Code Name November

by Bill Granger

  Then the sickness rose up in him.

  Going to the bathroom, he turned the light on and vomited into the toilet. When he was not sick anymore, he put his finger in his mouth and gagged and vomited again, a yellowish liquid.

  Carefully, he pulled off his clothing and placed the pieces on the toilet seat. Then he climbed into the tub and turned on the ancient shower. He let the cold water run across his body until he felt it, until he began to shiver. Finally, he toweled himself, went into the darkened bedroom, and fell into the bed, pulling the covers up to his chin. He lay and shivered for a long time until his body warmth regenerated him.

  Hastings’ face in life appeared in the darkness. They were on that island again. Hastings’ eyes stared at him; he had betrayed Hastings, turned him into a double agent, a spy for a friendly power.

  Finally, Devereaux’s brain could not stand it; a dizziness seized his consciousness; he fell asleep without realizing it, because the night was full of bad dreams.

  3

  WASHINGTON

  R Section had been formed after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961.

  President John F. Kennedy was furious at what he considered treacherous incompetency on the part of the Central Intelligence Agency in planning the invasion of Cuba. His fury finally found outlet among a group of former Senate colleagues who were also unhappy with the growing dominance of intelligence by the CIA.

  “What’s the point in having an intelligence agency that can neither gather intelligence nor undertake successful covert operations?” the young President had complained at the first no-notes meeting. The three other men who attended were: Senator John VerDer Cook of New York, Senator Thomas McGuire of Massachusetts, and retired Navy Admiral John Stapleton. All were close friends and all had expressed similar distrust of the CIA’s ability to function while it continued to receive undue public attention.

  “I think this country needs a good five-cent intelligence operation, one that gathers intelligence and doesn’t plan wars in banana republics,” Stapleton said at the meeting. (The conversations were later recorded by Stapleton in a diary. The diary turned up, somewhat mysteriously, at R Section headquarters shortly after Stapleton’s death in 1971.)

  At first, Kennedy suggested revamping the CIA and breaking it into two operations—one for gathering intelligence and a second for planning and executing covert and overt overseas operations.

  Stapleton had argued then—and at subsequent meetings—that any attempt to break up the CIA would be disastrous to the young President.

  VerDer Cook agreed, adding ominously, “Mr. President, they are very powerful people. They have really…” He hesitated for a moment as he tried to find the words to explain the agency’s power. “They have the secret power that Hoover at the FBI seems to have publicly.”

  Kennedy appeared puzzled. For most of his political life, he had revered Hoover and had accepted the myth and substance of his power.

  VerDer Cook stumbled on in explanation: “Mr. President. You are aware that Hoover keeps dossiers on… on us. On members of Congress. Undoubtedly, you’ve seen them.”

  Kennedy did not bother to deny it. He stared at the young New York senator.

  “Sir, those dossiers are child’s play compared to the reality of information at the CIA.”

  “Like the information they had before Bay of Pigs?” snapped the President.

  “Sir,” VerDer Cook continued doggedly, “I want to give you an example, which you may feel is far-fetched. I would have, too, at one time. It was given to me by a man—now dead, as a matter of fact—whom I considered absolutely reliable and truthful in every way. I cannot tell you his name even now.”

  They waited. They were sitting in the ornamental Oval Office of the White House. The President leaned back in his maple rocker and gave VerDer Cook his full attention.

  “Remember when the House of Representatives was attacked in 1954? By the Puerto Rican gunmen who had gained access to the visitors’ gallery?”

  The question was rhetorical. They all remembered the frightening incident.

  “My source was at the Puerto Rican desk at the Agency at that time.”

  Kennedy leaned forward in his rocker, his hands folded across his stomach.

  VerDer Cook looked down at the rug. “Mr. President, they knew.”

  “Knew?”

  “They knew. They knew who was going to mount the attack, when it was going to be mounted, how they would get into the gallery—everything, Mr. President.”

  Even Stapleton was impressed. “And they told no one?” he asked.

  “That decision was made by the CIA Council, sir.”

  McGuire interjected: “Not the top man, Jack. The Council. The old hands inside. It was never referred to the top—”

  “Why, for God’s sake?” asked John F. Kennedy.

  VerDer Cook smiled but it was not in amusement. “To lobby, Mr. President, for expanded funds in the next Congress. To increase surveillance of Puerto Rican terrorist activities and to increase the size of their Caribbean operations—”

  “They seemed to have had enough funds—” the President said dryly.

  “The money, Mr. President, would be used for other things. The Council inside the Agency reasoned that overt acts against this country would only increase the need for CIA—”

  “Crude empire-building,” snapped the President.

  “Extremely effective empire-building, Jack,” said McGuire quietly. “The most sophisticated plans are not as important as the crudest plans that are successful. The Council—and the membership in it—is really like a club within a club and keeps changing as some members grow old, retire, die—the Council is really the master of the CIA.”

  Again, Kennedy said, “Well, they weren’t so damned smart about Cuba.”

  “No,” agreed McGuire.

  VerDer Cook said, “And that’s what’s puzzling, sir.”

  There was a little silence.

  “You mean,” Kennedy began slowly. “You mean they might have sandbagged me?”

  “It’s a possibility,” McGuire said.

  Kennedy said, “Those men… On my order…”

  Stapleton broke through the building tension: “Jack, what these men are telling you is that you have to end-run the CIA to control it. You can’t fight them, and you don’t have to join them. Put the fear of God and the United States back into them—”

  “How?”

  Stapleton smiled savagely: “Create another agency, to keep them honest.”

  Kennedy had not liked the idea but eventually he became convinced of the monolith of power inside the CIA and of the inability of any one man—even an extraordinary President—to control it. And that was where the first suggestion of what became R Section started. VerDer Cook and Stapleton put it down in an “Eyes Only” single-copy memo to the President.

  R Section (though it was only called “the alternative agency” in that memo) would be funded out of appropriations buried in research and development within an unlikely department—like the Department of Agriculture (which eventually did become the front for R Section’s funding).

  Though an official secret, the agency in fact would be known to the President, obviously to the Secretary of Agriculture, and to the Senate and House committees on intelligence. And, just as naturally, it would be known to the CIA—which was part of its purpose in being. The agency would, indeed, gather information from foreign countries on their agricultural outputs and needs, but there would be other intelligence activities as well. (In fact, R Section successfully predicted the Soviet grain shortages in the early 1970s, but its report was buried in red tape—which eventually led to the infamous grain robbery by the Soviets of U.S. surpluses.)

  As Stapleton put it in the memo, the new agency would be the watchdog of the watchdog, the litmus test against which to place CIA findings and evaluate their worth. In effect, the alternative agency would be a freewheeling attempt to compete with the CIA in the matter of general information-
gathering—thus spurring the CIA to reveal its treasury of secrets to its own government—before the next Puerto Rican gunmen invaded the chambers of the Congress or before the next Bay of Pigs invasion was planned.

  The plan was swiftly and almost secretly approved, and passed routinely through Congress in 1962. For once, the CIA was caught with its clout down; the new agency was in operation before the CIA could mount effective internal opposition to it. Like all things, the establishment of the new agency insured its eternal life in the future budgetary recommendations of Congress.

  More than a decade later, in secret deliberations, another Senate committee would attempt to determine if the CIA had permitted the assassination of John F. Kennedy in deadly retribution for his act of independence from “the company.”

  The CIA—which gradually became known as the company and then the Langley company or Langley firm—tried three times to kill off the alternative agency. The first attempt came in 1964, when it blitzed the accidental president, Lyndon B. Johnson, with a cornucopia of information on Communist activities in Southeast Asia and suggested that it take over the intelligence-gathering function of R Section—which had acknowledged Communist activities in the same area but recommended a hands-off attitude on the part of the U.S.

  Johnson had been undecided and, in keeping with his senatorial background, kept looking for a way toward compromise of the opposing recommendations. The reports from the two agencies puzzled him: CIA warned the North Vietnamese were about to take over South Vietnam, that Laos was on the verge of totally falling into a Communist dictatorship, and that mild Cambodia was also endangered. The report from R Section downplayed dangers at the moment in Cambodia and Laos and said that U.S. involvement in Vietnam was not justified by the level of guerrilla activity there.

  Johnson finally chose to follow the CIA reports when the agencies could not be reconciled.

  R Section went into decline and was kept alive for two years only by funding pushed through by a handful of powerful senators—including VerDer Cook—who still did not trust the CIA and the growing American involvement in Southeast Asia.

  In 1966, Johnson privately rebuked the CIA for its inflammatory reports and personally breathed new life into R Section. A young R Section agent named Devereaux, working in Vietnam at the time, filed a long coded cable report accurately predicting the 1968 Tet offensive some four months before that event. Unfortunately, the President of the United States simply did not believe it, and Johnson’s generals in Vietnam had downplayed the report’s accuracy.

  In 1969, the CIA again approached a President—this time, Richard M. Nixon—and sought to have him terminate the stubborn life of R Section. Nixon, on the advice of Henry Kissinger, then his National Security Council advisor, decided not to act.

  (There is some fragmentary evidence now that certain members of that administration considered giving R Section a domestic-intelligence function but that the plan was not pursued.)

  A third attempt to kill R Section was made in 1972 when the CIA informed the President, through the usual courier, that they had information of the extraordinary facts behind the simple burglary that June in the Watergate building complex.

  With traditional stubbornness and anger, Nixon ignored the company’s veiled blackmail attempt. He is reported to have said, “If those goddamned spooks think they can blackmail the President of the United States, I’ll show those goddamned sonsofbitches just what the power of the President means.”

  Eighteen months later, Nixon resigned. The company made no attempt to influence Gerald Ford, Nixon’s unelected successor. They assumed—correctly—that Ford would be a mere interregnery. But the eventual Democratic president who succeeded Ford appalled the Council inside the CIA: Jimmy Carter had served in the Navy under the late Admiral John Stapleton, who had become the first head of R Section and might properly be called its father.

  Carter, however, turned out to be the CIA’s first ally in an attempt to kill R Section: Carter privately told senators concerned with maintaining R that he did not believe in multiple intelligence-gathering agencies and would like to see R die a quiet death. But the Senate—made feisty by Watergate—was in no mood to blindly follow the recommendations of a President. The life of R Section—maintained by slender, strong supports—seemed assured.

  Why R Section?

  Like most designations, it came as an afterthought.

  In the original appropriation setting up the agency in the 1963 fiscal budget (submitted in 1961), the cloudy description of the “research and development” section of the Department of Agriculture was listed in Agriculture’s budget in paragraph 789, subparagraph R.

  So it would always be.

  4

  EDINBURGH

  Devereaux awoke shortly after nine, his face to the window. Gray mist outside obscured the world. He knew someone was sitting by the door.

  He lay, his eyes open, breathing regularly. He thought of Hastings naked, dead. Saw himself.

  He could roll off the side of the bed. He rejected that. He couldn’t see whoever was at the door. He had no weapon at hand. He decided there was nothing to do. He didn’t move as he spoke: “I don’t suppose you’re the maid?”

  There was a low chuckle. He heard the familiar snap of a gun clicked off safety.

  “No, I’d not be being the maid, atall.”

  “I’m going to turn over,” said Devereaux. “I’m tired of this view.”

  “Ah, very slowly then, lad. Believe me when I say it.”

  Devereaux believed.

  Rolling on his back, the covers bunching up behind him, he faced the man. And the barrel of a .45 caliber automatic that was pointed in his general direction.

  “Did I leave my money at the bar?” Devereaux asked.

  “Naw,” laughed O’Neill, still wearing the same dirty-collared white shirt and tightly knotted red tie. “No, lad, ya didn’t atall. Quite generous, though; did I thank ya for that last whisky? It was a pleasure to talk with you. I mean that quite sincerely, sur.”

  “I’m sure you do,” said Devereaux.

  They stared at each other silently. Slowly, the stage Irishman receded into the depths of that dark, mottled Irish face. Now there was no smile, no frown. The voice lowered and a nasty edge came into it.

  “Where’s the bloody money, Yank?”

  “Money?”

  “Me ten thousand Yank dollars! Hastings’ ten thousand! Be quick now. Up and about and give me that roll or you’ll be the deadest Yank in Scotland this mornin’.”

  The voice had turned hard. The kidding, soft Irish lilt of last night had been swallowed up somewhere in the barrel of the .45 automatic.

  “You want both shares—Hastings’ and yours?”

  “And what’s poor bloody Hastings gonna do with his now?”

  O’Neill knew Hastings was dead, then.

  Devereaux smiled and slowly extended his naked legs from beneath the covers over the side of the bed. He stood up slowly.

  The gunman did not speak but kept the gun barrel pointed at Devereaux’s bare belly.

  Devereaux bent and pushed the upper mattress aside and revealed a brown envelope. He reached for it.

  For a moment, as he knew would happen, the gunman’s eyes glanced at the envelope. It was tricky. They were about three feet apart, which was just enough room. Devereaux held his breath as he moved.

  His left foot struck O’Neill full on the face, breaking his nose with a crunch of bone; blood welled out of both nostrils. His toe caught O’Neill’s eye. At the same moment, Devereaux’s right foot clattered the gun aside, though O’Neill pulled the trigger reflexively and sent a wild bullet into the plaster ceiling.

  Bruce Lee would be proud, Devereaux thought as his body hit the floor. He never managed the act with grace, even in training. He was only effective.

  In a second, he had rolled to his feet and kicked O’Neill—still sitting in the chair—hard in the lower abdomen. O’Neill vomited on the spot and continued to fall
forward in the chair. Devereaux pulled O’Neill out of the chair by his hair and kicked him in the left kidney, sending him sprawling to the floor.

  Picking up the brutish gun, Devereaux waited for O’Neill to stop being sick on the rug.

  Devereaux was out of breath. “Not bad for an old man,” he said aloud.

  O’Neill moaned again and vomited at the sight of his own blood.

  “Yer broke me fuckin’ nose,” he said in a muffled voice.

  Devereaux smiled.

  “Me fuckin’ face is caved in,” O’Neill said.

  “You ought to see yourself,” Devereaux agreed.

  O’Neill staggered to the bathroom, blood on his white shirt and jacket. He managed to stop the bleeding in a few minutes by placing a cold, wet towel on his mangled face. Then he sat on the edge of the bed, holding the towel.

  “Why’d ya do that, you bloody murderin’ bastard?” O’Neill said. The voice was self-pitying.

  Devereaux sat in the chair O’Neill had vacated. He had pulled on his tan trousers. He held the .45.

  Devereaux waited.

  “Yer gonna kill me,” said O’Neill. “Kill me just like ya killed that poor old pouf.”

  “Who did I kill?”

  “Hastings. Hastings, ya bloody-minded man, ya.”

  Devereaux decided he did not need the gun. He emptied the clip and threw it on the floor, but placed the gun on the table.

  “Tell me about Hastings,” Devereaux said quietly.

  “Ya know about him, ya bloody bastard,” whimpered O’Neill. “I saw ya kill him.”

  “Tell me about Hastings,” Devereaux said again.

  “I followed ya from the pub. Ya went to his room. When ya came out, I went up meself and saw him. Ya cut his privates off—God rest his soul, the poor old bastard.”

  “What are you to Hastings?”

  The same voice, quiet and even, delivering the words with menace.