Laughter in the Shadows (6 page)

Back in the cafeteria, when I mentioned the aborted interview, two others in our group described similar experiences of abruptly aborted interviews terminated for no apparent reason. Our conclusion was that there must be something in our files, some common denominator that was responsible for these curt dismissals.

It was Jean Gabin who discovered the common denominator. He was being interviewed when the interviewer was called away. Gabin immediately reached across the desk, took the file, and began reading through it. Inside were records of physical exams, polygraph tests, training evaluations, and various administrative papers. He found nothing out of the ordinary until he came to the end. On the last page two large letters were stamped in red in the middle: “PM.”

We eventually found out from a friendly secretary that the letters stood for “paramilitary.” This was the “elite” group the commencement speaker had referred to.

PM

The Operations Directorate was caste layered. The top layer is made up of the brahmins, the foreign intelligence (FI) officers. Real spies. The next layer is composed of the sudras, the political action/psychological warfare (PP) officers. The bottom layer consists of the untouchables, paramilitary (PM) officers.

The letters PM, like Hester Prynne’s “A” in Hawthorne’s
Scarlet Letter
, branded us as outcasts. PM officers were excluded from the “better” locales like Paris and Vienna, where the aperitif and savoir-faire are de riguer and the stiletto and plastic explosives are frowned upon. FI and PP officers looked down on PM officers as the bulls in the Agency’s china shop.

Now that we knew our place, we also knew where to look for assignments. It was rumored there were openings in certain Asian and African locations for PM officers. I decided to try for Bushido.

Bushido, steeped in a culture of the tea ceremony, flower arranging, and classic Noh and Kabuki theater, was an unlikely venue for paramilitary operations, but the fledgling government for the most part turned a blind eye on the activities of its former enemy.

I applied for an assignment to Bushido and was accepted. A month later I left “the pool” behind and boarded a Pan American flight for Edo, the capital of Bushido.

PART II

Operations

I think it may very reasonably be required of every writer that he keeps within the bounds of possibility, and still remembers that what it is not possible for man to perform, it is scarce possible for man to believe he did perform.

—HENRY FIELDING,
Tom Jones

INTRODUCTION

I
n 1947 President Harry Truman, fed up with tea leaf readers and rumor peddlers knocking at the back door of the White House, established a national marketplace for information, the Central Intelligence Agency. To direct this new agency, he chose Allen Dulles, a pipe-smoking savant, who had served with the World War II spy organization, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). To staff the organization, the new director first brought in professors, researchers, and scholars and grouped them into the Directorate of Intelligence (DI).

To balance this intellectual ivory tower, Dulles sent out a call to former OSS cloak-and-dagger colleagues. These he grouped into the Directorate of Operations (DO) and cached them in “temporary” buildings behind the reflecting pool of the Lincoln Memorial.

The Directorate of Operations took pride in its lack of structure. Its organization chart was a maze of zigzag broken lines and convoluted circles, not unlike the circles Dante passes through in the Divine Comedy during his journey through purgatory.

Entering the first circle, a candidate for covert service first had to pass physical and psychological examinations and the lie detector test. If the candidate passed these tests, he or she would enter the second circle where the candidate would be trained in the clandestine arts and science. When the tradecraft training was successfully completed, the candidate could enter into the third and final circle, operations.

The operations circle was a carnavalian merry-go-round, where informants and agents were recruited and later “doubled”; cabals were hatched and aborted; governments propped up and toppled; desert chieftains “godfathered” and left dangling from lamp posts; ballerina troupes sent off on world tours to vanish in the mist; hill tribes formed into guerrilla battalions and later abandoned. I entered the third circle in Bushido.

CHAPTER 4:
Bushido

T
he empire of Bushido, founded eight hundred years before Columbus discovered America, was steeped in tradition, customs, and well-defined codes of conduct. Pried open to the West in the mid-nineteenth century, Bushido came on stage as a world power when it defeated the Russians at the turn of the twentieth century and continued to play a dominant role in East Asia until the mid-1940s, when war ravaged the country. The country was only beginning to recover when I arrived after a twenty-four-hour flight on a Pan American “clipper.” My family, increased by one with the birth of our son, Kent, in Washington, D.C., would follow later by boat on the American President Lines.

I was met and taken by jeep to the air base where our installation was located. Although it was a large air base, our installation was easy to spot in the base’s farthest corner. It consisted of a long green windowless Quonset hut and a large hangar. The sign at the gate to the site read, “RESTRICTED AREA: RESEARCH IN PROGRESS.”

When I entered the green building, even though it was nine o’clock in the morning, several Steve Canyon look-alikes in baggy flight suits, former Flying Tiger pilots, were drinking beer at the rattan bar near the entrance. I walked to the far end of the building, where the chief’s office was located and where I could hear a loud voice shouting on the telephone. Waiting until the shouting stopped, I knocked and was told to come in. Colonel Applewhite was smoking a cigar and motioned me to a chair while he continued talking on the phone. After he hung up, he walked over, shook my hand, and then motioned me to a rattan chair opposite his desk.

“Welcome to Bushido. Great place, but am afraid you’ve come at a bad time. We’re in the middle of a big flap! Two case officers were shot down over China yesterday, including the one you were supposed to replace. All overflight operations have been canceled, and your slot has been eliminated.”

The smoke from Applewhite’s cigar fortunately obscured the dumbfounded look on my face. Overflight operations? I recalled the personnel officer having been vague about my assignment, saying I would be “filled in” when I got to Bushido. As Applewhite contemplated the smoke rings from his cigar coiling up toward the ceiling, I tried to absorb what he had just told me. Another flap. The rain cloud, like the one perpetually hanging over Mister Magoo, had apparently followed me across the Pacific!

As the cigar smoke lifted, I saw Applewhite looking at me. He must have known what I was thinking, and he did his best to cheer me up.

“Don’t worry, son,” he said. “I’m not going to send you back to Headquarters. We’ve had flaps before, and we’ll find something to keep you busy until another slot opens up, although I can’t tell you when that will be.”

Just then a communications officer knocked and came in and handed the base chief a cable, and said, “Another FLASH from panic city wanting to know who authorized American case officers on mainland overflights.”

As the base chief grabbed the cable, I decided it was a good time to leave, before he changed his mind about sending me back to Headquarters. I slipped out the door and walked toward the bar at the end of the hall to mull over my latest misfortune.

My slot had been eliminated and two case officers had been shot down over China. I knew, however, that I shouldn’t feel sorry for myself. If I had arrived earlier, it might have been me hunkering down in a bamboo cage somewhere in Red China. In fact, as it turned out, the two case officers spent twenty-two years as prisoners of the Red Chinese before, as a “goodwill gesture” during President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China, they were released.

Ming

A most solemn graveyard ditty, the mutual consolations of suicide lovers remembering the pangs and the delights of supernal love in the infernal groves.

—HENRY THOREAU,
Walden

The first priority was cleaning up the detritus from the flap. Safe houses, where agents lived while being trained, were turned back to their landlords and quit claims paid. Agents in training were paid off and terminated, with most of them melting into Edo’s Chinatown.

Most of them, but not all.

Ming had been a promising agent. According to his case officer, he was intelligent and highly motivated and was eager to return to his homeland and join the
“counterrevolution.” Since he was a Mandarin, Ming got preferential treatment, including his own safe house with a live-in Chinese maid.

Ming was a good student. He asked questions, took notes, and studied hard, at least in the beginning. Later, during his training, however, his case officer noticed Ming’s concentration flagging and initial enthusiasm beginning to wane. He became nervous and irritable and seemed to have difficulty concentrating. His case officer attributed the change to Ming realizing that his training was coming to an end and that he would soon have to forgo the comfort and security of his safe house for a dangerous future in his former homeland.

Ming also began taking more frequent and longer tea breaks during his training sessions, disappearing into the kitchen, where he could be overheard having whispered conversations with the maid. His case officer found it strange that a member of the Mandarin class would spend so much time in conversation with a servant but attributed the tête-à-têtes to Ming’s loneliness and desire to talk to someone in his native language.

A week before Ming was to finish his training, his case officer arrived at the safe house and found no sign of either Ming or the maid. both of them had apparently disappeared. Several days later John Madison, the security officer, got a phone call from his Bushidan liaison contact, Lieutenant Basho. Basho advised Madison that two bodies, in what was apparently a double suicide, had been discovered in a bamboo grove not far from the air base. One body was a Chinese female with papers indicating she was employed at the air base. Her family had been notified and had taken the body back to her native village. The other body was an unidentified Chinese male, and Basho asked Madison to come down to the police station and possibly identify the body as a base “employee.”

Basho had been helpful in the past in dealing with agents who slipped away from the training site and ran up bills in the tea houses and brothels, bills they couldn’t pay because they had no money. Madison would come and pick up these “strays,” pay their bills, and bring them back to their safe houses. It was an arrangement that suited Basho fine, because it relieved him of having to make out long reports that in the end would only upset his superiors.

Madison asked Sammy Lee, a Chinese-American case officer, to accompany him to the Station. When they arrived, Basho led them down to the basement, where the body had been laid out on a wooden table.

Basho went over and pulled back the sheet. Lee immediately cried out, “Ming, my beloved nephew!”

Lee’s outburst was followed by effusive sobbing. Basho, probably aware that the crocodile tears were for his benefit, looked on sympathetically, visibly relieved that the avuncular Mr. Lee would take the corpse off his hands. Once Lee’s tears had subsided, Basho told Madison Mr. Lee was free to take his nephew’s body away so
he could make arrangements for his final ancestral journey. Madison and Lee carried Ming out to the back of the police station where the jeep was parked. Rigor mortis made it difficult to wedge the body into the back of the jeep, but the two men finally succeeded and propped Ming up on the rear seat. They wrapped a blanket around him, leaving only his two unblinking eyes peering out into the darkness.

When they arrived at the air base, the guard shined his flashlight into the jeep. Madison explained that his friend in the back had drunk “too much sake,” but the guard decided to look for himself. When he got closer, however, he recoiled from the odor emanating from Ming and waved the jeep through. They drove to the special hangar and laid Ming’s body on a stretcher in the far corner until arrangements could be made for his disposition.

I was told the following day to report at midnight to the hangar to assist in a special operation. Ming had been zipped into a plastic body bag, and I helped Madison and another officer strap on “life belts,” in which lead weights had been inserted in place of Styrofoam packets.