Special Ops
Page 30
I am not going to scream, and I am not going to cry. I am going to go out there, put my nightie on, get in my bed, and watch television until I hear from Jack.
And there is no reason to modestly wrap a towel around myself. I’m all alone. Oh, God, am I all alone!
She went into her bedroom and then started for Jack’s office to get the goddamned nightgown. Halfway through her new living room, she heard a strange thumping noise and looked at the sliding glass door to the balcony.
Jack was standing there, in his flight suit, holding a bottle of champagne, his appreciation of her stark nudity written all over his face.
How did he know how to find the apartment? How the hell did he get up to the balcony? Answer: He’s a Green Beret. They can do anything.
She finally managed to operate the door’s lock, and slid it open. “Boy, talk about timing!” Jack said. “Shall we do it right here on the balcony, or do we have a bed?”
She threw herself into his arms.
After a moment, he asked, “Hey, baby. What’s with the tears?”
“I’m happy,” Marjorie said. “That’s all. Welcome home, baby.”
[ THREE ]
SECRET
Central Intelligence Agency Langley, Virginia
FROM : Assistant Director For Administration
FROM: 7 January 1965 1415 GMT
SUBJECT : Guevara, Ernesto (Memorandum #32.)
TO: Mr. Sanford T. Felter
Counselor To The President
Room 637, The Executive Office Building
Washington, D.C.
By Courier
In compliance with Presidential Memorandum to The Director, Subject: “Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara,” dated 14 December 1964, the following information is furnished:
1. (Reliability Scale Five) (From CIA Conraky, Guinea) SUBJECT met at 1945 GMT 6 January 1965 with Guinean President Sékou TOURÉ at the presidential palace. Also present was Senghor a LABE, President of Senegal.
2. (Reliability Scale Three) (From CIA sources) Both TOURÉ and a LABE expressed sympathy for African liberation movements, but neither requested any kind of assistance from SUBJECT to achieve liberation, nor offered any Guinean or Senegalese help, even though SUBJECT repeatedly suggested Cubans could safely offer aid covertly.
Howard W. O’Connor
HOWARD W. O’CONNOR
SECRET
[ FOUR ]
Room 637, The Executive Office Building
Washington, D.C.
1505 10 January 1965
Room 637 actually was a small suite. There was an outer office, with room for two desks, facing each other, with room to pass between them; two filing cabinets against one wall, and a battered leather couch against the other. Next to the couch there was a clothes tree and a door leading to a small washroom. Directly across from the door to the corridor was a door leading to the inner office. It was smaller than the outer office, and held a desk pushed up against the wall, two straight-backed chairs, and a clothes tree.
Chief Warrant Officer James L. Finton sat at one of the desks in the outer office, and Miss Mary Margaret Dunne at the other.
Five minutes before one of the telephones—the one connected to the White House Secure telephone switchboard—had rung, and when she answered it, a male voice had demanded, without any other preliminaries, “Is Felter there?”
“Yes, Mr. President,” Mary Margaret had replied.
The line had gone dead.
Mary Margaret had immediately informed the colonel of the call and she had been keeping one eye on the telephone ever since, expecting a second call, ordering the colonel to immediately report to the Oval Office, or the Presidential Apartments, or the private entrance to the White House, or the lawn, where the helicopters landed.
The door to 637 opened, and the President of the United States walked in.
“Afternoon,” he said to Mary Margaret.
“Wait here,” he said to the two Secret Service agents who followed him into the office.
“Stand at ease, son,” he said to CWO Finton, who had popped to rigid attention behind his desk.
“There?” he asked of Mary Margaret, pointing to the washroom door.
“There, Mr. President,” Mary Margaret said, pointing to the door to the colonel’s office.
The President walked to the door and opened it without knocking.
The three men in the room, two of them in uniform, stood up.
“Good afternoon, Mr. President,” Felter said. “I didn’t know you were coming here, sir.”
“I needed a breath of fresh air,” Johnson said, “and I realized I had never seen your office. So here I am.”
“Yes, sir.”
“This is a pretty shitty office,” Johnson said. “You want me to get you a better one?”
“This serves my needs very well, sir. But thank you.”
Johnson turned to look at the two men in uniform.
“Well,” the President said, offering his hand to one of them. “Look who’s here! And looking a hell of a lot better than the last time I saw you. How are you, Major?”
“Very well, thank you, sir,” Father Lunsford said.
“Who are you?” the President inquired of the other man in uniform.
“My name is Lowell, Mr. President,” Craig Lowell said.
“I’ve been hearing about you,” he said. “You don’t look like an investment banker.”
“I try not to, Mr. President,” Lowell replied.
“They told me about that,” the President said, and then stabbed at Lowell’s chest with his finger. “But not about that. I guess the Distinguished Service Cross doesn’t fit in with the picture somebody was—just a couple of minutes ago—trying to paint of you as a Wall Street investment banker playing at being a soldier.”
Lowell didn’t respond directly.
“Permission to withdraw, Mr. President?” he asked.
“I’ll tell you when you can, Colonel,” Lyndon Johnson said sharply.
“Yes, sir.”
“Your uniform looks like you slept in it, Colonel,” Johnson said.
“Yes, sir, I did,” Lowell said.
“You just flew up here from Buenos Aires?”
“Yes, sir.”
Johnson turned to Lunsford.
“You were with him, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I heard that Lowell was down there with another guy; they didn’t have your name. What the hell were you doing down there?”
Lunsford looked uncomfortable, as if he was phrasing his reply.
“You can tell me,” Johnson said sarcastically. “I’m the President. ”
“Sir, we were seeking the cooperation of the Argentine government with regard to Che Guevara,” Lunsford said.
“The last I heard, Colonel Felter,” Johnson said, looking at him, “we have an ambassador down there who’s paid to deal with the Argentine government.”
“I’m afraid Major Lunsford misspoke, Mr. President,” Felter said. “Colonel Lowell and Major Lunsford met, unofficially, with General Pistarini.”
"Who’s he?”
“Commander-in-chief of the Argentine Army, sir.”
“Doesn’t the chief of the Army down there take his orders from the President?”
“In a manner of speaking, Mr. President, President Illia of Argentina serves at the pleasure of General Pistarini,” Felter said.
“He’s another Perón, in other words?”
“No, sir,” Felter said. “From what I know of him, and from what Colonel Lowell and Major Lunsford have been telling me about him, he is not at all like Juan Perón.”
“In what way different?” Johnson asked.
“For one thing, if he considers a coup to remove President Illia necessary in the best interests of Argentina, he will order the coup with great personal reluctance, and appoint someone else—probably General Ongania—to the presidency. Perón, on the other hand, would like to be president for the sake of Juan Perón.�
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Johnson turned to Lowell.
“You talked to this guy—Pistarini, you said?—and he told you this?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you believed him?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why?”
“It was in the wee hours of the morning, Mr. President, and we’d all had a good deal to drink.”
“You were drinking with this Pistarini at three, four o’clock in the morning?” Johnson parroted wonderingly. He chuckled. “You got along with him pretty good, huh?”
“Yes, sir,” Lowell said, and then blurted, “It was all I could do to keep him from giving me a medal.”
“Why would he want to do that?” Johnson asked.
“That was never made clear, sir,” Lowell said. “But at three o’clock in the morning, General Pistarini seemed to think that decorating both Major Lunsford and myself was a splendid idea.”
Johnson shook his head and smiled.
“You know, every time I go south of Brownsville, I see all these Latin American generals marching around, covered from eyeball to belly button with medals, and I know most—maybe none—of them never heard a shot fired in anger.”
“I’ve noticed, sir,” Lowell said.
“Why didn’t you take it?” Johnson asked.
“I was under orders to maintain as low a profile as possible, sir.”
“Your low profile didn’t escape the attention of the secretary of state, Colonel. He thinks you two were pissing on his grass.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, sir.”
“Before you and he hit the bottle, how was this Pistarini planning on dealing with Señor Guevara?”
“He was not to be allowed to enter Argentina alive, Mr. President, ” Lowell said. “And General Pistarini told me that should Dr. Guevara meet an accident anywhere, not only would he not be unhappy, but also that the accident would be investigated by the Argentine intelligence service—it’s called SIDE—who would find, and announce, that they had found absolutely nothing suspicious about it.”
“And after you’d had a couple of belts?”
“He and the man who runs SIDE became convinced that your feeling that Guevara should be kept alive and allowed to fall on his face was in everybody’s best interests.”
“Can we do that, Lunsford?” the President asked. “Make the sonofabitch fall on his face in the Congo?”
“Yes, sir. I think we can. I’m building a pretty capable team at Fort Bragg.”
“Did Colonel Felter make it clear to you that nobody can find out we’re involved?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You think—all three of you—that this Pistarini character can be trusted?”
“Yes, sir, I do,” Lunsford said, and then Felter and Lowell chimed in simultaneously with the same reply.
“Okay. That’s it,” Johnson said. “If the secretary of state is still waiting outside the Oval Office, and I know goddamned well he will be, I’ll tell him what I told the Joint Chiefs Chairman yesterday. ”
He looked at Felter.
“Which is, Mr. President?” Felter asked.
“That I know all about what you’re doing for me, that they’re to give you anything you ask for, and that I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Thank you, sir,” Felter said.
“One more thing,” Johnson said, turning to Lowell and Lunsford. “I don’t want to have to pin another medal on either of you. Or send one to your next of kin. Clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
He shook their hands, then marched out of the small office.
X
[ ONE ]
Room 1322
The Fountainbleau Hotel
Miami Beach, Florida
1605 9 January 1965
J. Richard Leonard of the Gresham Investment Corporation, a somewhat portly forty-five-year-old, came out of the shower with a towel around his middle.
He sat down on the double bed and reached for the telephone.
There was a knock at the door.
“Room service.”
Leonard went to the door, admitted a bellman carrying a champagne cooler holding four bottles of Bass Ale, signed the tab, and handed it to the bellman.
“That was quick, thank you,” he said.
He had ordered the ale before going into the shower, thinking it would take at least half an hour for it to be delivered.
“Anything else I can get for you, sir?” the bellman asked suggestively.
A lone forty-five-year-old businessman in a nice suite often wanted more in Miami Beach than sand and sun.
“No, thank you,” Leonard said. “I like to catch my females on the hoof.”
"Well, if you change your mind, ask for Richard,” the bellman said, and left.
Leonard found a bottle opener in the bathroom, opened a bottle of the ale, and went back to the bed and picked up the telephone again. He gave the operator a number in northern Virginia.
“Twenty,” a female voice answered.
“Dick Leonard, sweetheart, is the boss available?”
“I’ll see.”
Howard W. O’Connor came on the line a moment later.
“What’s up, Dick?”
“I spoke with Captain Portet this afternoon,” Leonard said. “Which was more difficult than I thought it would be. There’s a place down here called Ocean Reef—”
“I know it. When Nixon was Vice President, he used to go there with his buddy Bebe Rebozo. Very nice.”
“Also hard to get into,” Leonard said. “Anyway, Portet’s got a house there. I think he’s renting it to give his family a vacation.”
“Well, that blows your ‘he’s probably broke’ theory, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, I guess it does. Anyway, after heavily bribing the security guard to let me in, I went to his house this morning, just as he was leaving. So I followed him. He went to the airport in Miami and was nosing around, asking about used airplanes. I struck up a conversation with him in a coffee shop, and made a preliminary pitch, told him Gresham was thinking of buying into a small airline, or starting one up, and that I’d gotten his name because of what he’s been doing in the Congo.”
“And he was interested?”
“A little,” Leonard said. “I didn’t get the enthusiasm I sort of expected. He told me to make him a proposition, and he’d think it over.”
“Well, make him one, and let me know what happens. We have to get this thing moving, Dick.”
“I’m going to hang around here a couple of days more, snoop around a little more. I don’t want to seem too eager.”
“Just don’t sit on the dime, Dick,” Howard W. O’Connor said, and hung up.
[ TWO ]
“Bonne Visage” (aka House A)
24 Golf Club Lane
The Ocean Reef Club
Key Largo, Florida
1820 10 January 1965
Captain Jean-Philippe Portet had just gone to the poolside wet bar and made himself a drink when the door chimes went off.
“There’s the door,” he called, in case Madam Portet hadn’t heard it.
“Get it,” Hanni called back from their bedroom. “I’m not dressed.”
“Give whoever it is a thrill.”
“Mein Gott!”
Captain Portet walked through the house to the front door and opened it.
Lieutenant Colonel Craig W. Lowell was standing there, in uniform. His enormous ancient Packard was in the drive.
God, he’s got more medals than Patton.
“Excuse me for just showing up like this, JP,” Lowell said, smiling. “I am about my master’s work, and there is no rest for the weary.”
“Oddly enough, I was just thinking about you,” Portet said. “We need to talk.”
“That’s my line,” Lowell said. “Look JP, I put this uniform on in Buenos Aires. I need a shower badly. What I’d like to do is buy you dinner, if that would be possible. But before that, could you come with me to my place while
I change clothes? What I have to say won’t take long, but it’s the sort of thing I’d rather Hanni and the girl didn’t hear.”
Why the hell not? What I have to say won’t take long, either.
He pushed the TALK and MASTER SUITE buttons on the intercom panel mounted to the exterior wall by the door.
“Hanni, baby,” he announced. “I’m going over to Colonel Lowell’s place for a couple of minutes. We’ll be back in a little while. And then we’re going to dinner.”
As he was closing the door, Hanni pushed the TALK and FRONT DOOR buttons on the intercom panel mounted on the wall and inquired, incredulously, “What did you say?”
Captain Portet did not respond, but instead walked to the Packard and got in.
I am almost certainly going to piss Lowell—probably his whole family—off, and/or cut off my own nose to spite my face— Hanni really loves that house—but I know myself well enough to know that if I don’t get this straight between us, it will get much worse. It’s better to settle it right here and now.
“I came down in a Learjet,” Lowell said. “A little less than two hours from wheels up.”
“I thought you said you just came from Argentina,” Portet replied.
“Buenos Aires, Miami; Miami, Washington; Washington, here. I am worn out and need a drink and shower badly,” Lowell said. “And in that order, I have just decided.”
“What were you doing in Argentina?” Portet asked, his curiosity overwhelming his intention to be polite but distant.
“I hope I succeeded in talking the Argentines out of blowing Che Guevara away,” Lowell said.
“I don’t think I understand that.”
“I shouldn’t have told you that much,” Lowell said. “Can you forget I said that?”
“Certainly,” Portet said.
“There’s an operation going on,” Lowell said. “If you’re willing to come to Washington, Colonel Felter will explain it all to you.”
“Why would he do that?”
“We need your help,” Lowell said. “That’s why I’m here. To ask for it.”
Lowell pulled up in front of 12 Surf Point Drive (aka House C). The lights were on, and as they got out of the car, the door was opened by a white-jacketed young man.