“We may not get out in the morning,” he said when he had finished listening to the weather forecast. “Or at least into Washington. There’s a front coming in from the West.”
“We’re going to have to try,” Oliver said. “You can ride out there with us, Jack. We’ll be at my car at six.”
“I’ll take him out to the field,” Marjorie.
“You don’t have to do that, baby.”
“I want to,” she said. “I’ll even throw in breakfast for your friends.”
And then I’ll come back here and wash the breakfast dishes, and see if I can get the dirt from the stove out of my new carpet, and then I will twiddle my thumbs for five days.
“I accept,” Johnny said.
“Thanks, baby,” Jack said.
[ FOUR ]
Room 914
The Hotel Washington
Washington, D.C.
0830 11 January 1965
When the doorbell chimed, Lieutenant Colonel Craig W. Lowell, wrapped in a terry-cloth bathrobe, got up from the room-service breakfast table, walked to the door, and opened it.
Two men were in the corridor. One was a bellman, carrying a uniform in a plastic bag. The other was Colonel Sanford T. Felter.
“Good morning, Colonel,” Lowell said cheerfully. “Let me have a couple of bucks, will you, please?”
Felter shook his head, but took out his wallet and handed Lowell two one-dollar bills. Lowell gave them to the bellman.
“Thank you,” he said, and took the uniform from him.
Felter walked to Captain Portet, who was sitting in his shirtsleeves at the table.
“Thank you for coming, Captain Portet,” he said. “I realize it’s an imposition.”
“I got to ride in a Learjet,” Portet said. “Good to see you, Colonel.”
“Did Craig explain what this is all about?” Felter asked.
Lowell ripped the plastic cover from the uniform, balled it up, threw it at a wastebasket, missed, shrugged, and then laid the uniform against the back of a couch and began to pin insignia and ribbons on it.
“He led me to me to believe you wanted to ask me about General Mobutu,” Portet said.
The telephone rang.
Lowell picked it up.
“Craig, Powell, Kenyon and Dawes,” he said, then: “Good morning, Porter. Hold it a minute, will you?”
He waved at Portet and Felter.
“It’s my cousin,” he said. “I want you to hear this. Both of you.”
Felter looked annoyed, but he followed Portet to where Lowell was standing, and both stood behind him so as to be able to listen to the conversation.
“Okay, Porter, what have you got?” Lowell said.
“Who’s with you?”
“Colonel Felter and Captain Portet,” Lowell said.
“The Gresham Investment Corporation has a two-room suite, 1107, in 27 Wall,” Porter Craig announced. “They have been in there four months, on a two-year lease.”
“What does Dun and Bradstreet have to say about them?”
“Not much. They’ve got a little over two million in Chase Manhattan. No other assets that D and B knows about. The officers were listed, or course, but I never heard of any of them, including J. Richard Leonard.”
“What about their credit references?”
“They gave us the Riggs Bank in Washington as a credit reference. I called a fellow I know there, and he assures me their credit is impeccable. I asked him how he knew, and he said I should trust him, they were as solid as the U.S. Treasury.”
“Interesting,” Lowell said.
“I thought so. I called their office a minute ago. A woman answered the telephone. I asked for Mr. Leonard. She wanted to know who was calling, and I lied to her; I said I was my friend in the Riggs bank. She told me Mr. Leonard was in Washington, and she knew I had that number. I didn’t ask for it.”
“Porter, you’re wonderful,” Lowell said.
“You want me to inquire further?”
“No, thanks,” Lowell said. “I just hope this Leonard guy doesn’t call your friend at Riggs, and he remembers you called him.”
“I don’t think that’s likely,” Porter Craig said. “I told him that it was a random check of credit references by the 27 Wall Street Corporation, and that I thought we could probably save us both time and money by me calling him.”
“Thanks again, Porter. I owe you one,” Lowell said, and hung up.
“What was that all about?” Felter asked.
“You tell him, J. P.,” Lowell said. “While I finish with my uniform. ”
“Hurry up with that, will you?” Felter said, a tone of annoyance in his voice.
Lowell looked at him a moment.
“Pardon me all to hell, Mouse,” he said. “The Commander-in-Chief, himself, as you will recall, gave me two demerits for a mussed uniform. I am trying to straighten up and fly right.”
Felter was not amused.
“I want to get out of here before the others arrive,” he said. “I had Finton send the ASA over to sweep one of the private rooms in the club.” The Army Security Agency was charged with signal counterintelligence, which often entailed “sweeping” rooms to detect electronic eavesdropping devices.
“Why do I suspect there is more to this meeting than you’ve told me?” Lowell asked.
Felter flashed him an angry look, then announced: “I just learned that Kasavubu has told our Ambassador (a) if Guevara shows up in the Congo, he will put him in front of a firing squad; and (b) that he has the entire situation under control; and (c) he absolutely refuses to have any American military personnel in the Congo.”
“Guevara?” Captain Portet asked. “Che Guevara? In the Congo?”
Lowell looked as if was going to say something, but at the last minute did not.
“When you’re finished,” Felter said. “Please bring Captain Portet to the club. I want to make sure the ASA has been there.”
[ FIVE ]
The National Aviation Club
The Hotel Washington
Washington, D.C.
0955 11 January 1965
Lowell led Captain Portet into a small, private meeting room in the Aviation Club. The roof of the U.S. Mint could be seen through the windows. Felter was sitting at a round table surrounded by red-leather-upholstered captain’s chairs. There was a coffee thermos and the associated paraphernalia on the table.
“They were still here when I got here,” Felter said. “For a minute, I didn’t think they were going to let me in until Finton cleared me.”
“Yes, thank you,” Lowell said, “I will have some coffee. Thank you so much.”
“I’m really in no mood for your sophomoric humor, Craig,” Felter said. “I think the first thing we should do is clarify the telephone call. Porter was suggesting the long hand of Langley was involved in something, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, he was,” Lowell said.
“What?”
“You tell him what happened, JP,” Lowell said. “I have to take a leak.”
“Well, Sandy?” Lowell asked when he came back into the room.
“They already own Air America,” Felter said. “Why not another airline?”
"’They’?” Captain Portet parroted. “You’re talking about the CIA?”
“The CIA,” Felter said. “The question is where did they get your name? Off the top of my head, I don’t think they have made any connection with Earnest.”
"’Earnest’?” Portet parroted again. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Sandy, I think you better start with Earnest,” Lowell said. “Hold off on Kasavubu until Jack gets here.”
“What have you told him about Earnest?”
“Just that I was in Argentina trying to convince the Argentines not to blow him away,” Lowell said.
“You shouldn’t have told him that much,” Felter snapped, then turned to Portet. “Captain Portet, some time ago I asked Colonel Lowell to look into the CIA’s
financial practices. “Would you please tell Captain Portet what you learned, Colonel?”
“Yes, sir,” Lowell said, and Felter did not miss the sarcasm.
“We’re pressed for time, Craig,” Felter said.
Lowell looked at him for a long moment.
“Okay,” he said finally. “JP, from what I understand—actually, from what Porter found out for me—the Agency, the Company, is into all sorts of businesses. They look for a business that seems to be a suitable cover for their covert operations. Preferably one in financial difficulty. They send somebody to see the guy, let him know—they don’t say they’re the agency, of course, they probably have a half-dozen variations of the Gresham Investment Corporation scattered around—that they’re interested in making an investment in a business like his.”
“And people aren’t suspicious?” Portet asked.
“People in financial difficulties tend to believe they need just a little help to weather the storm,” Lowell said. “Okay, so since they’re not trying to buy him out at distress prices, just invest in his business, the guy sells them a piece—say, thirty, forty percent. Business starts to pick up; he thinks he made the right decision, and then it goes bad again, and he needs just a little more help to weather the storm, and the agency winds up with fifty-one percent.”
“And eventually they own the whole thing?” Portet asked.
“No. They don’t want to own it. They want, should something come up, to be in a position to control it. Day to day, they want Mr. Clean to continue to operate a legitimate business in which they can hide their covert operations, and they see to it that it doesn’t go under. And Mr. Clean is happy because he’s still running the business and making money.”
“It doesn’t seem very ethical.”
“This is the intelligence business, JP,” Felter said. “Ethics in intelligence is about as common as honesty in politics.”
Both Lowell and Portet chuckled.
“There are two possibilities,” Felter went on. “The most logical, I think, is that the CIA’s right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. The right hand—in this case, the Asian desk— already has one airline, and they want another. Redundancy is the term. If the right hand has talked to the left—the African desk— the chances are it was only to get confirmation of what they had already learned about Air Simba.”
“How can you be so sure that Gresham Investments is the CIA?” Portet asked.
“The Riggs bank is the CIA bank, for one thing,” Lowell said. “And for another, it sounds like one of their projects.”
“What shape is Air Simba in, Captain Portet?” Felter asked.
“We were in the black. . . .”
"’We’? Who are your investors?”
“Me. Jacques and Hanni are the officers.”
“They’d find that interesting,” Lowell said.
“You were saying, Captain?” Felter said.
“Could I get you to call me JP?”
“Thank you,” Felter said. “My friends call me ‘Sandy.’ ”
“We were in the black before the Simba uprising,” Portet said. “I was actually talking to Credit Lyonaisse about borrowing enough to buy a 707 or a DC-8. The Simba uprising changed all that, of course.”
“I don’t understand that,” Lowell said. “Wasn’t there an increase in demand for air freight? Military and civilian?”
“Air Simba is chartered in the Congo, and is required by law to serve the government first,” Portet said. “And the government has been paying with vouchers that will be redeemed ‘when the emergency is over.’ They give the same vouchers to Mobil Oil for our fuel, and they cash enough of the vouchers to give us money to pay the crews and maintenance personnel, but we get a little deeper in the hole every day.”
“And the CIA in the Congo would know that, wouldn’t they?” Felter said thoughtfully. “My scenario—scenarios, there are several—is that maybe their report on what Kasavubu was doing to his civilian airlines was sent to Langley and passed to the Asian desk, and somebody there said, ‘Hey, this guy is just what we’re looking for. He’s an American citizen, about to go broke, and he knows how to run the kind of operation we want.’”
“Yeah,” Lowell agreed softly. “Or they did a database search for American pilots flying for foreign airlines, came up with JP’s name. Same result. They checked him out with CIA in the Congo, and got the same report.”
“Well, it doesn’t really matter, does it?” Portet said. “I certainly don’t want to get involved with the CIA.”
“Don’t be too hasty about that,” Lowell said. “Let’s think that over.”
“Think what over?”
“You could turn the agency’s interest in you to your advantage, JP”
“I’m not sure I’d want to,” Portet said. “But how could I do that?”
“By letting them finance your airline, which would in effect make it an interest-free loan, and then not letting them get fifty-one percent.”
“How would I do that?”
“Every time they up the ante, you match it,” Lowell said.
“Where would I get the money to do that?”
“Craig, Powell, Kenyon and Dawes is always ready to put money into a business guaranteed not to fail by the U.S. government, ” Lowell said. “And that’s business, not personal.”
“You want to go over that again?” Portet asked.
“That’s a very interesting thought, Craig,” Felter said. “But let’s put it on the back burner for the present. I think it’s time we brought JP up to speed on Operation Earnest.”
He turned to Portet.
“What I am about to tell you, for reasons that will be self-evident, is highly classified. Ordinarily, when it is necessary to give highly classified information to someone outside the system, there is a stock speech threatening all sorts of dire consequences if he reveals that information to someone else. That’s absolute nonsense. You can’t take someone to court for revealing a secret unless you’re willing to reveal in open court what secret, and that’s the last thing you want to do. All I can do is rely on your good sense and patriotism.”
“Thank you,” Captain Portet said.
“We have reliable intelligence indicating that Che Guevara intends to go to the Congo—he’s in Africa now—” Felter began, “to pick up the chaos where the Simba movement left off, and take the country over.”
“You are talking about the Cuban?” Captain Portet asked, surprised.
“Actually, he’s an Argentine. Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, M.D., born June 14, 1928, in Rosario. His father is of Irish descent, his mother of Spanish.”
“Why the Congo?” Captain Portet asked.
“His ultimate ambition is to take over all of South America,” Felter said. “The Congo is the first step. I don’t think he gives a damn about the Congo, except that if he can take it over, he will appear unstoppable, prove that Cuba was not an aberration. And, of course, I suspect that he believes it’ll be relatively easy for him.”
“That’s bad news for the Congo,” Captain Portet said, and then asked, “Did I understand you to say he’s a doctor?”
“Class of ’53, the University of Buenos Aires,” Lowell said.
“There are two ways to deal with the problem,” Felter said. “One is to terminate him. . . .”
“You mean kill him? Or have him killed?”
Felter nodded. “That would, of course, turn him into a martyr. Recognizing this, President Johnson has approved a plan in which he will be kept alive while his operations in the Congo are thwarted. We intend to make him fail in the Congo. Covertly, of course.”
“Interesting,” Captain Portet said thoughtfully.
“There are a number of people, and governments, who think that terminating him is the best solution for the problem. Colonel Lowell and Major Lunsford have just returned from Argentina, where they succeeded in convincing the Argentines that keeping Guevara alive makes more sense than killing him.”
>
“Hell, I’m almost on the side of those who would like him dead,” Captain Portet said. “Emotionally, I certainly am. I finally got Hanni to tell me what she saw the Simbas do in Stanleyville.”
“Lunsford and Jack are forming a team of Green Berets, Swahili-speaking American Negroes, at Fort Bragg. They will go to the Congo with the dual mission of making sure that Guevara fails and isn’t killed while failing.”
“You’re sending Jacques to the Congo?” Captain Portet asked. His tone made it clear that he didn’t like that at all.
“Not into the bush,” Felter said. “His skin is the wrong color. We can’t take the chance that someone would see him, or, worse, that he would be captured. But it was my intention to send him there, for short trips, to help Major Lunsford make contacts— and, of course, to take advantage of his knowledge of the Congo.”
"’Was your intention’? Does that mean you’re not going to send him?”
“What I have in mind for Jack to do now is to go there and see what he can do to get General Mobutu to get around the ‘no-American -military-under-any-conditions’ disaster our ambassador has created with Kasavubu. The Ambassador tried this, and Mobutu literally pushed him out of his office. I’m hoping Jack can do better.”
“Joseph can be difficult,” Captain Portet said wryly. “Particularly if he’s been drinking, which, rumor has it, is whenever the doctor’s not around, and sometimes when he is.”
“I got the impression that he and Jack are pretty close,” Felter said.
“Mobutu’s known Jacques since he wore short pants,” Captain Portet said. “He was still Sergeant Major Mobutu of the Force Publique.”
“And Lieutenant General Mobutu made good on his promise to decorate Jack for what Jack did at Stanleyville,” Felter said. “A private bill will be introduced in Congress tomorrow, so that Jack can accept it.”
“I asked Mobutu one time why he was only a lieutenant general when every other chief of staff in Africa was at least a full general or a field marshal,” Captain Portet said thoughtfully. “And he told me the doctor had given him a life of George Washington to read—that if being a lieutenant general was good enough for the Father of the United States, it was good enough for Joseph Désiré Mobutu.”
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