Operation DOUBLEPAYBACK

by Jack Freeman

  Later as the new day’s light came in through the half closed shutters, they were naked in the room’s king size bed under the black silk sheets and as Max awoke he began pressing into her.

  Afterwards, they fell back to sleep and it was noon when they woke again. Max arranged room service lunch with more ice for the Seagrams and they lounged naked under hotel dressing gowns on the balcony while exchanging life stories. In Max’s case, this was a mixture of truth about his home town of San Francisco and the cover story of Mike Brown which name he still used. He couldn’t tell how much of Lola’s story was true or not and didn’t much care. She said her name was Lola Lopez and she was a good catholic girl originally from Portland, Oregon. But at the University of Oregon she had fallen in with a wild crowd who were into dope and rock n’roll. Now she worked in LA doing corporate entertainment for one of the film studios.

  “Yep, that means organising wild parties so I’m not a good girl anymore. But we have fun ok. What usually happens is there’s an official party at a premiere say, which is pretty tame stuff. Just a few cocktails, finger food, studio execs, a few stars and some bought in model girls. There would be press and photographers there too. Then there’s the real party afterwards. No press allowed, just the in-crowd. Last one was up in the Hollywood Hills at a producer’s huge modern house on stilts looking way across town. You can just see the ocean from there. Anyway, there was everything, booze, coke, pot, uppers, downers, porn films, escorts and amateurs like me. I must’ve had real hot sex with about six guys and a couple of girls too that night. Other times we might go out on a big yacht with bars, screening rooms, gambling and all the rest. Screening rooms often end up out and out orgies, especially if some porn films get shown. Some stars make their own porn movies with each other and show them to friends. You can imagine what those would be worth on the market. What a scandal rag would give for a peek at those! Oh, hey, you’re a journo right? Don’t put any of this in your mag now, will you?”

  “Your secrets are safe with me baby. Don’t know how it’s all kept out of the Hollywood Enquirer and such like rags?”

  “Yeah, well if they get hold of something really juicy, like well known stars in a gay orgy, they shake down the studios. Blackmail basically. But the studios go along with it. Joe Public wouldn’t like it if he knew some big action hero type was actually a pansy who likes dressing as a baby and getting spanked till he comes. Or his favourite pin up girl was a lady loving dyke who can’t stand men!”

  “Ha,ha, Guess you’re right there. In my writing I’m dealing with people everyone knows are weird. It might be a shock if, say, Kerouac turned out to be an ordinary guy who worked steadily 9-5 every day and had a nice wife in the ‘burbs with 2.6 tow headed adorable kids instead of being a complete alkie who is too out of it to do much work these days. The only people that can stand being around him are Burroughs who’s a junkie and Kerouac’s old mom.

  Still, it’s good that you can keep secrets. It’s a big responsibility.”

  “Yeah, there is a sinister side. Anybody who blabs, and is found out to have blabbed, is out of work forever and some even come to sticky ends. Mysterious car crashes, boating accidents, house fires and such tend to happen to blabbers. There’s a huge amount of money at stake for the studios that they could lose if the public take against one of their stars. So they can’t afford to let people like me tell all, or most of today’s stars wouldn’t be stars, since most of them are monsters of self centeredness. Like the Roman emperors of old. Their wishes, whatever they are, must be obeyed. Most of them are psychopathic really. Another weird thing, some of the big stars like to say they’re Commies. Don’t see them giving their dough away to the poor though. Maybe they fund the Party behind the scenes. Maybe I’ll save it all for my memoirs which I could maybe write from somewhere far away when all the players are dead and buried. I shouldn’t really be talking about it with you. But you seem someone I can trust.”

  “I promise you I can keep secrets. But anyway, I’d pay good money for your memoirs if you get around to writing them one day. Maybe I could help with finding a publisher, be your agent, say. I’d like to hear more about the crypto-commie stars sometime. They are maybe hedging their bets in case the revolution really does come. Probably pay off the Republicans and the John Birch Society too or Rockwell’s far right nutters, just to be on the safe side. But that’s enough talk for now. Time for more action. Let’s pretend I’m a big star like say, Rock Hudson!”

  “No way. I will reveal that guy’s a total fag. Keep that to yourself. Let’s say you’re Brando. He swings big.”

  They agreed to party together till the next day when Max said he had to go back on an assignment in DC.

  The next sixteen hours passed in a blur. All his erogenous zones were tender and sore and he had picked up an extensive collection of scratches and bruises. But the good thing was he was now calm about the Cuba misadventure and felt he knew what to do. He would quit in a while, but stay on good terms with the Company. The Company can still help a guy out. But when to quit? That was the problem. Once anyone expressed doubts and even mentioned possibly resigning, they were frozen out, relegated to desk jobs in boring outposts and put on the fast track for termination. He was hopeful that Jack Johnson would say nothing to the bosses about the doubts Max had expressed in the initial shock of learning of the sell-out.

  Lola and Max promised to keep in touch and look each other up if they were ever in the same town. Max felt he meant it this time but he had had that feeling before and then it had faded.

  After two days in Miami Beach, Max had flown back to Virginia in the early morning and resisted the strong temptation over the coming weeks to phone Lola. It probably was best to let that affair fade away he felt. Or maybe pick things up again after a delay. Keep it casual.

  He had a small two bedroom apartment near Langley where the new Company HQ was being built and, there, a few weeks after the Miami Beach interlude, he found a message calling him in to a meeting with his line manager, Joe Kingman. This was set for noon the same day.

  As Max showered and then breakfasted before the meeting with Kingman he went over his feelings and thoughts about the future. He had decided to leave the Company as a regular officer eventually but not make waves and not right away. Kennedy might win the upcoming election and he had promised a new initiative which would offer a different way to serve. It was to be known as the Peace Corps and Max saw joining this as a way of atoning for some of the things he had done and continuing to serve what he still saw as the good basic cause of freedom and democracy. However, he would keep quiet until he was surer that the Peace Corps would really come about. After all, Dick Nixon looked much more likely to be next President than the less experienced and worse, Catholic, Kennedy. A lot of voters didn’t want to risk the Pope pulling the US president’s strings. What’s more, Max had heard plenty of gossip about Kennedy and the Mob, the women, the drugs and medical problems. If any of that got out, Kennedy would be sunk. Nixon was known to be weird, of course, but apart from some concerns about booze, there wasn’t much to smear him about, and his boozing was around the typical levels found among stressed executives at the top of large organisations. Just have to hope Kennedy makes it.

  At the meeting, Kingman started by saying, “Ok. Max. I just want to make it clear that you actually did good on the Kidd case. There was a change of plan that had to be kept strictly top secret, need-to-know only, and higher levels decided that you had to be kept in the dark. I gather Johnson has debriefed you about the whole business. No hard feelings, I trust?”

  “No, Sir. I quite understand. These things happen. It all worked out as you say. Officers at my level don’t make policy and if the higher ups have decided to try trusting Castro and his new pal Trujillo a bit, that’s not for me to argue about.”

  “Good. Well, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that now we don’t trust Castro again. Its not so long since the deal with him was made, but he’s shown absolutely no s
igns of ditching the Commies right away, as promised; quite the reverse. He’s still promoting Commies to all the top positions and sounding more red with every speech and there are several speeches every week. Trujillo too has become a problem. He is overdoing things. We hear he has been ranting to his cronies about getting rid of Betancourt in Caracas who has annoyed him. Now the other Latin states that we want on side are ganging up against Trujillo and he, in turn, is cosying up to Castro and the Sovs. So, we’re going to have a number of ops that we mean to go ahead over the next year or so. One will be a very big insertion of anti-Castro Cubans who can link up with the Escambray counter-Castro forces and tap into the widespread discontent with Castro’s Commie tendencies. A counter-revolution is still really what we want. We thought Castro might come round and play nice but after this latest double cross we’ve given up on him. In a second important op, Trujillo is in our sights. We’ll be helping high up locals in the Dominican Republic who want rid of Trujillo. It’s to be an assassination and palace coup job. We want you to work with Jack Johnson and another guy, Agee, who you’ll meet soon, on the Cuba op and look after the Trujillo action too. The Trujillo job is quite small as most of it is local. Jack can give you details on the Trujillo hit. The Cuba op is very big and there will be a lot of officers involved. We may have other Cuban ops over the next year as well.

  Basically, for the Cuba action, about 1500 armed and trained Cubans will be landed near the town of Trinidad about 250 miles from Havana and close to the Escambray mountains. They’ll have air support. There’s a lot of anti Castro feeling in the Trinidad area and it’ll be easy to link up with the counter revolutionaries in the mountains. It will all be presented as a purely Cuban operation by anti Castro forces who have been fleeing Cuba for a while now.”

  “Ok, Sir. Sounds good. Cuba will be like Iran and Guatemala all over again. I’m sure of it.”

  “Sure hope so, Max. Now, go and report to Jack Johnson for more details. Jack has been involved in the early planning of the new operations for the western Hemisphere and he specifically asked for you to be involved despite your run of bad luck. He reckons your luck must turn soon. Let’s hope this is that time. Good luck!”

  ”Thanks, Sir”

  Chapter 16. Overload

  Max walked slowly down the long corridor in the Western Hemisphere Directorate to Jack’s situation room, trying to figure out what was going on. It was unusual for him or anyone in fact, to be on two ops at once. So, maybe it’s a kind of test, to see if I’m still committed to the Company. It’s like they’ve read my thoughts about looking to quit before much longer. Whatever the reasons, just got to buckle down to it. He grabbed a coffee from a stall in the corridor staffed by a blind man, as were all the outlets inside HQ. It made work for them and had a security benefit. Max wondered if the KGB ever tried to smuggle fake blind men in. That may be worth checking out someday. He knocked, went in and reported to Jack in his cramped cubicle as present and correct.

  “Good to see you, Max. I know you haven’t been working two actions at once before. But these are close together in time and space and we’re short handed. There is going to be a lot of planning and nothing much may happen till ’61. Also, maybe Castro will have changed his spots by then, but we go ahead with the planning on the assumption that Castro won’t change the way we would want him to. It will be a lot of work, but still, we’ve got a new young fellow here to help out. Meet Phil Agee.”

  Agee was a slim young man of about six feet in height, with chiselled features, longish wavy hair and rimless glasses. Hellos were exchanged.

  Jack continued ,“Phil is a new officer and he’s been down in Quito, Ecuador for his first assignment. We’ve taken him off that for a while, to work with us. As you heard I’m sure, Cuba is the big one. The Trujillo business, you can basically handle most of that, Max. Let’s start with the Trujillo job.

  It’s just a matter of getting the guns over to our assets there. The basic plan is to machine gun his car on his regular late night visits to one of his young mistresses. Trujillo is ultra paranoid and rightly so. So, it’s hard for even military bosses to get guns off military sites. He has the place pretty well saturated with informants so using local suppliers is too risky. His secret police chief, Johnny Abbes Garcia, is totally feared and few dare even think anti Trujillo thoughts let alone conspire and try to do something. Garcia apparently is a bit of a torture scholar and collects torture gadgets; he actually likes that side of the work. They say he really does use sharks as part of his equipment for getting info out of reluctant sources. It’s like something out of those limey agent, Bond, books but with Garcia it’s for real. We have an asset over in Trujillo City, a US citizen, Lorenzo Perry, who owns the major supermarket there. He comes stateside frequently on business and at a recent meet he agreed that we can insert gun parts into various packs of supplies to his stores that are imported from here. They will have special supply numbers and he passes these over to the main conspirators who then gradually assemble the machine guns. The main conspirators are disaffected senior officers and rich landowners getting tired of the Trujillo gang’s greed. We don’t like Trujillo now because he could provoke a Castro style uprising in the Dominican Republic and he himself shows signs of drifting toward supporting Cuba and taking Sov backing. He has no discernible political principles, except racism, if that counts. Although appearing to be a fascist in style between the wars, he accepted Jewish and Spanish leftist refugees – because they were white, and could help counteract what he saw as the black Haitian racial threat from across the border. Some say he’s part Haitian himself, but he really does hate those guys. So, anyway, the movement of parts is set up and running. Max, you just have to keep an eye on it. If our assets over there need help they have ways to contact us and you will be the contact officer. All details of who is involved, contact methods and so on are in the file.”

  “That all sounds fine Jack. Now, what about Cuba?” replied Max.

  “I guess Kingman gave you the big picture. Your job is to liaise with the guys down in the training camps about supplies of ammo and small arms in particular. It’s all got to be untraceable back to Uncle Sam. This whole thing must look totally Cuban. We have stockpiles of ammo of all calibres, rifles, pistols, machine guns. These items are all marked as originating well away from the US, from Latin America, East Europe and so on. There are supply systems in place, company planes and boats that you can use. Again, all details in the next fat file. Copies for Phil too.”

  Max and Phil Agee indicated they understood the tasks. Jack showed them to their corner of the large room. In their cubicle were more files, telephones and telex machines and large maps of Cuba and the Dominican Republic pinned to the walls. Max and Agee settled down with coffees to get to know each other better.

  “Well, Phil, this sounds ok. Exciting even. Maybe we’ll save Cuba from the Reds after all.”

  “We’ll sure try. Beats drawing up lists of members of the Ecuador commie party and vetting candidates for jobs with Standard Oil down there! I got to say, Quito is a dump, Whatever happens, try not to get sent there.”

  “I’ll remember that! But unfortunately we don’t get much say in where we go. Undercover in the Baltics in mid winter isn’t much fun either, I can tell you that. How did you get into this game?”

  “Usual thing, Max. I was recruited. An old friend of the family back in Florida, was high up in the Company. Unusually, for the Company, it was a she, and she recommended me as a promising young fellow who was active in patriotic causes and did well in School. I was flattered to be asked to consider serving and I had been very inspired by speeches at Notre Dame by General Curtis LeMay of the Strategic Air Command and Admiral Burke at graduations. LeMay had a good line about the importance of faith in God, love of freedom and global air superiority, which was kinda funny, but true. I did consider the priesthood as a vocation, but was not totally suited to celibacy, so looked for some other vocation. Serving the nation by seeking the truth tha
t will keep us free, as the motto approximately has it, seemed to resonate with me. Now I am in, I know it’s right for me and I hope to be a lifer.”

  “That’s good, Phil. I was pretty similar. We had a family history of serving, but in the conventional military, rather than in the spook line. Though there were connections with the Office of Strategic Services in World War 2. When I graduated we really did fear that the Commies were going to paint the world red and take our freedoms away. After all, they had taken over half Europe as well as China, and were threatening the rest of Asia. Fact is, they haven’t lost any ground since those days and have gained some and look to gain yet more the way Cuba is going. Maybe Russia and China will really fall out and that would help, but guess in the end they will always back each other against the West. Anyway, I am sure we will work together well. Now let’s get to work.”

  Over the following weeks and months and into early spring 1960, planning seemed to be going ahead smoothly for the Trujillo job. However, in March 1960 a coded message reached Max from the Company’s main asset in Trujillo City, Lorenzo Perry, asking Max to meet up in the Dominican Republic as soon as possible. Max explained the situation to Jack Johnson, who agreed to Max going over to meet Perry and to leave Agee managing their other work at HQ.

  Max flew into Trujillo City in the guise of radical journalist, Mike Brown. This cover was workable since Trujillo was leaning leftward and getting favourable reports from Mike Brown in the NF magazine would help establish the unlikely change in Dominican Republic politics.

  Max was struck by the number of large posters and statues of Trujillo throughout the city. A large neon sign was visible from most parts of town with the slogan “God and Trujillo” and churches bore the slogan “Trujillo on Earth, God in Heaven.” The diminutive dictator, Max thought, bore a striking resemblance in appearance to Spain’s Caudillo, Franco. The taxi driver who took him from the airport in to town, satisfied that Max was an Americano, was rash enough to say that although Trujillo liked to be nicknamed “El Jefe” (the Chief) or “El Benefactor”, he was actually known in private anyway, as “Chapitas” which means “Bottle caps,” because of the number of medals he awarded himself and always wore. Some also called him “El Chivo”, that is “The Goat”, in view of his enthusiasm for very young girls. When Max asked if the driver had heard of security boss, Garcia, the man made several signs of the cross and clammed up for the rest of the trip to Perry’s department store. The driver was sweating heavily by the end of the ride and not just because of the high heat and humidity, thought Max, just mentioning Garcia brought terror to the citizens blessed with El Jefe’s wise rule.