by R.J. Ellory
“This is just too incredible—”
“It is not difficult to comprehend, Agent Travis. It has been said that politics will never learn from history, but I beg to differ. The current US administration is well versed in the language of Machiavelli and the Borgias, believe me.”
“So now? What we have here? A dead Hungarian, a name I am not supposed to know, a body that has just vanished into nowhere. What does that have to do with the CIA and Nazi rocket scientists?”
“It is one and the same thing, I am afraid, Agent Travis.”
“How? How can that be?”
“MK Ultra. Your Hungarian, why he was in New York, why he was arrested, how he ended up here in Seneca Falls four years later with a hole in the back of his head. I could be wrong, of course, but everything that has happened here is directing me toward MK Ultra.”
“And that is what, exactly?”
“Human behavioral engineering. Sanctioned at the highest level, running at more levels through this society than I can even count and utterly terrifying in its ramifications and implications. They employ LSD, sensory deprivation techniques, isolation, physical torture, mental and emotional abuse at a level that you cannot even begin to appreciate, even so far as trying to create sexual fixations and obsessions through the use of hypnotic repetition of images and words. They hope to determine the very limits of human endurance—physical, mental and emotional—to see whether they can change a subject’s loyalties, discover things about a subject that even the subject themselves has forgotten. It is headed by someone who is right there on your piece of paper. Sidney Gottlieb, real name Joseph Scheider, a club-footed stutterer from the Bronx who became a chemist, specialized in poisons, wound up heading the chemical division of the CIA’s Technical Services Staff. His assignment was authorized by Dulles himself, his instruction being to discover if there wasn’t some drug or technique that could be used to control a man’s mind, all of this in the supposed direction of fighting the Cold War. Gottlieb actually said that he hoped to find a technique that would crush the human psyche to the point that it would admit to anything.”
“Honestly, if this is true, the consequences—”
“Oh, it is true, my friend. As true as daylight and darkness. You know, the funding for this came from a certain long-established and well-respected foundation whose stated purpose is to promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world.” Doyle laughed sarcastically. “This very American foundation was so generous as to support Josef Mengele in those vital eugenics programs he was working on before he was assigned to Auschwitz. Oh, of course they do a huge amount of beneficial things, I am sure, but the connection to Mengele and Gottlieb alone means they’re off my Christmas card list.”
“But this is all CIA, Mr. Doyle. I am not CIA. I have never had anything to do with the CIA. I am an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
“You think they’re different? Of course, in name they’re different, in stated purposes they’re different, but it’s all the same playground, my friend. You don’t think that Dulles and Hoover talk to each other. You don’t think there are phone calls and lunch meetings and favors granted and concessions made. You do this for me, I’ll do this for you. It’s all the same bullshit. And one and all, right the way to the highest echelons, we are overseen and dictated to by the Freemason hierarchy, a hierarchy that cannot be sidestepped, bypassed, avoided, or negated. Loyalty to that Brotherhood is paramount, and the oaths that are taken can never be violated for fear of excommunication and disavowal.”
“So I am working for an organization that is involved in secret mind control experiments, all of it sanctioned by the CIA, funded by some well-respected foundation, and overseen by the Freemasons?”
Doyle laughed again, this time quite heartedly. “Well, I have to say that putting it like that makes you sound like a mad conspiracy theorist, but in a nutshell, yes.”
“You sound like the crazy conspiracy theorist, Mr. Doyle, if you don’t mind me saying.”
Doyle smiled ruefully. “Oh, I don’t mind at all, Agent Travis. I have been called a great deal worse than that.”
“And now?”
Doyle reached out and closed his hand over Travis’s. “You have to make a decision about what to do, Agent Travis,” he said. “And when I say make a decision about what to do, I am not talking about whether or not you should ask Laura McCaffrey out on a date.”
Travis’s reaction was sudden. He looked shocked, and then he started laughing, and before he knew it, his eyes were filled with tears and he was having difficulty breathing.
“St-stop do-doing that,” he gasped. “Stop fu-fucking doing th-that, for Christ’s sake!”
Doyle leaned forward and held Travis’s shoulders as Travis gathered himself together.
“I am sorry,” Doyle said, “but every once in a while I feel I have to do something to shake you out of your comfort zone.”
“I think you have accomplished that,” Travis said.
“Well, now I have seen you laugh, I have seen you shocked, offended, upset, angry. We’re doing pretty good, wouldn’t you say, Agent Travis?”
Travis knew there was no going back. What Doyle had told him made sense, but for all the wrong reasons. He did not know what to do or think, least of all how to extricate himself from this nightmare with anything remaining of his former life.
“Tough, huh?” Doyle said.
Travis nodded.
“You want to know what they have in store for me, for Valeria, for Chester Greene? You want to know why they’ve made so many attempts to infiltrate our little family?”
“Yes,” Travis said. “I want to know everything. Absolutely everything.”
44
Before Doyle could say another word, the door of the caravan opened and Valeria appeared. She was dressed in her robe, her hair tousled, her expression that of someone just awoken.
For some reason, Travis was reminded of those mornings he’d awoken beside Esther, and on the heels of that thought came a thought of Laura McCaffrey, and he felt himself slip away from familiar moorings even further. His mind resisted what his heart wanted. He hated how he felt, but he did not see any way to change it.
“Breakfast,” Valeria said matter-of-factly. “I know it’s officially closer to lunchtime, but nevertheless…”
“Breakfast would be good,” Doyle said.
“I’m all right, thank you,” Travis said as she started to close the door.
“Hey, you’ll eat what’s put in front of you and be grateful for it,” Valeria replied. “You don’t eat anywhere near enough as it is. Don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t dance for sure. Lord knows who raised you.”
Valeria closed the door behind herself before he could respond.
“Don’t make her mad,” Doyle said. “I have learned this at my peril.”
“Enough said,” Travis replied.
Doyle lit a cigarette and stretched his legs out in front of him. “This has been a long time coming, in all honesty. I knew this kind of thing would happen. There were moments when I thought I’d slipped out of the net, but I realize now that they will never really let me go.”
“What net? What do you mean?”
“Let me give you a little education,” Doyle said. “Let’s talk about the American intelligence community, though that term sometimes seems like the greatest oxymoron of all time. They’re nowhere near as intelligent as they like to believe they are, and despite the fact that they’re all supposed to work together, hence community, they actually lie to one another just as much as any prison population you could mention. Let’s take the director of the CIA, for example. Let’s start at the top, shall we? Right now, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency is a man called Allen Welsh Dulles. He was Office of Strategic Services, and then, when the OSS was dissolved in the latter part of 1945, all of its funct
ions were transferred to different state departments. Then came the National Security Act of 1947. That was the beginning of the CIA, ostensibly a civilian-staffed intelligence-gathering organization, and yet Truman’s first CIA director was a US Navy admiral.” Doyle smiled thoughtfully. “You know what their motto is?”
“Not a clue.”
“John, Chapter eight, verse thirty-two. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. Can you imagine anything more ironic and contradictory than that? And such arrogance. Such immeasurable and unbelievable arrogance.” Doyle shook his head. “It completely beggars belief, to be honest. Anyway, that was the start of it. In June of the following year, there was something called a National Security Council Directive. This gave the CIA authority to carry out covert operations against anyone who was considered a hostile foreign group. There was a clever little rider in the wording of that directive, you see, for it not only gave authority to attack perceived enemies, but it also gave the CIA permission to withhold information regarding their own activities from anyone that they considered unauthorized. And if you’re wondering who falls into the category of unauthorized, then it’s everyone but themselves. Free rein didn’t stop there, however. In 1949 they passed the CIA Act, and that gave them clearance to withhold their own financial and administrative procedures, exempted them from having to disclose the number of employees, their titles, salaries, and additionally gave them the authority to create what was known as ‘essential aliens’—”
“And what the hell is an essential alien?” Travis asked.
“Well, it is a foreign national who isn’t really a foreign national. It’s a false identity, a cover story, a fabricated identity that has all the paperwork necessary to prove that they are indeed someone that they are not, every little facet of it created, sanctioned, and funded by the agency.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. That was all within the first two years of the agency’s existence. When Eisenhower became president, he wanted an agency that would back him in the Cold War. Eisenhower was Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, remember. I don’t think he could get through a day without knowing that he was at war with something. So Communism it was, and everything was perceived as some kind of potential red infiltration. That NSC Directive of 1947 gave him all the legal and political leverage he needed. He just had to say something was a threat to US national security, and bang, they were on the hit list. As far as Ike was concerned, Dulles was the golden boy. Ike was in the Oval Office in January of ’53. Dulles was appointed as director of the CIA just seven weeks later. It was a match made in heaven.” Doyle paused. “More accurately, a match made in hell.”
Doyle leaned forward, elbows on his knees, his hands together. He looked at Travis, and there was a sadness in the man’s eyes.
“Anyway, the director is required to report on all activities in a timely and punctual manner to the Congress intelligence communities. That’s how they word it. Timely and punctual. What is timely? What is punctual? Who the hell knows, eh? This requirement is given a good degree of… shall we say, flexibility? The president can advise the director as to his interests, the director can carry out covert operations to support those interests, but never has to actually report that it was done. That way the president’s hands stay clean.” Doyle smiled sardonically. “If the shit hits the fan, then the chain of command ends with the director, though in truth it never actually gets that high. Someone way down the totem pole always takes the head shot, but even then it’s only nominal blame. They are quietly pensioned off, given a nice property in Martha’s Vineyard, and that’s the end of that. It’s a perfectly designed self-protecting mechanism, answerable to no one, no oversight committee, no internal investigations worth a hill of beans, a free license and unlimited funding.”
Doyle leaned back and reached for his cigarettes.
“It has been said that the collective body of Congress intelligence agencies—the NSA, the Department of Justice, the Attorney General’s Office, the Department of the Interior and so many others—know some parts of the truth. No one knows all of it, not even the president or the director of the CIA. Information combined, the president and director understand significantly more than seventy or eighty percent of what there is to know about America’s involvement in world affairs. The rest is known by the deputy director and the attendant legion of cohorts, contacts, agents, double agents, sleepers, moles, plants, scalp hunters, authenticated sources, floaters, friends, handlers, gamekeepers, and controllers. Worlds within worlds. Universes within universes.”
Doyle lit his cigarette. “And then we come to your gang, my friend. Hoover’s little band of merry men. I have to say that as far as the intelligence community is concerned, the FBI is something of a wild card. The FBI is Hoover’s creation, and he is a very smart man indeed. Crazy as a shithouse rat, but very smart. The FBI is national, internal, supposedly uninterested in externally sourced threats to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But when Hoover gets involved in anti-Communist activities, when he takes his marching orders from the Oval Office and those orders come via the director of the CIA, then we have a situation where someone is not playing ball, as they say.”
“And is that what has been happening?” Travis asked. “The president has been directing the FBI through the CIA?”
“Not exactly. Hoover would never stand for such a thing. They all walk on eggshells around Hoover. Hoover has his files, and they all know that if they ruffle his feathers, then their files will find their way to his desk, and phone calls will be made. They all have their dirty little secrets, you see? And even if Hoover doesn’t know every one of their secrets, it doesn’t stop them believing that he might know. The paranoid always manage to create that sense of paranoia around them. Hoover doesn’t like agents who are too short, too tall, who have sweaty hands, who can’t maintain steady eye contact, except when it doesn’t suit him, of course. He is a fickle man, Agent Travis. A fickle man with a great deal of power, and thus he is the most dangerous kind of all.” Doyle shrugged. “And yet who knows what really goes on, my friend? Perhaps everything that goes on in the Oval Office is taped, but I can’t imagine those tapes will ever see the light of day.”
“So, where do you come into all of this?” Travis asked. “I am still not seeing the picture here. Why on earth would someone like Dulles, or even Hoover, for that matter, be interested in a man like you? You own and run a traveling carnival. You are not exactly a threat to national security, surely?”
“Or so one would believe,” Doyle replied. “I am trying to paint a picture here, perhaps to build a jigsaw puzzle, you know? I am one part of it, as is Valeria, as is Chester Greene and Gabor Benedek, but on our own we mean nothing. However, you put all those pieces together, and you have something that means an entirely different thing. The whole is always greater than the sum of its parts.”
“So there’s more?”
Doyle laughed. “I have described some small part of a snowflake, Agent Travis. Beneath the snowflake is an iceberg, and this iceberg is far bigger than the one that sank the Titanic. We need to be specific here, though. I understand that this is a great deal of information to take in, and some of it sounds just too fantastic for words, but when you start to break it down and analyze it, then you begin to see where this thing is headed.”
“Mind control,” Travis said. “Behavior modification, making people do things that they have no control over, creating double agents and sleepers and whatever else they believe they need in order to fight the Cold War. That’s what you’re telling me, isn’t it? That we are just part of some grand and master plan to eradicate the threat of Communism?”
“Yes, to a degree, but that is the socially acceptable face of it,” Doyle said. “These people want a certain thing, and they enforce those wants on everyone else. They see it as some kind of divine ordination. They are labori
ng beneath the most fantastic self-created delusions and paranoias imaginable. They are part of the Freemason Brotherhood, and they feel that their calling comes from God. They believe that they are responsible for the world complete. They believe that psychiatric mind control techniques can be employed to effect political ends. These men fall well within the boundaries of their own classification for numerous mental disorders and yet would never subject themselves to the treatment they order for others. They are not crazy, you see? Everyone else is. You know Dulles, such a model of integrity and decency, is believed to have had more than a hundred extramarital affairs. That information from his own sister. These people shake one another’s hands, they pat one another’s backs, they safeguard their own positions, and they protect their vested interests. Behind the scenes, these are the very people who possess major financial shareholdings in the newspaper industry, the media channels, the medical and psychiatric drug companies, the arms manufacturers. They say they want peace, but they want war. They say they want well people and good mental health, but in reality they push ever harder to classify even the simplest difficulties as mental diseases, and thus they rake in millions in government appropriations for the research and development of so-called cures for the these imaginary diseases. It is a spider’s web of internal corruption, ulterior motives, and hidden agendas. These people make the Borgias look like children squabbling at a church picnic.”
“And they want you?”
“Yes, they want me.”
“And Valeria and Chester and everyone else.”
“Not everyone. Perhaps not Gabor or the Bellancas or Akiko. Those are our friends. Those are the outcasts and unwanteds that we have collected along the way. They are good people, and they have thrown their lot in with us out of support and camaraderie. They are gypsies, and they wish to remain gypsies, and for no other reason than a real sense of exhaustion with the world as it is. They have reached the point now where they simply want nothing further to do with it.”
