The Gun Runner's Daughter

by Neil Gordon

  You will be well advised to review the enclosed documents carefully, and then do nothing until I am in touch with you personally.

  Although it will no doubt come as a shock to you to find that I am alive, please be assured that it is a fact easily explained.

  Although you may believe that this letter is not bona fide, please be assured that I am able to recount what you drank the evening we spent together on Martha’s Vineyard—and, nearly word for word, what we talked about—from your father to the Constitution—and a host of other details.

  And although you have already expressed your lack of interest in my researches into your father’s affairs, you will do well to consider these researches a subject of the greatest and most personal importance to you possible, as I can and will put you in jail.

  Yours sincerely,

  Nicholson Jefferson Dymitryck

  He was alive.

  It did not matter how. It did not matter how, it did not matter why.

  As Allison sat on the bar stool, the Corner Bistro disappeared, and in her ears a roaring silence seemed to obliterate her surroundings.

  Nicky Dymitryck was alive.

  And if Nicky Dymitryck was alive, then she knew precisely—precisely, although she could not remember ever having thought it out—what to do.

  Grimly, she pushed Nicky’s letter back into its envelope. Thinking: so. So I do have to make the choice.

  What would she sacrifice?

  Dee? She would deal him a terrible blow, she knew. But it would be a lesser one than the one he was delivering to her father, and it would be far less, far less, than what she would do to herself.

  Could she do it? she asked herself; but once again, at the end of the long fugue of thought, she came back to the one indisputable fact: her father might be guilty, but he was not guilty of the crime for which they were scapegoating him.

  And if she lost her father, the last remnant left to her of her childhood, she had lost everything.

  And then the bar came back with its noise of glasses clinking and people talking and, in amazement at herself, Allison Rosenthal, Esther, knew that she was going to do a terrible, terrible thing.

  PART THREE

  So Esther arose, and stood before the king, and said, If it please the king, and if I have found favour in his sight . . . let it be written to reverse the letters devised . . . to destroy the Jews which are in all the king’s provinces: For how can I endure to see the evil that shall come unto my people? or how can I endure to see the destruction of my kindred?

  ESTHER 8:4-6

  CHAPTER 10

  Spring 1992.

  New Haven, Connecticut.

  1.

  To understand the death and resurrection of Nicky Dymitryck, it is not enough to look at the suspicious circumstances of his visit to Martha’s Vineyard late in the summer of 1994. The course of events that resulted in his murder in a bathroom of Boston’s Logan Airport—and, incidentally, in the arrest of Allison’s father—had started two years earlier, in the spring of 1992. And indeed: that he had been reported to the press as dead instead of, as was really the case, only very nearly dead was because, since the spring of 1992, Nicky’s life had been continuously at risk. So much so that declaring him dead, for public purposes, had come to seem the only way out.

  The incident that launched this series of events happened to Nicky in a fairly dramatic fashion. In this it was unusual: all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, most of Nicky’s best work came from research into arcane government documents, multiple source comparisons of Freedom of Information Act requests, and double reads of policy analysis, rather than being approached by mysterious strangers in hotel bars.

  This one, however, came exactly that way, although the hotel bar in question was in neither Vientiane nor Beirut, but rather downtown New Haven, and Nicky was neither covering a war nor tracking a gun runner but rather delivering the Porter Fellowship Lecture in Journalism.

  The Porter is of course a great honor for a journalist, but the kind of journalists whom Nicky tended to know viewed it rather as the opportunity for some serious seduction of people younger and much better looking than themselves. When he won the Porter, unfortunately, that wasn’t a big concern. For one thing, in 1992 he was about to be married, and the trip east was, for someone who traveled as much as he, a sad waste of precious time with his fiancée. For another, he had been to college at that same institution. He hadn’t liked it then, and he didn’t like it now. There was something pathetic, he had felt then, in the scared run for the status quo that by far the vast majority of his peers had been making. And there was something tragic, he felt now, watching the audience at his five-lecture series, “Lawyers, Guns, and Money: Post-Cold War Arms Export Policy,” in the fact that by far the vast majority of them seemed still to be doing the same.

  That was why, his last night in town, instead of listening to undergraduate girls sing for drinks at Mory’s with the group of deans and professors who had awarded him the fellowship, he was drinking alone at his hotel bar when he was approached by a tall, disarmingly handsome young man.

  “Mr. Dymitryck?”

  “Nicky,” he said automatically—even then, at thirty-three, he disliked being called “Mister”—as he looked up into the boy’s startlingly green eyes, so green that they seemed to glow behind a fringe of blond hair. “Yes?”

  “I wonder if I might talk with you a moment.”

  “About?”

  “Something private.”

  An aura of booze hung around him like a cloud. He was dressed in Paul Stuart and wore a Rolex. And, while it was more a matter of intuition than vision, to Nicky it was as clear as day that this boy had sought Nicky out to tell him something that the boy should not even have known.

  “Then I advise you to wait.”

  This surprised the boy. “For what?”

  “Not for. Until. Until you’re sober. Otherwise, you’re going to regret telling me.”

  The boy laughed, briefly.

  “I doubt that. You know who’s going to regret my talking to you? Greg Eastbrook is going to regret my talking to you. Now, you just order me a drink and I’ll tell you a good story. Okay?”

  Half an hour later, the boy was gone, and Nicky was alone in his hotel room speaking on the phone, long-distance.

  “Jay? Listen, you remember Mehmet Hourani? Turkish broker for Hussein, working out of Munich? Brokered chemical warhead sales to Iraq out of a Munich holding company until the Gulf War?”

  The person on the other end of the line seemed to remember, and to be commenting on it at length. At least, until Nicky went on.

  “Jay, shut up a second, okay? I just met a kid who says that the sales were coordinated out of the NSC staff by Greg Eastbrook.”

  Now, on the other end of the line, there was silence, and Nicky allowed his wide mouth to smile. Then, responding to a question, he said:

  “I’ll tell you why I believe him. You know who I think he is? I think he’s the son of someone in the trade. He was drunk as a sailor, and as gay as a box of birds. I think I just got a scoop from a kid who hates his daddy.”

  A short silence while he listened. Then:

  “No way. I’m going to Munich. Tomorrow, before someone tries to assassinate Hourani. Yeah, I met him at the Dubai air show. And I want to get this on camera. So get someone to meet me, okay?”

  Then he hung up, and called Lufthansa.

  2.

  Nicky Dymitryck never really got his interview with Mehmet Hourani—at least, not the part he was looking for.

  He got to Munich, and he found Hourani’s house at Harlanstrasse 14. And Hourani, surprisingly, let him in: he was, it turned out, somewhat in fear for his life, just then, and that made him eager to go on record. He didn’t, however, want to talk about Eastbrook. He wanted to talk about Ronald Rosenthal, which he did, and dutifully, Nicky took down the rather prosaic details of the Bosnian sales that would, two years later, put Allison’s father in jail. Only w
hen that was done, and Nicky had turned the conversation back in time to Colonel Eastbrook and the Iraqi tilt, did Nicky’s cameraman begin to run tape. Which was fortunate, for Nicky’s memory of what happened over the next few minutes was wiped, instantly, clean and never returned again.

  The surviving film shows three establishing shots: the living room in low spring daylight; a close-up of Hourani, sweating in a dark suit, and a medium-zoom to include Nicky, in jeans and a black shirt, holding papers. Then there is a flash and a sudden electric zip, and the video dies while the audio—which was on a separate and, luckily, digital deck—after a silence comes back to the sound of moans.

  It is not hard to imagine what had happened. The blast that spiked the DAT was loud enough to shatter windows on the street side of the house. It came from behind Hourani, nonnegotiable, absolutely without preamble. The couch—Biedermeier, very likely—splintered in the middle, throwing clouds of stuffing into the air. The man in jeans, protected by the interviewee, who was in the process of coming, literally, apart, was tossed over the low back of his armchair into a set of glass bric-a-brac on oak shelves.

  As for the cameraman, the newspapers reported it plainly. The shoulder-mount video camera shattered into the side of his face, which disintegrated while his right ribs and hip caved inward. His right leg was severed in a jagged line running from his gluteus inferioris to his kneecap, half of which was left exposed.

  The screen, showing darkness, plays his moans for perhaps three minutes. Then there is silence. It seems to last a long time. But it is only a few moments until there sounds the tinkling of glass and a groan, and then the dialing of a phone and a voice saying, over and over again, too loud and with an American accent: “Police. Emergency. Harlanstrasse 14. Police. Emergency. Harlanstrasse 14. Police.”

  As the commentator on Nightline explained when they aired the tape, the blast would have temporarily deafened Nicky, and he was repeating himself on the telephone in the hope that someone would hear.

  3.

  It was neither the violence nor the death: there had been far too much of both in his life since, at twenty-one, Nicky had turned down graduate school fellowships from the three best American Studies departments in the country and gone to answer telephones and fetch coffee for the furthest-left-wing editor in the country, submitting to years of Jay’s infamously cruel clerical abuse before winning his first chance to proofread, then, after years of Jay’s famously niggling editorial demands, finally being allowed, at last, to report. Oddly, once he had let Nicky loose, Jay supported his every venture, and so Nicky had gone from a life of Blackwing number two pencils and editorial markings to a tour of the most shocking violence and death the world had, really, to offer. In Rwanda he had been the first to enter a barn where three hundred Hutu women and children had been massacred by machete and machine gun. In Islamabad he had seen sixteen adult men hanged, one after the other after the other, during four hours on a sunny afternoon. As for more direct experience, Nicky’s small body had borne interrogations in cities as diverse as Kinshasa and San José, and a close inspection of his back showed that one of these interrogations had involved something that most people only hear about: a horsewhip.

  It was, rather, the futility. This was the closest he had ever gotten to Eastbrook, and by 1992 it had been nearly ten years that Nicky had been following this singular man’s tracks through the major hot spots of the world. In fact, it was the hunt for Greg Eastbrook that had led Nicky to writing for the NAR instead of, like his classmates James Dix, Ellen Dyson, and Thomas Barrett, writing for, respectively, the New York Times , the Wall Street Journal , and the Honorable Gentleman from Connecticut. No one but Jay Cohen—a La Penca survivor and one of the plaintiffs in the Christic Institute suit—thought it was possible to convict anyone from Eastbrook’s little underworld, and no one but Stan Diamond, Jay’s SDS comrade who had since made one of the country’s biggest fortunes in telecommunications, was willing to pay to try.

  That the NAR had allowed Nicky to pursue Greg Eastbrook for the ten years since the joint committee on Iran-contra had first granted him immunity from prosecution was because, precisely, the magazine was generally considered—by the kinds of people who had been Nicky’s classmates—the “alternative media.” They were not quite right about that.

  True, the NAR ’s longtime emphasis on tracking the movement of American armaments, legally and illegally, to their various uses around the world was hardly calculated to develop a viable advertising rate base, especially since this field led the NAR less to high-profile scoops in war zones than to detailed reviews of often highly arcane U.S.-Israeli transactions, foreign military grants, and defense contracts.

  But it was also true that its subscribers included nearly every current employee of the U.S. intelligence services and the Foreign Service, much of the Council on Foreign Relations, and many members of the U.S. Congress. As it was true that the NAR had long been supplied to the Kremlin as intelligence, translated by supposed KGB analysts in Washington, until Gorbachev’s staff reformed the practice by buying an airmail subscription, as Castro had done since the first issue. As had Noam Chomsky, as had Jesse Helms, as had Daniel Ortega and Theodore Shackley.

  It was, in short, the perfect place for a person who had fallen victim to a political obsession.

  Especially when that person was entirely unconcerned with his salary because he was the son of Johnny Dymitryck, who, up until his blacklisting, was among the highest paid screenwriters in the studio system and who, from the blacklisting on, invested his earnings wisely enough to allow his son to become, in Jay Cohen’s often repeated description, the “best dressed lefty in the country.”

  If the people who’d blacklisted, investigated, and harassed his father had still been around, Nicky’s field of expertise would have been different. As it was, he had to focus his journalistic sights on the longer-lasting Cold War institutions, and this he did with what can only be called obsession. His area of expertise was the small group of ex-army and intelligence officers who run through the history of covert military actions of postwar America, from the Bay of Pigs, through Laos and Cambodia, to the Mossadeq overthrow in Iran and the coup against Arbenz in Guatemala, and to their highest moment in the public eye, known as the Iran-contra affairs, and then, the placidity of their profitable enterprises barely rippled by the exposure, onward.

  Theodore Shackley, Felix Rodriguez, John Singlaub, Richard Secord, Thomas Clines: Nicky was not the only writer to have fallen victim to the temptation of figuring out what these men did, and how they did it. But in that small community of journalists who gave—more often lost—their careers to the conspiracy theories that united these kinds of people across the history of postwar America, Nicky Dymitryck was perhaps the most tenacious. That was fitting, because so was his chosen quarry, Greg Eastbrook, who had, since his closed-door congressional testimony on his work for Oliver North in South America, so convincingly succeeded in his government work that in 1992 he retired his naval commission and announced his intention to represent California in the United States Senate in 1994. A political ambition about which, in 1993—when Eastbrook won a bitterly contested Republican primary for the candidacy—Nicky stopped laughing.

  He recuperated from the Harlanstrasse bombing, that April of 1992, in, of all places, Jerusalem, where he wrote his article on Allison’s father from his hospital bed. The research was easiest here, on the spot. In addition, the hospital was first-rate, and not even that much-criticized country’s severest critic had ever denied the high degree of journalistic freedom that was available there. His story to bed and largely recuperated from his injuries, Nicky flew out for brief visits to sources in Istanbul and Beirut, and had returned home to Los Angeles by the time his Rosenthal story was published, in May.

  It was not a good time. Nearly immediately upon his return, his engagement fell apart, and by the end of the month he found himself spending more nights on the couch in his office than at home. And that was why he wa
s at the office when, on an evening in early June, the NAR received a call.

  “Mr. Dymitryck, please.”

  “This is Nicky.” Half reading a newspaper, he answered automatically.

  “Ah. Hello.” The voice at the other end was a man’s, and it was young. “I’m sorry about what happened with Hourani. I felt responsible.”

  Recognizing the voice of the green-eyed young man from the bar at New Haven, Nicky let the newspaper fall. “Did you set the bomb?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then you’re not responsible. Listen. I’d like to talk with you.”

  There was a short silence, and Nicky began to worry that he had gone too fast. But then the boy was speaking again.

  “Why?”

  “I’d like to know who you are. How you knew about Hourani. Listen, there’s no one in the world who mistrusts my discretion. It can all be perfectly confidential.”

  Again, a pause. Then the boy spoke carefully.

  “Who do you think I am?”

  “Somebody’s son. Somebody in the industry.”

  The boy sighed. “Mr. Dymitryck. You don’t want to speak to me. I’m just a kid. What you want is to speak to a man called Dov Peleg. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes.” Scribbling, the phone between shoulder and ear. “Who is that?”

  “Someone interesting. He worked for Israeli intelligence in the eighties. I believe he’d like to speak to you, too. He’s in Paris, and I’ve got the number. But you want to catch him as quick as you can, ’cause I believe he’s in trouble. Can you write down the number?”

  “Yes.” While he wrote, Nicky thought. This boy was going to tell him nothing else, he knew. But was there one thing he could get before the boy hung up? When he had taken down the number, he said: