True Believers

by Kurt Andersen

  Alex said Chuck was not the sort to try to kill us—which hadn’t even occurred to me—because if he did make some final grand gesture, he would want us to feel one-upped and admiring and guilty, to understand that he was nobler and braver than any of us, a bold maker of history.

  Surely he would call or just drive back to Cambridge alone, and when he heard our voices and felt my love, we could, Alex said and I hopefully half-believed, reel him back in. Except, I didn’t say, I wasn’t sure I still loved him, and maybe he would hear and see and feel that, and then what?

  “Come on,” he said, “it’s just Chuck.”

  We walked down Sixth Avenue, and Alex said he was going to the Dada show now, but I begged off. As I zigzagged west and south into Times Square toward our hotel, I wasn’t certain I was going to stop at a pay phone until I did.

  As I dialed Washington directory assistance, and then after I asked for the number and waited for the operator to come back, I kept my index finger—”your trigger finger,” Buzzy had called it a month ago—on the phone lever, ready to end the call.

  As I was dialing the eleven digits and even after I deposited my quarters, I thought I might hang up and keep walking. I thought so even after the switchboard operator answered and started putting me through.

  But when the second voice came on the line—”Good afternoon, United States Secret Service, Special Agent Hardison, how can I help you?”—I did not hang up.

  27

  I know I’ve reached the practical end of my working day because I’m checking email every ten minutes, and I just spent an hour Googling the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich by the heroic Levy family friends of friends. The assassination so upset Hitler, I learned, that the Nazis immediately murdered a thousand Czech civilians in retribution, and named the extermination-camp phase of the final solution in his honor, “Aktion Reinhardt.” Which makes me think of all the conversations Chuck and I had about unintended consequences.

  I check my email again and see a new one, from the FBI. Did I give them my email address when I submitted my Freedom of Information request?

  It’s from the Anti-Terrorist and Monetary Crimes Division, J. Edgar Hoover Building, 935 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.

  Oh, Jesus.

  You have just 72 hours to prove to us you are not a terrorist. Failure to comply with our instruction, you will be arrested and detained until this matter is settled.

  Fortunately, the second paragraph informs me that the sum of $10.5 million United States dollars were transferred to the Bank of America here in the United States, bearing your name as the beneficiary, from the Central Bank of Nigeria.

  Ah, Nigeria.

  We did not believe this at first until we saw the transfer. Note that we have done a proper investigation on this transaction and from our investigation, this funds truly belongs to you and it is not a scam, but we have instructed the Bank of America not to release the $10.5 million to you until you prove the legitimacy of the funds you are about to receive.

  We have your full contact address, which makes it easier for us to arrest you when ever we want to. As a matter of fact, you will be charged for money laundering as well as terrorism if you fail to prove to us that you are not a terrorist or a money launderer by obtaining the above mentioned certificate from the funds originated country, and if you are found guilty as charged, you will go to jail. Therefore you have been advised to get back to us immediately you receive this email or you will be arrested by the FBI. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

  Appealing to fear as well as greed seems like a brilliant scam-email innovation. However, you’d think that among the eight million people in Lagos, they could find an editor who might nudge the language of their fiction closer to plausibility. Good concept, but execution is everything.

  Waverly calls. She’s finished reading the previous chapter. “Were you really willing to go to jail or die?”

  “It’s hard to know for sure. It’s hard to remember exactly what you were thinking so many years ago, at that age, in those strange times. But yeah, I think I thought I was willing.”

  “Did you want to die? Was it like a suicidal feeling?”

  “No.” I think for a second. “Although the line between a willingness to sacrifice yourself and a desire to do so can get pretty thin.”

  “But you really would’ve gone through with it if he hadn’t stepped down, the president?”

  “Again, I can’t be absolutely sure. I think yes. Although since the CIA apparently knew what we were up to, thanks to Alex, I’m sure they would’ve come in or told the Secret Service to pick us up.”

  “Sophie thinks somebody in Miami snitched on her, told the cops about her fake dynamite. She thinks maybe it was that Dartmouth kid she hooked up with.”

  Sitting alone on my patio this Friday of Memorial Day weekend, relishing the L.A. weather, reading the new paperback of Daniel Moynihan’s correspondence, I marvel at how wise and grown up Moynihan was, how he managed to take the long view in the late 1960s when almost nobody else did, to see each frantic flibbertigibbet twist and turn as a curious moment in the continuum of history. And I think of that rainy night in the fall of 1967 when a high-strung Radcliffe freshman made the forty-year-old professor smile, almost, in the Kirkland House junior common room by suggesting that Lyndon Johnson shouldn’t be allowed to campaign for reelection. “In a sense,” I read now in Moynihan’s memo to President-elect Richard Nixon from January 1969, Johnson “was the first American President to be toppled by a mob. No matter that it was a mob of college professors, millionaires, flower children, and Radcliffe girls.” I don’t smile, but I sigh and sip my seltzer. I sigh a lot these days.

  Buzzy did not leave a suicide note because, as The Washington Post definitively reported today, he had staged his death to look like an assassination by an al Qaeda killer. When he was in Chicago giving a speech in April—six weeks after I told him about this book—he had paid a Yemeni taxi driver twenty dollars to write SERVING JUSTICE TO THE ZIONIST REGIME AND HER WASHINGTON MASTERS in Arabic on the back of a menu from a hookah bar. The evening of his death, with Mrs. Freeman in Maryland on a Presbyterian overnight retreat, he used a brand-new Home Depot crowbar to jimmy open the locked front door of his house, went on his regular evening jog through the park, stopped at a reservoir and tossed in the crowbar, returned home, stuck the fake jihadist message with a letter opener to the wood paneling in his den, sat down in his desk chair, tied his hands and ankles with Home Depot bungee cord, and pulled the pin from a Swiss-made hand grenade. The authorities believe he acquired the grenade during a visit to El Paso. “Although Freeman had grown increasingly alarmed about what he termed ‘the free world’s delegitimization and betrayal of Israel,’” according to the article, “family members and colleagues said he was proud of the book he had recently completed, and that they know of no illness or other motive for suicide.”

  His death saddens me—the fact of it, the blame I bear for it, his deception, the failure of his deception. And I feel horrible that I feel fortunate that he left no suicide note. His deceit has made my life more convenient. He hasn’t broken the embargo on my book before it’s finished.

  The Post’s headline calls the suicide a “mystery,” as do two people quoted in the article, a former senior administration official friendly with Freeman and Buzzy’s head of PR. “‘God only knows why he took his life,’ said the spokesperson for Freeman’s Civilization Group, ‘and that mystery will be an unknowable mystery forever. But the legacy of Buzzy’s heroic lifetime of work on behalf of freedom and justice remain unambiguous and untarnished for all time.’”

  There’s a wishful null set for you: legacy … unambiguous and untarnished for all time.

  I know why he killed himself. He didn’t want to be around when the world learns that, as a young man, he instigated a conspiracy to assassinate the president of the United States.

  There are nevertheless at least two small unknowable mysteries. Buzzy’s faux-martyrdom was
driven by vanity and politics and maybe kindness toward his family, yet I wonder if he also thought that by making it look like murder instead of suicide, he was doing me one last favor, trying to prevent me from feeling responsible for his death. I also wonder if he instructed his Arab scrivener to write “her” instead of “its” as a bit of faked illiteracy, to make it seem more authentic.

  “You got to hand it to him. Going to all the trouble of acquiring a late-model HG 85 from a Mexican narco instead of just picking up some army-surplus Vietnam-era piece of shit at a gun show in Virginia. For an amateur, that’s an admirable commitment to tradecraft.”

  “Hello, Stewart.”

  He has called my third disposable cellphone for the first time. I’d found it hard to throw the perfectly good ones in the trash, although that’s what you’re supposed to do with burners. I play by the rules. I assume correctly that Stewart is praising Buzzy’s choice of hand grenade.

  “If the broad at Dalecarlia Reservoir,” he continues, “hadn’t seen him toss the crowbar, I think he would’ve gotten away with it, gone down as the first victim of homeland terrorism in 2014. And don’t you love why she called the cops?”

  “Stewart, I am really not into joking around about Buzzy Freeman’s suicide.”

  “I know, I know, but seriously—because she saw him praying and he had a beard, she thought he was an Islamic terrorist tossing poison into D.C.’s water supply? I mean, whoa, you really can’t make that shit up. Oh, and speaking of calling a suicide a homicide, another thing? That nobody’s mentioned?”

  “Stop. Come on. Please.”

  “Remember right after 9/11, when FOX News and the White House tried to get everyone to call suicide bombers ‘homicide bombers’? You know whose bright idea and personal mission that was? Your boy Buzzy.”

  I didn’t know that. “This is why you called?”

  “Uh-uh. His archival life has suddenly become more, as they say, transparent. Spectacular death tends to do that to privacy scruples. I can now tell you with almost a hundred percent confidence that during the 1960s, except for his sweet two years of service in the U.S. Coast Guard getting high and tending the lighthouse in Mendocino, Bernard L. Freeman had no direct contact whatsoever with any government agency concerning your un-American activities. He wasn’t one of your snitches.”

  “Okay. Good.”

  “Unlike you.”

  Stewart knows I called the Secret Service. “How long have you known? About me?”

  “Known for sure? Mmm, let’s see, about … four, five seconds now. When you and I first discussed this, you said you’d FOIAd Homeland Security, which I figured had to mean Secret Squirrel. And I told you early on that somebody dropped the dime on Levy to Secret Squirrel headquarters in 1968. Then after I voice-stressed you in April, I had a fairly good idea that somebody was you.”

  “But you told me your machine said I was telling the truth. You lied?”

  He chuckles. “I didn’t lie. About your lie to me. I was economical with the truth. There wasn’t any stress showing when you said you had no ‘ongoing relationship’ with any agency. Before that, though, when I asked if you’d ‘cooperated’ with any agency? Your voice-gram was like a fucking postcard from Yosemite, this nice big El Capitan. I busted you accidentally. You’d be surprised how often the game gets played that way. Part of the fun of it, really.”

  “Ah, the ninja jester.”

  Not long after we first met, when Stewart told me about a shocking, funny secret deal he’d brokered years before to get Sesame Street on TV in the Persian Gulf by arranging for the sale of advanced weapons to Arab governments, I told him I’d never imagined the same person could be a ninja and a jester. He’d said, “Well, they were both medieval and both employees of the regime—and besides, what about the Joker in Batman?”

  He asks me about Greta and Waverly, and I tell him I’m sorry to hear his father died.

  “Hey, I’ll be in L.A. again, next month, on my way out to Seoul. Want to hook up?”

  “Sure. But people our age should not say ‘hook up.’ What’re you doing here this time—more super-duper unmanned aerial vehicles?”

  He laughs. “I’m not your age. Yeah, an unmanned aircraft system incorporating surf and turf. Big system-integration show. The navy’s got this new electric gun up the coast, fires these giant rounds with no propellant or powder at Mach fucking ten. From Malibu they could push a button and destroy your house twenty seconds later.”

  “Nice to know.”

  “Don’t be so un-American. The idea’s for the UAV flying out over the desert, eight miles high, picking targets for the electric gun, and simultaneously finding buried bombs, IEDs, that this new gadget, this all-terrain robot laser, can go fry. Multitasking—same platform protecting the good guys at the same time it’s dealing with the bad guys.”

  I don’t mention to Stewart that our 1968 plan to deal with our bad guy involved a small UAV that we’d turned into an improvised explosive device. I don’t tell him that we mixed up a big batch of acetone peroxide in a dorm room—the same explosive, I recently learned, used by the failed al Qaeda shoe bomber in 2001 and the failed al Qaeda underwear bomber in 2009, and in the successful bombings of the London Underground in 2005 and the Boca Raton yacht in 2013.

  Stewart is joshing when he calls me “un-American.” Anti-American, maybe, from age sixteen to age nineteen. But un-American? Operation Lima Bravo Juliet was a hell-bent, self-dramatizing, wildly optimistic improvised do-it-yourself scheme to improve the sinful world, not entirely unlike the English Puritans’ plan to create utopias in the American wild, not unlike the American patriots’ attacks on the British before the Revolution, not at all unlike the abolitionist John Brown’s attempts to organize a violent slave uprising before the Civil War or the bombings of abortion clinics and murders of abortionists. For those first three months of 1968, we embodied that part of the American character that has troubled and scared me ever since. On the other hand, as it turned out, three out of the four of us never entirely lost our minds or abandoned common sense. When the facts changed and it seemed crazy to carry on, we stood down. Except for Chuck Levy, we were flexible and pragmatic, the way Americans pride themselves on being. For better and for worse, in 1968 I think we were very American. Terribly American.

  28

  Alex and I did wind up staying in New York for two more days, sleeping on Sarah’s floor at NYU. She asked why I seemed so freaked out. I told her it was because I’d slept with Buzzy, and Chuck had found out and disappeared.

  None of us heard from Chuck on Monday or Tuesday. On Wednesday, when North Vietnam responded positively to Johnson’s Sunday peace initiative and agreed to begin negotiating, we thought: That’s good, that might help make Chuck come to his senses, understand we’ve made the right choice. But Chuck didn’t call.

  When I got back to Cambridge, Buzzy told me he hadn’t intended to tell Chuck about us. But as the first round of their argument about aborting the mission got angrier and louder Sunday night, Buzzy said, and Chuck insisted he knew that I wouldn’t want to back down, “it just kind of came out. In the heat of the moment. I also sort of thought, to tell you the truth, that it’d be a slap in his face in a good way, to bring him back down to terra firma—you know, chicks, guys, instinct, real life.”

  After breakfast on Thursday, I was nervous, because that afternoon was Archbishop Cooke’s installation. Johnson did go to New York City, did fly his helicopter into midtown Manhattan. That night on TV at Alex’s, the three of us watched Air Force One landing at JFK, the president waving and walking across the Sheep Meadow, antiwar protesters outside St. Patrick’s on Fifth Avenue. As it turned out, Johnson had walked out of and back into his helicopter four different times during the afternoon.

  None of us said what each of us was thinking, that we’d have had four separate opportunities to dive-bomb him by remote control in the middle of Central Park. There was nothing on the news about a radio-controlled model airplane, or an explos
ion, or shots fired, or a would-be assassin taken into custody.

  After a commercial, Walter Cronkite came back on and announced that just minutes earlier there had been a shot fired, had been an assassination—not in New York City but in Memphis, and not President Johnson but Martin Luther King, Jr.

  “Oh, shit,” Alex said.

  The world was flying to pieces. Monsters had been unleashed. I might have cried no matter what, but my crying was for myself as much as for Dr. King, because I felt partly responsible for his death. I had been infected by the assassination pathogen. I had bought into the insanity. When Walter Cronkite said “police have issued an all-points bulletin for a well-dressed young white man seen running from the scene,” I shrieked.

  “It’s not Chuck,” Alex said. “He loves King.”

  “It was obviously a rifle,” Buzzy said.

  “I know, I know,” I sobbed.

  Black Americans started rioting everywhere, in a hundred different places, and kept rioting all weekend long. The National Guard was called out in two dozen cities. Buzzy kept buying the Washington newspapers, so we read detailed coverage of the thirteen thousand troops deployed in Washington, D.C., marines with machine guns on the steps of the Capitol and army infantrymen guarding the White House. Still nothing about a radio-controlled airplane buzzing the president, or an explosion, or shots fired, or a suspicious young white man taken into custody by the Secret Service.

  I was fortunate that I hadn’t gone down to Washington to look for Buzzy. I felt lucky, and I felt bad about feeling lucky.

  We didn’t hear from Chuck that weekend. Monday, April 8, was his nineteenth birthday.

  The three of us anguished about our rogue member, but I alone secretly anguished about my secret call to the Secret Service. I felt like a poseur in class, pretending to make pertinent comments about Colette and explain the similarities among the trickster figures in Native American and Caribbean myths. I imagined the worst. I had occasional hopeful thoughts, too, ranging from the banal to the extravagant. Wouldn’t he come back to campus for finals in May? Or maybe he wasn’t waiting for his moment to strike but had decided to take off, assume a new identity, go to Addis Ababa by himself. He had his new passport and a lot of cash. If he’d flown overseas on April 1, the day he disappeared, the Secret Service wouldn’t have had time to put his name on any list.