by Jack Freeman
Operation DOUBLEPAYBACK
Jack Freeman
Copyright © K. J. Gilhooly 2011
Contents
Meet up
The test
Another job
Something big
Safe house
Isola
Return
LA arrival
Ali
Interview
From the past
Cuba ’58
Cuban agenda Mk 2
Billy the Kid
Rest, re-creation
Overload
Operation Max
Playing away
Mohsan and the end of the world
Chapter 1. Meet up
On a wet autumn afternoon in 1961, it was nearly closing time at Max Blue’s “London Lights Book Store” in Judd Street, Bloomsbury, when a crew-cut man wearing a beige trench-coat came through the shop door. Max was sitting behind the wooden counter and as the bell above the door jangled, he looked up from the latest issue of Partisan Review and immediately thought “Company.” Next, he realised that there was something very familiar about the man. Yeah, it was Jack Johnson, last seen nearly a year ago in DC after the last Cuba debacle. As he came in to the empty store, Johnson did not look directly at Max at first, going over to the magazine rack, which he browsed with every sign of great interest. Johnson glanced over towards Max and thought, Max has really gone beat, or was it beatnik or hipster now? He always was someone who didn’t quite fit in the Company, he took things too hard and then he ended up quitting. Jack Johnson came up close to the counter and said quietly, with a distinct Boston accent, “Would you have a copy of this?” As he spoke, he pushed a small piece of paper with a few scribbled words on it over the counter top.
Max read the note. It said “Meet me in 30 mins. Marlborough Arms.”
Max said “Ok. We don’t have it in stock right now. But we can get it in a week if you want to order.”
“Ok”, Johnson replied softly, “I guess I’ll try elsewhere and come back and order it if I don’t find it soon.”
“That’s great. I hope we can help with this.”
Johnson nodded, smiled thinly and left after a brief look around him, as if for any hidden listeners. There were none visible.
Through a scuffed door marked “Staff only”, an athletic dark-skinned woman emerged and moved quickly over to Max. She cupped her hand to his ear and whispered “Who was that straight guy? Those clothes! I checked him out through the spy-hole. We don’t get many real straight types in here. My first thought was “Cop”! But what’s an American cop doing here?”
“It’s ok, Azar, babe. There’s no need to whisper. The shop is empty. Wait a minute and I’ll just close up now.”
While pulling down the tattered blinds, Max began to give an explanation; but because he feared that a truckload of pain was on its way, he decided that any explanation had best be a partial one.
“I don’t really know what this is about yet. He’s an old CIA man, a Company guy, name of Jack Johnson. I know him from way back. He joined the year before me in ’50. Like me he’s from a service family. Unlike me, he’s very steady, reliable and will never quit the Company. They’ll have to drag him off the premises when the day comes he hits retirement age. Then he’ll no doubt be back as a free lance consultant or some such. We’ve been together on quite a few ops in the Western Hemisphere, mostly in the Caribbean. I’m guessing he’s been sent to deliver some shit news, or maybe push a shit job on to me. I am only guessing, but I very much suspect that this’ll have an Iran connection. It’s no secret that your old compadres in the Movement are acting up again. They’ve been churning out dire threats against Western imperialism and its lackeys and stooges and so on, even more than as per usual. There’ve been those bombs hitting US airline offices in Europe and that’s probably just for starters. Anyway, this guy Johnson wants to meet me in about twenty minutes from now at the Marlborough, so I best go and see what it’s all about, don’t you think?.”
“Of course! I guess I never did believe it would be “happy ever after” once we got out of Iran. I thought it would be Savak or maybe my old comrades in the struggle that would bring us trouble. But it looks like I got that one wrong. It’s your old pals bringing us grief this time. I think I’ll go upstairs and practice my martial arts to get ready for whatever is coming, while you try to find out what this is all about. I’m sure it’s not good whatever it is.”
With mutual nods, Max and Azar parted. Max went out the shop door, and locked it behind him. He suddenly thought that the glass door seemed too flimsy and maybe it was time to get steel shutters. He turned up his bomber jacket collar and studied the sky briefly. Thick clouds were filling the sky from the West and rain looked imminent again. Just something one had to expect in a damp island, he thought. As he began walking away from the store, Azar went up the steep stairs to their small flat above the shop and started to work through her karate and judo routines.
While he walked down Judd Street with its succession of small specialist shops, bars and cafes towards the Marlborough Arms pub, Max thought about how much he had enjoyed the recent months of peace as a bookseller, specialising in beat generation literature and related material, after many years of danger, covert war, betrayal and hate-filled enemies. Now, a new call to action looked to be coming in a smoky London pub. Guys like Jack Johnson did not stop by without a good reason. Maybe after the new business, whatever it was, there would be peace again, at least for a while. Peace and war were like yin and yang, left and right, up and down, each opposite made the other meaningful and just had to be accepted.
Max knew the Marlborough Arms well and had become a regular customer. Being close to University College London, Birkbeck College, the British Museum Library and many other scholarly institutes, it was the local students’ and academics’ favoured drinking place. It was already early evening, a light rain was starting to fall and it was growing dark as he walked quickly through the dense crowds of home-bound commuters. Soon he reached the Marlborough Arms, which had intricately decorated frosted windows and traditional dark wood décor. The bar displayed elaborately carved features worthy of eighteenth century master carvers but which had actually been churned out by a Victorian factory. Inside, the air was blue-grey with smoke from the cheap thin Players No. 6 cigarettes and French Gauloises favoured by the British academic classes. Then Max picked up the once familiar rich smell of Chesterfields’ Virginia tobacco and homed in on the only crew-cut man in the bar.
“Hi.”, said Max “Hey, Johnson, you sure stand out like the proverbial sore thumb in this place. How can you stand all the long hairs sniggering at you behind their hands?”
“I got to get used to it, nowadays. If they’re all so damn nonconformist, how come they all look just the same? Anyway, you do fit right in here, Max Blue. That’s for sure! Long hair, black rollneck, moustache, the torn black denim. You’re out of place in London town…you should be in Greenwich Village or ‘Frisco or somewhere the beatniks flock together. If your old boss in counter-intel, the blessed James Jesus Angelton, could see you now, he’d be the one freakin’ out. Anyway, before we get down to boring business, what are you drinking? and don’t tell me you’ve quit the sauce for the weed. I know you and I’ve seen your files, the SR-ROLLBACK and the Cuba files for operations PLUTO and ZAPATA, and you have history in the booze department, a long history, believe me.”
“Ok, ok..I wonder what the dusty files do say on that question? Let’s see if they’re right. I’ll take a double of whatever the file says I like.”
After what seemed to Max a worryingly long delay, Johnson returned with a tray laden with eight double Jack Daniels, two pints of London Pride bitter,
a basket of scampi and a half pint glass filled with already melting ice cubes.
“Hey, the files are right on one thing anyway. JD is my number one drinking buddy, from way back. And eight doubles is more than generous. Must be pretty bad, whatever it is you’ve come all this way to see me about.”
“It is bad. Real bad. But before we start, the eight ain’t all for you…I need a couple or maybe three. Sorry about the delay, there was the usual trouble here with getting ice, and on top of that, at first they made out they’d never even heard of JD. After I literally spelled the name out, there was a lot of head scratching and tooth sucking until the manager showed up and fished out an ancient bottle from somewhere. I thought we might as well have the whole bottle, as its on expenses. So there you are. Plus, I felt peckish and this weird scampi stuff is all they have and I thought beer was best with them, warm beer naturally. Cheers, as the natives say.”
“Cheers”
Max raised his glass of Jack Daniels and took a careful sip, savoured it slowly before swallowing a mouthful of the pleasantly burning whiskey and exhaled, “Mmmm. That’s good stuff all right. Now, are you goin’ to tell me what the hell this little bottle party is all about?”
Following a quick look around, Jack Johnson pulled up closer to the table and spoke in a low voice.
“Max, old buddy, it’s like this. We need you to look into something that’s come up and you can be sure that we think it’s important or we wouldn’t bother you. You know, of course, that we can make things tough for you and that Iranian woman, sorry, wife, of yours, given your, what we might call, “chequered history”. The Brits very graciously let you stay here, playing at being a bookseller and don’t look too much into your beatnik activities, only because we ask them nice…and promise to help them now and then, when they get into a spot of bother in what’s left of their old colonies or with their home grown troublemakers, Reds, IRA holdouts, even Scotch and Welsh nationalists and such like.
But regarding our interest in your good self, the thing is, your wife’s old buddies in the Workers’ and Peasants’ Revolutionary Party of Iran, known to you and me as the RPI, have been getting bothersome again, after Savak managed to lose half of them due to that jail break from Komite Moshtarak prison in Tehran – you know - the one that you had a hand in. Personally, I wouldn’t have let you off with that. After all, whether you like him and his crew or not, the Shah is our guy, on our side in the great struggle against the Sovs. Savak are keeping our guy in charge over there, while on the other hand, the RPI are basically commies and so, ultimately, they’re on the side of the Sovs, our number one enemy, “The Threat” as Angleton calls’em.
Basically, Blue, you helped the other side, The Threat. In my book, that is treason. A hard word, but that’s what it was and is. Still, higher echelons thought different about you and Mrs Blue. In their far sighted way, our bosses decided to keep you in play rather than slam you both up, in a not so nice place, indefinitely, or bump you off. They thought you and Mrs Blue could come in handy one fine day. And that day has now come. So, anyway, we’re hopeful you will agree, to be happy warriors in the Free World’s cause once more.
Getting down to it, we are 100% sure that the RPI are up to something big, we don’t know what yet, but we are sure it will be outside Iran. After the last crackdown by Savak and the jail break, a lot of them fled Iran and set up cells in Europe. We have good intel that a heist of 10 million US dollars from the Banque Nationale de France in Paris last week was down to the RPI cell in Paris. Shows complete lack of gratitude for the French giving them asylum, doesn’t it? But that’s how it is with these guys. No gratitude whatsoever. It’s like the old story of the frog giving the scorpion a ride across a wide river. Half way over the scorpion gives the frog a fatal sting, the frog sinks and the scorpion drowns. Why? Because that’s what scorpions do. Anyway, now the French are really pissed with the RPI. They thought the RPI would only attack US interests and that was totally fine and ok with them. They don’t like us Americaines too much. Guess we embarrassed them by saving their asses from the Krauts in the last war and they sure hate being reminded of that. But anyway, they do feel strongly that attacking French savings deposits isn’t ok, even if attacking US interests is ok. Interestingly, there’s no sign of the Paris RPI cell now. Their old safe houses are dead and deserted. Where they’ve gone we don’t know. But these RPI types are serious guys and we don’t think they will be blowing the dough on girls, boys, gambling, booze or drugs…none of which they object to, as it happens, being godless commies, not good Iranian Muslim folks. The money will most likely go into some major headline grabbing attack on the US or on other friendly interests.
Now, here’s where you come in, Max. There is a goddam RPI cell right here in old London town. They are smart for sure and we haven’t been able to bug them effectively, despite trying plenty. You’ll probably not be surprised that we don’t want the Brits in on this one either. The Brits’ve been pretty unreliable lately. They’re totally riddled with commie sleepers and moles, just like our friend, J. J. Angleton, has always said, from way back. He had their number ok and you can be sure he’s on the money about the Limeys being generally unreliable. Just this year, we’ve had the case of the Krogers and Lonsdale. Come to think of it, the Krogers had a similar front to you. They ran an antiquarian book shop on the Strand.”
“Yeah, I knew them, although my shop is at the other end of the spectrum. We cover the latest stuff, contemporary, revolutionary…”
“Ok, Ok, we know the kind of stuff you peddle, but anyway, we did check you out and no suspicious links to the Krogers showed up, you’ll be glad to hear. Anyway, the Krogers were really American commies, actual names, Cohen, and they ran things from the distant suburb of Ruislip out in West London. The Brits let me have a look see round their bungalow. Stuffed with trade ware – radio transmitters, miniature cameras, torches and cig lighters with extra compartments and plenty naval docs passed on by a couple of Limey creeps in the Admiralty. Anyway, the Cohens and their boss, Lonsdale, who was really KGB man, Kolon Molodi, are now tucked up at Her Majesty’s pleasure, till they’re sprung or a deal is done.
Plus, what’s even worse, there was the double agent George Blake who sold out about 40 Brit assets in East Germany to the KGB. All shot in the back of the head. Brits wanted to hush it all up, give the creep immunity for spilling all he could about his activities, contacts and so on. Uncle Sam said, no, and the Brits went along. So Blake’s on a forty two year stretch in Wormwood Scrubs.
It so happens there’s still more about to come out very soon, featuring a blackmailed queer in the Admiralty. As you can see, we can’t trust the Brits an inch these days. If our thinking on this RPI cell gets back to the Sovs via some Brit mole, it’ll then get back to the RPI and then they’ll be out of here pronto and we’ll lose the scent. So, all we want you to do, is somehow get the trust of the London RPI cell, find out what’s in the works, what are they plotting now….oh, yeah, and then stop it, if you can.”
Max swallowed the third JD in one slug and lit up a Chesterfield. He replied:
“Whoa! That’s a big job ok. Can’t a regular staffer take this on?”
Johnson gave Max a quizzical look.
“Not really, old buddy, old friend. The regular staffers are all completely tied up with the other big threats that we’re monitoring. Come on, you just got to read the papers to know that Castro’s up to plenty mischief since he definitely went commie, and he’s busy not just in his own backyard. He takes up a lot of our time. On top of which, there’s stuff going on down ‘Nam way that needs constant staffing and monitoring. That situation is going to hell fast. Plus, right now, the Gulf States look fragile, with Nasser eager to grab as much as he can of their oil, which, let’s face it, is effectively our oil, and he is desperate to whack Israel once and for all while he’s at it. Then, he’ll be the big man in the Middle East and there’ll be Sov bases all over that region. And, of course, the Russian and Chinese com
mies are stirring shit all over the goddamn world, as always. But, I digress. To get back to the point, look Max, we’ve picked you, because we think you can do this, you owe us this and frankly, you are not really in a position to turn it down.
Your history will pre-dispose the RPI to give you some benefit of the doubt, at least. You can easily come across as a renegade CIA man, persecuted for crossing the line and helping anti-Shah dissidents who were being held and tortured by Savak goons in the notorious Komite Moshtarak prison in old Tehran. You were supposed to be using your Peace Corps cover to find out about dissident movements and pass intel to us and our friends in Savak. But no, you get the hots for a cute little commie chick, Azar, whom you meet in the line of business and when she is scooped up in a Savak crackdown, you just have to go break her out of Komite Moshtarak jail and flee over in this direction. As we have already been over, very far sighted guys in DC decided to let that pass, square your residency here with the Brits, and even give you an allowance for Christ’s sake, so you can play at beatnik book seller and generally goof around with booze, weed and Zen mystic shit. Well, now, I gotta tell you, its pay back time.
Oh, and here’s another reason, that you can maybe use to get Azar’s full cooperation. We know she might not be too keen on helping us counter her old compadres’ plans. But, it so happens we are holding her little brother, Mohsan, in a not too nice place that only we know about. For all practical purposes, he has now disappeared off the face of the planet earth; he is outside any jurisdiction and we can hold him for as long as we like and do what the hell we like to him. Before you sound off about his rights and all that crap, he was rounded up just last week in DC on an RPI mission. We’ve really got to clamp down on student visas! but Iran’s still our great loyal ally and friend, so its hard to stop them coming in…anyway, seems he and two other guys got in on phony student visas and were going for a revenge attack on our mutual friend and esteemed ex-Company colleague, Kermit Roosevelt, for his role in removing our long time enemy, Mossadegh, and re-installing our good friend, Reza Pahlavi, as Shah just a few short years ago. The other two RPI jerks who were with Mohsan in DC, stupidly put up a fight and didn’t survive. Azar’s brother was smarter, dropped his weapon and went hands up right away. Although he is maybe a little battered and bruised, he is ok for now and he will be ok, as long as Azar cooperates. Otherwise, who knows what might happen when some of our very determined guys decide he’s just got to talk?”