Maybe he should just call and say I am going to call you, you know? I did hear what you said and I really would like to take you out, but right now we have this thing. He could say we because she would understand that. She’d understand that he wasn’t trying to put her off. He could say Right now we have this thing. There’s one hell of a lot of heat on it. From Lassiter - he’s my precinct captain, you know? - and from the chief, all the way down from the mayor, and right now I don’t even have time to piss straight . . . No, not that. Not that kind of language. Right now I don’t even have time to open my mail, so please don’t get the idea that I’m not interested, but you’re in the loop on this and you understand where I’m coming from, right?’
‘Robert?’
Miller snapped to, turned and looked at Roth.
‘You just drove past the bank.’
Miller parked the car half a block down and they walked back the way they’d come. They waited in the foyer while someone spoke to someone who spoke to someone else, and finally - after perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes - the VP for security came down. Pleasant guy, perhaps early forties. Hell of a suit, Miller noticed. Kind of suit you couldn’t buy in a store.
‘I’m Douglas Lorentzen, Vice-President for Security,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to have kept you waiting . . . please, come this way.’
Walked out back of the reception area and down a corridor that ran the length of the building. They reached a door at the end and Lorentzen punched a code into a pad on the wall. Once through it they took a left, Miller ahead of Roth, every once in a while glancing over his shoulder as if he expected Roth to say something.
They went through a door at the end of the second
corridor into an ante-room, beyond that a plush office -
large, no windows, a bank of security monitors across the right hand wall. Pot plants, a wide mahogany desk, several chairs around a smaller oval table, its surface buffed to a glass-like finish.
‘Please sit down,’ Lorentzen said. ‘I can get you something . . . some coffee, mineral water?’
Miller sat down. ‘We’re fine,’ he said. ‘We just need your help on a small matter and then we’ll be gone.’
Lorentzen appeared unruffled, as if this was routine - the appearance of two detectives with a warrant, a meeting in a basement office, questions to be asked and answered.
‘I understand you have a warrant,’ Lorentzen said, preempting Miller.
Miller withdrew the warrant from his pocket, slid it across the table.
Lorentzen read through the warrant and looked up. ‘Not a problem,’ he said. ‘Give me a moment.’
Lorentzen lifted the phone and asked for Records and Archives, shared a few words with someone, gave them McCullough’s name, the approximate date the account had been opened, asked for all files or documents relating to McCullough’s account to be delivered to the security suite.
Lorentzen replaced the receiver. ‘So, is there anything you can tell me about what we’re dealing with here?’ he asked.
‘Unfortunately no,’ Roth replied. ‘It’s an ongoing investigation. ’
‘Some aspect of fraud perhaps?’
‘I don’t think so, Mr Lorentzen,’ Miller answered. ‘We’re simply trying to gather information regarding the whereabouts of a particular person.’
‘And this person, this Michael McCullough, appears to have opened an account here some years ago?’
‘Appears so, yes.’
The phone rang.
‘Excuse me,’ Lorentzen said. He picked up the phone, listened for a moment, acknowledged the person at the other end and instructed them to come right in. Moments later a knock at the door, Lorentzen opened it, took a file from someone, and then closed the door.
He smiled as he walked toward Miller and Roth. He was efficient. He was VP for Security, and within a handful of minutes he had proven his ability to administer the system, to assist the police, to find what they were looking for. The Washington American Trust bank did what it said it could do.
Lorentzen sat down and opened the thin manila file. He leafed through some papers, and then looked up. ‘The account was opened in the name of Michael Richard McCullough on Friday, April 11th, 2003. Mr McCullough attended the bank as a new customer that morning, was seen by the assistant manager for new accounts, Keith Beck. Keith, unfortunately, is no longer with us.’
Roth took a notepad from his inside jacket pocket. He wrote April 11th 2003 and Keith Beck New Accounts Manager, Wash Am Trust.
‘Mr McCullough made an opening deposit of fifty dollars. That’s the minimum deposit required when opening a new account—’
‘Cash or check?’ Roth asked.
‘Cash unfortunately,’ Lorentzen replied.
‘And the ID he used?’ Miller asked.
‘His police department identity card, his social security card, a bill from the telephone company to confirm his address on Corcoran Street.’
Miller glanced at Roth. ‘Three blocks from me,’ he said, and turned back to Lorentzen. ‘We’re going to need copies of all of those documents.’
‘Unfortunately that will take a little time. Once an account has been opened we return the originals to the account holder. We have copies, but they’re scanned into a computer and held on file at our central security unit.’
‘Which is where?’
‘Here in Washington,’ Lorenzten said, ‘but—’
‘This is a warrant case,’ Miller said. ‘We really need whatever help you can give us.’
Roth leaned forward. ‘This could actually contribute to the resolution of a tremendously important investigation, Mr Lorentzen. We need to get copies of these documents as rapidly as possible.’
Lorentzen understood. He was not over-complicated. One of those rare officials who actually considered it was his job to help, not to hinder with explanations of administrative regulations and bureaucratic protocol.
‘You’re happy to wait here?’ he said.
‘No problem,’ Miller replied.
‘I’ll do what I can, okay?’
‘That’s all we can ask of you.’
Lorentzen left the room, closed the door firmly behind him.
Miller looked at his watch: it was ten after three.
J
uly 20th, 1981 we landed in Managua. We did not leave until December of 1984. The Nicaraguan electorate wanted the Sandinistas back in power. They wanted the Contras, along with their Yankee support and funding, to be nothing more than another piece of their strained and awkward history.
Anastasio Somoza Snr. started it in 1936. He assumed the presidency of Nicaragua. The United States assisted him in any way they could. With the National Guards as his enforcement arm, Somoza brutalized the nation. He countenanced and condoned the rape, torture and murder of the populace. He massacred thousands of peasants; he robbed, extorted, smuggled drugs and terrorized anyone who considered opposing him. His Somozan clans seized land and businesses. Nicaragua was his kingdom until the revolutionary Sandinista Party overthrew the National Guard and the Somozan clans.
The Sandinistas tried to slow the decay. They established a government for the people. Land reform, social justice, the redistribution of wealth. But we, we mighty Americans, didn’t want the people of Nicaragua to own their own country, just as we had resisted and opposed similar self-government plans in Chile. It started with Carter - signing authorization to fund opposition to the Sandinistas. The CIA ran anti-government propaganda in the newspaper La Prensa. Pirate radio stations out of Honduras and Costa Rica told the people of Nicaragua that their new government was nothing more than an atheist puppet of Marxist Russian godfathers hell-bent on destroying the Catholic Church and all that the Nicaraguan people held dear. We put a front organization down there - the American Institute for Free Labor Development. That’s where I ended up. And what did we do? We singled out significant individuals in the Sandinista government’s health and literacy programs, and then we killed them.
When Reagan took office in January 1981 he stated categorically that the situation in Nicaragua was nothing more than a Marxist Sandinista takeover. He said he deplored what was happening there. Apparently he deplored it so much that he greatly expanded the CIA’s guerrilla warfare and sabotage campaigns. In November, ten months into his first term of office, he authorized nineteen million dollars of taxpayers’ money to assist the Argentinians train a guerrilla force in Honduras. And who were the backbone of this force? Ex-members of Anastasio Somoza’s National Guard, alongside them known war criminals and American mercenaries. It was even rumored that court-martialed and dismissed Special Forces operatives and members of Delta were amongst those stationed in Honduras ready for the push against the Sandinistas.
By the fall of ’83 there were somewhere between twelve and sixteen thousand troops. They named themselves the Nicaraguan Democratic Force. They became known as the Contras, and they hid out along the Honduran and Costa Rican borders, repeatedly striking in hit and run raids against rural towns and known Sandinista outposts. The CIA were under no illusions. They knew the Contras would never overthrow the Sandinistas. That was not their purpose. They were there merely to slow down the machine, to damage and halt the progress of all Sandinista development projects - economic, health, educational and political. They blew up bridges, power plants and schools. They burned crops, laid siege to hospitals. They destroyed entire farms, health clinics, grain silos, industrial plants, irrigation systems. A group of concerned Americans calling themselves Witness for Peace gathered intelligence on Contra atrocities from one single year. The rape of young girls, torture of men and women, the maiming of small children, decapitations, dismemberment, cutting out of tongues and eyes, castration, bayoneting pregnant women in the stomach, genital amputation, breaking toes and fingers, pouring acid on faces, scraping off people’s skin, summary executions, crucifixions, live burials, setting people on fire.
Reagan named these people ‘freedom fighters’. He referred to them as ’the moral equivalent of our founding fathers’.
The Senate Committee initiated the Boland Amendment, and
thus ‘prohibited the use of tactics for the purpose of overthrowing
the government of Nicaragua’.
The CIA gave another twenty-three million dollars to the Contras and we stepped up our activities.
Nicaraguan harbors were mined with three hundred-pound C4
devices. Vessels were arbitrarily destroyed, some of them French and British. Seamen were wounded and killed. Nicaragua’s fishing industry lost millions of dollars from delayed and sabotaged shrimp exports.
April of 1984 the World Court declared the U.S. actions illegal.
The Saudi Arabian government secretly arranged with the CIA to fund the Contras at a rate of a million dollars a month. The money was laundered via a bank account in the Cayman Islands, through a Swiss account, and on to the Contras. The accounts were held in the name of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, assistant to Rear Admiral John Poindexter, Reagan’s national security adviser. It would be the better part of three years before the world knew what had happened, and then they would only be given the bare bones.
Money also came from Israel, South Korea and Taiwan. Reagan’s war in Nicaragua had racked up fourteen thousand casualties. Dead children exceeded three thousand, another six thousand orphaned. In November 1984 the Nicaraguan government officially stated that the Contras had assassinated nine hundred and ten state officials. CIA-backed mercenaries had attacked over one hundred civilian communities and displaced one hundred and fifty thousand innocent people.
In October of 1984, two months before I left, the Associated Press disclosed a ninety-page training manual entitled Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare. The manual was authenticated by the House Intelligence Committee as a CIA-produced manual for the Contras. I can guarantee that the manual was indeed authentic. The chapters that dealt with covert assassination and sniper work were written by me.
In Congress, Reagan was asked, ‘Is this not, in effect, our own
state-sponsored terrorism?’
Congress cut all funding. The Saudis increased their commitment to two million dollars a month.
The deal came to light. Reagan went on TV. He was a trained actor. Lied like a pro.
He went on to circumvent the ban on military funding by giving the Contras thirteen million in intelligence advice and twenty-seven million in humanitarian aid. Two years after I left Nicaragua, just two years, Congress went ahead and authorized an expenditure of one hundred million for the Contras.
Ultimately it was the financial devastation of Nicaragua that lost the election for the Sandinistas. In a country where the average annual income had dropped to two hundred dollars a year, the United States proudly handed forty dollars to everyone who voted for the U.S.-favored candidate, Violetta Chamorra. The new American presidential incumbent, George Bush, called the electoral result ‘a victory for democracy’.
Even now we are condemned by the World Court of Justice at
The Hague for ‘the unlawful use of force’ employed in Nicaragua.
I read a report from a Pentagon analyst a while back. He stated categorically and unreservedly that the United States policy for Nicaragua was a blueprint for successful intervention in Third
World politics. He said, ‘It’s going right into the textbooks’.
I know what we did out there. I know exactly what we did. I saw it. I lived it. It was my life for three and a half years. Catherine was my controller. She relayed the orders. She ferried the instructions and pushed the buttons. Not just for me, for others too. And how many of us were there? Eventually I lost count. Dozens, perhaps hundreds. We appeared in ones and twos and threes. We seemed to multiply like bacteria, like some invisible virus, and we grew ever more virulent and destructive. What we did became addictive. It became something above and beyond necessity. After a while it was not a job, it was a vocation, a reason to live.