Yet to Barnes, a Soviet illegal bent on bringing down the FBI, none of that mattered.
Withdrawal of the final Russian forces from Afghanistan left chaos in their wake. Grain production had declined 42 percent since hostilities began, with hunger rising in direct proportion. Afghan gas fields had been capped to avert sabotage, with postwar restoration hampered by internal strife and loss of historic trading relationships as the Soviet Union dissolved. Guerilla fighting between regional warlords continued, while the U.S. State Department and Langley's Near East Division squabbled over which strongmen to support. A new civil war was brewing, with the CIA's support divided among Gulbadin Hekmatyar, Ahmed Shah Massoud, and Osama bin Laden.
Pakistan, as usual, remained a fat fly in the ointment. Its Inter-Services Intelligence group financed Hekmatyar in a campaign to wipe out his rivals, including Massoud, with an eye toward toppling President Mohammad Najibullah's regime, but Hekmatyar's attempted coup failed in March. On the side, ISI plotters asked bin Laden to help them eliminate Benazir Bhutto, a rising political star who longed to be Pakistan's first female prime minister. Osama hadn't accomplished that goal yet, but Al-Qaeda was holding its own on the terrorist front. President Bush couldn't resist the lure of involvement, either, suspending U.S. military and financial aid to Pakistan under the 1985 Pressler Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act, requiring annual White House determination that Pakistan had no nuclear weapons. That naturally angered President Ghulam Ishaq, further straining relations between Islamabad and Washington.
And then, there was Kuwait. An oil-rich nation 6,880 square miles in area—slightly larger than Delaware—it bordered Iraq in the northeast corner of the Arabian Peninsula. In fact, Tehran claimed that Iraq had owned Kuwait before Britain imposed its "protectorate" in 1899, and had renewed those claims sporadically since Kuwait achieved independence in 1961. Now, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein accused Kuwait of tapping his nation's oilfields by means of "slant drilling," a claim which Emir Jaber Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah stoutly denied from Kuwait City. CIA reports had warned of an imminent invasion since May, but troops didn't cross the border until August 2nd, completing occupation within two short days, Saddam proclaiming Kuwait the nineteenth province of Iraq.
That made the Saudi royals nervous, and when Riyadh's lords of oil felt shaky you could feel their tremors all the way to Washington. President Bush—conquistador of Panama, still waging an illegal war in Nicaragua fueled by drug money—instantly initiated "Operation Desert Shield" to pacify the House of Saud and keep their product flowing to American gasoline pumps. UN Resolution 678, passed yesterday, called for Iraq to withdraw by January 15th, and word from Langley indicated Bush was spoiling for a fight, sick of being called a "wimp" after Reagan had seized mighty Grenada during his first term as president.
None of that fazed Barnes, but his KGB contact wanted every scrap of intel available from the Bureau and collaborating agencies. He likely had at least one mole inside the CIA, as well, and that was fine with Barnes.
He didn't give a damn about American prestige, beyond his private goal of bringing down the FBI.
FBI Headquarters: December 7, 1990
Pearl Harbor Day held personal significance for Agent Wyman Gantt. He hadn't been alive in 1941, but knew December 7th was the day his G-man grandfather sat down with his twin sons, advising one to join the Bureau, while the other would become a cloak-and-dagger warrior for the fledgling OSS. From that sit-down a dynasty of sorts was born, though Wyman saw it coming to an end before much longer, now that he and cousin Hardy both were childless bachelors on the downhill side of forty with no steady women in their lives.
But what the hell. They both had ample work before them in a world gone mad, and it was work best done alone.
Wyman had almost given up on any further action from the Unabomber, going on three years and ten months since his last device had wounded Gary Wright in Salt Lake City. Gantt supposed the suspect sketch published back then may have frightened the crackpot into hiding, but did that make any kind of sense? Couldn't a man who built bombs out of junk he had around the house, hiding his tracks effectively since May 1978, figure out a disguise—or at least get rid of his mustache and hoodie?
Screw him. There were kooks aplenty without one more psycho bomber running wild.
In March, Black Liberation Army founder Richard Moore, aka "Dhoruba bin Wahad," had appealed his 1973 prison sentence on grounds that newly declassified COINTELPRO documents proved prosecutors had illegally withheld exculpatory evidence at trial. It took Moore fifteen years to pry that information loose, Bureau headquarters fighting him every inch of the way when he filed suit under the Freedom of Information Act, but on March 15th Judge Peter McQuillan of the New York Supreme Court reversed the illegal conviction, freeing Moore without bail while Justice appealed.
Across country, in Oakland, a pipe bomb demolished the car occupied by Earth First! activists Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney on May 24th, wounding both of them. Bureau agents charged the victims with transporting illegal explosives, while Bari claimed right-wing extremists set the bomb to kill them and intimidate fellow environmentalists. Bari noted the swift arrival of G-men, suggesting they'd been "waiting around the corner with their fingers in their ears." Embarrassed, the Frisco field office referred to a vague anonymous phone call, warning that "some heavies" were driving a bomb south from Oakland to Santa Cruz, earmarked for some unknown target there. Alameda County's D.A. dropped the charge against Bari and Cherney in July, citing lack of evidence, and Bari—now disabled by her injuries—was suing the Bureau for civil rights violations. Meanwhile, Santa Rosa's Press Democrat newspaper received a convenient letter signed by "The Lord's Avenger," claiming credit for the blast. The Avenger's stated motive: Bari had offended him somehow during an anti-abortion protest at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Ukiah, seventeen months earlier. That lead was going nowhere fast, and Wyman personally thought the note had likely been ginned up by some G-man out west with too much time to spare.
June put Idaho survivalist Randy Weaver back in the ATF's sights, using last year's dubious shotgun sale as leverage to make Weaver a spy inside the Aryan Nations. When Randy refused, the ATF swore out an arrest warrant charging him with illegal firearms possession by "a bank robber with criminal convictions." A glance at Bureau files proved that was crap: Weaver's record was clean, and he wasn't suspected of any holdups. Finally, this month, a federal grand jury had indicted him for making and possessing—but not selling—sawed-off shotguns. All they needed now was evidence, which seemed to have a way of disappearing, and some means of taking Weaver into custody.
In Pennsylvania, condemned cop-killer Wesley Cook, now "Mumia Abu-Jamal," had lost his appeal to the Keystone State's Supreme Court last year, and that panel denied a rehearing on January 26th. Next, he took his case federal, but the U.S. Supreme Court had rejected Cook's petition for a writ of certiorari on October 1st. Barring executive clemency or revelation of new evidence, the ex-Black Panther was living on borrowed time.
Six days after that ruling, 1,200 miles south of Philadelphia, Miami's Mayor Xavier Suárez had honored cult leader Hulon Mitchell Jr. by proclaiming "Yahweh ben Yahweh Day" for Mitchell's alleged community service. One month later, on November 8th, FBI agents had arrested Mitchell and sixteen followers on twenty-five accounts of racketeering that included fourteen murders, two attempted murders, plus extortion and arson. Now Mayor Suárez had egg on his face, while the Bureau and Dade County cops claimed the bust solved a grisly series of "ear murders" targeting random white indigents, slain by elite "Death Angels" to please Mitchell, the severed ears kept to commemorate their achievements. Other charges related to firebombing of black homes in Delray Beach, beatings of cultists who failed to meet their collection quotas, and Mitchell's demands for sex from "both adult and minor followers." So far, no one had linked Miami's Death Angels with the 1970s "Zebra" murders in San Francisco, but Gantt guessed it was only a matter of time.
Finally, me
dia rumors had been circulating since September that indicted members of the May 19 Communist Organization's "Resistance Conspiracy" might plead guilty to spare some fringe players from prosecution. This morning, it had finally happened, Judge Harold Greene dismissing charges against three defendants while Linda Evans and Laura Whitehorn pled out to a series of bombings. Greene gave Evans thirty-five years for illegally buying guns, with five years concurrent for blowing up government property. Whitehorn got twenty years for bombing, while the three whose charges went away were all locked up from previous convictions.
Better luck with the next revolution, Gantt thought, if you can fight that battle from a walker or a wheelchair.
Miami: December 25, 1990
Christmas Day was always great for going to the movies. Sure, the kids were out of school, but most of them were busy playing with their new toys or were taken by their parents to see "family" films like this year's Home Alone. Teenagers mostly flocked to Die Hard 2 or even Kindergarten Cop, while lovers cuddled up to Ghost or Pretty Woman.
Not Dom Giordano.
He still went for gangster flics like Goodfellas which struck him as a close facsimile of life. He'd liked it better than The Godfather Part III, screening today for the first time, particularly when the characters were forced to read lines fawning over the director's real-life daughter, telling her how "beautiful" she was.
Beautiful my ass, Dom thought. Gimme a freakin' break and get back to the shooting.
Christ knew there had been plenty of that going on this year. The Miami Herald told him New York had set a new record for murders—2,245, or roughly six per day—and one of the victims was Rabbi Meir Kahane, loudmouthed boss of the violent Jewish Defense League, shot down by some Egyptian at Manhattan's Marriott East Side Hotel.
The Gotham mob scene had been relatively quiet by comparison, no killings on the news, just federal indictments of Gambino Family boss John Gotti, underboss "Sammy the Bull" Gravano, and consigliere Frankie Locasio. There were whispers of Gravano turning rat, but who in his right mind would swallow that, after the Bull had clipped something like twenty guys?
Cocaine still made it snow and kept inflating Dom's secret account in the Cayman Islands, but that scene was changing. Colombia still produced most of the product, but Mexicans were taking over the majority of distribution stateside, killing anyone who pissed them off on both sides of the border. It was like one of those old-time Wild West shows, with six cartels fighting each other, terrorizing rural villages, assassinating cops and anybody else who wouldn't go for bribes or look the other way.
Dom wasn't big on studying geography, but he had learned enough about the various cartels to see which ones might help his business grow. The oldest, based in Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, had been growing steadily since 1970 under Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, who liked being called El General. Next up in line, both formed ten years ago, were the Michoacán Family, run by Carlos Rosales Mendoza from La Piedad, and the Guadalajara Cartel, spreading out from Jalisco under El Padrino, Félix Gallardo. The Gulf Cartel, launched in 1984 by Juan García Ábrego in Matamoros, was headquartered a short stroll from Brownsville, Texas. 1988 had spawned the Sinaloa Cartel, founded by Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada at Culiacán. The new Tijuana Cartel had been organized by the Arellano Félix brothers, cousins of Félix Gallardo, after he was jailed last year.
So far, the various cartels were acting like the old bootlegging gangs of Dominic's childhood, but he figured the time would come when they got wise and settled down to putting profits over payback. In the meantime, he was happy to buy product from whoever offered the best price, hoping he would be filthy rich when it was time for him to pull the pin.
Already sixty-six, Dom wanted to retire and spend his so-called golden years where it was always warm—and safe from federal indictments in the States. Who knew, but what he might wind up in Mexico.
Right now, he only hoped it wouldn't be inside a shallow desert grave.
Chapter 8
Medellín: July 15, 1991
Some days, Hardy Gantt reflected, nothing was less welcome than reminders of his family and its chaotic past in service to America.
That certainly had been the case in February, when a car packed with 440 pounds of explosives detonated outside Medellín's Plaza de Toros La Macarena, just as 10,000 people ended a day of watching men in shiny suits wield swords to slaughter bulls. They'd cheered the bullring's bloodletting, but they were unprepared for sudden death among themselves—twenty-one killed outright, including eight policemen, sending 132 more to hospitals and leaving Carrera 63 strewn with shattered, burning vehicles and heaps of broken window glass.
Cops were presumed to be the targets of the Medellín Cartel's worst terrorist attack so far—as some 250 had been murdered in the past twelve months—but Hardy's personal reaction to the bombing was more visceral and personal. The blast occurred just two months shy of eight years since his father and sixty-two others had died in a suicide bomber's attack on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. That tragedy, in turn, had triggered Hardy's uncle Devon, a longtime FBI agent, to kill himself on the day twin brother Colby came home for a closed-casket funeral.
Bad luck or Fate? Who even cared? Denied a transfer stateside for the moment, Hardy shook it off and kept filing reports with Langley on the state of mayhem in Colombia.
Pablo Escobar's mob hadn't topped the car bombing yet, but they were waging nonstop war against the government in their attempt to frustrate extradition of their boss and his lieutenants. In January they'd kidnapped Diana Turbay—daughter of a former Colombian president, lately a popular TV journalist—held hostage to force government concessions. She was dead now, but the bullets had been fired by "rescuers" from the Colombian National Police, ironically handing Escobar a PR victory.
More recently, on April 30th, Pablo's sicarios had gunned down Enrique Low Murtra, an advocate of extradition as Minister of Justice in 1987-88, and later as a professor at the University of La Salle. Why they'd waited nearly three years after he left office was a mystery, but Gantt supposed it had something to do with Murtra's famous quote: "My voice may tremble, but not morality."
Now he was silent as the grave.
Elsewhere throughout the "Southern Cone" of the Americas, bloodshed was commonplace, much of it carried out with military and financial aide from Washington. President Bush had authorized $42.5 million in military aid to the Salvadoran army on January 16th, bringing America's not-so-secret war out of the closet, just days before "persons unknown" tossed U.S.-made grenades at the leftist Democratic Convergence offices in Usultán—coincidentally located two blocks from Sixth Infantry Brigade headquarters. In February death squad members torched the Diario Latino opposition newspaper and shot two Nationalist Democratic Union candidates for office, killing one with his pregnant wife. Despite such incidents, the March elections saw the ruling right-wing National Republican Alliance lose its majority in the Legislative Assembly.
Not that President Cristiani or his henchmen gave a damn. While UN negotiators tried to end the country's long civil war, neutral investigators recorded 70,000 murders nationwide, 60 percent presumed to be the work of government troops or pro-Cristiani death squads.
Things were much the same on Chile, where President Pinochet had resigned on schedule in March 1990 but remained in command of the nation's army. That meant business as usual for "Operation Silence," a campaign to whitewash crimes committed on the home front and abroad over the past eighteen years. In April, DINA assassin Arturo Sanhueza Ross fled Chile before he could be jailed for killing leftist spokesman Jecar Neghme in September 1989. September saw Pinochet hitman Carlos Herrera Jiménez evade arrest for murdering militant trade unionist Tucapel Jiménez in 1982. A month later, DINA agents smuggled chemist Eugenio Berríos to Uruguay, using a forged Argentinian passport, to spare him from testifying about the Orlando Letelier assassination.
Even so, the truth was leaking out via the National Commission for Truth and Reco
nciliation, established by plebiscite in 1988, consisting of three Pinochet partisans, three former exiles, and two "neutrals." The commission's report, published in February, pinpointed three major government centers for torture and summary execution. One was Santiago's Estadio Chile, a 6,500-seat sports arena built in 1949, converted to an open-air prison in '73. One of the site's many victims, folk singer Estadio Jara, died there only four days after Pinochet assumed command, naming his last song for the stadium.
A more peculiar torture center was the tall ship Esmerelda, launched in 1963 and ironically nicknamed "The White Lady," anchored off Valparaiso—Pinochet's birthplace—until 1980, where it had served as a floating dungeon and chamber of horrors. Its best-known victim was Michael Woodward, a Catholic priest from England who'd died in 1973 after ten days of torture, his corpse buried at some still undisclosed location.
The strangest site, in Gantt's opinion, was Colonia Dignidad—"Dignity Colony"—a fifty-three-square-mile enclave of Third Reich fugitives and their offspring, twenty-some miles southeast of Parral in Linares Province, on the north bank of the Perquilauquén River. Its latter-day führer, Paul Schäfer, was a West German fugitive from child molestation charges who staged the commune's annual "Miss Nazi" pageants, raved against Jews, and allowed DINA to carry out atrocities at will inside his compound, in keeping with the fascist principles of his disciples, while President Pinochet dismissed them as a clique of "harmless eccentrics." Now Schäfer faced renewed investigation, for collaboration with the junta and on further child-sex charges, but he still ruled his tiny fiefdom like a 1940s Gauleiter.
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