As Owens went on talking, McGarvey could begin to envision a young, arrogant, well-educated Yarnell first taking over the fledgling CIA and then transferring his efforts and considerable talents to the Russian presence in Mexico City. God, how it must have galled mere mortals like Basulto’s case officer, Roger Harris. How much, he wondered, of Harris’s pushing was simple paranoia? Harris had wanted to be king, or at least in the top ten. He had to work for it, whereas a man like Yarnell could simply snap his fingers and the service, collectively, would come running. Men like Yarnell became presidents or senators or at least DCIs. Men like Harris had to work for every single scrap that came their way, and they often resented those for whom success seemed to come so naturally. Maybe he was chasing after a very old vendetta after all, McGarvey thought.
Yarnell took over our embassy in Mexico City just as he had taken over the agency itself back home. The State Department, which even in those days raised objections about the CIA, never said an unkind word about Yarnell, but their universal sentiment was that he was wasted in the agency; he’d fit in so much better at State. He would have become an ambassador. It was a foregone conclusion. He had the feel for the job. He had the look, the flair. But for Yarnell in those days there was nothing but the agency.
“Operation Limelight, it was called,” Owens continued telling his story. “From the beginning it was Yarnell’s brainchild. In fact, it was he who suggested the program in the first place.”
“Program?” McGarvey asked. It was an odd choice of terminology, he thought.
“It was more than a project. Yarnell figured to put a permanent mechanism in place that would counteract the inroads the CESTA network had made. The Russians certainly would never quit the region so it was up to us to neutralize their effect.” Owens was remembering everything now. “CESTA was more than simply Russians, of course. There were East Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Bulgarians, and naturally the odd lot of Spanish Communists. Their product was said to be the best, though there was a lot of natural animosity between the Mexicans and the true Spaniards. But then a lot of money was being spent down there. Nothing was too good for CESTA. Nothing was too good for the cause; the best equipment, the cream of the crop from NKVD’s Intelligence School One outside of Moscow, the old Eastern European hands. And above all, one of the most sophisticated banking systems anywhere in the world.”
“He must have had the help of the Mexicans themselves,” McGarvey suggested. He could envision Yarnell as a force, but even a superman doesn’t work in a vacuum.
“He could have been president of Mexico, for all I know,” Owens said, cross that his story had been interrupted. “He arrived in Mexico and promptly took over the capital. In those days he didn’t spend much time at the embassy. Of course it was exactly what we wanted, but no one figured that Yarnell was so dedicated to the cause that he’d actually go out and get married to a native just to ingratiate himself to the country.”
Yarnell had had his detractors in those days, too, Owens stopped a moment to explain. There were a few early voices who thought he was too big for his britches, that he was going too far too fast, and that when the fall came Yarnell, for all his youthful enthusiasm and foolishness, would take a lot of good people with him. When he married this young girl, a member of a good family, his critics claimed he had finally gone too far. The girl was just a baby, still in her teens! What could he be thinking?
“But then none of us really knew Yarnell’s measure then, not yet, and none of us had met Evita. If Darby Yarnell was a force to be reckoned with, if he was the sun, then Evita Yarnell was a super nova. All of Mexico City was at their feet.”
CESTA was pals with bureaucrats at every level of the Mexican government. Yarnell’s Operation Limelight was the counteraction; our answer to something that had been in place since the forties. Not so easy a task. His first step was to gain the love and respect of the Mexican people, which had been hurried along by his marriage, and then he could come in with his sweeping gestures to capture the hearts of the men who ran the country.
Owens was a natural storyteller, but he was an old, lonely man who was happy for the company and meant to string out every little detail for as long as he could get away with it. McGarvey had no real objections, for often the kernel of truth you were looking for came in the offhand remarks of some garrulous storyteller. But he wanted the man to at least stay within the main framework of the story—Yarnell’s life.
“I still don’t get a sense of what Yarnell’s program was all about,” McGarvey said. “I understand what he was trying to do, and I certainly understand why, but I’m not quite sure I see the how.”
“Yarnell has always had money. He was raised by his grandparents, as I recall, and they died when he was quite young, leaving him a bundle in trust, which came under his sole control when he turned twenty-five. He hasn’t lost money, from what I heard.”
Yarnell bought himself a house on the outskirts of Mexico City … possibly one of the largest, finest palaces in the capital. He staffed it with a lot of his friends—God knows how he got them so quickly, but he was always surrounded by them—and he began to throw parties.
“I saw the house only once,” Owens said, smiling at the memory. “Let me tell you, McGarvey, the place was a palace. He had one of everything there and perhaps two of some things.”
“Who were his targets in those days? I mean, how were they picked out of the crowd?” McGarvey asked.
“He had a governmental directory, of course. He went through it with a red pencil for everyone he figured was committed to CESTA, and a blue pencil for everyone committed to us. In those days the reds outnumbered the blues two to one.”
“He invited the unmarked … uncommitted ones to his house?”
“To his house, to a hunting lodge he rented, to a little retreat on the ocean. He bought them presents, gave them weekends with beautiful women if need be, but mostly he gave himself; his free, helpful advice on how to solve any problem they might have, from love to engineering, from business to bureaucracy. He became their banker as well as their father confessor. For the entire government.”
“CESTA had more money than Yarnell,” McGarvey said. “Even rich Americans couldn’t possibly compete with an entire governmental network … . From what you’re telling me CESTA was the entire Warsaw Pact’s organization.”
“Of course there was no competition, at least not for money. But CESTA was indiscriminate. They went in for quantity, while Darby Yarnell went for quality. CESTA, for example, might manage to turn five out of the six men running the water utility for Mexico City. But Yarnell would pick the one man on whom the department was most dependent. The one indispensable man. He’d put that man into the limelight so that the entire world could see that he was numero uno, that he loved Mexico above all other nations, that his loyalty could never come into question, and that there would never be another man half as good as he for the job.
“Yarnell knew how to make a man feel good about himself, but he also knew how to make everyone else feel the same way about that man. It was an art.
“But then the Bay of Pigs fiasco came along, Yarnell was assigned to the planning team in Guatemala City, and when it all fell apart he was lucky to get off the beach alive.”
17
Houses seemed to take on the personality of those who lived in them, McGarvey had always heard. He wondered, mightn’t it also work the other way around? After lunch Owens said it was his custom to walk along the beach every afternoon. Kept his mind fresh, he explained, his juices flowing, and demon constipation, the absolute bane of an old man’s existence, from rearing its ugly head. Looking back now as they walked at water’s edge, McGarvey could see that the house was a lot like its master; old, a bit on the worn side, but with a grace and wisdom that pressed you to come back again and again. That part, McGarvey suspected, Owens had inherited from the building, which was comforting in a Victorian way, yet demanding of nearly constant attention and care lest the entire fabr
ic of its structure unravel because of careless handling. Clouds had begun to form out to sea, but they didn’t look very threatening although McGarvey could tell there was wind in them because already the surf was up from when he had first arrived. Owens wore an old navy pea coat, its broad round collar up around his blue-tinged ears, and a woolen watch cap on the back of his head, a few strands of wispy white hair sticking out in back. His hands were stuffed deeply in his pockets as they walked, and from time to time he would spit into the water. They headed up the beach at a fairly good pace. No one else was in sight in either direction.
“Does the name Roger Harris ring any bells with you, Mr. Owens?” McGarvey asked, keeping up.
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“He was stationed in Havana until Castro took over. In the fifties.”
“He might have been one of them in charge of the recruitment medical exams down in Miami. If he’s the same one.”
“Was he a medical doctor?”
“No, just another idiot with ambitions like the rest of us.” Owens looked back without breaking stride. “Wasn’t he one of the ones who bought it in Girón?”
“Yes, sir,” McGarvey said. “And I think there is a very real possibility that Darby Yarnell murdered him.”
This time Owens did stop. He studied McGarvey’s face. “Are you trying to pull my goddamned leg, or what?”
“No.”
“Where the hell did you come up with such a notion as that? Did someone feed you that line of crap? Is that why you’re here? Was Harris something to you, then?” Owens came a little closer. “That was a long time ago, mister. I suspect you weren’t even out of college by then.”
“High school.”
Owens laughed. “I don’t think you know shit-from-Shineola. You’re guessing.”
“But you’re not. It’s why I came here like this.”
“For what? For whom?”
“I wanted to know about Yarnell. You called him a prick; you couldn’t have liked him.”
“I’ve got no ax to grind,” Owens said. He turned as if to continue up the beach but then came back. “People could get themselves dead, dredging up old business. It’s happened before, it’ll happen again. You should know.” He looked out to sea. “Dark clouds on the horizon,” he muttered. “When the grim reaper is standing next to you, it makes you want to think out your next moves pretty carefully, if you catch my drift.”
“Maybe he keeps doing it. Maybe—”
“I watch the television. I read the newspapers,” Owens interrupted. “I have a question for you, McGarvey. Does the name Plónski ring a chime with you? Janos Plónski.”
“A very old friend,” McGarvey replied softly.
“Did you kill him?”
The question was startling. McGarvey hadn’t known quite what to expect, but he had not expected that. Owens was looking at his eyes.
“He was working for me,” McGarvey said. “Doing me a favor. I should have warned him. Watched him. Anything.”
“Who killed him?”
“I don’t know. Yet.”
“Yarnell?”
“Not him, at least not him directly. I was watching him when it happened.”
“Yarnell always had his followers, his entourage, wherever he went. Not always visible all of the time, mind you, but they were never far. His mob, he used to call them. Different ones all the time, but after a while all the faces seemed to be the same one. Do you know what I mean?”
McGarvey nodded.
“Maybe I’m one of his mob, had you considered that?”
“No, at least not seriously,” McGarvey said.
Owens blew air out of his mouth all at once, as if he had just run a mile. He looked back toward the house. “You’re an arrogant sonofabitch, too. But, what the hell, it makes the world go round.” Again he looked into McGarvey’s eyes. “At one time I would have called you a liar and a damned fool. Yarnell was tops in my book, and in the books of a great many people who counted. But that was then.”
They started again up the beach, this time walking at a much more leisurely pace. The fight, or more accurately the spunk, seemed to have diminished in Owens. McGarvey was sorry for it, but he couldn’t stop now.
“What made you change your mind about him?”
“I don’t know if I ever changed my mind about him,” Owens said over his shoulder. “Maybe not until this very minute, you know. But I’d always had my doubts. Then, which one of us doesn’t have his doubts about his fellow man? ‘Everyone is crazed ’cept thee and me, and sometimes I wonder about thee.’ Bastardized Shakespeare, maybe, but pretty valid on the whole, I’d say. From day one you had to wonder just what the kid was trying to prove, scrambling the brains of the very people we had sent up there to recruit him. It wasn’t just a little joke, though a lot of people did take it that way. Nor was Mexico City such a light and easy lot. Real people’s lives were in the balance, and Yarnell was in many ways the fulcrum and the motivator all at the same time. By the time he brought his bride up to Washington she was starting to fall apart at the seams, and it wasn’t a very pretty sight. Of course, we all thought that once Darby finished down south he’d come home and put her back together. He had that power. But he never did. From that day on, Yarnell became a possessed man, a driven spirit.”
It was thought that the shock of the failure of the Bay of Pigs had set Yarnell over the edge. He had put his all into the project. Once he had his wife settled in Washington (settled in the sense that he had an adequate house and staff for her), he returned to Mexico City where he began feeding the Russians all sorts of wild stories about Cuba. At least once a week he would fly down to Guatemala City, though he never did spend the amount of time there at the training base that everyone thought he should. But they were confusing times. Americans were just learning to flex their muscles, and no one was very sophisticated about it.
“He was at the Bay of Pigs? He went ashore?” McGarvey asked. He wanted absolutely no mistake about it.
“Yes, he was there. At Girón. But so were a lot of others, including a lot of angry Cuban regular army who were shooting at our people. Anyone could have killed your Roger Harris.”
They walked for a long time in silence. It was a couple of miles up the beach to the Marine Museum at Amagansett. For a bit McGarvey figured they were going to walk all the way, which was fine with him. Owens had told him a lot, but McGarvey figured he had much more to tell. In fact, the important parts were yet to come, and although he wanted to keep the old man on track, he did not want to push him out of his cooperative mood. He didn’t think the chance would come again. It was just a feeling.
After a while Owens stopped and looked back as if he had suddenly awakened to realize he had gone a lot farther than he had intended. He glanced up at McGarvey.
“Let’s go back,” he said.
“Sure.”
Evita Perez Yarnell could have been the hit of Washington, Owens said. But she kept pretty much to herself, with her staff. A sister came up for a time, and of course her mother visited whenever possible. But Evita was not the same woman she had been in Mexico City. Whether Yarnell had taken her spirit from her, or she was just out of her element in Washington, no one knew at the time. Everyone felt sorry for her, but no one knew what to do about it. In the meantime Yarnell’s product coming out of Mexico City was fabulous. The sun and the moon wouldn’t have been enough payment for what Yarnell was sending back. Not only was he gathering intelligence about the Mexicans, but about the entire CESTA network as well. Yarnell had managed to turn some of the CESTA agents as doubles. It was his moment of glory.
But it didn’t last forever, of course. Nothing ever does. It was in the late spring of ’62 that Yarnell came home in triumph.
“He could have had anything he wanted. Any assignment. Practically any job. All of Washington was kissing his ass, and I was one of them. I was right there standing in line with everyone else. The only thing that bothered me at the time was how that wife of
his was turning out. But then it takes two to tango. No such thing as a one-sided argument—like clapping only one hand.”
“He moved back in with her, I assume,” McGarvey said, but he didn’t know why. Yarnell’s marital status really had no bearing on whether or not he was a traitor. But after having met her, he was curious.
“Sure he did. And nine months later she had Juanita, their only child. A very pretty girl. Had her mother’s beauty and her father’s brains.”
McGarvey thought it was likely she was the one he had seen leaving Yarnell’s house. “She’s living with her father?”
“That’s what I heard,” Owens said dryly.
By that time Owens had been bumped up to assistant deputy director of intelligence, they had moved into the newly constructed building across the river in Langley on what was called the Bureau of Public Roads Research Station, and Yarnell contented himself to take over the Latin American desk, running the entire Caribbean Basin show. “And he was nothing short of brilliant, let me tell you. I had been nothing but a technician during my tenure in that hot seat, whereas Yarnell was the concert master.” Owens smiled wanly with recollection now that the story was becoming more personal to him. “It also marked the beginning of the period when Darby and I worked with each other on the same turf. Even though I was right there all along, I could never quite figure out exactly how he did what he did. It was like witchcraft following in his footsteps, legerdemain. But damn, he was good.”
On the way back McGarvey was on the seaward side, where the sand was packed a little more tightly and the going was much easier. Owens had slowed way down. McGarvey wanted to reach out a hand for him, but he didn’t think the old man would have accepted it. He was too proud. Little by little as the story progressed McGarvey began to build up a picture in his mind of the relationship that had existed between Yarnell and Owens in those days. Owens was in awe of Yarnell, or had been, and yet he had also felt a small measure of resentment for the cavalier way in which the younger man dealt with the world in general, with the co-workers around him on a day-to-day basis, and in particular with his wife.
Without Honor Page 17