by James Bruno
— Monetary inducements will be offered clandestinely to Karadzic, Mlavic, et al., to resign, with additional, ongoing support offered to those who agree to relocate outside of ex-Yugoslavia. CIA to administer.
— As a contingency, in the event that the new Bosnian government proves to be non-viable, certain resettled CHASM assets will be repatriated and assisted in assuming positions of authority as intelligence assets of the USG. These repatriated assets would pursue assigned USG policy objectives aimed at ensuring a stable government non-hostile to U.S. interests;
— In order to expand U.S. influence with Serbia, USG cooperation with that country’s security, intelligence and military forces shall be established on a clandestine basis to include training and provision of equipment. By no means is the Bosnian government to know of this relationship.
The passwords that Ferret had so hurriedly provided to Thompson yielded from the otherwise impenetrable NSC computer databank a veritable motherlode of information on CHASM and related black programs which was accessible to but a handful of high-level officials. Information on which Thompson had been completely blindsided. And he was not happy about it.
As usual, the call caught Lisa at a bad time. Haley had been steadily reducing her responsibilities. But her resultant workload had become anything but lighter. Haley took her off the hot political issues and moved her into Science and Technology. The new portfolio was unsexy and dense, requiring many hours for reading in. Instead of attending meetings chaired by the President, instead of performing telephonic triage with calls from the nation’s media stars, Lisa now sat in on somnolent conferences of dry, third-tier technocrats who droned on for hours about “marine infrastructure redevelopment” and “enhancing localized participation in rural capital improvement projects.” Maybe once a week she would get a call from a cub reporter at Scientific American. Her career was taking a sharp turn, and she suspected why.
Thompson’s voice did not reflect his usual self-confidence.
“Lisa. I need to see…um, can we…you free for…for coffee?”
“Uh, sure, I guess. How about tomorrow at—”
“Like right now?”
Lisa detected that Thompson was struggling to maintain a normal, even tone to his voice. “I’m supposed to sit in on a teleconference of the Interagency S&T Working Group, but the more I get involved in these things, the more it feels like S&M. Downstairs in the cafeteria?”
“Uh, no. No. Meet me at the Seventeenth Street exit in five minutes.” He hung up.
Thompson was uncharacteristically silent during the fifteen-minute walk to the Old Post Office, now a trendy arcade of boutiques and food stalls. They each ordered a cappuccino, Lisa taking hers decaffeinated.
Lisa paid close attention to Thompson’s face. The dark circles and drawn expression told her that something indeed was bothering him. He suspiciously studied the crowds of schmoozing yuppies, gold-bricking office workers, pressured attorneys and aimless vagrants. He sipped his coffee absent-mindedly.
“Hel-l-o?” Lisa called as she leaned forward with penetrating eyes to try to get her colleague’s attention.
Thompson stirred as if caught by surprise. A faint grin glided across his face. “Oh. Sorry. Daydreaming. I guess. Sugar?” He offered her a couple of packets.
“No thanks. I’m trying to become unwired. No caffeine. No sugar. No booze. I’m eating a lot of fruit. Trying to get at least six hours of sleep every night.”
“Found religion, or something?” Thompson said with a half-hearted stab at humor.
“No. Just trying to re-find a life. I’ve been among the ranks of Washington’s Undead for too long. You’re aware that I’ve been consigned to the coal cellar of issues.”
“Who’d you piss off?”
“Don Juan Tulliver.”
“Shit. What happened?”
“Oh. He just wanted me to take a position which, shall we say, had nothing to do with our nation’s foreign policy.”
Thompson looked at her gravely. “You’re kidding.”
“You’re so naive, Buckwheat. Do you actually think that all the young women on the NSC staff are here as part of an affirmative action recruitment program?”
“File a grievance, for crying out loud.”
“Get real, Buckwheat. These guys are pros at manipulation. They’d simply lump me in the illustrious company of Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones. Just another Bimbo Eruption on the part of another flaky camp follower. I’m already burned out to the max. I couldn’t handle the added pressures, the prying, the pain.”
“So, you’re content to waste yourself on bugs, drugs and slugs?”
“Of course not. I just need to regain my bearings. Find something I like to do. And then move on. Trouble is, Haley isn’t making it any easier. He keeps piling on the bugs, drugs and slugs. I think he’s doing it on purpose to keep me distracted, preoccupied. What I can’t figure out, however, is why.”
“Because you’re a threat. That’s why.”
“Huh?” Lisa looked at Thompson uncomprehending.
“It takes one to know one. From one Threat to another, I advise you to be careful.”
Lisa shook her head. “Buckwheat, I don’t follow.”
Thompson rotated his head slowly, searching the crowds in a paranoid fashion. He then focused again on Lisa. He leaned forward to within inches of her face.
“Listen to me, Lisa. There are things going on you wouldn’t believe,” Thompson whispered. “Bad things. Very bad things. I’ve been used. You’ve been used. Unwittingly.”
“Bad Things. Like what?” Lisa insisted.
Thompson became agitated. “Like murder! Now just shut up and listen!” His unkempt hair fell over his forehead.
Lisa jerked back as if just ducking a bullet.
Thompson again studied the masses. He focused on a bum sitting three tables away who kept looking in their direction. Then to a Greek at a souvlaki stand who was leaning back with his arms crossed. A Brooks Brothers-clad gentleman nursing a Dr. Pepper had his black-leather attaché case pointed suspiciously at them.
“C’mon.” Thompson shot up, grabbed Lisa’s hand and yanked her toward the exit.
Out onto Pennsylvania Avenue, Lisa stopped in her tracks, and folded her arms across her chest. “What the hell is going on, Buckwheat?!” she demanded.
Thompson looked around almost frantically. A Metro bus pulled up to the street curb. He leaped to the open door and signaled Lisa to follow. “C’mon. Come on!” Lisa followed.
As the bus pulled away, Thompson looked out the window. He untensed and eased into the seat. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”
“Wrong. I know it.” Lisa’s face indicated that she was not amused.
“I had to be sure that they aren’t onto us.”
“Who?” Lisa asked dubiously.
“Haley’s men.”
Lisa gave Thompson a sidelong look. “Buckwheat. Your partner. What’s his name?”
“Huh? Uh, Gordon. Why?”
“How is he?”
“He’s dying.”
“You’re under a lot of stress. I can see it—”
“Lisa, be still and listen!”
Lisa obligingly fell silent.
“Have you heard of ‘CHASM’? ‘Operation CHASM’?”
“No.”
“’PAPERCLIP’?”
“No.”
“Otto Ambros? Wernher von Braun?”
“Von Braun, sure.”
“Father of the U.S. space program, right? Also father of the V-2 rocket used to blow up thousands of British civilians. Ambros, director of I.G. Farben. He decided that Zyklon B was the gas of choice to kill six million Jews. He was found guilty of mass murder and slavery at Nuremberg. Six years later he’s carrying out chemical weapons experiments on seven thousand GI’s at Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland. Just like at Dachau. Why? How?”
Thompson had Lisa’s full, wide-eyed attention. She shrugged.
“At least sixteen hun
dred Nazi scientists and their families were resettled in the U.S. after World War II. Under PAPERCLIP.
“Project National Interest. Project 63. Heard of them?”
Lisa shook her head.
“The CIA and the Pentagon used them to slip more war criminals into the United States to work for universities and defense contractors.
“The Ninth Proviso? The CIA Act of 1949?”
Again, Lisa shook her head.
“Loopholes to allow the Pentagon and the CIA to bring in Nazis, communist turncoats, revanchist killers from the Balkans, sordid, sadistic monsters of every stripe. CIA alien agents whose covers were blown, mad pseudo-scientists, intelligence assets, Fascist murderers who also happened to be anti-Soviet.”
Two fit young men entered the bus and seated themselves behind Thompson and Lisa. Thompson fell silent. He grabbed Lisa by the arm, marched to the front of the bus, obtained two transfers from the driver. They got off at the next stop and boarded another bus.
“Come 1973. Bam!” Thompson clapped his hands.
Lisa jerked back.
“Watergate blows the whole stinking mess wide open. Congress is appalled and reacts swiftly. The programs are ended. Twenty-eight years after they began. Can you believe that?”
“Incredible.”
“Well, get this. It didn’t end. The good folks at DoD and the CIA — with the White House’s blessings, simply resurrect the Monster Witness Protection Program in a new form. Hence, Uncle Sam’s new Rosemary’s baby: Operation CHASM. But this time, they shift the operations and budget over to State. They bury it all in the most innocuous bureau at State — refugee affairs. So, while the Congressional oversight committees and the Washington Post scrutinize Defense and the intel agencies with a fine-toothed comb year-after-year looking for nefarious, hidden activities, CHASM goes unnoticed. Only now we have new clients. Having sifted through all the best Nazis and fellow travelers, they start tapping Latin American death squad commanders, druggie informants, Cambodian Himmlers, African mass murderers, Russian psycho-torturers, East German Stasi agents and, yes, the most effective practitioners of genocide from the ex-Yugoslavia.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“But, why—”
“Never mind that for now. We haven’t got enough time. This is what I’ve been doing for the past six years.”
Lisa looked at him searchingly.
Thompson turned his face to the window. “I don’t know,” he said. “You know how it is. You come to Washington all fired up. Got to make your mark. Become a big shot before you’re thirty. The secrets. The clearances. The arcane, insider rituals of ‘National Security.’ Proximity to power. The prestige. You sell a piece of yourself every day in this town trying to grab the brass ring.”
Lisa touched his arm. “So. Why now?”
Thompson turned to her. His eyes were sad and scared. He swallowed hard. “Because…because I didn’t know the full extent of what was going on until yesterday. Ferret told me.”
Lisa blanched. “The Ferret?”
“Yes. By phone. Of course, he’s crazy, but I’m convinced that it was CHASM that drove him over the edge. He coordinated the Yugoslav program. His key agent was a PAPERCLIP graduate, a former SS man now named Glassman.
“People are killed, Lisa. The criminals and psychotics they bring over here kill…kill your next door neighbors, vacationers, children. These people are pros. Most know how to get away with it. The serial killings of those college girls in Texas since last year? A Guatemalan colonel is responsible. But the police don’t know it. CHASM shields them even as it tries to track them down and murder them. We, I mean the White House, kill the killers who get out of control. No embarrassments to rock the ship of state, you see?”
It was too much for Lisa to digest mentally. She rubbed the sides of her head as if she had a throbbing headache. Her eyes turned from side to side as she sought frantically to piece together the entire picture of what Thompson was describing. Her mind raced back through the months, examining her own role in the Administration.
“Me. How do I fit into all this? How?!”
Thompson looked at her gravely, silently.
“How! I need to know!”
“Lisa. You were the smokescreen. Haley fed you the substance. You turned it into pretty smoke and blew it into the collective eyes of Congress and the media.”
The impact of his statement hit Lisa in the head like a steel I-beam. Now it all came together.
“I’ve…I’ve been the Josef Goebbels of…of an administration of murdering hypocrites. And I didn’t even catch on. I didn’t even catch on!”
Thompson placed his hand gently on Lisa’s forearm. “No. You were used. Much more so than I was. I knew, I was centrally involved. Now I’m going to get back. Blow it wide open. I’ve got documents. I’m turning them over to the Post tomorrow.”
“How far up the chain does this go? The President. Does he know?”
“He knows about CHASM for Yugoslavia. He approved it. The contract killings, I don’t know. If he does and it gets blown wide open, he can assert ‘plausible deniability,’ claim he had no knowledge, make his underlings take the fall. Like Ollie North did for Reagan and Bush. But something tells me he’s not aware, that it’s Tulliver’s show, at least that there’s nothing in the files on the assassinations. Haley must run things out of his hip pocket.”
Lisa stood up and ran for the exit, holding her mouth as if about to vomit. On the way, she yanked hard on the stop cord. Thompson followed. They found themselves as the only white people in the middle of Northeast Washington’s most crime-ridden ghetto. Their office garb made them stand out that much more. They felt as if they had no clothes on.
Passersby studiously paid little attention to the visitors from Washington’s other side.
Lisa and Thompson looked around for a Metro stop — the oasis, the escape hatch for nice, middle-class citizens who find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Two young toughs with the hardened expressions of junkyard dogs took immediate notice of the pair. They trailed behind in the animated gait typical of their generation and milieu.
“Just keep walking,” Thompson said through clenched teeth. They quickened their pace as they passed by pawn shops, fried chicken joints, tacky wig and nail salons. So did the young men.
“What do we do?” Lisa said, looking straight ahead. “I see no taxis.”
“Look for a cop. There’s got to be patrolmen in this neighborhood.”
Lisa stole a glance over her shoulder. “Buckwheat! They’re closing in!”
“Yo. Yo man. Wait up,” a voice shot at them.
“Great. We don’t have to worry any more about CHASM hitmen offing us. We’re about to become D.C’s 999th and 1000th victims of random, lethal violence this year,” Buckwheat said. “We’re fucked.”
“Hey man!” the voice was louder.
Buckwheat swung around with his palms extended outward. “Hey, look. We made a mistake coming here—”
“You tellin’ me!”
Lisa clutched her purse to her torso and shut her eyes, braced for the worst.
“Glad to have you here man. Ya’ll come and join our block party.” The men smiled beneficently. “Our church is sponsoring it. Great ribs and corn. I’m Ralph. This here is Jake.” They extended their right hands.
R-e-l-i-e-f was spelled on the faces of Thompson and Lisa who looked at each other as would a pair convicts just spared from the gallows.
“It just goes to show once more. In this town where appearance is everything, what you see isn’t necessarily reality,” Buckwheat remarked to Lisa as they shook the locals’ hands.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Stille gleicht Tod. In all the missions he had carried out over the years, Fechtmann never lost track of the basics. After all, it was attention to the basics that ensured human survival just as it did in the animal world.
He kept an eye on everyone who entered and departed
the grungy, old apartment building in polyglot Adams Morgan. His vantage point was a bench in a small park just opposite. He had scoped his target over a period of weeks, taking careful mental notes of his quarry’s routine. Off to the office at 6:00 am. Return was more problematical. Could be anywhere from 7:00 pm till midnight. That was okay. He was careful. And the whores and junkies and bums who hung around the park ceased taking second notice of the lean, towheaded man in Levis and leather boots. Even down-and-outers were entitled to their privacy after all.
Buckwheat Thompson raided every NSC databank he could intrude into, stored the information on disks and stashed them in his apartment. Personnel records, funding transfers, policy formulation, black programs. Everything on CHASM.
“Operation Breathing Space” — to channel cash to the Somali warlords. “Operation Pilgrim’s Pride” — CIA bribes to senior Indonesian officials to ensure that an American aircraft manufacturer clinched a huge plane deal. Contingency plans on whom to back as leader of Russia when Putin finally departed the scene. And on it went. Onto the discs. Until Wednesday. The passwords no longer worked. Something was wrong.
Haley appeared in Thompson’s office like a specter in the night. The sudden realization that his boss was inches from him as he fruitlessly scanned the computer files startled Thompson.
“Looking for something in particular?” Haley asked.