The Kill Zone km-9

by David Hagberg

  Former CIA director Bill Colby called such operations the CIA’s family jewels. They had to be protected at all costs. McGarvey pulled himself out of his funk, and smiled. “Not too late to pull out, Counselor.”

  Paterson shook his head. “I wouldn’t miss this brouhaha for all the world, Mr. Director.” The clerk came in, called the chamber to order and the senators, led by Hammond, filed in and took their places. “I remind Mr. McGarvey that he is still under oath as far as concerns these proceedings,” Senator Hammond said. He looked as if he hadn’t slept well last night either. It was well-known that the senator was a big drinker. Yesterday’s contentious session could not have done much for his stress level. “Yes, Senator, I understand,” McGarvey said, thinking suddenly about Katy. At least she would be spared most of the ugly details today. Paterson sat forward. “Do we have this committee’s assurances that the members of the audience have the proper clearances and have been briefed on the necessary security procedures?”

  “That goes without saying,” Senator Hammond sputtered. “Excuse me, Senator, but I’d like to ask a question before we get started this morning,” New York senator Gerald Pilcher said. Hammond motioned for him to go ahead. “Mr. McGarvey, on Tuesday you were asked if you wanted this appointment, and you told us no, that you did not. But that you would accept the job because President Haynes asked you to.”

  “That’s correct, Senator.” “Then let me ask you a related question.

  Why did you join the CIA in the first place: What was it, twenty-six, twenty-seven years ago? And two follow-up questions: Who recruited you and how was it done?” McGarvey went back. He’d been young, cocky, brash, certainly arrogant. He was doing something that counted, something that his father and mother could be proud of. He caught Brenda Madden’s eye. She was sitting back in her tall leather chair, fingers to her lips, a scowl on her face, her eyes narrowed. She looked like an animal ready to pounce. “The CIA recruiters were on campus in my senior year. I talked to them. But Vietnam was chewing up our people, and I thought that I could do some good in the military rather than dodging the draft. By the time I finished OCS and Intelligence Officers School it was the spring of 1972, and I was sent to Saigon. I did my two tours, came back to the States and resigned my commission in June of 1974.” “Our troops were being brought home by then,” Senator Pilcher said. “That’s correct, Senator. The drawdown began in 1973.” McGarvey was back in full force; all of his memories intact and vivid. “I’d been given a telephone number by the CIA recruiters, so I called it, and the next morning I met with Lawrence Danielle who was the deputy director of Operations. He knew my parents, or knew of them, and he told me that I could do just as important a job, maybe even more important than I had in the air force or than my parents were doing down at Los Alamos. I thought about it and agreed.”

  “How long did you think about it?” Brenda Madden mumbled. But everyone heard her. “About five seconds, Senator. I believed in my country just as strongly then as I do now.” “What happened next?”

  Pilcher asked. “I went through the CIA’s training program and worked on the Vietnam desk at headquarters until late 1975, when I was assigned back in-country.” Pilcher was startled. “Saigon had already fallen by then, hadn’t it?” “Yes, it had. But besides our POWs who were being repatriated, there were Vietnamese nationals who had worked for us who were marked for arrest and execution. I was sent in to help find them and then get them into Laos and eventually to Thailand.”

  “Who were those people?” Brenda Madden asked. “The program was called CORDS. Civilian Operations Revolutionary Development Staff. They were part of what was being called the Hamlet Pacification Program to identify Viet Cong infiltrators at the village level.” “And mark them for assassination?” “No. The VC were being offered amnesty. If they didn’t want to switch allegiance to the south, they were treated as POWs for the duration.” “None of them were killed?” “Some of them were killed, yes, Senator.” “Then the real reason that you joined the CIA and went back to Vietnam was exactly as I suggested yesterday.

  Because you wanted to involve yourself in the action by rescuing fellow assassins.” “By saving the lives of men and women who gave loyal service to the United States,” McGarvey countered. “If we could move along now,” Senator Hammond prompted. “We have a lot of material to get through ”

  “Were your rescue efforts effective, Mr. McGarvey?”

  Brenda Madden pressed. “Not very.” She glanced at her fellow committee members. “Don’t be modest. How many of the CORDS people, as you call them, did you actually rescue? I mean get across Laos to freedom in Thailand and then here to the United States. One hundred?

  Two dozen? Five or ten?” “No.” “One?” Brenda Madden demanded.

  “Isn’t it true that not a single one of those people was brought here?”

  “There were some, I think,” McGarvey said. “But not by me.”

  “Why?” All the frustration came back to him. He shook his head.

  “They were not issued visas for one reason or another.” “You have no idea why not?” “It was political. The war was unpopular, and it was over. We lost. Nobody wanted to deal with it anymore.” “Which made you angry,” Brenda Madden said. She didn’t wait for his answer. “That was simply the first step in Mr. McGarvey’s disillusionment with his country, with the CIA, with power in general. With following orders.”

  She glanced at the other senators while gesturing toward McGarvey. “It was the same in Berlin and Hong Kong and France. Every assignment ended up a disaster for one reason or another. But always it was Kirk McGarvey in the middle of it. Not following orders. Working outside of his charter. Taking matters into his own hands. Charging in, guns blazing.” McGarvey sat back in his chair to let her rant. She was right in more than one way. The CORDS rescue operation had been a total disaster. Not as a field exercise, but in the political arena at home. And she wasn’t far off the mark when she accused that the aftermath of the Vietnam War had started him on the path of disillusionment. But then she hadn’t brought up the sorry episode of James Jesus Angleton, who looked so hard for moles inside the CIA that he all but brought the Agency down. And she wasn’t aware of John Lyman Trotter, Jr.” McGarvey’s friend since the CORDS days, who turned out to be the mole that Angleton had sought. But that was much later, after McGarvey had been fired. Brenda Madden stopped to take a breath, and McGarvey stepped into the breach. “Was there a question in there, Senator?” Even Hammond seemed to be fascinated by the California senator’s hatred for McGarvey. But he was content for the moment to allow her to continue. His agenda in the hearings was a purely political one. He wanted to be president, and he wanted to cut President Haynes down to size at every possible opportunity. But Madden, who’d moved to San Francisco as a young woman, had shaped her political career as an activist. She was anti-nuclear power plants, anti-free world trade, and virulently anti-Republican and the party’s fiscal conservatism. In her estimation the only reason the social welfare programs of the last half century had failed was because not enough money had been spent on them. Instead of squandering our taxes on the B-2 bomber and stealth fighters, or nuclear submarines and fabulously expensive aircraft car tiers, the money could have been much better spent on educating young, black, single mothers. President Haynes and the Central Intelligence Agency were prime examples of the people and Beltway “old boys” clubs that she most despised. And McGarvey, who’d once inadvertently wondered out loud at a Washington cocktail party why Madden had never married, epitomized both. He was a friend of Haynes, and he was running the CIA. “Let’s cut to the chase,” she said. “Actually you weren’t in the CIA for very long. At least not as a card-carrying employee with a desk, a regular paycheck and benefits. Saigon, Berlin, Hong Kong, and Paris with stints at Langley, and then you were fired. Everything that you did afterward for the CIA was freelance. Isn’t that so?” “That’s correct, Senator.”

  “Good. Let’s talk about Santiago, Chile.
Operation Title Card.” She smiled. “You people at Langley come up with the most interesting code names.” “A machine picks them,” McGarvey said. “Yes, I know,” she said. “It’s too bad that the entire Agency couldn’t be run with such imagination.” Tide Card was not on Paterson’s list. It was a Track III ops, but tame by comparison with some of the other operations McGarvey had been involved with. But she would milk it for all it was worth.

  Sensationalizing a dismal mission that had satisfied no one. Hopefully she was so blinded by her own agenda that she would miss the connection between Santiago and two other operations that sprung out of it. One involved a director of the CIA and a former U.S. senator. The other involved a president of the United States. “What would you like to know?” McGarvey asked. “Tell us about the operation, in your own words,” Brenda Madden said. “I was sent to assassinate Army general August Pifiar, who had been indicted by a U.S. court for ordering the deaths of more than two thousand civilians, most of them dissident students, some of them the wives and mothers of the opposition party, and several of them Americans.” No one stirred. This was the first time in history that such a high-ranking officer of the CIA had made such an open admission. “Actually I didn’t catch up with him until three days after I got to Santiago and checked in with the chief of station. The general suspected that he was being targeted by us and barricaded himself with his wife and three children in their compound in San Antonio, about sixty miles outside the capital on the coast. “I had seen the documentation, the pictures of the bodies lined up inside the Estadio Chile, audio recordings of torture sessions, and three film clips of three groups of women and some children lined up on their knees in front of a long trench. Officers walked down the line firing their pistols into the backs of the prisoners’ heads. The bodies fell or were pushed into mass graves. Some of them were still alive, raising their arms for mercy. “General Pifiar was in all three of the film clips. He personally shot at least a dozen women, and when it was over he refused to order his soldiers to fire the coups de grace into those still alive. Instead he ordered the bulldozers to bury them alive.” The picture had been so vivid in McGarvey’s mind that when he arrived in Santiago he was sure that he could smell the stench of the rotting corpses. He shuddered. All eyes were on him. Even Brenda Madden had nothing to say for the moment. Paterson looked at him with an expression of sorrow mixed with a horrified fascination. “I am what I am,” Mac had once admitted to Larry Danielle. “An assassin.” The acting DCI had been an old man then, with his own memories starting as a senior member of the OSS during the war, and participating in the formation of the CIA. The motto in the early days at the Agency had been Bigger than State by ‘48. They’d gotten their wish and then some.

  “What you are is a product of this business, dear boy,” Danielle told him in his fatherly way. “Get out while you still can.” Turn away now and run, run, run. Don’t look back. Get out while there’s still time to save Katy and Liz and the baby. Hide. Jump out of the light, and pull the shadows back in around you. “I got to him by subduing one of his guards, dressing in the man’s uniform and entering the compound. He was in bed asleep with his wife. I shot him once in the head with a silenced pistol, and then got out of there, back to Santiago. The next morning I flew home.” “Did you harm his wife or children?” Senator Clawson asked. “No.” Brenda Madden roused herself. But for the moment even she was subdued. “His wife had to have been damaged psychologically.” “I’m sure that she was,” McGarvey admitted. What he hadn’t told the committee, or anyone else for that matter, was that the general was not asleep. He and his wife had been in the act of lovemaking. His wife spotted Me Garvey and was about to cry out, alerting the guards just outside, so McGarvey had killed her. “Who issued the orders?” Clawson asked. “Mr. Danielle. He was acting DCI at the time.” “That’s very convenient. He is now deceased,” Brenda Madden said. “But your orders were changed. A Senate intelligence oversight committee voted to reject the assassination, and you were ordered not to go through with it. Yet you ignored those orders and went ahead on your own. Isn’t that so?” “I wasn’t informed of the new orders until after I had returned to Washington.” “According to you.”

  “Yes, Senator, according to my sworn testimony, then and now.” “But you were sacked anyway, weren’t you?” she continued to hammer. “Yes.”

  Senator Clawson interrupted. “Knowing what you know now, would you have gone ahead with the assassination?” McGarvey had agonized over that question for a very long time. He could never forget the horrifed look on the woman’s face, knowing that she was about to die. It wasn’t until years later that he had learned that Christina Pinar had styled herself as a female Mengele. She had tortured many of the prisoners, and had even ordered the harvesting of their hair and gold fillings, the money going directly to her. Knowing that she was a monster just like her husband did not erase his memories, however. Nor did they ease his pain. He had murdered two defenseless people. He nodded.

  “Yes. General Pinar was a bad man. He would almost certainly have continued killing innocent people. The CIA thought that there was a real possiblity that he would take over the military government.” “Why were you fired?” Clawson asked. “Political expediency,” McGarvey answered without hesitation. “The CIA is an executive branch agency.

  The Senate was trying take control, as it has on several occasions since.” “Oversight ” Hammond blustered. “Yes, Senator, I agree that the CIA needs oversight. But responsible oversight.” He looked directly at Brenda Madden. “I have no doubt that I’ll read about my testimony in tomorrow’s Washington Post.”” There was an angry stir from the senators as well as from the audience. Hammond banged his gavel for order. “You’re not doing yourself much good here,” Senator Clawson said, not unkindly.

  “You’ll either recommend to confirm me or you won’t. But for the sake of the men and women working for me I want you to understand that you’re putting their lives at risk by criminally sloppy security measures. If you want answers, then understand that the information you’re looking for could cause the United States a great deal of damage if it becomes public.” “Like everything you’ve ever been involved with, the outcomes have always been the same,” Brenda Madden interjected. “Bodies stacked like cord-wood. Yet you have the gall to sit there and point a finger at us?” Hammond was again banging his gavel for order. “I have just one further question for Mr. McGarvey,”

  Brenda Madden said. Hammond stopped his gavel in mid swing and Brenda Madden turned back to McGarvey. Her voice was calm now, soft, even reasonable. “Do you know how many men, and probably some women, whom you have murdered in your career, Mr. McGarvey?” she asked. “Do you even care?” “I know the number,” McGarvey replied softly. It was etched on his soul. “And yes, I do care.” They were coming for him now. Back from the grave. From a past that he could not change. This time he could not stand up and face them because he didn’t know who they were, or from what direction they were coming.

  FOURTEEN

  “YOU’RE THE DCI. SOMEBODY’S ALWAYS AFTER THE DCI. IT’S WHY YOU HAVE BODYGUARDS AND RIDE AROUND IN AN ARMORED LIMO.”

  LANGLEY

  Early in the afternoon McGarvey and Paterson rode back to CIA headquarters. The hearing had dragged on for nearly five hours without letup and Mac was bone weary. “Reading the records and hearing about those kinds of things in person are two wholly different experiences,”

  Paterson said. “Living through them is even worse,” McGarvey replied.

  He managed a tired smile. “Still with me, Counselor? Still think that I’d make a good DCI?” Paterson nodded. “My friends call me Pat. If anything I know for sure now that you’ll make a damned fine DCI.” His lips compressed. “People like Senator Madden have their circles of friends. But they’re usually very isolated and they know it. Makes them bitter. Most Americans are reasonable people. That includes politicians.” McGarvey had to laugh. “You’re becoming more convinced, and I’m becoming
less convinced.”

  “Come on, Mac, you can’t believe that the direction they’ve taken will hold up in the full Senate. It’s primarily Hammond and Madden who want to dump you. The others are, at worst, neutral.” McGarvey pulled himself out of his downward slide. “You’re right, Pat.” He glanced out the window at the snow piled along the road up to the headquarters building. Already it was dirty; mixed with salt, oil, dust. The next snowfall would cover it, but a day later it would be grungy again. He turned back to Paterson. “Postpone tomorrow’s hearing until Monday. I need a couple of days off. Can you do that without creating a firestorm?” “Sure. I don’t blame you; we all could use a break.”

  “I’m taking Katy out of town for a long weekend.” He caught Yemm’s eye in the rearview mirror. “Good. Don’t even think about this place while you’re gone,” Paterson said. They went through security together at the executive entrance. Paterson headed off to his office, leaving McGarvey to ride up with Yemm. “Do you want me to have travel section work out something?” Yemm asked. “Yeah. Let’s go down to JefFHamil’s place.” Harml had been the deputy director of Operations during planning stages for the Bay of Pigs. He had set up a CIA-owned compound on St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands to train some of the top Cuban officers. In addition to the old sugar plantation great house with its long verandas, there were a half-dozen outbuildings, some of them barracks, that the National Park Service sometimes used for ranger training. Most of the island was national park land.

  McGarvey had been down there a couple of times with Roland Murphy, but Katy had never been. He expected that she would fall in love with the place, as he had. It was an idyllic tropical paradise. “When do we leave?” “I have to take care of a few things in the morning. Let’s say we leave at noon, and come back Sunday afternoon.” “Just you and Mrs. M.?” Yemm asked. “I’ll ask the kids if they want to tag along.”