“We know you were in possession of keys you used to open the office and unlock the file cabinet. You pulled out files and snapped the photographs.”

  With that, Helen collapsed, prompting Engwall to gently lift her by the elbow to guide her to the door. She wailed that this would harm her career—she had an outstanding personnel record! They were making a terrible mistake because everything she did, she did at Talbot’s behest. While she waited in the government car, two agents, equipped with a warrant, searched her apartment. The key ring in the drawer of her bedside table was among the first items they bagged and labeled. Next to the key ring was a memo pad from the inn in Warrenton, receipts from hotels in Las Vegas and London, and a tie clasp that signified honorable discharge from the army—an odd little assortment of keepsakes, it seemed, bound to complicate her contention that she was forced to do what she did because of Talbot’s sexual coercion.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY

  Monday, June 13, 1960

  Washington, DC

  Since Helen had no long record of service, coming to work out of college with no previous employment, the government placed her in detention and delayed her bond hearing to more deeply investigate her background. They learned she was fluent in several languages and had inquired about enrolling in a course in Russian at the Defense Language Institute. Believing her a spy, they ordered her isolated from other detainees and her meals served in her cell, hoping to keep her situation out of the press as long as possible. Jerry Engwall was assigned to speak with people in the office who knew her and to canvas her neighborhood.

  Her next door neighbor—an avid gardener who spent a lot of time in his front yard—told Engwall that more than once, he’d chatted with Helen on a Friday afternoon when she’d outlined plans to drive to the mountains to hike, only to have his wife return from work and mention she’d just passed the bus stop and seen Helen waiting not three blocks away. The teenage son of the family who lived on the other side of Helen’s duplex smirked when Engwall arrived to ask questions.

  “Miss S? Oh yeah. I’ve seen her. I play basketball in the rec league at Cabin John Park,” he said. “She goes there—always with the same guy.”

  Engwall took down the boy’s description of the man—it was Bentley—then asked what the boy had observed them doing. Were they talking? Meeting anyone else? Looking at folders or documents?

  “Uh…” he looked at his parents and gave a little shrug. “They were going at it. Outside. Going at it standing up…leaning on a tree.”

  The boy’s mother retreated into the kitchen, hand over her mouth. Engwall didn’t flinch.

  “When did you first see them?” he asked.

  “Almost… a year ago? Yeah, I think that’s right.”

  “How many times?”

  The boy thought. “Maybe…four?”

  Engwall nodded. “What else did you observe?”

  “Observe?” the boy repeated. “Well, they seemed to like doing it.”

  “I meant how long are they there? They’re obviously out in the open—visible to others—so I’m just trying to get a sense of these little encounters.”

  “The first time, the guys and I weren’t exactly sure what they were doing. We’re playing ball and I see this girl walking across the meadow at the back gate, off the path and into the woods where it gets pretty full, pretty dense with bushes and scrub and trees and stuff. And I notice because she’s wearing a dress—not what people usually wear to the park. Then this guy in a suit shows up, carrying a basket or something and he’s obviously headed the same way. There aren’t many people their age at Cabin John who aren’t with kids or a scout troop or something. So a couple of us creep closer to get a better look. And holy crap, I say to my buddy. That’s my neighbor! At first, we think maybe they’re wrestling or having a fight. And then it hits us, what they’re doing. We couldn’t believe it. But it was kinda embarrassing, grownups doing it in the woods. I mean it’s funny. But it’s not like I want to see it, you know?”

  “I’m sure you don’t. Did you ever observe them meeting other people, or pulling files from briefcases—that kind of thing?”

  The boy’s eyes grew wide and he shook his head. “Never saw anyone else come with them, or approach them. It was just the two of them.”

  Engwall handed him a card. “If you think of anything else, give me a call.”

  The investigator headed back to the office armed with a much fuller picture of the risks Helen Sizemore seemed willing to take to Talbot’s benefit.

  . . .

  The second morning she awoke at the DC jail, Helen was advised an attorney was waiting to meet with her. Finally. Her parents had promised to bring in her cousin the lawyer,

  whom they were confident could quickly resolve this misunderstanding. Todd Sizemore handled many of her family’s legal issues—wills, real estate—nothing remotely like this. But when she was escorted to the conference room, it wasn’t her cousin there to console her, but George Jeffrey wanting to ask her a few questions.

  He rose as she entered, extending a hand.

  “Miss Sizemore? I’m George Jeffrey, representing Mr. Bentley. I wondered if we could speak.”

  “Talbot?” she said. “Did he send you here?”

  “He knows I’m here, yes.”

  “Is he alright?” she persisted. “What is he saying about this—about me? I need to talk to him.”

  “He’s okay, Miss Sizemore, but I’m not sure you’ll have the opportunity to speak. But I’m here to ask you a question. Won’t take long, I promise. Why did you do it? Why did you fabricate a story that could land you both in prison for years?”

  Helen blanched. “I’ve fabricated nothing. Talbot made me do what I did,” she said. “Now he’s ruined my life, with his promises and lies.”

  “Promises? What did he promise you? What did he lie about?”

  She sputtered, recognizing she was veering into territory that could undermine her contention that she’d been manipulated. “Well…he promised that taking those photos was part of my job. He lied to me. I was not authorized to do that and it’s landed me here.”

  “But what were you promised for doing it? Money—some kind of payment?”

  Helen looked puzzled. “Payment?”

  “Yes—payment for taking the pictures, perhaps getting them into the hands of someone else?”

  “Someone else? I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said. “I’m saying I was only doing my job at CIA, Mr. Jeffrey. Or at least what I understood to be my job, as requested by my superior.”

  “And was sleeping with him just doing your job? Or was that something different?”

  Helen blinked, her throat so dry she knew she couldn’t speak.

  “Because what we have to tease out here, Miss Sizemore, is what you chose to do versus what someone asked you to do. But thank you for speaking with me today. I’ve got what I need. And—if you’ll permit me—it’s time you hire a lawyer. This thing isn’t going away.”

  . . .

  Alone in her cell, Helen could feel her heart thudding in her chest as she realized what her impulsivity, her resentment, her jealousy could cost her. She wanted to take it all back—to ask for another interview with Chamberlain and Engwall to confess the affair, say that she and Talbot had fallen in love and the transfer had upset her so, that she had behaved recklessly—but not because she was involved in anything criminal. Only because she was hurt and felt she was losing Talbot. Her parents would be shocked when they learned the real story, but she knew it was time for her to change course to save her own skin.

  Cousin Todd arrived to meet her the next day and within a few minutes learned this was not at all the case he’d anticipated.

  “So he didn’t pressure you into taking the photographs? You did it because…”

  “Because he hurt me. I was angry. I wasn’t thinking.”

  Todd nodded, made a few notes on his legal pad, and told her he was working on getting her bail. He would try to secure a plea deal for her, one that could still involve jail time and require her to testify against Talbot.

  “I’m not ready to drop the idea that he made sexual advances that you felt pressured to respond to. He was your boss. It was wrong.”

  “I loved him, Todd. I thought we had something.”

  “I don’t want to hear it. Whatever you felt has nothing to do with the case we need to make to get you out of this. He crossed a line. That’s a fact. So. I’ll keep working. In the meantime, keep your mouth shut, okay? No more talking to other people’s lawyers or anybody at the CIA for that matter.”

  Helen nodded mutely.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-ONE

  Monday, June 20, 1960

  Arlington, VA

  Talbot became a caged tiger, drinking too much and eating too little, pacing the townhouse, hungry for information about his own situation and what Powers might be saying to his Soviet interlocutors. Khrushchev had bailed on the Paris Summit after Eisenhower refused to apologize for the overflights. The papers declared the president’s stock had fallen, that Nixon’s election was no longer a sure thing. Talbot’s misery, he imagined, was broadly shared across CIA and official Washington, what with the Soviets, in gleeful daily briefings, dribbling out details of all they were learning about the spy plane they’d captured. And because of Helen and her schemes, Talbot was the one blamed for it—for poor mission analysis at a minimum and covert espionage at the worst, one Washington Post columnist noting

  Bentley is a former OSS agent whose loyalty had been questioned during his service in Turkey during the war. Sources say his apparent anti-American activities related to the shoot-down of the U-2 over the Soviet Union resulted in his suspension from duty and the criminal charges he now faces. Further, sources allege a co-conspirator—a female and some say, a paramour.

  Anti-American? The hell.

  Daily, he took calls from his mother, who relied on her Southern reserve to manage her emotions when they spoke. While her unrelenting belief in him was reassuring, he learned later she usually wept after their calls. His father made plans to drive up, but he was older, more frail now and Talbot worried about him managing steps in the townhouse and the added stress that being in Washington would cause. Talbot convinced him there was no need to come now, but gratefully accepted his offer of additional resources should the case drag on and additional payments to lawyers required.

  . . .

  In a meeting with government investigators, George Jeffrey learned of Helen’s star turn on film, the images they had of her pulling the Minox from her purse and taking the photos.

  “So that’s one thing to cross off the list,” George told Talbot. “Surveillance footage confirms you didn’t take the photos—you didn’t even have possession of the camera. Now we just have to convince ‘em that she did it on her own, not because you asked her to.”

  “She took those photos when the U-2 was already missing. If I was making her do it to sabotage the flight, I was a couple days late.”

  George nodded his head and sighed. “Well, you weren’t supposed to keep that camera. The government’s floating the idea that you must have had a purpose in keeping and concealing it—and they’re going to try to attach that to the espionage statute—and probably go beyond that and try to suggest you might have used it over the past number of months and years to take photos of maps and documents that made their way to our enemies.”

  “We’ve been flying over the USSR for years now, successfully, uneventfully. So if I’ve been supplying them with maps and timetables all this time, why didn’t they use them before?”

  “Maybe over time, the data helped improve their capability to take out the U-2. So—and I’m speaking theoretically, Talbot, I’m on your side—the government’s theory of the case might be that maps and schedules you provided helped them figure out where the U-2 would be most vulnerable during the flight. It might have helped them tailor their missile development so they could shoot this plane down.”

  “Fiction,” Talbot said. “I had no part in helping advance their capability.”

  “We gotta explain why you kept the camera, Talbot. They’ll push on that.”

  “It was a souvenir to me—a relic of the war. Helen stole it and kept it. I haven’t had it in my hand in months. She took the photos to get back at me. That’s it. That’s all. There’s nothing to it beyond that.”

  “Miss Sizemore is sticking with the story that you coerced her. She thought her job was at stake so she did whatever you asked her to do—including taking photos of documents in your file cabinet. Her lawyer has hinted that if we push back too hard on her version of things, she’ll say you sexually assaulted her. That you raped her repeatedly—on business trips, in a park near her house. So we need to step carefully and not push her into making those allegations out loud.”

  What was the word Eleanor always used to refer to Helen? Plucky? Well, she was far more than that. He and Eleanor had vastly underestimated her.

  . . .

  In truth, Chamberlain and Engwall had concluded Helen had been all in with Talbot. She had been the one booking reservations at the inn in Warrenton and saving little mementos from their time together, the one hopping city buses to reach rendezvous sites, participating with enthusiasm amid the flora of Cabin John Park. But their boss, counterintelligence chief Angleton, was always eager to expose a turncoat and made it clear that those facts were less important than the imperative that they identify the saboteur at whose feet they could lay this failed mission.

  Rather than apologize for spying on the Soviets, the narrative had now been reshaped by Angleton and fed to press secretaries across official Washington, that the overflights were a brilliant, necessary tool that not only kept tabs on Soviet missile development, but had helped draw out and expose spies at home—perhaps even a spy cell within CIA, eager to trade on information. Instead of outrage at Eisenhower or Dulles for conducting illegal spy missions, public sentiment began to shift to how the secret overflights had done immeasurable good in revealing there was no missile gap with the Soviets, and in cleaning out rats within the intelligence agency.

  . . .

  Six weeks after Bentley’s arrest, Chamberlain and Engwall sat in a CIA conference room, sorting through their notes and the clutch of documents around which the government would build its case. The search for others associated with the apparent espionage had come up empty, no sense of alarm detected in the wiretapped calls of the rezidentura inside the Soviet embassy, no coded calls placed to the Bentleys’ home or shadowy strangers turning up on their doorstep. Talbot and Helen seemed to be the only players.

  “How are we handling Sizemore’s access to Bentley’s office?” Engwall asked. “Did she poach the keys somehow? Did he make her a set?”

  “We can say he gave her the keys.”

  “Weird to give a secretary full access to his office. Wouldn’t there be things in there he would not want her to know about? Things involving his wife maybe, or other women? I just can’t see a guy with lots of secrets allowing unfettered access like that.”

  “Good point. Maybe she copied the keys without him knowing. Ask some of his former secretaries if they recognize the key ring. Maybe see what his wife says about how careful he was with his keys.”

  “The wife. What do you make of her?” Engwall asked. “Did she just look the other way? Are we going to take the position she was aware of Bentley’s extracurriculars?”

  “Yeah, she’s a bit of an odd one. I don’t know. I’m inclined to leave her on the periphery—the unknowing, trusting wife who didn’t have a clue.”

  Engwall pulled out a notebook and flipped it open. “We’re having trouble finding more about her background. She says she was in Italy during the war—trapped there as a college student—which I guess we can chalk up to extreme ignorance, going to Italy while the war drums are beating. But when we backtrack to Massachusetts, where she was raised, we can’t find much.”

  “Her dad taught at Smith, right? What do they say?”

  Engwall shook his head. “Nobody remembers him specifically. I mean it’s been almost thirty years now, so the faculty has come and gone a few times over. We did talk to a retired assistant to a former dean who remembers a Dr. Halsey, but she thought he was a bachelor. Didn’t recall the family. We’ll keep looking. May not even be important.”

  “The family continued to live on campus after he died, according to Mrs. Bentley. There’s got to be something. Keep digging,” said Chamberlain.

  “We are.” Engwall crossed his arms and thought a minute, “What if Sizemore did this just to hurt him—because he tried to get out from under her—excuse the expression. That could exculpate him. Woman scorned and all that. The plane going down, the photos—just terrible timing for him.”

  “Jerry, the government’s gonna focus more on the fact that it was his camera, his documents and maps that were photographed, his team that led the U-2 mission that resulted in a massive black eye for the United States. Whatever Sizemore might have done in retribution, Bentley created the conditions where top secret information was shared and we think, possibly, made its way around the world so the Soviets were ready when that plane crossed into their airspace.”

  “We have no evidence of intent on Bentley’s part—that he was purposely careless, or that he enlisted his secretary to do this. Just her contention.”

  Chamberlain shrugged. “His office. His camera. His secretary. His files. Is it espionage? Is he a traitor? Can we tie it to the shoot-down? I don’t know. But we need to keep looking because that’s what Angleton and Dulles and the president need us to do so they’re not the ones losing credibility with the American people in the middle of the Cold War.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-TWO

  Wednesday, June 22, 1960

  Arlington, VA