Skandal (35 page)
Authors: Lindsay Smith
When we leave the coliseum, Papa is waiting out front for us, leaning against a transport van with Cindy and Winnie in the front seat. The smile on his face isn’t so big as it usually is, but somehow, he looks happier. He feels happier.
“Trouble in Turkey, kids,” Winnie says. She’s ditched the Air Force uniform, but instead of joining the Urban League, Cindy—our new PsyOps chief—hired her on at the CIA as an operations officer. Rumor has it she glared the director into submission when he initially vetoed the idea of a colored woman on the staff. She looks just as commanding in her pretty flower-print dress as she did in her Air Force uniform. “One of our diplomats has gone missing, and a courier bag full of secret documents is gone with him.”
“Plane leaves in an hour,” Papa says. “Zhenya’s staying with the neighbors while we’re gone.”
“Valya, you’ll be helping me at our command post,” Winnie says, ticking off her fingers. “Yulia, you’ll scout ahead with your dad…”
Valya links his hand in mine. Our melodies knit themselves together, unburdened, unhurried, pure. His lack of powers soothes him, while my power keeps me whole.
Our minds are ours alone.
The year 1964 was a time of both victories and setbacks for America. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the countless other crusaders for equal rights, school integration, and repealment of Jim Crow laws paved the way for the Civil Rights Act. But as political unrest between the communist North Vietnamese and rebel South intensified, many Americans hoped to stamp out the spectre of communism abroad, or at least contain it, as America had attempted in the Korean peninsula in the 1950s. Sadly, it was not to be the case—by August of 1964, an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin prompted President Johnson to launch military operations in Vietnam, and the resulting American role in the war dragged on into 1973.
Since its founding in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency has captured the imagination of Americans with its dual image of dangerous glamour and extreme secrecy. Allen Dulles’s account of the CIA’s creation and early days,
The Craft of Intelligence
, informed much of my representation of the CIA in this book, as did Robert Littell’s
Inside the CIA
, which details the day-to-day structure and operations of the CIA now. The rubric of agent personality factors that Yulia and Valentin use to hunt for the mole are adapted from Henry Crumpton’s
The Art of Intelligence: Lessons from a Life in the CIA’s Clandestine Service.
Although I fabricated the PsyOps team within the CIA and the MK INFRA experiment, both are (very loosely) modeled after real American attempts to induce psychic powers. As outrageous as it sounds, the Department of Defense’s Stargate program did indeed seek to develop psychic ability and the CIA’s MK ULTRA experiments actually explored espionage applications of LSD.
Less fantastical but no less damaging to the agency’s credibility, however, were the projects run by people such as Frank Tuttelbaum, who tried to turn the agency into their own vehicle for egotistical political maneuvering. In the 1960s, these renegade CIA managers orchestrated political assassinations, illegal wiretapping and infiltration of American organizations and individuals, and manipulation of Latin and South American politics. In 1973, Congress created the Church Committee to investigate such government abuses and, thankfully, they dismantled many such fiefdoms. Tim Weiner’s
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
touches on these programs as well as the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, both of which serve as cautionary tales for government overreach today.
Lindsay Smith
’s love of Russian culture has taken her to Moscow, St. Petersburg, and a reindeer festival in the middle of Siberia. She writes on foreign affairs and lives in Washington, D.C. You can sign up for email updates
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CONTENTS
Copyright © 2015 by Lindsay Smith
Published by Roaring Brook Press
Roaring Brook Press is a division of Holtzbrinck Publishing Holdings Limited Partnership
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010
All rights reserved
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smith, Lindsay.
Skandal / Lindsay Smith.—First edition.
pages cm
Sequel to: Sekret.
Summary: “In the sequel to SEKRET, Yulia and Valentine have escaped Russia to live in Washington, DC, where they are working with CIA psychics, including Yulia’s increasingly erratic father”—Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-1-62672-005-3 (hardback)—ISBN 978-1-250-07369-3 (trade paperback)—ISBN 978-1-62672-006-0 (e-book) [1. Spies—Fiction. 2. Psychic ability—Fiction. 3. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 4. United States. Central Intelligence Agency—Fiction. 5. Washington (DC)—History—20th century—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.S65435Sk 2015
[Fic]—dc23
2014040757
eISBN 9781626720060
First hardcover edition, 2015
eBook edition, April 2015