everyone when despite my brilliant four-years-older sister, I barely cracked the top third of my high school graduating class of eighty-seven. On the third string of the football team only because there was no fourth string. Obsessed by, unworthy of, and unsuccessful with every teenage girl. An uncool member of Teenage Republicans. The son of good, loving, respectable, middle-class parents who did their best and believed in the post-World War II American Dream. My workaholic father managed movie theaters, which meant I grew up seeing thousands of Grade B movies. My mother was a county librarian, which meant I didn’t need to worry about how long I kept the thousands of crime and adventure novels I devoured. I’d worked since grade school: theater ticket taker, motion-picture projectionist, janitor, hay bale bucker, rock picker, tractor jockey, gravedigger. I lucked out and put myself through my state university shoveling for the city road crew.

When I went to the University of Montana, I was so naïve I thought that the journalism department that gave me a small work-study scholarship included my passion: writing fiction.

I’d started spinning fictional tales literally before I could write, dictating stories to my patient mother (she threw them away). By my high school graduation, I’d written my senior class play and was sending out the first of hundreds of short stories to be rejected by crime, mystery, science fiction, and mainstream magazines. I was seven weeks into my university studies before I realized that the journalism major I’d chosen did not cover fiction. But (eventually) I witnessed Seymour Hersh change our world for the better with his journalistic exposé on the My Lai massacre and the journalism department gave me access to scholarships the fiction writing department couldn’t — though that department did have professors named James Lee Burke, James Crumley, and Richard Hugo, the poet and the only one of that illustrious American literary trio whose classes I took. Yeah, dumb me. One scholarship was the Sears Congressional Internship for investigative reporting that took me to that garret near a phony-looking townhouse in Washington, D.C.

Beyond that internship, the University of Montana’s School of Journalism gave me no-nonsense training in the fundamentals of clear writing. My exacting reporting and editing teacher, Robert McGiffert, was so good that his summer job was editing for the Washington Post.

I shed more of my self-deluded and small-town naïveté at the university in Missoula. Let my hair grow long with the Beatles’ rock ’n’ roll times. Experimented with illegal controlled substances, inhaling with a result best described as I got stoned. But only a few thousand times, and I never danced with the Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds crowd. As friends came home from Vietnam in coffins and obvious untruths came out of Washington, I joined anti-war protests and argued to keep them respectful, constitutional. I spent one spring break studying with a group of black community organizers in Chicago’s ghetto and ran a Montana Ralph Nader project on corporate responsibility that hustled some victories even though its secret was that the only other member was… Shirley, the young co-ed I’d convinced to be my girlfriend.

But when I came back from my D.C. internship to graduate from the university, I had no idea how to make my dreams work. All I wanted to do — well, not all—was write fiction. I’d ditched my parents’ and high school teachers’ plans for me to become a lawyer, even though I’d once imagined litigating bad guys into prison, innocent people to freedom, and constitutional challenges to democratic safety during the day so I could afford to eat and rise before dawn or stay up at night to write fiction. In the autumn of 1971, I began an “independent undergraduate studies” fifth year to give me what I thought was a necessary legitimizing academic umbrella to write fiction…

… only to be saved—dazzled, actually — by another dose of great luck.

Montana was rewriting its outdated, robber baron-bred state constitution — Dashiell Hammett set his great first novel of crime and political corruption, Red Harvest, in the old constitution’s Montana. The meager staff of the new constitutional effort needed an emergency replacement who could write fast and had a résumé involving government and politics (say, working for a U.S. Senator). A friend plucked me out of my campus wanderings for that job, where I got to see how wonderfully democracy works when ordinary citizens rise to their best and refuse to work behind closed doors.

After the convention, spring of 1972, I disappeared on the road for a few months of driving around the country, survived the trip, came back to Helena, Montana, and after a brief foray as a laborer/fire hydrant inspector, took a job targeting juvenile delinquency in an octopus of a state agency backed by federal funds. I needed a day job that required me mostly to use my mind and hands, because my heart and soul belonged to my dreams.

I’d decided that the only way to learn how to write a novel… was to write a novel.

And that the only way to be a writer… was to write.

Seldom has a novice been so unprepared for the consequences he catalyzed.

But the rage to write burned in me like a heroin addiction welded to sex.

I lived in a small, second-story apartment above a sweet cottage not far from the state capital building in Helena. For a while, my roommate was one of America’s smartest Baby Boomers, a longtime friend named Rick Applegate. Often, I stole my fictional characters’ names from the spines of Rick’s nonfiction books. My neighbors were a beautiful, nice, so cool couple: he was an affable, whip-smart lawyer, she was that tawny-haired, artsy woman so many of us sixties soldiers wanted to be or wed. I lived in that apartment long enough to meet their first born, a baby girl named Maile Meloy who went on to become one of the major American novelists/short story authors/essayists of her generation, but I moved out of town before they brought home their second child, a son, Colin Meloy, leader and chief writer for the famous twenty-first-century indie folk rock band The Decemberists. I labored within a classic American bureaucracy by day, jogged and studied judo at the YMCA, saw my girlfriend when I could, was a bumbling godfather to my cousin’s newborn son, soared in AM radio and record player rock ’n’ roll, went to movies, saved my pennies, and spent the rest of my time drifting in surreal worlds or at the kitchen table hunkered over a forty-pound, high school surplus, green Royal manual typewriter.

And felt two what-if questions from my Washington, D.C., days come to life.

In those days, James Bond, super spy, dominated espionage fiction. Despite fine movies having been made from their excellent books, masters John le Carré (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold) and Len Deighton (The Ipcress File) were overshadowed by 007. Eric Ambler, Joseph Conrad, and Graham Greene could be found on library shelves, but at bookstores they were blanked out by the glitz of Dr. No, Goldfinger, and From Russia With Love (the best Bonds) — Sean Connery and Ursula Andress, sex and a Walther PPK.

As much as I love “Bond, James Bond,” I didn’t want to write about a superhero. A superhero always triumphs — is immune to paranoia, is never in ultimate jeopardy.

And was someone I’d never met. Trained — or perhaps tainted—as a journalist, I wanted to keep one hand on facts while my other shaped fiction. So I knew that whoever my hero was in that novel of what-ifs that ambushed me on a Washington street, he was no superman.

But he did work for the CIA.

The Central Intelligence Agency, America’s best-known spy shop. In that fearful post-Joe McCarthy era, when assassinated JFK had publicly loved James Bond and secretly been entangled in covert intrigues like assassination plots against Cuba’s Fidel Castro outsourced to the Mafia by our spies, the CIA was a myth-shrouded invisible army. In those pre-Internet days before electronic books, Web sites with varied credibility, and search engines — before Vietnam war protests and Watergate helped expose espionage scandals — the average bookstore and library carried… zero books about the Agency.

When I researched Condor, I found only three credible books on the CIA, two by David Wise and Thomas B. Ross (The Invisible Government and The Espionage Establishment) and one by Andrew Tully (CIA: The Inside Story). I stumbled across a book by historian Alfred W. McCoy, who braved the wrath of the U.S. government, French intelligence agencies, the Mafia, the Union Corse (the major French criminal syndicate), the Chinese Triads, and our exiled Kuomitang Chinese allies to write The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, an analytic history of the twentieth century whose depth, accuracy, and brilliance deserved (but did not receive) a Pulitzer Prize. McCoy tramped the mountains of Laos, air-conditioned government corridors of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), and along the klongs of Bangkok to show how, in our crusade against communism, America’s government had at the least embraced ignorance about the gangsterism of those who called themselves our friends and allies.

Those works — plus a few columns by my future muckraking boss Jack Anderson and cryptic conversations with friends who’d come back from the Vietnam war having “seen some things”—constituted the only reporting I did on the CIA.

My imagination was thus luckily unencumbered by much reality.

Fiction in that era treated the CIA like a ghost, a giant presence authors tiptoed around and barely touched. CIA agents made appearances in hundreds of novels, but they were usually somber creatures of unquestioned monomania and solid competence. What and how and why they did what they did went unexamined.

Four notable exceptions were Richard Condon, whose The Manchurian Candidate military intelligence nightmare blew me away in adolescence as both a novel and a movie; the noir and cynicism-drenched novel by Noel Behn and its John Huston-directed movie The Kremlin Letter (which focused on “off the books” spy groups, not the CIA); Charles McCarry, who, until I graduated from high school in 1967, worked as a deep cover CIA operative and whose novels started coming out as I was writing Condor (novels I didn’t see then); and another CIA agent named Victor Marchetti, who in post-Condor 1974 co-authored The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, a classic exposé that a First Amendment-loving U.S. Supreme Court censored on a word-by-word basis. In a 1971 novel called The Rope Dancer (that I read only after writing Condor), Marchetti followed a then-frequent but today absurd-sounding practice: he changed the name of the CIA to the NIA, further distancing fiction from reality.

Hollywood treated the CIA with an awestruck touch: on movie and TV screens, the CIA meant impossible mission gadgets and trenchcoated knights in righteous pursuit of a Holy Grail. An engrossing exception that few people, including me, saw at the box office was the 1972 movie Scorpio, starring Burt Lancaster as a CIA executive who may or may not deserve the French assassin the Agency forces to hunt him. Ironically, Scorpio’s cast sometimes stayed at the same hotel and crossed paths with the team of Nixon “plumbers” who were surveilling the Watergate complex across the street for their soon-to-be world’s-most-famous burglary. Two great movies of the era’s paranoia—The Parallax View and The Killer Elite—did not come out until after I’d long finished my novel. I was a fan of the TV show I Spy from my high school days, starring Bill Cosby and Robert Culp, but TV in the sixties was broadcast in the shackles of rigorous, censorious standards, and those two American agents too often came off like super spies.

Of course there was Alfred Hitchcock, the master of cinematic suspense. His great movies often unfolded in worlds of espionage and international intrigue — most notably North by Northwest. But for Hitchcock, spies were merely agents of the great term he created: the MacGuffin — that thing or force that throws characters together and provides the motivation that drives the story, the “what it’s about” for suspense and action.

Of all the creative lessons I absorbed from Hitchcock, perhaps his most important influence on me was that the best suspense stories are believably personal: real people hit with life or death choices, whether generated by strangers they met on a train or geo-political covert wars fought beyond the characters’ ordinary lives. Hitchcock’s often regular, or even bland, characters, once triggered into action, battled to save their lives, to reclaim control that had been destroyed by the story’s MacGuffin.

Such was the cradle of Condor.

Many of my credited revelations about the CIA came from Wise and Ross. They’d stressed how much the agency depended on analysts sifting often mostly public records, so I pushed that concept.

I invented a job I’d love (if I couldn’t be a writer): reading novels for espionage tidbits — including Nero Wolfe mysteries by Rex Stout (a favorite of mine).

Wise and Ross provided a skeletal outline of the CIA’s structure.

After my experiences in the U.S. Senate, plus working on Montana civic road crews and in the octopus, state-run, federally funded small office, I decided that even a secret national security agency like the CIA was still a government bureaucracy powered by the same forces and foibles I witnessed every day.

So, I thought, knowing all that, how would I organize the CIA?

And I projected the answers to my questions in my fiction, including creating such (to me) obvious things as a panic line for agents in trouble, an entity that I proved to be true in my future muckraking days with Jack Anderson.

Because I definitely knew that, whatever my plot was, my hero had to panic and had to be the kind of guy who needed all the help he could get. My image of him meant he could only do things that an ordinary guy could do. He could be clever, but not magically super-competent, and most of his training would come from the kind of fiction in which he was being created. I chose his name to reflect what American slang refers to as a “nerd.” No cool-monikered Hemingway Nick or Hawaii Five-O Steve for my guy: he became Ronald Malcolm, a name perfect for playground mockery. Like me, somehow even his friends called him by his last name.

I came at my first novel like a journalist, reporting the what-if questions in the lean, sparse, straight-ahead prose in which I’d been schooled. Nights and weekends for four months, I sat in that yellow kitchen nook in Helena, Montana, and let my imagination command my fingertips on that battered green Royal manual typewriter. I had no idea what I was going to call the book until I’d finished it and realized I had a straight line chronology that, with a slight re-organization, fit into six days: our culture had already absorbed a week of a thriller with Seven Days in May. I’d spent a Saturday afternoon coming up with Malcolm’s codename, settling on “condor” because it connoted death and sounded much cooler than “vulture.”

I’d never considered writing Condor as just a learning exercise. Of course, I was an aging twenty-three-year-old nobody living thousands of literal and cultural miles from the publishing world of New York. I had not a single connection, no one to advise me, make a phone, or write a letter or knock on a door in my behalf.

Such absolute isolation gave me a so what attitude that inspired hustle.

I went to the local library, roamed the stacks to find which publishers published any kind of fiction remotely resembling the rough draft manuscript sitting in my garret. In late 1972, I came up with close to thirty firms that published at least some fiction. I used my work’s “high tech” IBM Selectric typewriter and Xerox machine, crafted a synopsis that did not reveal the novel’s ending, a sample chapter, and a biography that, while true, hinted at mystery. One day I dropped thirty packets of hope in the U.S. mail, then went back to ordinary life that included abusing my job’s facilities to type the final manuscript of Condor. Of the thirty publishers, half responded in my pitch packet’s self-addressed, stamped envelopes; of that half, six said yes. I picked one at random, sent the then-finished manuscript off.

Four months later, still having heard nothing, I was about to leave my job in Helena for a starving-author’s life in Missoula, then a more cosmopolitan Montana city. But I’d still heard nothing, so I called publisher number one, got through to the editor, who politely told me they were rejecting my novel. I waited a few days until I had my new apartment and phone number in Missoula, then dropped the manuscript in the mail to W.W. Norton, and moved.

My parents and some of my friends were terrified: nobody we knew made a living writing fiction. I didn’t care. In 1973, I was twenty-four, living in a shack in Missoula’s blue-collar section of town, subsisting off my savings, hustling less than a month’s rent worth of freelance journalism, spending only what I had to (I rationed the Cokes I drank to the nights my karate club practiced), excitedly pounding out fiction on that old green manual typewriter, including one twelve-plus-hour marathon session that ended only when my typing fingers began to bleed — call that chapter of my life Blood on the Keys.

That period’s output included a classically overly self-conscious novel in the college-awakening genre that hopefully no one else will ever read, and one subsequently published comic caper novel called The Great Pebble Affair, released under a pseudonym in the U.S. to mildly approving reviews. In Italy, Pebble was published under my name and stayed in print for years. In 2000, Wu Ming — an Italian collective of authors — told me it was one of their inspirations.

In the real world, my bank account was dwindling and the news increasingly focused on scandals smelling of crime and intrigue coming out of the Nixon White House. Washington, D.C., sounded much more exciting than starvation row. My former boss, Senator Metcalf, had a year-long fellowship open to Montana applicants who were journalists — a stretch for me, but the Missoula paper had published one of my freelance articles and the national magazine Sport was about to run my hustled three-paragraph story about a weird gopher-racing civic promotion stunt back in my hometown of Shelby. I applied for that fellowship, started thinking about road crew jobs or white collar bureaucracy work that wouldn’t sap my creativity for my real work.

When the phone rang.

The man on the call introduced himself as Starling Lawrence, an eventual novelist but then an editor at W.W. Norton, who said the house wanted to publish Condor, and it would pay me $1,000—more than ten percent of the annual yearly salary I’d been making working as a white-collar warrior. Of course I said yes, and he said: “We think we can sell it as a movie, too.”

Doesn’t he know that kind of thing only happens in movies? I thought, but said nothing and refrained from laughing. He was going to publish my novel; no way would I say a discouraging word.

Two weeks later, as I stood in my empty bathtub, trying to use duct tape to rig a shower out of some discarded plumbing parts, again the phone rang.

Starling Lawrence and a pack of Norton staffers were on the line, telling me that famed movie producer Dino De Laurentiis had read Condor in manuscript form and quickly (Dino later told me after the first four pages) decided to make it a movie. He bought the book outright, and my share of the sale would be $81,000.

I stood there, still holding the spool of gray duct tape, listened while Starling excitedly rehashed what he’d told me, then I said: “You’ll have to excuse me, I need to go back to duct taping my shower and I haven’t heard a word you’ve said after $81,000.”

I could subsist writing fiction for years on that!

A week later, Senator Metcalf awarded me the fellowship to come back to Washington and work on his staff.

I was twenty-four years old.

And I drove off into tomorrows of adventure I couldn’t have imagined.

Most of you reading this have some knowledge of the Condor story from the movie, so let me risk being a spoiler to reveal more of the Condor saga.

Every novel is two books: the manuscript the author writes, and the product that publishers, editors, and the author carve out for readers. In the process of creating that second book, the author is both beef and butcher.

My manuscript Condor character is as he’s become in legend, but the novel first published in 1974 is not quite the story I first created.

The manuscript is a noir spy story, which propels Condor through my what-ifs with a plot about a small group of corrupt CIA operatives and executives who turn rogue and create their own heroin smuggling operation out of the murky chaos of the Vietnam War that defined my generation. That MacGuffin races Condor through his six days of life-changing peril, during which the woman he dragoons into being his lover and co-target (think Faye Dunaway) is killed by the assassin, an act that transforms Condor from victim and prey to hunter and killer.

A prologue and epilogue set in Vietnam bookend the D.C. spy-slaughtering saga. The manuscript also set the story in rock ’n’ roll, from a classic “Just My Imagination” radio moment as we meet Condor aching in girl-watching to the brutal climax when — call it assassination or call it justice — Condor loses his innocence in the men’s room at the Washington airport while the piped-in lavatory music plays four quoted lines from the Beatles great song, “With a Little Help from My Friends.”

Those Beatles lines were the first to go when I was informed that what I saw as literary journalism, the rights holders saw as a necessary fee — a small fee that would have decimated my advance for the book. I was too nervous about my economic future to risk that in-hindsight paltry sum. Having the Temptations playing on the radio when Condor steals time from his work to sit at the window and watch for a certain unknown beautiful girl to walk by then seemed too obviously ironic. While the girl stayed — how often had I sat at that window? — the radio and song got red-lined.

But I was proud of how little editing the book seemed to need or get from Starling and the hardback publisher, though he did have me drop the Vietnam prologue and epilogue.

Then, after the movie sale had moved to movie-in-production, the paperback publisher — or rather, someone at a meeting in the paperback publisher’s firm — asked Norton if I would make two small changes.

First, change heroin into something else: “Could it be some kind of super-drug?” With the movie The French Connection having been a hit, “The feeling is, heroin’s been done.”

Second, let the Faye Dunaway heroine live: “Killing her is so dark.”

These paperback suggestions came to me over the phone in the suburban Washington apartment where I stayed briefly in January 1974 with Montana friends until I could get my own place in the city. What I didn’t realize was that I might have a choice in the matter: As a journalist, I’d been schooled to believe the editor’s word was law and that if you fought the editor, you lost and your story often died unread.

Losing the rock ’n’ roll made me sad, but seldom was it seen that much in novels then anyway. Dropping the epilogue and prologue in favor of faster, more immediate plot development made a lot of sense.

But changing heroin into “something else… some kind of super-drug” was ludicrous. I was writing a novel whose power came in part from being as close to real as possible, and a super-drug insulted reality.

And letting the heroine live meant the hero had no trigger to transform into the kind of assassin he’d been fleeing.

So I came up with Condor only thinking she’d been killed (I left her crippled but maybe on the road to recovery), on the theory that that was good enough for his motivation.

As for heroin, this rube from Montana ran a Trojan horse idea past the faceless sophisticated New York City paperback editors: instead of heroin, have the bad guys smuggling bricks of morphine. “Wonderful!” was the response, and I realized at that moment that these editors who were cultural gatekeepers knew next to nothing about the gigantic narcotics scourge they feared and that they’d been motivated by junior high school-level analyses of what’s cool and what’s so been done. Nobody smuggles morphine bricks into America: it’s economically not worth it, in part because morphine is an early manufactured stage of… heroin. But for me, at least it was a real drug and not some editorial committee hallucinated super-drug that would have made Condor more parody than plain-speak.

Still, I was only a twenty-four-year-old first-time novelist. I was lucky to get off with the light editing Condor received. Hell, I was lucky to be published at all.

Some lucky novels are three books: the author’s original work, the edited published volume, and the story Hollywood projects onto the silver screen.

Casting for Condor locked up Robert Redford before I’d even met my great editor Starling Lawrence in the lobby of his office’s New York skyscraper.

And history that exploded outside in our streets after the manuscript’s acceptance inspired changes for the movie’s creative team.

Already the plot had been shifted from Washington, D.C., to New York because, I was told, Robert Redford had to shoot two movies that year: Three Days of the Condor and All the President’s Men. He and his family lived in New York and he didn’t want to have to uproot them to move to Washington for the year. Of the two movies’ plots, only Condor could be moved to New York.

More important was the MacGuffin.

Just before I left Montana for Washington, the United States got hit with its first oil embargo. The invisible world of petroleum politics suddenly dominated the way we all lived. That change in America’s reality, that change in Americans’ consciousness, was too creatively cool to ignore, so the MacGuffin’s addictive narcotic went from heroin to oil. And instead of my noir ending, the brilliant screenwriters came up with an even more chilling, culturally impactive Lady or the Tiger? climax.

Beyond such meta-changes, the movie absorbed jargon and language just then breaking into our cultural consciousness — dirty tricks from President Nixon’s attack-dog teams and new reportage on the intelligence community. Condor was one of the first movies to show such things as computers scanning documents — a revolutionary concept in 1974.

There’s no way to describe what it’s like for a novelist to walk onto a movie set that has created a three-dimensional, real-life setting from a vision born in the writer’s fevered dreams. The cast and crew welcomed me on the set. I drifted in a surreal daze.

Sydney Pollack showed me around, letting me see the exacting, painstaking detail with which he approached his art, right down to hand-selecting the never-filmed-before guns the assassins would wield. I listened in awe as he described how to create tension in a scene by having nothing happen — except, of course, that the ruthless killer and his prey ride the same elevator surrounded by innocent witnesses. Sydney explained that in film, telling a chronological chase story meant he couldn’t show Redford on the run for six days and night, so everything compressed into three days.

Redford went out of his way to be gracious. He stood outside with me one wintry Manhattan morning on the front steps of the set-decorated secret CIA office made real from my what if and talked about our work while we ignored two mink-coated high society women who’d imperiously breezed through the police lines only to look up and see who was standing there. Those two oh-so-sophisticated Manhattan matrons clutched each other like schoolgirls, hip-hopped past us in gasping glee. I’ve often wondered if Robert Redford has that kind of effect on women, too.

Few other book authors have been treated as well by Hollywood as I was. Dino, Pollack, Redford, and the rest took my slim first novel, elevated and enhanced it into a cinematic masterpiece. I’m so lucky and grateful to have been a first step in that wondrous process. My whole life has been blessed by the shadow of Condor.

But until the KGB story broke, who knew that shadow was so huge?

In the same year that the great American author of my generation, Bruce Springsteen, released his seminal Born to Run, my movie came out, Nixon had resigned, my Senate fellowship had ended, I had two more novels about to be published, and I’d jumped at a chance to join Jack Anderson’s handful of muckrakers. After all, Nixon’s thugs had plotted to murder Jack (luckily, they’d been worse at murder than they were at burglary), and Les Whitten, the man who’d graciously but inadvertently helped inspire my novel about the CIA, was one of my bosses. How cool and lucky was that! Redford arranged for me to see the movie before its 1975 premiere in Washington, so I took Shirley (still my girlfriend) and my Jack Anderson colleagues. I kept telling myself that this was the real world.

Though I’d rushed a traditional novel sequel into a successful and New York Times-bestselling life, I realized that the quintet of Condor novels I envisioned after selling Six Days would have to fly into the culturally branded image created by the great and deserving movie star of my times, Robert Redford. I did not want to compete with that.

So I let Condor fly away.

Until 9/11.

As that smoke cleared, Condor flew back.

First, he made me reveal what happened to Ronald Malcolm, that just-like-me-sixties rebel, but do so in a way that stayed true to the image of Redford — or at least didn’t do it violence.

So in one my favorite novels, 2006’s Mad Dogs, Condor has a crucial cameo in the CIA’s secret insane asylum.

That wasn’t enough.

But now the novella I wrote about our post-9/11 Condor—condor.net—lives as an ebook and, along with the essay explaining its birth, awaits only your eyes.

Condor’s been an angelic shadow on my life.

Even before I knew about the secret KGB 2,000-man division Condor inspired, convicted Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis told me his CIA codename had been Condor, though my work was not the inspiration for that or for the 1970s’ Operation Condor consortium of right-wing South American assassination squads. An assassin dressed as a mailman murdered a former Iranian diplomat inside D.C.’s Beltway in 1980, a tactic that intelligence and police officials insist came from Condor, though the admitted fugitive assassin with whom I made contact in Baghdad after 9/11 said he wasn’t sure if I’d provided his inspiration.

Condor inspired parodies on the TV shows Seinfeld, The Simpsons, Fraiser, King of the Hill, and cultural chatter references on shows like NCIS and Breaking Bad. The avant-garde rock group Radiohead samples the movie’s dialog on a song.

In his January, 2000, Washington Post essay on films of the preceding century, Pulitzer Prize-winning movie reviewer (a great friend and renowned novelist) Stephen Hunter picked Three Days of the Condor as the movie most emblematic of the 1970s, the film typical of its paranoid times. Also, wrote Hunter: “This marks the globalization of the cinema as Tinseltown has surrendered its own natural mantle of world centrality.”

And without Condor — picked by the International Thriller Writers as one of their “100 Must Reads” — I’m guessing I might not have been included with Charles Dickens, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and other of my literary heroes on the London Daily Telegraph’s 2008 list of “50 Crime Writers To Read Before You Die,” or gotten career awards from France and Italy.

Condor opened hundreds of doors for me from Hollywood to journalism to publishing to homicide detectives’ cruisers. Condor gave me a reputation that let me run, survive, and leave America’s twentieth-century noir streets of terrorists, drug desperados, con men, killers, thieves, covert warriors, revolutionaries, cops, and spies — a saga I fictionalize in The Nature of the Game, also available as an ebook, thanks to The Mysterious Press.

But most of all, Condor gave me the freedom to fly with my dreams. Let me create what ifs for the world. Gave me a base to build a good life for me and eventually for my family. Gave me a chance to touch and, if not enlighten, at least lighten the lives of millions of my fellow human beings who I’ll never be privileged to know.

Like you.

Thanks.

James Grady