God's Spy

by Juan Gomez-jurado

  But Dicanti actually felt better, for two reasons: first, for having the chance to do what she had many times imagined she would have to do; and second, for having done it in private. If the identical situation had presented itself with someone else present or in the middle of the street, Dante would never have forgotten being smacked down in public. No man would. There were still more ways to adjust the situation and create a semblance of harmony. She looked at Fowler out of the corner of her eye. He stood in the doorway, not moving, his eyes mesmerized by the photographs littering the floor of the office.

  Paola sat down, took a sip of coffee, and, without raising her head from the Karosky dossier, said, “I think you have some explaining to do, Padre.”

  THE SAINT MATTHEW INSTITUTE

  Sachem Pike, Maryland April 1997

  Transcription of Interview #11 Between

  Patient No. 3643 and Doctor Anthony Fowler

  Dr. Fowler: Good afternoon, Father Karosky.

  No. 3643: Come in, come in.

  Dr. Fowler: I’ve come to see you because you have refused to speak to Father Conroy.

  No. 3643: His attitude was insulting. In fact, I asked him to leave.

  Dr. Fowler: What exactly seemed insulting about his attitude?

  No. 3643: Father Conroy questions certain unchanging truths of our faith.

  Dr. Fowler: Such as?

  No. 3643: He says that the devil is an overvalued concept! It will be very amusing to watch when this concept sticks its pitchfork in his rear end.

  Dr. Fowler: Do you think you will be there to see it?

  No. 3643: In a manner of speaking.

  Dr. Fowler: You believe in hell, yes?

  No. 3643: With every bone in my body.

  Dr. Fowler: Do you think you deserve to go there?

  No. 3643: I am a soldier of Christ.

  Dr. Fowler: That doesn’t tell me anything.

  No. 3643: Since when?

  Dr. Fowler: Since there is no guarantee for a soldier of Christ that he will either go to heaven or hell.

  No. 3643: If he is a good soldier, he does.

  Dr. Fowler: Father, I want to give you a book that I believe will be of great help to you. It was written by Saint Augustine. It is a book which speaks about humility and inner struggle.

  No. 3643: I will be happy to read it.

  Dr. Fowler: You believe that you’ll go to heaven when you die?

  No. 3643: I am sure of it.

  Dr. Fowler: Well, then you know more than I.

  No. 3643: . . .

  Dr. Fowler: Let me give you a hypothesis. Let’s assume we meet at the Pearly Gates. God weighs your good acts and your bad, and the balance on the scale is even. And so he asks you to call on anyone you like to help dispel his doubts. Who would you call?

  No. 3643: I’m not sure.

  Dr. Fowler: Let me suggest a few names: Ryan, Jamie, Lewis, Arthur . . .

  No. 3643: Those names mean nothing to me.

  Dr. Fowler: . . . Harry, Michael, John, Grant . . .

  No. 3643: Shut up!

  Dr. Fowler: . . . Paul, Sammy, Patrick . . .

  No. 3643: Shut up! I’m warning you!

  Dr. Fowler: . . . Jonathan, Aaron, Samuel . . .

  No. 3643: Enough! [The sound of a brief, confused struggle between the two men can be heard on tape.]

  Dr. Fowler: The part of your body which I am squeezing between my thumb and forefinger is your trachea, Father Karosky. It goes without saying that it will be even more painful if you don’t calm down. Signal with your left hand if you understand me. Good. Do it again when you have calmed down a little bit more. We can wait as long as is necessary. Already? Good. Here, take a drink of water.

  No. 3643: Thanks.

  Dr. Fowler: Sit down, please.

  No. 3643: I’m better now. I don’t know what came over me.

  Dr. Fowler: Both of us know what just happened. Just as both of us know that the young boys on the list I read will not exactly testify on your behalf when you stand before the Almighty.

  No. 3643: . . .

  Dr. Fowler: You’re not going to say anything?

  No. 3643: You don’t know anything about hell.

  Dr. Fowler: You think so? You are wrong: I have seen it with my own eyes. I’m going to turn off the tape recorder now and tell you something that I’m sure will interest you.

  UACV HEADQUARTERS

  Via Lamarmora, 3 Thursday, April 7, 2005, 8:32 A.M.

  Fowler took his eyes off the photographs scattered around the floor. Making no effort to pick them up, he merely glided over them. Paola asked herself if that represented an implicit response to Dante’s accusations. Many times over the course of the next few days, Paola felt she was standing in front of a man as unreadable as he was polite, as ambiguous as he was intelligent. Fowler was a walking contradiction and an undecipherable hieroglyph. But at that moment she felt another emotion, blind anger, which her quivering lips could not conceal.

  The priest sat down in front of Paola, resting his worn black briefcase against the side of her desk. In his left hand he carried a paper bag with three coffees. He offered one to Dicanti.

  “Cappuccino?”

  “I hate cappuccino. Makes me think of a dog I had whose vomit was that color. But all right.” She took one of the cups.

  For several minutes Fowler said nothing. Paola gave up the ruse of reading the Karosky dossier and decided to confront him. She had to know.

  “And so? You’re not going to . . .”

  And she stopped in her tracks. Paola hadn’t looked at Fowler since he had walked into her office. But when she did, she discovered that he was miles away. The hands that lifted the coffee to his lips were shaking and insecure. The room was cool, but tiny drops of sweat sat like pearls on the crown of his bald head. And his green eyes shouted that their owner had witnessed indelible horrors, and that, in his mind’s eye, he was seeing them all over again.

  Paola was silent. She realized that the apparent elegance with which Fowler had passed over the photographs was pure facade. She waited. The priest took several minutes to recover, and when he was ready, his voice was faraway, lifeless.

  “It’s difficult. You think that you’ve gotten over it, but then it turns up again, like a cork you try to sink in the bathtub. You hold it down and it pops back up to the surface. And that’s where you run into it again.”

  “Maybe talking about it will help.”

  “Take my word for it: It won’t. It’s never helped in the past. There are some problems that cannot be resolved by talking.”

  “An interesting thing for a priest to say. Incredible for a psychologist. But appropriate for an agent of the CIA who was trained to kill.”

  Fowler did his best to keep from frowning.

  “They didn’t train me to kill, no more than any other soldier. I was trained in counterespionage tactics. God gave me the gift of perfect aim, that much is true, but I didn’t go looking for it. And, to anticipate your next question, I haven’t killed anyone since 1972. I killed eleven Vietcong soldiers, at least that I know. But all of those were killed in combat.”

  “You enlisted voluntarily.”

  “Before you judge me, let me tell you my story. I’ve never told anyone what I am about to tell you, so please, I only ask that you hear me out. Not that you believe me or trust me, because that is too much to ask at this moment. Simply, listen to what I have to say.”

  Paola nodded in assent.

  “I suppose that all this information has arrived courtesy of our Vatican supervisor. If it’s the Sant’Uffizio’s report, it will have given you a very approximate idea of my history. I enlisted voluntarily in 1971, owing to certain . . . disagreements with my father. I don’t want to blow you away with a horror story about what the war was for me, because words could never describe it. Have you seen Apocalypse Now?”

  “Yes. Some time ago. I was surprised by how crude it was.”

  “A superficial farce. That film was a shadow on
the wall, compared with what it was trying to describe. I saw enough pain and cruelty to fill several lives. But that’s where I discovered my vocation. It didn’t come to me in a foxhole in the middle of the night, with enemy fire whistling all around my head. It didn’t come looking at the face of a ten-year-old kid wearing a necklace of human ears. It happened behind the lines, on a quiet afternoon spent with the regiment’s chaplain. I knew then and there that I wanted to dedicate my life to God and his creatures. And that is what I did.”

  “And the CIA?”

  “Don’t jump so far ahead. I didn’t want to return to the United States. My parents were still there. So I went as far away as I could, right up to the edge of the Iron Curtain. I learned many things there, but some of them—you are only thirty-four years old—you wouldn’t know how to make sense of them. For you to understand what Communism meant for a German Catholic in the 1970s, you would have had to live through it. We inhaled the threat of nuclear war on a daily basis. The hatred that existed between the various groups was a religion unto itself. It seemed that every day we were a little closer to someone, either them or us, losing control. And that would have been the end of everything, I am certain of it. Sooner or later, someone would have pushed the button.”

  Fowler paused briefly to sip his coffee. Paola lit one of Pontiero’s cigarettes. Fowler was reaching across the desk for the pack when Paola slid it a few inches farther away.

  “They’re mine. I have to smoke them all by myself.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I wasn’t going to take one, I just asked myself if you had suddenly picked up the habit again.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I would rather you continue your story than we talk about that.”

  Fowler intuited the pain behind her words. He went back to his story.

  “Of course. I wanted to continue to be part of the military. I love the companionship, the discipline, the feeling of a military life. If you think about it, it’s not very different from the concept of the priesthood: it’s a question of giving your life to others. Armies are not bad things in themselves; it’s war that’s evil. I asked to be sent to an American base as a chaplain, and as I was a diocese priest, my bishop went along.”

  “I’m a little vague on the meaning of diocese.”

  “It more or less means I am a free agent. I’m not tied to a congregation. If I want, I can petition my bishop to assign me to a parish. But if I think it’s a better idea, I can undertake my pastoral labor where I prefer, always with the bishop’s permission, understood as formal acquiescence.”

  “I follow.”

  “There, at the base, I worked alongside various members of the Agency who were giving a special instructional program in counterespionage activities for military personnel who did not belong to the CIA. They invited me to join them, four hours a day, five days a week, over the course of two years. It wasn’t incompatible with my pastoral labors; it just cost me a few hours’ sleep. So I accepted. And it turns out that I was a good student. One night, after class, one of the instructors pulled me aside with the proposal that I join the Company. That’s how the Agency was known in its inner circles. I told him that I was a priest, that it would be impossible. I had a tremendous job in front of me with the hundreds of young Catholics at the base. Their superiors dedicated many hours each day to teaching them how to hate the Communists. I dedicated one hour each week to reminding them that we are all children of God.”

  “A lost cause.”

  “Almost always. The priesthood is a career for long-distance runners.”

  “I think I read those words in one of the interviews with Karosky.”

  “It’s possible. We limit ourselves to making small points. Small victories. Every once in a while we achieve something a little grander, but that’s few and far between. We plant a few seeds, with the hope that part of the crop will flourish. Typically the person who plants is not the one who sows, which can be demoralizing.”

  “Not to mention pissing you off.”

  “Once upon a time a king was strolling through the forest and he saw an old man, a poor man, bent over a furrow. He walked up to him and saw that he was planting seeds for chestnut trees. He asked the old man why he was doing it and the old man replied, ‘I love the taste of chestnuts.’ The king responded, ‘Old man, stop punishing your bent back over a hole in the ground. Do you really not know that by the time even one of these trees has grown tall enough to bear nuts, you will not be around to gather them?’ And the old man answered, ‘Your Majesty, if my ancestors thought the way you do, I would never have tasted chestnuts.’ ”

  Paola smiled, surprised by the fable’s undeniable truth.

  “Do you know what that anecdote teaches us?” Fowler paused before he went on. “That you always get ahead with goodwill, a love of God, and a good strong shot of Johnnie Walker.”

  Paola was a little abashed. She hadn’t imagined the upright and proper priest with a bottle of whiskey in his hand, but it was clear he had been alone for long stretches of his life.

  “When the instructor told me that some other priest could help the young men on the base but that the thousands of young people behind the Iron Curtain had no one to help them, I knew that what he was saying wasn’t far from the truth. Thousands of Christians languished under Communism, praying in bathrooms and listening to mass in dark basements. They could serve the interests of my country and those of my Church at the same time, in those places where the two coincided. At that time, I really did believe they were in much greater agreement.”

  “And what do you think now? Because you’ve returned to active service.”

  “I’ll get to that shortly. They offered to let me be a free agent, accepting only those missions I believed to be just. I traveled everywhere. In some I acted as a priest, in others as a normal citizen. My life was in danger many times, but it was almost always worth the risk. I helped people who needed my assistance in one form or another. At times that assistance took the form of a timely warning, a report, a letter; on other occasions it was necessary to organize a chain of communications, or to get someone out of a tight jam. I learned languages, and I even felt strong enough to go back to the United States. That was before what happened in Honduras.”

  “Hold on. You’ve jumped over an important part, your parents’ funeral.”

  Fowler’s face twisted into a look of extreme discomfort.

  “I refused to take part. I merely arranged a few pending legal technicalities.”

  “Padre Fowler, you surprise me. Eighty million dollars is hardly a legal technicality.”

  “Ah, so you know about that as well. All right, yes, I relinquished control of the money. But I didn’t give it away, as many people think. I used it to create a nonprofit foundation which works in various fields of social endeavor, inside and outside of the United States. It bears the name of Howard Eisner, the chaplain who encouraged me in Vietnam.”

  “You set up the Eisner Foundation?” Paola brightened. “In that case, you really have been around.”

  “I didn’t create it. I just gave it a push, supported the finances. In reality, it was my parents’ lawyers who did the work. Much to their dismay, I might add.”

  “Fair enough. But tell me about Honduras. Take all the time you want.”

  The priest regarded Dicanti with curiosity. Her attitude had quickly changed in a subtle but important respect: she was now inclined to believe what he said. And she asked herself what had provoked the change.

  “I don’t want to bore you with the details. The history of El Aguacate would fill an entire book, but I’ll give you the essentials. The CIA’s objective was to work on behalf of a revolution. Mine was to help Catholics who were oppressed by the Sandinista regime. A volunteer army was formed and trained, in order to undertake guerrilla warfare to destabilize the government. The soldiers were recruited from among the poorest Nicaraguans. An old ally of the United States government sold them weapons, a man of whom few suspected just how he w
ould turn out: Osama bin Laden. And the command of the Contras fell into the hands of a high school graduate by the name of Bernie Salazar, a fanatic, as we later learned. Throughout the months in which the army was being trained, I went with Salazar across the border, on incursions which became a little riskier each time. I helped to get some compromised religious people out of the country, but I found myself progressively more at odds with Salazar with each raid. He starting seeing Communists here, there, and everywhere. Communists under every rock, if you listened to him.”

  “According to what I read in an old psychiatric manual, fanatic leaders quickly develop a heightened sense of paranoia.”

  “The case corroborates your book to the letter. I suffered an accident, which I only learned much later had been planned in advance. I broke a leg, which kept me out of any further border crossings. And the guerrillas started to come back a little later all the time. They no longer slept in the barracks, but in clearings in the jungle, in bivouacs. At night they were supposedly taking target practice, what was later revealed to be summary executions. I was laid up in bed, but the night that Salazar captured the nuns, and accused them of being Communists, someone warned me. He was a good kid, like many of those who threw their lot in with Salazar, but he was a little less fearful than the others. Only a little less, because what happened he told me in the secrecy of confession. He knew I wouldn’t tell anyone, but it put me in the position of doing everything possible to help the nuns. We did what we could. . . .”

  Fowler’s face was utterly pale. He stopped long enough to swallow, not looking at Paola but somewhere outside beyond the window.

  “. . . But it wasn’t enough. Today Salazar, like his young recruits, is dead, and the whole world knows that the Contras seized the helicopter and threw the nuns out over a Sandinista village. They needed three trips to do the job.”

  “Why did they do it?”