Deadly Assets

by W. E. B Griffin

  “First Sergeant, do I have a choice in this?”

  “Indeed you do, PFC EXPLETIVE DELETED!! Head. You can get the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! out of my sight now, or delay doing so for thirty EXPLETIVE DELETED!! seconds, after which I will shove my boot so far up your EXPLETIVE DELETED!! that you’ll have EXPLETIVE DELETED!! shoelaces coming out of your EXPLETIVE DELETED!! nose.”

  —

  After giving the subject a great deal of thought, Phil purposefully failed the Morse Test. Failed it twice, as the tester suspected he wasn’t really trying on his first try. And then a third time when his failure came to the attention of various officers in the chain of command.

  Phil saw for the first time in his life the unexpected ramifications that can occur when there is a bureaucratic misstep. This took place immediately after he failed the Morse Test for the third time.

  Captain Barson Michaels, who looked kindly on Phil as a result of their time together on the skeet and trap ranges, turned to him and said, not unkindly, “What the hell are we going to do with you now, Phil?”

  “Make him take the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! Morse Test once an hour until he passes the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! thing,” another officer in the room suggested.

  “There has to be another option,” Captain Michaels said. “I know this young soldier, Lieutenant. He’s given the test his best shot, so to speak.”

  He winked at Phil, which suggested to Phil that Captain Michaels understood and sympathized with Phil’s reluctance to become an ASA Intercept Operator.

  “The regulation is clear,” the lieutenant argued. “Complete background investigations, which cost a EXPLETIVE DELETED!! arm and a leg, are not to be initiated until all testing has been satisfactorily completed. It’s the same with the CIC. No background investigation until the soldier passes the tests. Do you want to tell the Inspector General who EXPLETIVE DELETED!! that up here?”

  Phil had never heard of the CIC.

  “What are the tests required for the CIC?” Captain Michaels inquired.

  “Two years of college. PFC Williams has two years and two months of high school. I thought of the CIC, Captain,” the lieutenant said.

  “The U.S. Army moves on a trail of paper, Lieutenant,” Captain Michaels said. “You may wish to write that down. That suggests to me that the CIC may have clerk-typists to care for its special agents.”

  “They call them CIC administrators.”

  “And what does the CIC demand, education wise, of potential CIC administrators?”

  The appropriate regulations were consulted. Nothing was mentioned at all about minimum educational standards for potential CIC administrators.

  “Permit me, PFC Williams, to wish you all the best in your CIC career,” Captain Michaels said.

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Sir, what’s the CIC?”

  [ Seven ]

  The CIC Center and School

  Fort Holabird

  1019 Dundalk Avenue

  Baltimore, Maryland

  0845 Monday, February 3, 1947

  PFC Williams stood at the position known as Parade Rest—feet spread, hands locked behind his back—before the desk of the company commander of Company B.

  The company commander, a captain who had been sitting behind the desk when Phil had first been taken into the office by Company B’s first sergeant, was now standing against the wall next to the first sergeant.

  The captain had given up his chair to the major who, after the first sergeant had brought the problem at hand to the captain’s attention, had brought it to the major’s attention, whereupon the major had announced, “I’ll be right there.”

  The problem was that there was indeed a minimum educational requirement for CIC administrators, although it had not reached Fort Dix. It clearly stated that high school graduation was a prerequisite. And, as first the first sergeant and then the captain had learned—and the major was now learning—from the classified SECRET Final Report, Williams, Philip Wallingford III, Complete Background Investigation of—Phil’s formal education had ended after two years and some months of secondary school.

  “That’s as far as you got in school, son, is it?” the major asked. “Got kicked out again, did you? And ran off and joined the Army? With a forged birth certificate?”

  “Yes, sir,” Phil confessed.

  He had visions of himself blindfolded and tied to a stake, as he waited for the firing squad to do its duty.

  “We’ll have to send him back, of course, sir,” the captain said to the major. “But I thought I’d better check with you first, sir.”

  The major ignored him.

  “Tell me, son, did you get the boot from Saint Malachi’s School for academic deficiency? Or was it something else?”

  “Sir, it was something else.”

  “What else? Every detail of what else.”

  Phil confessed to stealing the intimate undergarments of Miss Bridget O’Malley, a student of Miss Bailey’s School who was visiting St. Malachi’s as captain of Miss Bailey’s School’s Debating Team, from where they had been hung out to dry, and then hoisting them up St. Malachi’s flagpole. And then cutting the rope.

  “I see,” the major said. “And tell me, son, where did you get that Expert Marksman’s Badge pinned to your tunic? You bought it at an Army-Navy store, to impress the girls, right?”

  “No, sir. I got it from the Army.”

  “You expect me to believe that in your brief military career, you have become an expert with the rifle, the pistol, and the submachine gun?”

  “Yes, sir, and also the shotgun.”

  The major then rummaged through Phil’s records.

  “I’ll be a EXPLETIVE DELETED!!,” he said softly. “Very interesting,” he went on. “First Sergeant, take PFC Williams to the Education Center and see that he is administered the GED test. When it has been graded, bring him and it to my office.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  —

  Phil had no idea what the GED test was. On the way to the Education Center, the first sergeant told him. GED stood for General Educational Development. It had been developed to see if an individual’s life experiences had given him knowledge equivalent to that of someone who had actually finished high school or gone to college for two years. If one passed the test, the Army considered that the same thing as actually having graduated from high school, or having been exposed to two years of college instruction.

  Phil took the test, spending about an hour and a half with it.

  “You’re quitting?” the test administrator, a captain, said. “Give it another shot. You have three hours to take it. Don’t give up!”

  “Sir, I finished the test.”

  The test administrator graded Phil’s GED test.

  When he had finished doing so, he said, “I’ll be a EXPLETIVE DELETED!!” and then said, “Congratulations, PFC Williams, you have scored in the ninety-fifth percentile.”

  Phil didn’t know what that meant and confessed his ignorance.

  “That means you have scored better that ninety-four percent of all others who have taken the test.”

  I’ll be damned, Phil thought.

  I am now the legal equivalent of a high school graduate!

  He was wrong.

  This was brought to everyone’s attention ten minutes later when Phil was again standing at Parade Rest before a desk, this time the major’s. The major barely had time to open the envelope containing the Certificate of GED Test Results when the administrator sought and was granted access to the major’s office.

  “What?” the major inquired.

  “Sir, there’s been a little mix-up,” the administrator said. “We gave PFC Williams the wrong test.”

  “How wrong?”

  “We gave him the college-level GED test, sir. Not the high school level.”

  “A
ccording to this, he scored in the ninety-fifth percentile.”

  “Yes, sir. He did. But he wasn’t supposed to take that test. He’ll have to be retested.”

  “He scored in the ninety-fifth percentile on the college test and you want him to take the high school test? What the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! is wrong with you? Dismissed!”

  The major then turned to PFC Williams.

  “Welcome to the Counterintelligence Corps, son,” he said.

  So that’s what CIC stands for!

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “I think you’ll like Fort Holabird,” the major went on. “There’s all sorts of things to do here. We even have a skeet team which competes against other governmental investigative agencies in the Baltimore-Washington area. The first sergeant will show you where the skeet range is on Saturday morning.”

  “Sir,” the first sergeant protested, “on Saturday morning, CIC administrators in training have a barracks inspection.”

  “Not if they’re on the Fort Holabird Skeet Team, they don’t,” the major said. “I intend to kick the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! out of the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! Naval Intelligence Team at the Sunday shoot, and I want PFC Williams to get all the practice he can. Have him there at oh-eight-hundred.”

  [ Eight]

  Phil did like Fort Holabird.

  He learned a great deal in the CIC Administrator School, including how much of a threat the Soviet Union posed to the world in general and the United States specifically, and how they did so—subjects that previously had escaped his attention.

  He learned what the Counterintelligence Corps did, and, presuming he completed the training, how he would fit into the Corps.

  Put simply, there were three kinds of laborers in the CIC’s fields. At the very bottom of the totem pole were CIC administrators, and their major contribution was to prepare the final reports of CIC special agents and CIC analysts.

  His instructors impressed upon him the cardinal rules for preparing reports: One, there were to be no strikeovers, misspellings, and grammatical errors, and, most important, reports could contain absolutely no ambiguities.

  If something can be interpreted in more than one way, it will be.

  He learned there were two kinds of people senior to ordinary CIC special agents. One of these categories was supervisory special agents, and the other was CIC analysts. It got a little confusing here, as analysts could be pure analysts (that is, neither CIC agents nor supervisory special agents) or they could not.

  Analysts analyzed what the agents had discovered in the course of their investigations, and reported their analysis to their superiors, aided and abetted by CIC administrators who prepared—not just typed—such analytical reports.

  This was an important distinction.

  Any Quartermaster Corps clerk-typist could type a report, many of them without a single strikeover, but a CIC administrator was expected not only to type a report without a single strikeover, but was also expected to inspect it for ambiguities and grammatical errors and then to seek out the author of the report and get him (or her) to fix the ambiguities and errors.

  Phil suspected this might cause problems when he “got into the field” over what was and what was not really an ambiguity.

  He also learned that the CIC—in addition to denying the Russians and the Cubans and a long list of other “un-friendlies” access to the secrets of the U.S. Army—had two other roles.

  One of these was investigating the misbehavior—usually the sexual misbehavior—of field rank and above officers and their dependents. That meant majors through generals and their dependents. Sexual shenanigans of captains, lieutenants, and noncommissioned officers and their dependents were dealt with by the Criminal Investigation Division of the Corps of Military Police.

  Phil thought preparing the special agents’ reports of the sexual shenanigans of majors and up—and their dependents, which he had learned meant their wives and offspring—might be very interesting and quietly hoped he would be assigned to a CIC detachment in some hotbed of forbidden sexual activity.

  But he thought of himself as a realist, and the reality was that he was probably not going to wind up assigned anywhere interesting, but instead wind up in someplace like Sunny Lakes, Wisconsin, preparing the reports of CIC special agents who spent their days working on complete background investigations.

  This was known somewhat disparagingly in the counterintelligence community as “ringing doorbells” because the CIC special agents conducted these investigations by going to the neighbors of those being investigated, ringing their doorbells, and then when the door was opened making a presentation from a script they had memorized along these lines:

  Good afternoon (or morning), ma’am (or sir). I am Special Agent (Insert Name) of the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps. (Show CIC credentials folder.)

  Your neighbor, John (or Mary) (Insert Last Name), who is now a PFC (or second lieutenant) in the U.S. Army, is being considered for assignment to duties which will give him (or her) access to classified information.

  The U.S. Army would be very grateful for your opinion of John (or Mary) and whether or not you think it would be safe for us to entrust him (or her) with the nation’s secrets.

  We are especially interested in what you may have heard (or suspect) about John’s (or Mary’s) character flaws, such as, but not limited to, tendencies to write “Insufficient Funds” checks, imbibe intoxicants to an excessive degree, or engage in abnormal sexual activity either within or without the bonds of matrimony.

  Your answers will of course be held strictly confidential.

  Phil, who had by then accepted the CIC premise that the worst scenario of any situation was nine times out of ten the one right on the money, saw himself spending the foreseeable future in Sunny Lakes, Wisconsin, or some similar bucolic metropolis in the middle of the corn belt, preparing the reports of CIC agents who had spent their days ringing doorbells.

  He was wrong.

  When graduation day from CIC Administrator School came, and with it both his promotion to corporal and his assignment orders, the latter read:

  17. CPL Williams, Philip W., 142-22-0136 detchd Co B CICC&S trf in gr wp XXXIII CIC Det APO 09237. Tvl by CIV AT in CIV clothing dir. 10 DDERL Auth. PP Auth. CIV Clothing Allow of $350 auth. Approp. 99-99999999903 (Secret).

  Because he had paid attention while a CIC administrator in training, Phil had no difficulty at all in deciphering his orders. He was a bit surprised to see that Sunny Lakes, Wisconsin, or whatever bucolic village in the Great American Midwest he was to be banished to had its own Army Post Office (APO) number, but the rest of his orders he understood.

  He was being detached from Company B, CIC Center & School, and transferred in grade and would proceed to the 33rd CIC Detachment (for reasons never explained, the CIC used Roman, rather than Arabic, numbers on its CIC detachments). Travel by civilian air transportation in civilian clothing was directed. Ten days of delay-en-route leave were authorized, and so were a passport and a $350 allowance to buy the civilian clothing. The money was to come from Congressional Appropriation 99-99999999903, which was classified Secret because Congress didn’t want the Russians and the other un-friendlies to know how much they were willing to pay to keep the U.S. Army’s secrets secret.

  As soon as he could, Phil found the book listing all APO numbers and the physical locations thereof. With a feeling of great foreboding, he ran his finger down the list of numbers until he came to 09237.

  When he found it, he exclaimed, “I’ll be a EXPLETIVE DELETED!!! I’m not going to EXPLETIVE DELETED!! Sunny Lakes, or any other EXPLETIVE DELETED!! place in the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! Midwest! I’m going to Berlin! Berlin, Germany! Not the Berlin in EXPLETIVE DELETED!! New Hampshire!”

  “Watch your mouth, Corporal!” a stern voice chided him.

  Phil turned to see that he was being addressed by a second li
eutenant who was wearing the identification badge of a CIC agent in training.

  “You’re in the CIC now,” the second lieutenant went on. “We of the CIC do not use obscene language such as ‘EXPLETIVE DELETED!! New Hampshire,’ which is one of the United States we are sworn to defend from undue Soviet and other unfriendly curiosity.”

  “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. I will endeavor to remember that.”

  “See that you do!”

  —

  Over the next few days, as he waited for the administrative wheels of the CIC Center to slowly turn, Phil wondered if his assignment to Berlin was possibly a sub-rosa award for his having been a member of the Fort Holabird Skeet Team, which not only had kicked the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! out of the Navy Intelligence Skeet Team the very week he had joined it, but on other occasions during his time as a student had inflicted similar defeats upon the skeet teams of the National Park Service and the Pentagon Police Force in Washington, D.C., and the security forces of the National Center for the Control of Venereal Diseases in Baltimore.

  In the end, he decided it was just a coincidence, as he had been told again and again there was no room for personal favoritism in the CIC.

  —

  As soon as he got the $350 check to buy civilian clothes, his new passport—which identified him as an employee of the U.S. Government—and his airline tickets, Phil started to faithfully execute the orders laid out in Par. 17 above.

  Well, maybe not faithfully.

  If he executed them absolutely faithfully, he would have gone on leave—he was headed for New York—at his own expense.

  Ten days later—if he faithfully followed his orders—he would have taken the train back from New York, again at his own expense, and upon his arrival in Baltimore gone to Baltimore-Washington Airport and taken an Eastern Airlines flight to Newark using the Army-provided ticket. From Newark he would have taken the shuttle bus (ticket provided) to JFK Airport, where he would board the Pan American flight to Frankfurt.

  He decided it would make more sense to skip the Go Back To Baltimore et seq elements of this agenda, and instead take a cab to JFK from his father’s apartment in Manhattan when his leave was over.