The Company

by Robert Littell

  “I wish you’d start my day with the good news for a change,” Leo said.

  She shook her head resolutely. “Mr. Bissell always wants the bad news first—get it out of the way and move on, that’s his theory. Here’s the good news: we’ve found more B-26 bombers than you could shake a stick at. There’s an entire fleet of them mothballed outside of Tucson, Arizona.”

  “That is good news,” Leo agreed. He took the cable and pushed through the door marked “ADD/O/A” (Assistant Deputy Director Operations for Action) into his office, draped his suit jacket over the back of a chair and settled down at his desk to read it. Bissell had decided to use vintage World War II B-26 bombers as the main aircraft in the brigade’s small air force because hundreds of them had been sold as surplus around the globe after the war, which meant that Washington could plausibly deny that it had supplied the planes to the Cuban exiles. The problem now would be to pry a dozen or so of the B-26s loose from the Pentagon’s tightfisted paper-pushers without telling them what they were for. The Alabama Air National Guard pilots who had been sheepdipped to JMARC would sanitize the planes—remove all numbers and insignias that could reveal where they came from—and then fly them down to the runway being constructed below the Helvetia base, at Retalhuleu. The Alabama air crews could then begin training the Cuban pilots, recruited from the exile community in Miami, for combat missions over Cuba.

  Leo went through the overnight folder, cable by cable, routing several to the JMARC desk officers in the building; forwarding the good news about the mothballed B-26s in Arizona to Bissell with a note attached asking how he planned to approach the Pentagon brass—perhaps Dulles would want to take the matter up directly with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Lemnitzer, Leo suggested. Mrs. Hanks brought in the loose-leaf news book prepared by the night watch, and Leo read through every item concerning Castro or Cuba that had appeared in the national press or wire services in the past twenty-four hours. He added three eyewitness reports on conditions inside Cuba to Bissell’s pouch; one of them suggested that more and more Cubans were attending Mass on Sundays, and interpreted this as a sign of growing passive resistance to Castro’s Communist regime. That out of the way, Leo attacked the metal folder with the red slash across the cover. This morning it contained only one item, a deciphered cable from one of the Company’s assets in Havana. The cable passed on a story that the asset had picked at a cocktail party for Fidel Castro’s brother, Raoul. According to this account, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Argentine doctor who fought the revolution alongside Castro and emerged as the second most powerful figure in Cuba, had just returned from Moscow, along with Castro’s American-educated chief of the Dirección Generale de Inteligencia, the bearded and elegant Manuel Piñeiro. Both men boasted about meeting Nikita Khrushchev, as well as a mysterious Russian who was said to be a leading figure in the KGB known by the nickname Starik, the Old Man; the Cubans jokingly referred to their Russian interlocutor as “White Beard” to distinguish him from Piñeiro, who was known as “Barba Roja” or “Red Beard.”

  The asset’s cable, too, was earmarked for Bissell.

  Leo called through the open door for Mrs. Hanks to come collect the pouch and hand-deliver it to Bissell’s bailiwick on the top floor of Quarters Eye. His morning housekeeping chores out of the way, Leo swiveled around to the locked file cabinet against one windowless wall, spun the dial and pulled open the top drawer. Rummaging through the files, he found the one he was looking for and opened it on his desk. When his father-in-law had asked about Cuba that morning, Leo had been startled. It’s an open secret in Jack’s campaign that he’s been briefed on some kind of anti-Castro operation. In fact, it was Leo who had briefed the Democratic Presidential candidate. He’d caught up with Senator Kennedy in his Miami hideaway, which turned out to be the sprawling home of Frank Sinatra. Kennedy and three of the five members of the legendary Hollywood Rat Pack—Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis—had been lounging around the pool behind the house, along with a short, balding man who went by the name of Sam Flood and a stunningly beautiful young brunette who had not been introduced. (Only later, when Leo managed to buttonhole one of the Secret Service agents assigned to the candidate, did he discover her identity: she was a sometime Sinatra girlfriend named Judy Exner.) Leo had been taken aback to find himself in the presence of the Rat Pack; he and Adelle had seen them the previous month in Ocean’s Eleven, an entertaining film about a caper in Las Vegas. Oh, how Leo had relished the look on Adelle’s face when he described Sinatra himself handing him a drink and chatting him up while Senator Kennedy took a phone call.

  Back at Quarters Eye in Washington, Leo had drawn up a summary of the briefing for Bissell and kept a copy for his own files. Rereading it now he realized how vague he had been; perhaps it was Sinatra and Sammy Davis and Dean Martin and Judy Exner, boozing it up just out of earshot, that had inhibited him. Kennedy, according to Leo’s notes, had remarked that the subject must be important for him to have come all that way to brief him. Leo had said it was CIA policy to keep the major candidates informed on current events. Kennedy, looking fit and relaxed in white flannel slacks and an open-collared shirt, had fixed himself another gin and tonic and had clinked glasses with Leo. I’m all ears, the candidate had said. It’s about Cuba, Leo had begun. Kennedy had nodded. Thought it might be, he had said. Leo had started to talk in very general terms about the Cuban exiles being trained in a secret CIA base on a remote coffee plantation in Central America. Had Eisenhower signed off on the operation? Kennedy had wanted to know. Absolutely, Leo had replied; this wasn’t the sort of project the CIA would undertake without presidential authorization. If things went according to plan, he had continued, the infiltration of the exile brigade into Cuba would coincide with the formation of a Cuban provisional government, as well as the acceleration of guerrilla activities in the various provinces of the island. You want to be careful, Kennedy had remarked, not to make so much noise that everybody in the world will know the US is behind this. The noise level, Leo had assured the candidate, would be low enough to avoid that particular pitfall and high enough to trigger an island-wide rebellion against Cuba’s Marxist dictator. Is there a timetable? Kennedy had asked very casually. Leo had glanced at Sinatra, who was cracking up over one of Dean Martin’s stories. Vice President Nixon was pushing the CIA to put the show on the road before the November election, he had informed the Senator.

  Will you?

  We don’t think that’s practical.

  Hmmmm. I see. Kennedy had scratched at an earlobe. Anything else I need to be aware of? he had asked.

  Leo had shaken his head. For the moment, that’s it. Needless to say, Senator, the information I gave you this morning is highly classified and must not to be shared with anyone, including members of your staff.

  That goes without saying, Kennedy had said. He had offered his hand. I appreciate the briefing.

  That night Leo had caught the Senator on TV tearing into the Eisenhower administration for permitting the Iron Curtain to come within ninety miles of the American coastline and not doing anything about it. Not doing anything about it! Kennedy knew they were doing something about it; knew also that Nixon couldn’t defend himself for fear of compromising the entire operation. His face a mask of sincerity, Kennedy had gone on to vow that, if elected, he would support the Cuban freedom fighters in their efforts to bring democracy to Cuba.

  The briefing of Kennedy had taken place in July. Looking up from the file now, Leo was surprised by how much the profile of the Cuban operation had changed in the past two months. What had started out on the drawing boards as a series of guerrilla pinpricks designed to panic Castro into fleeing had become, thanks to Bissell and his top-floor planning staff, a World War II-style amphibious landing on a beach near the Cuban city of Trinidad, involving up to 750 guerrillas and an armada of B-26s overhead to provide air cover. It was not Leo’s job to weigh in on the pros and cons of the operation but he could sense that JMARC was spiraling out of co
ntrol. And he thought he knew why. In theory, Bissell presided over the entire Clandestine Service: fifty undercover stations around the world, hundreds of covert operations, not to mention the “candy”—$100 million in unvouchered funds to finance the operations. In practice, however, he left it all to his second-in-command, Dick Helms, while he focused on what had become an obsession for him: bringing down the avowed Marxist who ran Cuba, Fidel Castro.

  The interoffice phone on Leo’s desk purred. Bissell’s voice came booming down the line. “Great work, finding those B-26s, Leo. I’ll speak to the Director straight away about borrowing some of them from Lemnitzer.”

  “While you’re on the phone,” Leo said, “I think there’s something you should know.”

  “Shoot.”

  Leo told the DD/O about the rumor Phil Swett had picked up from one of Kennedy’s staffers. “I just looked at my briefing notes,” he added. “I warned the Senator the material was highly classified. I specifically asked him not to share it with anybody, including his campaign staff.”

  Leo could almost hear the shrug of Bissell’s stooped shoulders on the other end of the phone line. “We can’t get into a flap over every rumor making the rounds of Georgetown—“

  “Dick, the Guatemala newspaper La Hora ran a story a few weeks ago about a heavily guarded CIA base near Retalhuleu. Luckily for us the American press didn’t pick up on it. But one of these days there’s going to be one rumor too many. The Times or the Post or someone else is going to put two and two together…”

  “I’ll be seeing Kennedy at a Georgetown dinner tonight,” Bissell said. “If I can get him off into a corner I’ll raise the subject.”

  To Leo’s ear Bissell sounded half-hearted. Dulles’s retirement wasn’t far off and Bissell had high hopes of succeeding Dulles as Director Central Intelligence. Clearly, he didn’t want to rub the Democratic presidential candidate the wrong way. You never knew—despite the political handicap of being Catholic, Kennedy might conceivably squeak through and win the election.

  Four hours out of the secret CIA air strip at Opa-Locka in suburban Miami, Jack McAuliffe came awake in the belly of the unmarked C-54, violently air-sick. The drumfire of the engines reverberated through his jaw bone. The crew chief, a Cuban who went by the nickname Barrigón because of his remarkable beer belly, stumbled back into the passenger compartment with a glass of neat whiskey and spiked it with powdered Dramamine when he saw Jack holding his head in his hands. “You gonna vomit, vomit in the vomit-bag,” he yelled over the drone of the engines. He stirred in the Dramamine with a thick pinky and handed the drink to Jack, the only passenger on the weekly mail run to Guatemala. Grinning from ear to ear —people who weren’t air sick tended to enjoy the misery of those who were—Barrigón watched as Jack gulped down the concoction.

  “You gotta know it’s worse without the noise,” the Cuban shouted.

  Jack shuddered. “Jesus H. Christ, how could it be worse?” he yelled back.

  “No noise, no engines,” the Cuban explained. “No engines, we’d come to a sudden stop—like against a mountain.” Barrigón tapped a dirty fingernail against his balding skull, as if he had just delivered a nugget of aviation folklore. Waddling down the aisle formed by the packing crates, he headed back toward the cockpit.

  Jack had been loath to leave Washington so soon after the birth of his redheaded son, christened Anthony McAuliffe, but he didn’t want to pass up a plum assignment. Anthony had come into the world three years to the week after he and Millie Owen-Brack tied the knot in a small civil ceremony in Virginia. Jack’s college roommate Leo Kritzky, who had been best man at the wedding, was the boy’s godfather; Ebby’s wife, Elizabet, who had become a close friend of Millie’s after her escape from Hungary, was his godmother. Elizabet’s daughter, Nellie, had cracked everyone up when she appeared at Anthony’s baptism holding hands with Ebby’s boy, Manny, the two of them wide-eyed and serious and looking like a dwarf couple. The priest—fascinated by Anthony’s curious birthmark, a dark welt forming a cross on the little toe of his right foot—anointed the baby’s head with holy water and everyone had stepped outdoors into the sunlight for a group photograph. A framed copy of it hung now over Jack’s worktable in his Arlington apartment; Millie could be seen cradling her infant son as she gazed lovingly up at the profile of her husband.

  The whiskey and Dramamine had a soothing effect and Jack, stiff from dozing in the cramped seat, wandered up to the cockpit to stretch his legs. Off to the right he could make out the low folds of a coastline. “That there’s Texas,” called the pilot, an Alabama air national guardsman working as a CIA contract employee. “We’ll be hitting the Gulf of Honduras in an hour fifteen minutes, give or take. After that it’s a cakewalk into the strip you dudes put down at Retalhuleu.”

  “Don’t miss the landing—it’s worth seeing,” the co-pilot shouted to Jack. “We come in under a volcano. Scenery’ll knock your eye out.”

  Jack glanced at the dozens of dials and knobs in the cockpit. Many of them had small plaques over them with Chinese writing. “What’s with the Chinese?” he called.

  The co-pilot, who was smoking a reefer, laughed. “Plane’s on loan from the Formosan Air Force,” he explained. “Someone in your shop forgot to sanitize it.”

  “Maybe they left it on purpose,” quipped Barrigón, sitting on a stool near the radio and swigging beer out of a can. “We go down over Cuba, Fidel’ll figure he’s being attacked by the Chinks.”

  The landing at Retalhuleu turned out to be every bit as exciting as the co-pilot had said. The volcano, which was still active and named Santiaguita, towered over the sprawling coffee plantation that had been carved out of the wilderness of the Sierra Madre Mountains. The C-54 banked around it, then plunged through a thick mist so rapidly that Jack’s heart rose to his mouth. At the last instant the mist thinned and a long ribbon of tarmac—the CIA’s spanking new strip—materialized dead ahead. The transport plane hit the deck hard and bounced and hit again and, with every bolt in the fuse-lage vibrating, taxied to a stop at the far end of the runway. An antiquated bright orange fire engine and several canvas-topped army trucks and a Jeep came racing down the runway behind the plane and pulled up near the cargo hatch. Jack tossed his duffel out the door of the plane, and then jumped down after it. A thin Cuban in spit-shined combat boots and crisp fatigues stepped forward from the Jeep.

  “Habla español?” he demanded.

  “Antes hablaba español,” Jack replied. “It’s kind of rusty now.”

  “I’m Roberto Escalona,” the Cuban announced.

  “Jack McAuliffe,” Jack said.

  “I welcome you to the asshole of the planet earth, known locally as Camp Trax,” Escalona said with a twisted grin that conveyed more irony than humor.

  “Glad to be here.”

  Flinging the duffel into the back of the Jeep, Jack climbed in alongside Escalona, the Cuban field commander of Brigade 2506. Escalona let the clutch out and the Jeep shot off the tarmac onto a dirt trail and, ricocheting from one rain-filled chuckhole to the next, jolted its way up hill.

  Jack held on for dear life. “You angry at the Jeep or me?” he shouted.

  Escalona, a professional army officer who had been jailed for leading a revolt against the Cuban dictator Batista before Castro succeeded in ousting him, glanced sideways at his passenger. “I’m angry at Castro for betraying the revolución,” he called back. “Since I can’t get my hands on him I take it out on my Willys.”

  “Where’d you learn to speak English so well?” Jack asked.

  “Fort Benning, Georgia. I took an advanced course in infantry tactics there once.”

  The brigade commander skillfully twisted the Jeep through a gully and over a narrow wooden bridge. Arriving at a clearing filled with rows of Quonset huts, he jammed on the brakes and skidded the vehicle to a stop in front of the coffee-grading barn that served as a barrack for the thirty-eight brigade “advisors”—sheepdipped military people posing as civilians. A p
lank walkway led from the dirt path to the front door of the barn. On either side of the walkway, in carefully weeded patches, the leaves of waist-high marijuana plants trembled in the fresh morning breeze washing down from the volcano. From behind the screen door of the barn came the scratchy sound of Julie London singing “If I Am Lucky.”

  “You want my shopping list, Mr. McAuliffe?” the Cuban demanded.

  “You don’t waste time,” Jack observed.

  “I don’t waste ammunition, words or time,” the Cuban said matter-offactly. “All of them are in short supply.”

  “My orders are to act as a clearing house between you and Washington,” Jack said. “You tell me your problems, I’ll pass on the ones I think are important enough to need solutions.” Jack took out a notebook and a ball-point pen.

  Escalona pulled a small dog-eared pad from the pocket of his shirt and fitted on a pair of reading spectacles. “Yeah. So. First off, the CIA has to screen the recruits in Miami better before it flies them out here. Last week I got one man who is a convicted murderer, I got another who is retarded and thinks Castro is a brand of sofa. Trouble is, once they’re out here we can’t send them back because they know we exist.”

  “Screen recruits in Miami,” Jack said as he wrote. “What else?”

  “I was promised portable showers but so far they never came. Your advisors wash in the finca swimming pool but they put up a sign saying ‘Officers Only,’ which means my Cubans have no place to bath except in the streams, which are ice-cold.”

  “For starters we’ll take down the ‘Officers Only’ sign at the swimming pool,” Jack said. “Then I’ll see you get your portable showers.”

  “We were supposed to have a fully equipped dispensary,” Escalona continued. “All they gave us was a trunk filled with Band-Aids and aspirins and insect repellent. These hills are crawling with poisonous snakes—but we don’t even have snakebite serum.”