Authors: Brian Haig
“But you gave him the job?” I asked or said or pronounced as a verdict.
“I did.” He glumly nodded. “I thought that if I gave him the strongest team in the battalion, things would work out. Persico’s probably the best warrant in all of Tenth Group. He’s been through some rough shit, and he knows what he’s doing. I thought he’d keep Terry from screwing up. His NCOs are pretty tough, but damned good, and Persico keeps ’em in line.”
“And Sanchez’s performance since then?”
“I guess I’d have to say that on good days, he’s fairly mediocre. Not for lack of trying, though. Christ, I wish some of my guys with more talent would put in half the energy.”
“So it’s a matter of talent?”
“Some guys just do it naturally. Terry has to work at it every minute. Guys like that run scared and his people smell it.”
Morrow said, “When Akhan’s team were killed, what happened?”
Smothers became very focused. His eyes narrowed and he started rubbing his lips. “That happened on the fourteenth. In the morning, I think. Sanchez called on the radio sometime around noon. All he said was Whiskey 66—that was Akhan’s call sign—was that the Whiskey 66 element was at black. You understand that?” he asked.
Morrow shook her head.
“It’s a color code we use to describe unit strengths. Green means the unit’s at one hundred percent. Red is fifty percent. Black is zero percent. Some of our KLA units have gotten shot up pretty bad, but we’ve never had a whole company, ninety-five men, go from green to black in only a few hours.”
“Did he explain what happened?” Morrow asked.
“Only that they were performing an operation. But that bothered us, because we hadn’t approved an operation for Akhan’s team.”
“According to the statement he gave us, they were attacking a police station in a town named Piluca,” I said.
“Well,that’s what he said.We had a problem with that,though. Piluca wasn’t on our approved target list.”
“Excuse me,” I interrupted. “What approved target list?”
“We get a list of what to hit. It’s screened all the way up the line to the Joint Staff in the Pentagon. The idea is to avoid any kind of screwups.”
“And those are the missions you assign to your teams?” “That’s right. No targets of opportunity are permitted in Avenging Angel. Everything’s run tight, you know?”
I guess I did know. If the Avenging Angels made a mistake, like the Air Force hitting the Chinese embassy or bombing a column of Kosovar refugees, the ensuing furor would blow the lid right off their secret war.
“Okay,” I said, “so Sanchez reported that his KLA company was wiped out, then what?”
“I ordered him to extricate.”
I said, “General Murphy told us he was ordered to stay in place.”
“That’s not right. We considered it, but I was worried.” “What specifically worried you?” Morrow asked.
“Sanchez, I guess.”
“What, specifically, about Sanchez?”
“Every time one of our teams train a KLA company, you get this big brother mentality. Not just here; same thing happened in northern Iraq with the Kurds. Bosnia, too. They’re just so damned helpless and needy and eager. American soldiers can’t resist it.”
“So you were worried that Sanchez couldn’t control the situation?”
“Two of our other A-teams had their Kosovars get beat up pretty good, and we actually had to stand them down and let the Group psychiatrist and chaplain help them sort through it. A lot of guilt and other powerful emotions get unleashed. It would take a real strong leader to hold it together and ...yeah, I guess I was worried that Terry couldn’t do it.”
I gave him a steady look.“The suicide and the attempted suicide, they weren’t members of those two other teams, were they?”
He nodded, a painful, jerking motion. “Yes, they were. Like I said, the emotions become very powerful.”
“But Sanchez and his team, they didn’t extricate?” I asked. “No, not when I told them to. For two days, they kept reporting heavy Serb activity in their sector. Sanchez said he felt it was too risky to move south.”
“And how did you respond to that?”
“What could I do? He was the guy on the ground. I did ask the NSA station here to increase surveillance over Zone Three, so we could get a picture of what was happening.”
“And did they?” Morrow asked.
“They put a thermal up for an hour or two each day. The films showed Sanchez’s team in their base camp, but there were no signs of unusual Serb activity. Basically, though, we had to believe him.”
Now I understood why NSA used a thermal gatherer over Zone Three during those days. They weren’t looking for targets that required pictorial analysis. They were looking for human heat sources, like Serb soldiers in the woods.
I said, “So his team finally extricated four days later?” “Right. But you had to figure it would’ve taken a day and a half, maybe two days, to make it out on foot. So there were only two days unaccounted for.”
“When they got back, did they report the ambush?”
“No,” Smothers said, and you could hear a note of anger in his voice. “We debrief every extricating team. They never mentioned it. They just insisted the area was crawling with Serbs, so it took them a while to make it out.”
I said, “Then three days later, Milosevic started holding his press conferences, and what did you do?”
“I went to General Murphy. I told him I thought Sanchez’s team might’ve done it. It was the same sector they were in. It was three days after Akhan’s unit was killed. It all fit.”
Morrow said,“Back to what happened to Akhan and his unit. Did Sanchez and his men clarify what occurred?”
“It was discussed during the debriefings.”
“And what did they say?” Morrow asked.
“They all said Akhan made the decision to attack the station himself. They couldn’t stop him. Zone Three was where most of Akhan’s men lived. The commander of Piluca’s police station was supposed to be a real cruel bastard, and he’d supposedly murdered or tortured some of their family members. It made sense. We’ve had other KLA units launch off on private vendettas.”
I said, “Have one of your people run a copy of the debriefing notes over to my office as soon as we’re done.”
“Okay.”
“Doesn’t it feel better to tell the truth?” I asked.
He looked at me strangely. “No, not really,” he said. “None of us liked lying to you. But we believe in what we’re doing out here.”
Well, so much for truth and justice being the American way. I turned to Morrow and she indicated she had no more questions, either. I gave Smothers a long, solemn look. He stared back, clear-eyed, not the least bit bothered by the fact he’d been involved in a massive cover-up, or that he’d lied in an official investigation. This boy would get ahead, I thought to myself. He was a true believer.
We left him there and headed to the airfield, where a C-130 was already revved up and waiting.
W
e pulled up to the marble entrance of the same Italian hotel on the hill, and my mouth watered. Morrow and I got side-by-side rooms and stowed our gear. My room had one of those cushy German featherbeds, which made me think God just might love me after all. It also had a minibar. A well-stocked minibar. My body hurt like hell and I stared at the row of tiny Dewar’s bottles. Dr. Drummond screamed at me to give that pain what it needed. I fought the temptation and went back downstairs to the lobby.
Imelda and two of her girls took rooms a floor below us and rented a full suite to use for our office. When Morrow and I got outside to take the van to the air base, Imelda and her assistants were still lugging computers and boxes of paper up the entry stairs to the elevator. Imelda was bellowing at them to move their asses, and the girls were giggling at her. They’d obviously figured out her secret. She really was a softie, like one of those dogs that barks a lot but don’t bite too hard.
It took fifteen minutes to get to the Air Force holding facility. The same pudgy Air Force major was there to meet and greet us. He was being real deferential and courteous, virtually fawning, I guess because he didn’t want to get any dishonorable mention in our report. I treated him coldly, and Morrow followed my lead. Let him sweat.
Morrow and I had spent a lot of time considering our next move. Our first inclination was to start the re-interrogation of the team with Sanchez. We needed one of the nine to break, and he was the one carrying the most baggage. All we needed was one. Like with all conspiracies, once that first man broke, there’d be a chain reaction. We’d pit them against one another, and threaten and make deals until we had the whole story, as well as a slew of witnesses to testify against one another.
But the more we talked about it, the more we persuaded ourselves that Sanchez probably wasn’t the right man. He’d obviously made some kind of pact with his troops. And for whatever went wrong out there, he was ultimately responsible, and therefore had the most to lose. It is a prosecutor’s maxim: Most to lose very often equals last to confess.
It was Morrow’s notion to bring in Persico first. I thought it was a real dumb idea. Well, at first, anyway, but the more I considered it, the better sense it made. In every organization, there’re two kinds of leaders. There’s the leader appointed by the system. That was Sanchez, the guy with a commission provided by the United States Senate and two silver bars on his collar. Then there’s the leader appointed by the men themselves. That was Persico, the guy with Silver and Bronze Stars on his chest. Get him to talk, and the rest would follow.
But there was another reason, too. At some point while in Kosovo, the formal chain of command in Sanchez’s team simply disintegrated. That’s what Imelda had detected in their statements. Quite possibly, there’d been a mutiny. We were sailing on instinct there, but based on our earlier interrogatories, there’d been no indication that Sanchez was in charge. There had to be a trigger for that. The team probably had doubts about Sanchez all along, but soldiers, especially experienced noncommissioned officers, generally adhere to the arrangements the Army makes. Unless, that is, some dramatic event comes along and persuades them otherwise.
Something had happened out there. Something powerful. I was guessing it occurred around the fourteenth, because that’s when the team began acting in odd and mysterious ways. That’s when Akhan’s company got wiped out. That’s when Sanchez got on the radio and claimed they couldn’t extricate. That’s when the chain of events began that led eventually to a narrow road between two hills where thirty-five men were slaughtered. It was just a guess, but I was pretty sure that was the day Persico took over command of that team.
Morrow and I positioned ourselves in the interview room and began arranging tables and chairs into a rough-and-tumble resemblance of a courtroom. Imelda showed up a few minutes later with both her girls. They began setting up a desktop computer and a court transcription device. Morrow and I had decided to formalize the atmosphere, to make it look as much like an actual courtroom as we could. It would get the witnesses thinking about what lay ahead.
We were finally ready and I sent Imelda to bring in the first witness. It took a few minutes, during which we all sat around nervously and waited.
Finally the door opened and Imelda came through, followed by Chief Persico. She formally announced him, as though she were a court bailiff. He casually, but not at all casually, looked around and studied the new setup. Again, I had the impression of a man checking the field of battle, trying to calculate his odds.
“Please sit down, Chief,” I said, indicating a chair we had positioned in the middle of the floor. The chair sat isolated, without the protective comfort of a desk or table.
He sat down, folded his legs, and spent a brief moment studying Morrow, who was holding a tape recorder. Then his gray eyes shifted to me. “Mind if I smoke?”
He hadn’t smoked the first time we talked.The cool demeanor aside, I guessed that something about this session made him more nervous.
“If you’d like,” I told him.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of Camels, unfiltered, knocked a fag out of the packet, tapped the end a few times on the palm of his hand, then stuffed it between his lips and lit it. All this was accomplished in a smooth, flowing, almost instinctive motion.
I said, “Please state your full name and rank for the record.” He blew smoke as he talked. “Michael John Persico. Chief Warrant Officer Four.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Our last meeting was merely an interrogatory, an informal exploratory session, to discuss the events that transpired between 14 June and 18 June 1999. The purpose of this session is to take your full formal statement concerning the same time period. Are you sure you want to waive your right to have an attorney present?”
“I’m sure,” he said.
“At your interrogatory, you stated that you and your team were in Kosovo participating in Operation Guardian Angel. You were lying, weren’t you? You were participating in Avenging Angel, which involved the performance of combat missions against Serbian forces in Kosovo. Isn’t this correct?”
Morrow and I had decided the best way to handle Persico was to come barging out of our corner and shock him with our best punch. We knew now why he, and the rest of his team, had been such confident, able liars. They had the U.S. government behind them. Who couldn’t tell a great whopper when NSA was building evidence to support you, when the CIA was fronting for you, when the United States Army was tying the hands of your listeners? I could tell a perfectly good lie even without all that help.
Persico took a long draw from his cigarette. Aside from that, he showed no visible signs of anxiety or distress. Finally, he said, “I ain’t got the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”
I said, “Jack Tretorne and General Murphy cleared Captain Morrow and me on the details of Avenging Angel. Now, please answer my question, or I will add obstruction of justice and lying under oath to whatever other possible charges we come up with today.”
He considered this only a moment.“Okay,” he said,“we were part of Avenging Angel.”
“Let’s deal with another lie,” I said. “When Captain Akhan’s unit raided the police station in Piluca, was this an approved and authorized operation?”