Why did Driffter bother bringing all that gold and stuff back with him? He could have made a million dollars writing fiction. Come to think of it, that’s exactly what he did. He must have offloaded the chopper at some point along the coast, then flown it out and ditched it, shooting it full of holes as it sank. His buddies followed him out with a speedboat, picked him up and whisked him back up the coast, maybe transferring him to that fishing boat for the final few miles to make it look authentic. So, if I were going to correct this homespun yarn, where would I begin? And where would I end up?
“I might argue with a few of his details, but he captured the general picture.”
“It’s a damn amazing story,” Sonarr reflected with wonderment. “Who’d have believed it?”
“One thing I heard while I was in Cambodia, that you might want to check out, was a pretty strong rumor some MIAs were spotted in a hidden mountain valley on the western edge of the Darlac Plateau, about sixty miles northeast of Kratie.”
“Officially, that’s impossible. We’ve never had any MIAs in Cambodia, because except for the one border incursion in 1970 we’ve never had any military operations there… unless they were POWs that the Viet Cong brought across the border, from Nam. Unofficially, I’ll put it into the hopper, but I’m afraid it’ll be a while before we can go in there looking for MIAs. Anything else?”
“Todd, the original mission you sent me into Phnom Penh for, the objective wasn’t really to rescue Driffter. You didn’t care about Driffter at all. You were more concerned that somebody was going to contact me. Come on, what was going on?”
“Jake, that operation was classified Top Secret / Need to Know. You don’t have a legitimate need to know, but you have a right to know. It’s over now, and we won, so I’ll tell you the whole story—well, most of it.
“It was part of a deep cover mole hunt operation. A defecting KGB agent had told the Company counter-intelligence chief, Jim Angleton, that a KGB agent had managed to burrow his way into a key job in the CIA. Like Philby, Burgess and those others the Brits had so much trouble with. One of those spy writers, John LeCarré, called them “moles”—very descriptive. Well, Angleton had been trying to root that mole out for years, with no success. That’s a real tricky problem, trapping a mole. It’s somebody highly placed in the organization, but you have no idea who it is. So how do you go about finding him, without him finding out what you’re doing?
“A couple years ago, Angleton thought he’d narrowed it down to four prime suspects. He then came up with a plan and brought in four case officers he knew he could trust to execute it. The idea was secretly to create four fictitious deep-cover super-agents, and leak one to each of those four suspects. Then watch and see if anything happens. If they aren’t moles, nothing will happen. But the one that is, his super-agent will get a rise out of the KGB.
“When Bill Colby took over the Company in 1973, one of his first moves was to can Angleton’s ass—nothing short of criminal. They should have strung Colby up for treason for that one, if you ask me. You’ll never find a more devoted patriot than James Jesus Angleton. That sort of killed the mole-catching scheme. The other three case officers let it drop, didn’t want any trouble with the new Director, goddamned office politicians. But I stuck with it, because I was convinced Angleton was on to something. Had to do it on my own, of course, with off-the-books payments and no paper trails and a little leverage here and there to move things along. Figured that with the size of the potential payoff, it was worth the risk.
“Well, you were the lucky guy, Jake. Sending you to Saigon was the make-or-break, and lo and behold, Emil Grotesqcu, one the KGB’s rising young stars, suddenly appeared as part of the Polish Mission, old Mickey Mouse. Could have been a coincidence. So I sent you down to Phnom Penh, then sweated blood. It took a lot longer than I’d expected, but he did follow you down there, and made contact. That confirmed it. So, congratulations, Jake, you helped us nail our mole.”
“How’d you know he was going to contact me in Phnom Penh?”
“We didn’t know what he’d do once he got there, but we figured he’d do something. That contact story was just to keep you on the string until something happened.”
“Then my assignment in Cambodia had nothing to do with Driffter at all? I was just a decoy for the KGB?”
“The assignment was Driffter, because I figured it was impossible. He’d disappeared without a trace, and we’d written him off a year ago. I figured there was no way that assignment could get you in any trouble while you waited in Phnom Penh for Grotesqcu to show up. We had to give you some excuse for being down there. That was the only reason for Driffter. I guess I sort of underestimated your abilities.”
“But then you left me high and dry.”
“Sorry about that. The situation fell apart too fast. You can’t imagine how bad I felt, leaving you there after the evac. But I knew Grotesqcu had left Saigon, and we had to have him arrive in Phonm Penh to confirm the connection. We had all the local assets in place to get you out of Phnom Penh, even after the evac, but then the damn Khmer Rouge chased everybody out of town. Totaled our network, just simply destroyed it. What we’d spent years putting together was out of business in 24 hours.”
“How bad you felt? What about how I felt? Why didn’t you tell me about some of this?”
“It’s what I call the Mushroom Theory of Management.” Sonarr leaned back in his chair, looking exquisitely satisfied with himself. “Keep ‘em in the dark and feed ‘em bullshit. It’s the only way to run this kind of operation. Supposing I’d told you the true story. Number one, if any of it got out, it’d wreck the whole operation, not to mention my career. Number two, knowing the actual point of your mission, you’d have acted unnaturally and drawn attention to yourself. You might even have started looking for Grotesqcu, just so you could get it over with and go home. By not telling you, we preserved the authenticity of the whole charade.”
“Just how far back does this charade go?” I asked, dreading the answer I suspected he’d give.
“Quite a few years,” he replied. “Something this delicate and this deep takes time, time, time. Only five people in the Company knew anything about it, Angleton and us four case officers. He first got us together in 1970. We each were to find a candidate for super-agent and build his legend from scratch. I did a lot of searching, and your name kept popping out. You were the right age, and your LRRP record fit our specs—intelligence specialty, tops in your training cohort, expert in field operations, decorated for gallantry in combat—the exact kind of guy we’d want to recruit for covert ops. So I took control and groomed you into the sort of agent that would cause the KGB to sit up, take notice and give you Very Special Treatment.”
“You mean OCS and all the rest.”
“Yep. The time you spent teaching those field ops classes at Company headquarters in Langley went into your résumé as advanced counter-intelligence training. Remember how you ate lunch only in the South Cafeteria? Nobody told you that was strictly for covert ops guys. That inspection tour you took was presented as organizing a global counter-intelligence network. Remember all those goofy assignments I gave you in Saigon? The KGB thought you were taking over the Saigon network as part of your global operation. The DRAGONFLY caper was painted to look like a special assignment that only Jake Fonko, superspy, could handle. Palling around with Sarge didn’t hurt either. He was heavy-duty around Saigon. You and I know he’s okay, but a lot of people didn’t.”
“What happened to all those people in Saigon they thought I was contacting?”
“Got a little rough for some, but most of them deserved it. We were starting to wind things down, and I had a few scores to settle. You have any idea how hard it is to recruit agents for our kind of work, Jake? We had a bunch of crooks and con-artists on our payroll, charged us a fortune for day-old newspaper stories they passed off as intelligence, plus a few guys I suspected had been do
ubled. And then I had you contact a few of the other side’s network, too—give their controllers something to think about,” he added with a chuckle. “Our real agents, we managed to evac most of them.”
“Jack Philco was part of all this, too? Who is he?”
“No such person,” Sonarr said. “But you see, we hadn’t yet leaked your résumé to our mole suspect. The KGB would be sure to backcheck you pretty thoroughly, so we had to have a believable history behind you, to fake out their movement analysts. As you flew into those intelligence bases, somebody carrying Jack Philco’s passport came through immigration. That way, there’d be a paper trail so the KGB could verify that you’d been where your résumé said you’d been. And they’d eventually connect your face in their photographs with Philco’s comings and goings. There’d be no way to know that there was really no connection.” He chuckled. “I understand they even had people checking out your old movies and TV programs. They really fell for that legend I built, didn’t they just? Their guys even tried to take you out a couple times in Saigon.”
“Take me out?”
“Oh, not to worry. I had assets covering you like stink on shit. They stopped them every time. Added to your legend—why would we keep you so well-preserved, if you weren’t what we said?”
“But now I’m back to sergeant, and my entire career as an officer has been zapped off the records. Is that necessary?”
“Afraid so, Jake,” said Sonarr. “We, uh, bent a few rules conducting this mole hunt operation. That was one reason why Colby canned Angleton—he just didn’t think it was kosher. Personally, I think if you want to make an egg, you’ve got to break a few omelets. But, all things considered, it’s best if there’s nothing in the records that might get somebody in trouble. Having you officially MIA keeps things clean, from our point of view.”
“But I took that training, and I passed all those tests, and I taught those courses, and I did all that work. Goddammit, I’m an officer in the U.S. Army!”
“Well, you did, but you didn’t. If we hadn’t tapped you for this operation, you wouldn’t have gone into OCS. So you’d still be Sergeant Fonko, in any event.”
“Jesus, Todd, this just isn’t fair!”
“Some things can’t be helped, Jake. I don’t like this either, but running covert ops, sometimes you wind up doing things you’re not too proud of afterwards. Hey, lighten up. The CIA is not ungrateful for what you did. In fact, quite the opposite. Don’t underestimate the importance of that mission. A mole in the CIA means FUBAR operations, disinformation, deflection away from sensitive enemy activities, foreign assets getting murdered. If we nailed the guy, you helped us save a lot of lives. And bringing Driffter back out of there was nothing short of miraculous, icing on the cake.
“Let me tell you what we have in mind, in compensation for services rendered far beyond the call of duty. First, you’re leaving the army—no, don’t look at me like that, the war’s over, they’ve been reducing force since 1971, you’re not the only guy who got RIF’d. You’re leaving at rank E-7, a one grade promotion retroactive to the day you went MIA, with honorable discharge and your DSC. You’ll get full back pay, plus full combat and other allowances, from August of 1970. Don’t forget, you’ve already been paid at officer grade for that entire period. Furthermore, I wouldn’t be surprised if you find a typographical error on the check you are issued. If you don’t say anything about it, I bet nobody else will either.
“In addition, I am pleased to offer you a job with the Company. We need men like you, Jake, tough and resourceful guys that we can count on to go out and do the impossible.”
Guys like Clyde Driffter, before he went over the edge? What was it he said about situations that don’t bring out the best in people? “Todd, a lot just landed on top of me here. It’s going to take a little time to sort through it. I appreciate what the CIA is doing for me, I really do; but up until ten minutes ago, I’d been counting on a career as an army officer. Let me think things through before I give you an answer.”
“I quite understand, Jake,” Sonarr said earnestly. “What you learned just now would be pretty disorientating for anybody. Take all the time you need. Of course, I don’t need to point out that your CIA assignment, and what I’ve told you about it, are Top Secret, and always will be, and the Company takes security on matters like this deadly seriously. You’ll have to sort things out on your own. But give my offer careful consideration. You could do a lot for the CIA, and the CIA could do a lot for you. It’s a good outfit. I’ve never regretted signing on. Well, let’s get you out of here. The last thing I want is eager-beaver army intelligence officers asking you a lot of questions about the past five years. What could you tell them? You’d have to make up a big story, fast. Try to tell them the truth, and they’d hustle you straight to a psychiatric ward. Boy, wouldn’t they?”
He was right about that—one more reason for me to keep quiet. He took me back to my quarters, and I assembled my gear. “We’ve got a room booked for you in the Oriental Hotel,” he told me as we walked out toward the parking lot. “Open tab. Enjoy Bangkok for a few days.”
“One thing I wonder if you could do for me?” I asked. “I brought a woman out of Cambodia with me—no, not like that—she saved my ass more than once. I promised her I’d get her to the States. They’ve put her in a refugee camp. Can you spring her?”
“They told me about her. Let’s go over right now and see what we can do.”
“Oh, one other question. Did you ever own a Lincoln Continental?”
“Can’t say that I…oh, yeah, in Saigon. Bastards stole it. Why do you ask?”
“Just interested in cars, that’s all.”
As we approached the white Chevrolet, a lanky fellow, crisply-dressed with close-cropped hair, stepped out to meet us. He gave me an enthusiastic smile and put out his hand. “Welcome back, Mr. Fonko,” he exclaimed. “I was so relieved to hear you’d made it. Man, the story Driffter told. It’s an honor to shake your hand. I have a feeling this may be the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” he added with a wink.
He looked familiar. No, it couldn’t be him. But it was—the Phnom Penh Bogart fan. “Jake, meet your guardian angel,” said Sonarr. “Or rather, meet him again. He was your case officer in Phonm Penh, part of our network. Call him Kevin. He’s attached to the Bangkok station now, my aide while I’m in town. We had to sneak him out of Phnom Penh right after he talked to you. Couldn’t very well take you out with him, might have given away the game.”
“Hello, Kevin,” I said. “Sorry for not recognizing you right away, but you looked a little different two months ago.” Funny, I could have sworn he went by Ken in Phnom Penh. But then, in Phnom Penh I was Jack Philco; and Todd Sonarr was now Major Smith. Was he really Todd Sonarr? I wondered. Maybe that’s the answer to the population problem: get everybody sorted out, and we might find there are actually only half as many as we’d thought.
“Yeah, well, I really hated that cover. You try living in that climate with a beard and long hair. I’m glad that assignment’s behind me now.”
Kevin took the wheel and drove us out of town to the refugee camp. Sonarr talked to the director, and ten minutes later he personally ushered Soh Soon into the office. She’d survived the night in good shape and looked none the worse for wear. “So glad see you, Jake,” she exclaimed. “So many sad people here. Stories they tell, Khmer Rouge even worse than we thought.”
Sonarr had moved beside Soh Soon and put a hand gently on her elbow. “Excuse me, Jake, but I’d like to talk with your lady-friend here for a moment. Make yourselves at home.” He guided her into a conference room off to the side. A secretary brought me and Kevin coffee, and we sat and swapped Cambodia stories. Interesting kid—he’d been in a few hairy scrapes himself.
After about an hour Sonarr escorted Soh Soon out, and motioned me in. “I’ve seen some wild women in my time, but nothing to match that little ga
l,” he said after we’d seated ourselves, his tone a blend of awe and disbelief. “So, what do you propose we do about her?”
“Like I told you, I’d promised to get her to the States. She wants to go to college. Can the CIA help us out there?”
“She doesn’t need any support or anything?” he asked.
“I doubt it. Her family’s rich. I’m sure her father’s provided well for her. All she needs is papers. Entry visa, maybe a passport if she doesn’t have one. I don’t know what all’s required in a case like this.”
“Do you think she’d be a reliable person?” Sonarr asked. “I mean, could a man count on her to carry out an assignment?”
“What kind of assignment?”
“Oh, I don’t know—writing reports, talking to people, hard to say what might come up.”
The Jake Fonko Series: Books 1 - 3 Page 21