The Passenger

by Chris Petit

  ‘I expect you’re asking what you’re doing here and who I am.’

  ‘You’re Hoover.’

  ‘I’m your fairy godmother. You were dead in the water.’

  ‘And afterwards?’

  ‘I’m sorry about that. I had to be sure. A man like you, who is what he says he is, is hard to read. Straightforward confuses in our business. But it can get you a long way. I’ve been watching you since you were in Wales. Valerie told me you’d figured out Philby, which was smart. I also understand you’ve been communing with the dead, which I would normally regard as superstitious nonsense, but in the case of Jim Angleton I am prepared to make an exception. It’s the damnedest thing.’

  He smiled, sceptically.

  ‘I’ve seen one of your men before. In Nazir’s house.’

  ‘He was there for me.’

  ‘How do I know you don’t work for Nazir?’

  ‘I’m probably one of the few in all this who didn’t work with Nazir. The man you know as Sheehan. Quinn. Churton. Tranter. Even Kim Philby worked with Nazir.’

  ‘Philby?’

  ‘Philby chaired the Soviet committee that advocated the production of a regulated, government-controlled poppy crop in the Bekaa Valley, as a way of Syria paying off its Soviet loans. Philby was the author of the Frankfurt Connection, in spirit if not in practice.’

  Collard shook his head.

  ‘Does it really all tie up?’

  ‘There are always bits missing. You were unlucky enough to find yourself in a huge, three-dimensional puzzle and managed to put enough pieces in place to see some of it, but not the rest. You didn’t know if it was one puzzle or several.

  ‘You need to understand that Angleton was a fundamentalist, a Cold Warrior, undeviating and endlessly devious in his commitment to the cause. Angleton is also the metaphor for understanding that world.’

  ‘Is Angleton the answer to what happened to that plane?’

  ‘In surrogate terms, if not its execution.’

  ‘Like Philby with the Frankfurt Connection.’

  Hoover gave a wry smile. ‘You’re getting the hang of it. One might ask whether the bomb was a straightforward act of terror, or a diversion. Angleton would ask whether it was both, and other things besides. I can hear him say, in that circumlocutory way of his, “What are the repercussions? Is it a straightforward act of terror or is it a diversion, gentlemen, calculated to take the eye off something else, in which case, what is that something, and what is the something behind that?” ’

  There was no doubt Churton and Tranter had taken advantage of the crash to do some tidying.

  ‘Angleton taught the Israelis to run an operation from both sides, but we know that in this case the thing got jumped by someone else. That was the risk with Angleton – you had to watch the whole thing didn’t blow up in your face.’

  ‘Is my sitting here to do with Angleton?’

  ‘Ask yourself what hasn’t got to do with Angleton. He runs through this whole thing like a name in a stick of rock.’

  ‘Why am I here? I thought I was dead.’

  ‘You were pretty easy to follow. You left a credit-card trail, amongst other things. We lost you for a while after Sheehan came by and sent your graph right up, but picked you up again when you came back to the house on Sunday.’

  ‘Was I that important?’

  ‘You worked out Wales, which nobody else had, and you led Sheehan to it. I was interested to know where else you might lead. So we tucked in behind. When you resurfaced on Sunday in that fancy Jaguar we were curious and nosy enough to follow. I was keen to meet a man who believed he had seen Jim Angleton seventeen months after he officially died. It even crossed my mind that the old snake had faked his death for the sake of some last crazy hip-pocket operation.’

  Hoover removed an envelope from the desk drawer and tipped out several photographs which he arranged on the desk facing Collard, who recognized the first three as the ones he had been carrying, distressed but still intact after their recent drowning.

  There was Angleton standing on the banks of the Usk with Greene and Philby; the desert photograph of Sandy Beech; and the Polaroid of Sheehan’s daughter.

  To these Hoover added four more.

  A blurry black-and-white snapshot of a man in the jungle, dressed like a native in a sarong, and a full head of wild hair that made him nearly unrecognizable.

  ‘Taken in Laos in 1968. The man you know as Sheehan.’

  Next was a young man in American uniform sitting in a Jeep, taken in Rome soon after the Second World War.

  ‘Angleton methodology is: always ask, however big something is, what else happened? In this case, who else was on the plane?’

  Collard saw an unsympathetic, sharp-featured man with a pointed nose, unaware the photograph was being taken.

  ‘His name was Abe Stavinsky. Stavinsky was what Angleton called the shadow – not the main reason the plane got blown up, but his presence on the flight was no more coincidence than Barry’s.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘He was an old hunter of war criminals.’

  Next was a portrait of a mild man of around fifty, wearing glasses that made him appear academic. Unruly hair gave him a boyish look.

  ‘Brennan Jarrald.’

  Jarrald looked dull. Collard couldn’t see where he belonged and was about to move on when Hoover said, ‘I grant you, he doesn’t look the sort to authorize the destruction of an airliner.’

  Collard looked up at Hoover, who held his gaze.

  ‘Jarrald was responsible for the deaths of Barry and Stavinsky, and the incidental destruction of all those other lives.’

  They were all shadows, Collard thought. Until that moment he had been dealing only with shadows – Churton, Round, Beech, Quinn, Sheehan, Tranter, Nazir and all the rest. Phantom narratives that disguised and distracted from the tight nugget at the centre. Collard was sure these separate stories all revolved around the centrifugal force of the plot but were incidental cover-ups of the kind Churton and Tranter were desperate to put in place.

  ‘What does Jarrald do?’

  ‘He makes Presidents,’ Hoover said quietly and gestured at the last photograph, of former President of the United States, Ronald Reagan, and his successor, former Vice-President George H. W. Bush.

  The occasion was an informal outdoors party. Reagan grinned amiably. Bush gave the impression of a man failing to relax. They were talking to a third man, elderly and wearing huge spectacles. Compared to the photogenic Reagan and Bush, he looked unfit, clumsy and grey.

  ‘The man who looks like Mr Magoo, that’s Bill Casey, Head of CIA for most of Reagan’s administration, from 1981 to 1987.’

  Collard looked at the lined-up photographs and Hoover said, ‘Every picture tells a story.’

  Snapshots

  The first photograph was a surprise to Angleton (and Hoover, going through Collard’s belongings): of him standing by the Usk. Not out of the question that Greene and Philby played an unwitting role in the fate of the crashed airplane. Not impossible. Taker of the photograph: Hoover; not admitted to Collard, perhaps from embarrassment. It was a terrible picture.

  The photograph of Sandy Beech; date and occasion: December 1979, the Raising of the Siege of Mecca after the seizing of the Grand Mosque by fundamentalists. Stun guns and chemical weapons. Firing squads to dispatch militant survivors.

  The other man in the picture: CIA agent named Al Haines; prior to Mecca, he and Beech were undercover on deniable ops in Angola, with Quinn. Casey called them his Three Musketeers.

  Taker of the Mecca photograph: Quinn. Quinn’s refusal to have his taken in return was wise, as Haines’s careless souvenir became his death warrant, removed from his Beirut apartment on the day of his kidnap by terrorists in March 1984. Haines was as good as dead once the photo was out of the bag. While the Iranians used his kidnap as leverage for arms, his captors strung out their negotiations and tortured him because too many relatives of those he had sh
ot in Mecca knew.

  Haines got killed in one of the nastiest and cheapest ways Angleton had ever heard of. They shoved a balloon down his throat and inflated it with an oxygen cylinder.

  The Iranians got their arms. Casey’s sweated deal was Haines’s confession stayed off the table (all four hundred fucking pages of his history in deniable black operations) in exchange for the sacrifice of the only penetrative ring of local agents the Americans had, a team that had been patiently built up by one Colonel Charles ‘Chuck’ Barry. The betrayal of his agents earned Bill Casey the sworn enmity of Barry, who as a result was a recruit to Angleton’s cause.

  The Polaroid. Angleton was annoyed for not working out the girl. He had ignored an important lesson of his method – look for the personal. That was how these big things worked.

  As for the girl’s Daddy: how many passports; how many histories? A man rarely surprised. A notable exception, his first confrontation with Collard: Sheehan thought him a spy snooping for the Brits. Certainly not a civilian who should have been on the plane, dead, and the father of the boy.

  Taker of the Laos photo: Hoover, again not admitted to Collard. Sheehan performed cross-border assassinations for Hoover and worked among the Hmong hill tribes, protecting their opium crop in exchange for their anti-communism. In the 1970s, Sheehan did Angola for George Bush, then CIA chief, and ran Quinn, Beech and Haines. After that, Australia, deep into a money-laundry operation that was a legacy of Vietnam, rinsing in Hong Kong.

  As for Abe Stavinsky, the less said the better. Angleton didn’t want to be reminded.

  Jarrald.

  Casey.

  In the end they were the only two names that counted. And Angleton’s.

  The Last Cold Warriors

  Collard neither trusted nor mistrusted Hoover. He now assessed people only on the information they had and Hoover knew more or less everything. He went back to the beginning, to Angleton in Rome at the end of the war. He was with Angleton in Wales in 1986. He worked with Sheehan. He worked with Barry. He worked with Beech. He understood the tight intricacy of intrigue and counter-intrigue surrounding events in the Lebanon in March 1984 and March 1986, which led to Angleton setting up a secret operation called Ghost whose botched outcome resulted in Barry’s death and the destruction of all those innocent lives. He understood how that tragedy came down to a rift in ideology between an old order and a new one, between Angleton and Casey, though both Angleton and Bill Casey were dead by the time of the bomb. He understood that Angleton would have blamed Casey, and Angleton was to blame for Casey’s methods. He understood the connections that linked fascist activity in wartime Zagreb to the highest echelons of the American Republican Party and why Abe Stavinsky had to die. He understood why Angleton used Mafia muscle to control the Italian docks after the war. He understood how intelligence and criminal activity were synonymous, both operating beyond the laws that governed societies. He understood how men like Nazir ended up with immunity at the same time as being in everyday danger of their lives. He understood how the Israeli sting operation worked. He understood how the bomb plot crystallized around the activities of a sanctioned black economy, specifically the sale of arms to embargoed countries; the temptation of the enormous sums of money to be made from selling drugs; the overlaps between the operating worlds of men like Nazir and Sheehan and Churton. He understood the mechanisms of those worlds, and how Casey’s (Angleton-inspired) unofficial policy depended on friendly satellite countries with the most experience in secret activities and with less stringent arms-export laws. Casey’s need was satisfied by Margaret Thatcher, who repaid the United States for its covert assistance in the Falklands War in her special relationship with Ronald Reagan, the rewards of which filtered down to those old friends and partners in crime, Sandy Beech and Nazir, who worked either end of the London–Tehran arms channel, organized by Nigel Churton of the Foreign Office and MI6, for Bill Casey of the CIA who ran the secret operation through the Vice-President’s office in the White House.

  Collard came to see that the world Hoover showed him had nothing and everything to do with his son.

  Hoover understood how betrayal lay at the centre of everything. He understood that there never was such a thing as full understanding; it was always relative. He said he hadn’t a clue what Philby was doing in Wales or what the outcome of that was. Hoover understood Angleton’s belief in the metaphysical dimension.

  Hoover initiated Collard into the wilderness of mirrors.

  Hoover said, ‘I was in Budapest in 1944 for Allen Dulles, who ran the American intelligence desk in Switzerland. Dulles was in secret negotiations with the SS about ending the war and turning round to fight the Soviets. Dulles and the SS used Jewish couriers who became fashionable in elite circles, the better to save German necks as the war drew to a close. Dulles and Angleton worked a plot with the SS to smuggle huge quantities of the Third Reich’s assets – what later came under the generic title of Nazi gold – out of Germany, through Austria, down to Rome where the equally anti-communist Vatican bank dispersed it to places like Argentina. The same route was used to smuggle out Nazis and Fascists. As these activities were treasonable, the Jews could dictate their own terms and targeted Angleton, who ran the sharp end of the operation in Rome.’

  Hoover retained a very clear memory of Angleton’s introduction to Dulles’s couriers on a clear late-winter day in Trieste when it had been unexpectedly warm enough to eat outside, on a restaurant terrace overlooking a partly destroyed old rice factory, near the sports stadium. Their contact had gone on to become senior Israeli intelligence. His credentials at that initial meeting included a first-class meal of black-market goods. Angleton the trencherman ate greedily, hands circling between his plate, glass topped up and his cigarette smouldering in an ashtray. On being taken over the road afterwards to the rice factory and told it had been a German extermination centre for the Resistance and Jews, and shown the blood on the walls, Angleton spewed his lunch and brazenly asserted the lobster had disagreed with him.

  Jewish terms were straightforward. In exchange for their silence, they would take a percentage of German assets smuggled by Angleton, which they called their reparation fee for the Zionist settlement, and access to the Vatican escape line, which from then on, as well as sending Nazis to Argentina, would smuggle Jews to Palestine, in anticipation of the founding of the homeland.

  Seen one way, what Hoover told Collard was irrelevant. Seen another, it was crucial. It marked the start of an uneasy relationship between Angleton and the Israelis, which explained why, years later, an agent of the Jordanian secret service, heavily under American influence, was loaned to an Israeli sting operation to pose as a Palestinian bomb-maker.

  On the night of that first meeting with the Jews, Hoover and Angleton (his appetite restored) sat down for another feast, this time for Croatian fascists and their priests, a dubious bunch also inherited from Dulles. Angleton learned fast and proved as promiscuous as his mentor in the cultivation of strange bedfellows.

  As a direct result of this meeting, some weeks later a five-year-old boy had walked out of Croatia in the company of a Franciscan priest, two among the millions of displaced people making their way west ahead of the Soviets. They ended up in a refugee camp in Italy and from there transferred to the diplomatic immunity of the Croatian delegation for the Vatican. Hoover knew of this first hand because he had driven the priest and the boy from the refugee camp to San Girolamo.

  Hoover said, ‘That boy became Brennan Jarrald.’

  By 1947 the Vatican ‘Ratline’, as it became known, was the single largest smuggling route for Nazi war criminals, including Adolf Eichmann, and Angleton had his work cut out keeping it from being discovered by the rival US Army’s Counterintelligence Corps, which worked in the same building in Rome as Angleton and Hoover.

  ‘Stavinsky was a pushy CIC officer. It turned out he had uncovered the whole operation, except for identifying the Americans involved. He didn’t know Angleton was running it and
because Angleton was counter-intelligence Stavinsky went to him for help.’

  ‘How did you feel about sheltering war criminals?’

  ‘That’s not how we saw it. It’s the old saying: my enemy’s enemy is my friend. The whole order was changing. We were fighting the next war.’

  ‘What happened to Stavinsky?’

  ‘Angleton framed him as one of the Americans assisting the fascists. It was pure Jim. After the war Stavinsky became obsessed with Angleton, trying to prove his fascist connections. He ran a small research foundation investigating war crimes but most of his time was taken up with fund-raising and budget problems. He never realized it was Jim financing him all along, the better to keep an eye on him.’

  ‘What did Stavinsky have on Jarrald that was so dangerous?’

  ‘Nothing on Jarrald. It was the priest he had the dirt on.’

  ‘The priest?’

  ‘Yes. Angleton got him out of Rome to the United States where he and a junior intelligence officer called Bill Casey became lifelong friends. The priest abandoned his vows, changed his name to Jarrald, officially adopted the boy and reinvented himself as a secular man. He was successful in business thanks to contacts old and new, became rich through investment and wealthier still by marriage, a staunch Republican, a major fund-raiser for the party and, like Bill Casey, a pillar of the Roman Catholic Church. Jarrald Sr. is as respectable as it is possible to get, a fine example of the great American success story.’

  ‘And Stavinsky threatened to undo all that?’

  ‘Yes. He became as embittered and resentful as the man who had destroyed him. Angleton’s life also turned on a single betrayal by Kim Philby – like Stavinsky, he spent the rest of his life trying to get even. They led lives that stank of loneliness and solitary endeavour. My guess is that’s what Wales was about, and Angleton failed, as Stavinsky did. In Stavinsky’s case we might still be able to redress the balance.’