Restaurant recipes. All secrets.

rd Nixon got flushed down the toilet because an asshole with an indelicate touch was chosen to tape the doors during the Watergate burglary. A sloppy tape job, thats all it boiled down to. The guard saw the tape and phoned the cops and that was it for Richard Nixon. And Jimmy Carter could have used a delicate man capable of decisive action when the Ayatollah grabbed the American embassy in Tehran. Mitterands problem was only the topper, to the Presidents way of thinking. The real need of a delicate man lay in the history of screw-ups that had plagued the Company since it had taken over from the old OSS. The coup de grace to the bad old days was applied by Richard Helms in his appearances before the Senate Intelligence Oversight Committee in 1977. For some inexplicable reason-never completely understood by the infuriated people in Langley-the former DCI told the Senate everything, just puked up the whole mess with reporters for the Times and the Post poised like Queequeg, pencils at the ready. In spite of all the righteousness and breastbeating that followed, life went on. And the Company, facing perfectly awful morale among the troops, still had a secret war to fight. It was either that or let the Soviets do whatever the hell they pleased. All bullshit aside-and all manner of noble intentions notwithstanding-that just happened to be the problem. There were congressmen who denied the existence of a need to do anything other than collect intelligence, but that also was voter puckey and everybody knew it. The senators to whom DCIs nominally reported knew there was a need to shoot a prick every now and then. As long as the violence fell upon foreign nationals in foreign lands, the senators were prepared to accept, with an agreed-upon genial ignorance, a certain amount of tit-for-tat. They did insist that those involved in the administration of Old Testament justice be responsible and few in number. It fell upon Peter Neely, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and his deputy, Ara Schott, to nominate a delicate man for personal approval by the President. It was disingenuous for a Company man to refer to anything by its real name; although Schott coined the usage, Neely almost immediately referred to this as delicate work, and the candidate as the delicate man The question came down to who was the most skilled and trustworthy agent for the delicate job of applying an appropriate tit when a tat went beyond the pale or when excrement was clearly headed for the fan? Although Neely and Schott both knew who they would choose in the end, they covered their butts by drawing up separate rosters of candidates, which they then discussed and dutifully trimmed to short lists. The standards were complicated and exacting. For example, an individual so positioned to do personal chores for the President must be free of greed, the single most important reason for the Soviet Unions recent spectacular success in gaining access to American and NATO secrets in .