JAKE’S STORY OF THE AMRITSAR MASSACRE, CONTINUED
All in all, it was the worst six months of my life (Cambodia had it beat as a harrowing experience, but took less time). I hit the water in the Amritsar Golden Temple pool with nothing on me but my wallet and standard men’s pocket equipage. I thank my stars the guys shooting at me were hysterical religious fanatics, not trained military. Despite being stunned when I banged my head I managed to keep below the surface of the murky water and swim away from the gunfire without being hit. I surfaced, got my bearings and a deep breath, plunged back underwater and swam further to a spot by an open doorway in the building through which I’d entered the complex. I lunged up out of the pool and scuffled my way inside against the flow of the crowd flocking to see what all the hubbub was about. Typically Asian, every man was eager to be first in line, so they paid me no attention as I squeezed toward the back of the crush. The gunfire outside increased in volume and frequency. Mortar rounds began landing around the building. The surge of gawkers reversed field and became a raging stampede of safety-seekers. Bucking the tide of panic, I threw elbows, knocked turbaned men over, ducked incoming lead and found a hidey-hole to calm down, gather my thoughts and formulate a plan.
My plan—get the hell out of here! The troops I’d seen massed outside were laying siege to the Golden Temple. The sodden clothes on my back were an Indian army uniform—it got me a pass with one side of the fray but made me a target for the other. I found a doorway fronting a street with cover enough that I could make a break for it. I dodged my way through street pandemonium to the skirmish line, where I paused to rally a team of Indian regulars with wild arm waving and urgent, incoherent commands. That focused their attention on riddling the building with enthusiastic and totally ineffective fire, and they paid me no mind as I passed behind them and worked my way to the rear.
Amritsar is relatively small compared to major centers like New Delhi, Calcutta and Mumbai, and though shabby by Western standards it is as well kept as Indian cities get. That owes to its predominately Sikh population—a rule of thumb in India, I was to learn, is “if you want something done competently, ask a Sikh to do it.” In quieter times Amritsar would have been a nice place to visit, but Sikh extremists had holed up in the Golden Temple. The Indian Army arrived in force and set up positions, poised to attack at first provocation. Which I unwittingly provided, and it was now a live-fire war zone resounding with explosions, rattling machine guns, the fully panoply of noise and stinks of battle. I threaded my way through the narrow streets of the roiling city to my hotel. The desk clerk said he’d never heard of me and refused to give me the key to my room. I went around behind the building, negotiating my way through an alleyway clogged with dustbins, trash piles, discarded junk and tangles of parked bicycles. I rock-climbed up the back wall via windowsills, ledges and rusty drainpipe to the window of my third-floor room and burgled my way in. To my dismay, the room had been ransacked and all my stuff stolen. Several sets of determined footsteps came pounding up the stairs, so I bailed out the window and clambered back down to the cluttered alleyway, dropping from above the ground floor onto a trash heap I’d previously noted comprised mostly cardboard boxes and soft-looking garbage.
I’m getting a little old for urban acrobatics—and believe me, the reality of it ain’t like spy-thriller rooftop chase scenes—but I alighted without spraining anything and scurried away. Once again I found myself stranded in the middle of an unholy mess with no passport, no kit, no weapon, no support, very little money and nary a clue. Indians tend to be taller than other Asian nationalities, so I at least wouldn’t be standing a head taller than everyone else around me. It was a population I could blend into, fortunate because I soon found myself a fugitive sought by Sikh militants, Muslim terrorists, gangsters and departments of the Indian government including, but not limited to, the Army, the secret police and civil authorities. This in a vast, impoverished and hostile country I knew next to nothing about, whose inhabitants mostly spoke languages that I didn’t. Just what I deserved for placing my trust in swarthy strangers.
That incident became known as the Massacre at the Amritsar Golden Temple. A thousand Sikh rebels were slaughtered, more or less, and a larger number of civilians, touching off bloody riots and insurrections across the country, including the assassination of Premier Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. Talk about misplacing your trust.
By that time starving hungry, I grabbed a naan and helping of curry from a street vendor who was happy to be overpaid with an American dollar. I found an unassuming, cheap hotel on an out of the way street, where I sponged myself off (full en suite bath being not included). My clothes had dried out but were droopy and bedraggled. In any event, I wouldn’t fare well wearing a bottle-green Army uniform amidst running gun battles in the streets. I skulked around until I found a clothing shop, where I got an off-white, loose blouse with a Nehru collar and grey pajama bottoms like the Indian men wear (in contrast to the neon-colored, spangled saris the women flaunt). I replaced my leather shoes, ruined from my impromptu swim, with sturdy work shoes that could cover ground. Back in my room I opened the window and rubbed my new duds around on the outside wall to grime them up for the sake of camouflage, gave the shoes a good scuffing, and then turned in for some desperately need sleep. In the middle of the night I awoke with shits and shakes, maybe from the food, maybe from bugs I picked up from my plunge in “the pool of nectar,” as “Amritsar” translates to. Recovery took another day, by which time the scrape I got when I hit bottom with my forehead in the Amritsar Temple pool had become inflamed.
I set about searching for a route home from Punjab, but unidentified pursuers I soon found on my trail introduced new complications. My money ran out fast, leaving me scrounging food, shelter and transportation in any way I could. Periodically I sampled the menu of fevers and festering diseases that India so abundantly provides. My off-again on-again partnership with Emil Groteqcu turned out to be both a blessing and a curse. All in all, a classic misadventure—the gods were against me on that one, for sure.
Love it or hate it, you’ll never forget it, they say about India. How true that is. I saw some gorgeous scenery and spectacular art there, not to mention some of the world’s most beautiful women. Was amazed by exotic architecture straight out of oriental fantasies. On a few occasions when I wasn’t scrambling for a mouthful of anything digestible I tasted flavors I’d never have imagined—hot, sweet, tangy, savory and spicy all in one glorious rush (just because food is brown, don’t turn it down). Strangers displayed extraordinary generosity and kindness (and not just Mother and her Missionary). Nevertheless, the poverty, the desperation and the meanness of the place stick with me. So many, many miserable people. And for most of six months, me trapped among their numbers and sharing their squalor.
I’d been had. The questions were: How? And why?
I later compared notes with Pat Swayze, who starred in City of Joy. Supposedly set in those same Calcutta slums, nobody from Hollywood would go within 8.000 miles of them. The set designers built a brand new, sanitized slum for the movie shoot. I recounted to him my own India adventures, good for some hearty laughs when we weren’t wincing.
My tour there was in 1985. I hear that since then things have improved, with money being made in high-tech ventures, people manning outsourced call centers, modernized agriculture now feeding the country closer to adequately and so forth. But they’ve also added hundreds of millions more Indians. Maybe economic progress has gotten ahead of population growth, but with one of the world’s highest birthrates the race against poverty stays close. I haven’t been back lately to see for myself, but I note that emigration is still very popular there.
Oh well. Win some, lose some. There was half a year’s lost income to make up, so I got back to work, picking up mundane delivery jobs, security consulting, celebrity escorting and the like, nothing major. It paid the bills and kept me close to home, which was good, because
it also kept me in touch with Dana Wehrli.
We’d been keeping close company up until I left on my disastrous assignment in India, and after she flew over and rescued me, even closer. To update that: I spent the winter of 1983/84 in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where she worked at the ABC station as local weather-babe. A role designed for her, and vice-versa, she thrived on it. The locals had never before been so glued to the morning weather reports. When we could, we did getaways at ski resorts, where I tried my hand at snowboarding. It was close enough to surfing that I got into it pretty quickly. Not all Rockies resorts welcomed it, especially not Aspen, but you can’t keep a good concept down, and one weekend we found snowboarders messing around with something they now call “half-pipe,” doing stunts back and forth between opposed ridges of snow. It became an Olympic Sport, of course, but in the winter of 1984 few had ever heard of anything like it. Guys flying into the air and turning spins and somersaults on snow-going surfboards? Gnarly!
Dana was intrigued, so she cajoled a cameraman from the station to come along with us and shoot some footage. One of my wipeouts provided comic relief—it’s a sport you want to take up in your teens, not at age 35. She got an editor to shape it into a newsbite for her weather segment one morning, and other ABC affiliates picked it up. Audiences responded enthusiastically, so her boss assigned her to produce a short subject on half-pipe snowboarding, which ABC aired on Wide World of Sports. Turned out, she had a flair for production and direction, and coupled with her captivating on-air presence, one thing led to another. She wound up back in Los Angeles in the ABC production unit assigned to human interest features. And then she hit the Big Time: 20/20 snapped her up. Sure worked for me in Calcutta.
As I said, we’d been keeping closer company, but no serious consideration of marriage. With my free-lance career, such as it was, and the demands of TV feature production on her, our lives didn’t mesh in any kind of daily routine. Plus I declined moving from Malibu, whereas Dana had no time for long commuting so needed to live near her studio. We each had a king-sized bed, and we spent as much time together as we could in the context of our mutual chaotic arrangements. We were happy enough with it.
And then came that fateful knock on my door on that sunny autumn afternoon in 1985. Opportunity? No. It was Todd Sonarr, my former CIA boss who sent me on that doomed mission in the closing days of the war (as recounted in the first of Professor Pflingger’s books, Jake Fonko MIA).
Strictly speaking, Sonarr didn’t actually knock; he poked the buzzer on the back door by the parking apron. Considering that he ruined my Army career and damned near got me killed in Cambodia, you can understand why my reaction when I saw him standing there was muted. “Todd? What the hell are you doing here?”
“Hey there, Jake,” he said. “Long time no see. I was in the neighborhood, thought I’d drop by and see how an old friend is getting along these days.”
Huh? In the neighborhood? Old friend? My internal bullshit detectors lit up like the Las Vegas strip. “Just strolling through Malibu, were you?”
“Well, you know … you going to invite me in, or just stare at me through the screen door?”
What could I say? I opened the door and stepped back. He swung the screen door wide and came in. He was still beefy, a few pounds more so than when I’d last seen him in 1975. A receding hairline encroached into his crewcut, and what remained of it showed grey. Hardly a glimmer of his former gung-ho intensity remained; in fact, he looked tired and defeated.
“Let’s go in here,” I said, leading him to the living room. “Have a seat. Get you something to drink?”
“Scotch if you have it. Anything else if you don’t. Don’t be stingy. Throw a little ice in it.” He looked out the picture window at the rollers crashing on the beach. “Nice view you got here. Man, you’re living the life, aren’t you just! Oh, hey,” he exclaimed. “That is some carpet!”
He meant my superfine Naheen, that token of gratitude from Razi Q’ereshi. “A souvenir from Iran,” I replied over my shoulder as I went to the bar. I poured him a tumbler of Chivas Regal, took a couple fingers myself, plopped in some ice and took a seat across the room from him. He savored an initial sip of scotch. “You look good, Jake. Keeping yourself in shape. I understand you went through a bad patch in India recently?”
“Let’s just say they provided me with a prolonged refresher course in Survival, Escape, Resistance and Evasion. Not as tough as Ranger training. So, what’s up?” I asked. “Still going great guns with the Company?”
TODD SONARR’S STORY
Todd took a big swallow from his glass and relief spread through his face. He sat silently for a moment, then took another big swallow. After a long pause he said, “Not exactly great guns, Jake.” Another pause. Then he drained his glass. “Not great at all. Any chance of a refill?” he asked, tentatively.
What the heck? “Sure.” Remembering how he and his CIA buddies used to swill it down, I poured the tumbler full and returned it to him. He grabbed it and swigged a third of it. Some things never change.
That braced him. He sat up straighter. “It’s been a rough decade,” he said. “That mole hunt I involved you in, all that trouble and turmoil, and nothing ever came of it. Just a false lead, but it was the straw that broke Angleton’s career; had to resign in disgrace. Damned near got me canned, too, but with some fancy footwork I managed to dodge that bullet. And then the Church Committee shafted the Company but good. Everything went down the crapper after they got through with their investigation. Oh, prohibiting CIA assassinations of foreign leaders was well-advised, I suppose. Looking back, they usually caused more trouble than they were worth. Having Ngo Dinh Diem bumped off was the root of our troubles in Nam, for example. But Congress went too far, gutted the Company, slashed our funding, put us under the microscope. That was the worst. How are you supposed to run covert ops with a gaggle Senators looking over your shoulder? Every Congressional staff has young hotshot aides determined to Make a Difference, so the goddamned oversight committee leaks like a geezer with a shot prostate. You were there in the last of the good old days. You’d never recognize the place now.”
“Todd, I was never in the CIA. I was an officer in Army Intelligence, on loan.”
“Right,” he said. He gulped the last of his Chivas. “Whatever. The Church Committee started us downhill,” he continued. “Then Jimmy Carter took over. That fucking hillbilly peanut farmer finished us off, but good. He appointed a fellow Navy guy, Stansfield Turner, as director. A technocrat like Carter, they both favored gadgets over human intelligence, shrank what networks we still had. Shifted the mission from protecting America to promoting human rights. Human rights! Some of our enemies aren’t even human! Promoting their rights? The hell’s the point of that?
“So then we had that Iranian disaster, the Islamic Revolution. Naturally the CIA gets all the blame, but Carter wouldn’t let us do anything that might offend or upset the Shah, wouldn’t let us probe the opposition, so our intel was crappy. I think you might know a little about all that mess. Then Carter set us to undermining Apartheid in South Africa. Sure, life wasn’t a picnic for the indigs, but who thinks the place will be better off when they take over? He had us trying to subvert the Soviets with cultural exchanges, underground presses, radio broadcasts, support for dissidents. No harm in it, but not enough to tip the scales against those bloody-minded bastards. Boycott the Olympics? Yeah, that sure showed’em!
“When Reagan came in he appointed Bill Casey as director, and things looked up. Casey was a protégé of Bill Donovan back in the OSS. Reagan was a Cold Warrior, dedicated to beating the Commies, not containing them. Casey got the budget restored, and he restaffed with 2,000 new officers. The Company got more active, set about doing something to root the Commies out of Central America. Went after Muammar Gaddafi in Libya in’81. Supplied Egyptian-made arms to the rebels in Afghanistan …”
“So what’s the problem?” I asked. �
�Sounds like you’re back in business.”
“Two problems. The new officers turned out mostly to be ‘yuppie spies,’ more interested in their retirement plans than in going to the mat to protect Americans, better at infighting and obstruction than intel work. Casey figured John McMahon as too cautious for a chief of clandestine services and replaced him with Max Hugel, an obnoxious runt who wore a rug. Hugel was a campaign fundraiser and former used car salesman, absolutely clueless about the CIA. The covert ops guys rebelled and applied their talents against him, forced him out in two months, the first of a series of lackluster appointments that came and went. Finally got a man with balls in that slot, Clair George …”
“Todd, I just asked how things were going at the CIA by way of making conversation. Why this extended tale of woe?”
“I’m coming to that. It concerns you. Be patient. I came out here for a specific purpose.”
Concerns me? Specific purpose? Shit. He looked expectantly from his empty tumbler to me, but I wasn’t going to turn him into a menace on Highway 101 by passing him more scotch. “How about if I make us some coffee?” I asked. Keeping him awake was imperative. I wanted him to leave my pad and drive away ASAP, not flake out on my couch. Unfortunately, ASAP didn’t seem likely to come any time soon.
“Sure, okay, coffee’s okay,” he said, disappointedly. I took our tumblers into the kitchen, unlimbered the coffee gear and got a strong blend brewing while Sonarr continued his story. “So the Company was chaotic and disorganized, but with Reagan in the White House at least we seemed pointed in the right direction. Protect American interests, beat the Commies. Not that the two goals always coincided, but you don’t always know that at the time you make the decisions.
“Now, covert ops is about the only thing I’ve ever had a talent for, hard as it may be for you to believe that I have any talent at all for that. So I stuck with it through thick and thin and four years of shitty missions, and after Bill Casey took over and we weathered Max Hugel it seemed things were looking brighter. In 1981 Bill Haig announced that international terrorism would replace human rights as Issue Number One, and that the Ruskies were behind the international terror. That approach was more to my liking, but I wound up in bad news assignments nevertheless. Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, so they sent me there, where we backed, as it belatedly became clear, the most unpopular group available, Maronite Christians. Fortunately I was out in the field the day they blew up the U.S. Embassy 1983. Killed 63 people, including Bob Ames, the CIA chief of station, a long-time friend. A few months later they blew up the marine barracks by the airport, and Reagan pulled out of Lebanon entirely.
The Jake Fonko Series: Books 4, 5 & 6 Page 24
