Laughter in the Shadows (5 page)

I almost botched the escape. Con Rouge left first, breaking out of the cell and spraying canine repellent along the bottom of the fence before climbing over, followed by Pipi and Jean Gabin. Dropping down on the other side, the three crouched in the woods waiting for me to join them. When I got to the fence, I
threw my poncho up on top to protect me when I climbed over the barbed wire. I threw too hard, however, and the poncho went over the fence, dropping on the other side. When I climbed up the fence and swung a leg over, my pant leg ripped, and I suddenly found myself pilloried like a scarecrow. Cold air rushed through my crotch as the others yelled at me to hurry.

I tugged frantically at my pant leg until it finally tore off, and I swung over and dropped down on the other side just as the searchlight beam came to a stop on my pant leg, fluttering in the wind like a tattered pennant. We could hear laughter drifting out of the stalag. Bert was probably sitting there smiling.

We arrived at the rendezvous point and made camp under a fallen tree. The next morning we thatched our lean-to, set snares, baited fish lines, and waited to be contacted.

For five days while we waited, we went out only long enough to inspect our snares and fishhooks. The rain didn’t let up, and we spent most of the time sitting inside the lean-to watching the fire. Our snares remained empty, our fishhooks denuded. On the fifth day we heard noises coming from the back of the lean-to, and we thought a bear had gotten at our rations. We had been issued emergency rations with the warning that breaking into them for anything other than a real emergency, was cause for a failing grade in survival training.

When we peered back into the back of the lean-to, two wide eyes belonging to “Pipi” Cauley peered back. He was biting into a chocolate bar from his rations, and when he saw us staring at him, he growled that he was starving and “sick of this Mahatma Gandhi routine.” He added that that he couldn’t care less if he got an “F” in survival. Without comment, we turned around and went back to watching the fire.

While we had been preoccupied with Cauley, someone had dropped an oilskin packet in front of the lean-to. It contained directions to a cached rubber boat and signal codes for contacting the submarine standing by offshore.

We broke camp and were putting out the fire when Con Rouge, who had gone for a final check of the snares, came back with a partridge. We toasted it over the coals and ate it in front of the sulking Cauley.

We located the rubber boat cached under a log and at midnight signaled the submarine. When the all clear was flashed we paddled out to the “submarine,” a rusting fishing trawler fitted out with a stovepipe periscope. The captain invited us on board for coffee and donuts and handed us a new set of orders that instructed us to proceed to the village of L’Espion and contact the Resistance leader at the Le Chat Noir Café.

The main street of L’Espion was lined on either side with plywood mock-ups of la patisserie, la boulangerie, le Hotel de Ville, and Le Chat Noir—the bakery, butcher shop, town hall, and the Black Cat Café.

Candles flickered on red-checked tablecloths inside the Chat Noir. As we entered, we noticed Monsieur Moulin (Hodacil) sitting at the far table. Gabin walked over to the table and introduced himself as the “foie gras salesman.” Hodacil’s reply that foie gras was for fat “bourgeois-zees.” Our bona fides established, he invited to sit down to join him in a glass of wine.

Hodacil toasted Les Reynards, slid an envelope across the table containing our missions for the next month, and got up. He wished us Bon Chance and said the wine was “on the house.”

We read over our assigned missions, finished the wine, and went out to pick up supplies behind La Boulangerie. The Team Fox duffle bag contained four Swedish Ks and ammunition, several packets of C-3 plastic explosive along with fuses, detonating cords, and time pencils. We buried the duffel bag, divided up the weapons and supplies, and headed back into the woods.

For the next four weeks we covered an area bigger than most state parks, blowing bridges, ambushing enemy patrols, mining roads, and derailing trains. Blowing up the fuel dump, however, almost spelled finis to Team Fox.

The dump consisted of ten oil drums lashed together behind a wire fence. We cut through the fence and taped a shape charge of C3 explosive onto one of the drums. We set the time pencil for thirty seconds, giving us enough time to get away before the charge blew.

Time pencils, like fever thermometers, are delicate instruments and not always reliable. Whether it was human error or a defective time pencil that set the charge off prematurely, we never knew. We were on our way out through the fence when the charge exploded, knocking us all to the ground and sending a geyser of crankcase oil fifty feet into the air. The black oil raining down from the geyser soaked our fatigues and left us smelling like the crew from the
Amoco Cadiz
tanker that ran aground off Alaska.

When we walked into L’Espion for the final exercise, the teams already there made a point of holding their noses when we passed.

The last week of the Comp in L’Espion was a simulated run-up to the D-day landings. Teams stumbled over each other trying to recruit agents in the Chat Noir, putting sugar in the gas tanks of SS armored cars, and cranking out leaflets. Radio antennas that sprouted around the town were pointed toward London, waiting for the “dit-dit-dit-dah” of Beethoven’s Fifth to signal that the landings were under way.

When the “V” signal came over the air, we ran out tossing cherry bombs, firing Swedish Ks in the air, and marching out to welcome the “liberators” in the form of
Hodacil parachuting in for a stand-up landing with a bottle of champagne. When he popped the cork, it was the signal that The Comp was over.

Two days later we became the first class to graduate from The Farm. A Headquarters VIP delivered the commencement address and told us we were now members of the Agency’s elite. Just how “elite” we would find out when we got back to Washington.

Hodacil came by the day we left. He said he had mixed feelings—joy and jubilation—about our leaving and presented a rabbit’s foot to Cauley. He said that he would sleep better knowing we were out there “stemming the tide of red aggression.” The old shitter to the end. The flashbacks for that first class are still fresh, the paramilitary catechisms, the suturing and stilettos, living off the land, the moonlight parachute jumps, and the campfire comraderie.

The curriculum, however, was an anomaly. We were immersed in a World War II resistance culture, which had long since given way to doctrines of Che Guevarra and Mao Zedong. Although we were never called on to garrote a Nazi sentinel or blow up the guns of Navarone, the fundamentals still applied whether winning hearts and minds in Southeast Asia or tunneling under East Berlin.

Most enduring were the ties that bound us. When meeting later, eating sticky rice along the Mekong, drinking Singapore Slings at Raffles, or watching pirogues paddling up the Congo, we would hark back to liberated rabbits, “stiletto” Ski, and the “old shitter.”

As I write, Jean Gabin and I are the only members of Team Fox still alive. Jacques Pipi and Con Rouge “bought the farm,” and their names are inscribed on the rotunda wall.

CHAPTER 3:
The Flap

For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither anything hid, that shall not be known and come abroad.

—
Gospel of Luke

J
building, along with I, K, and L, was once located behind the trees lining the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool. The temporary prefabs served as temporary government offices during World War II but for some reason had been bypassed by postwar demolition crews.

J building’s frame was reverberating from couriers pounding along the warped linoleum corridors, delivering “OPERATIONAL IMMEDIATE” and “FLASH” messages. Branch chiefs and desk officers nervously awaited their summons from the deputy director of operations. A flap was in the air.

“Flap” is a semantic holdover from the days of steaming open flaps of envelopes to “read other peoples mail.” It currently refers to a “blown” or “compromised” activity, an operational meltdown.

The epicenter of the flap rocking J building was Kaltenborn, a small town in Bavaria. A displaced persons (DP) camp had been taken over to serve as a training site for political action cadre. The townspeople jokingly referred to the site as Wienerschnitzel.

The political action trainees were mostly from East Germany, and after their training in Kaltenborn, they were reinfiltrated into their home country either to sow the seeds of counterrevolution or to go underground as “sleepers” and wait for the anticipated uprising. Kaltenborn citizens joked about Wienerschnitzel but didn’t really worry about the strange goings-on in the camp, because local merchants were Wienerschnitzel’s primary suppliers.

One day, however, a reporter passing through Kaltenborn heard talk about a “secret” installation outside of town and decided to investigate. He drove out past the camp, parked his jeep, and climbed a knoll overlooking the camp. His camera was equipped with a long-range lens, and he took photographs of the DPs mixing Molotov cocktails, printing leaflets, and engaging in hand-to-hand combat.

His photographs appeared a week later on the front page of a Frankfurt newspaper under the caption “CIA cooks Wienerschnitzel in Kaltenborn.”

The exposé was officially denounced by the German government as a “KGB fabrication.” Privately, the German chancellor was furious and called the U.S. high commissioner on the carpet to complain about the flap and the embarrassment it had caused. The high commissioner ordered the Station to shut down the operation immediately, and in less than a week, more than a hundred CIA case officer trainers were on their way back to Headquarters.

The ignominious return of these officers to Headquarters coincided unfortunately with our return from The Farm. The dual influx from Germany and The Farm led the deputy director of operations to issue a directive putting a temporary “hold” on further overseas assignments.

The recent graduates from the Farm were sent to “the pool” to wait for the dust to settle.

The Pool

The pool is a way station, a dumping ground for the unassigned. Our group spent most of the day in the cafeteria drinking coffee, grousing about our “limbo” status, and sitting around waiting to be called.

We were occasionally given odd jobs in Registry, sorting and filing the backlog of documents yellowing with age in an Arlington warehouse. Going through these old documents reminded me of rummaging through old family letters in an attic trunk. These letters, however, were dispatches from overseas Stations, and we read the best of them out loud, vicariously transporting ourselves to locales such as Hong Kong, Calcutta, or Montevideo, where we hoped one day to be assigned.

Some of the dispatches read like pulp fiction, with passages describing agent concubines nibbling the ears of Middle East potentates, chauffeurs blackmailing Balkan ambassadors, double agents being “tripled” and then sent back to their Soviet KGB handlers. While the dispatches made good reading, they reminded us of an operational world of which it seemed we would never be a part. Two months had passed, and we were still treading water in the pool, unassigned.

Three members of our group tired of waiting and signed on as polygraph operator trainees. The rest of us decided to strike out on our own and approach the country desks directly.

Trading on my rubber company experience, I arranged an interview with a Southeast Asia personnel officer. The interviewer seemed impressed with my
background in the rubber company and told me he thought there was an opening coming up soon. He was going to tell me more when something in my file caught his attention. He quickly closed the file and told me he had been mistaken. The opening had already been filled.