Mongoose, R.I.P. Read online

  It was nearly 10 P.M. when in midsentence Pano said suddenly, “Blackforrd, shall we swim?”

  Blackford’s answer was instantaneous. “Sure. Can I assume you brought your own trunks, or do I assume you guessed I would have more than one pair?”

  “El último.”

  They went down the elevator, Blackford in a dressing gown and trunks, Pano with his slacks over his trunks and a bath towel over his naked shoulders. They went to the bathers’ exit on the basement floor and made their way out to the beach, empty though wonderfully inviting, with the low half-moon on the horizon. A few feet from high water, Pano stripped off his pants and dove into the gentle surf. Blackford followed, and they swam out together. Blackford wondered whether Pano would succeed in talking while he swam, was relieved he did not attempt to do so. Pano swam exultantly, and Blackford felt the competitive emanation and quickened his strokes. They were racing now, and Blackford felt the satisfaction of a totally mended shoulder as, little by little, he drew ahead of Pano. He stopped and waited when they were a half mile out. Pano spoke: “You swim well, Blackforrd, like a Cuban.”

  “You swim pretty well, like most Americans.”

  Blackford could see the grin, the teeth pearled by moonlight. Pano laughed. “Shall we?” He started back, and Blackford swam lazily this time, both of them at ease.

  They dried themselves and walked back to the elevator. Pano said happily, “I think perhaps a beer. No, perhaps three beers.”

  In their suite they discarded their trunks and showered in separate bathrooms, and by the time they were back at their upholstered stations the beer had arrived. Blackford spoke directly.

  “We need to know who might be the central figure in a cabal that could stage a coup.”

  “Yes, of course, that is the theoretical cuestión. But is it now the actual question? Who? I know who. And”—Pano smiled as he inhaled his cigarette smoke—“I know that you know who.”

  Blackford paused. Rufus had not been explicit on just how much Pano could be expected to know about the central figure. “By what name do you know him?” Blackford asked, cautiously.

  Pano laughed. “Yes, of course. But at this point we do not mention names, do we, Blackforrd? What do you call him?”

  Blackford paused. But only for a moment. “We call him AM/ LASH. A-M-slash-L-A-S-H.”

  “AM/LASH. Ele A Ese Hache?”

  “Yes. LASH.”

  “Clumsy, no?”

  “I did not give him that designation.”

  Pano paused. “If he—if AM/LASH—succeeds, he will be called AM/LASH El Libertador.”

  “That could be arranged. It is a part of Operation Mongoose, as you have been informed, Pano, that the liberator must be plausible, that the Cuban people will welcome him.”

  “The Cuban people will require a little coaxing. Many of them think Fidel is God.”

  “Many Russians thought Stalin was God.”

  “Are we supposed to talk tonight about how to approach AM/LASH?” Pano asked.

  “Are you in a position to make contact?”

  “Yes.”

  “Shall we talk about those arrangements?”

  Pano drank deeply from his glass. “Security is very important, Blackforrd. The identity of Mr. LASH is the … ultimate secret. Miami is full of Fidel’s agents.”

  “I know. And both of us know who some of them are. And I must suppose you know more of them than I do.”

  “Yes. Yes. And there is one less of them tonight than at this time last night.”

  “I am aware that there is—interaction—between the two camps even here, in Miami.”

  “The one we—eliminamos—last night had been a trusted friend of mine for four months. It was very difficult, but duty is duty, and although I am sentenced in absentia to die by a Cuban military court, I still think of me as a Cuban soldier—” he reached into his back pocket and with something close to a flourish took out his wallet. From it he drew out a plastic identification card and handed it to Blackford.

  “We received these when we were commissioned at the Managua Escuela Militar.”

  Blackford inspected the card. Pano, in solemn pose, looked like a seventeen-year-old, the lieutenant’s bars pinned to his shirt collar. Blackford sensed the prickly question he had several times before sensed between strangers-in-arms. He laughed, and drank from his own glass: “You wonder about me, Pano?”

  “I need to wonder about todo el mundo, the whole world. My professional puntillo—how do you say that, my friend?”

  “Punctilio. Okay, Pano, but it is only right, then, that we should wonder about each other. Whom do you want to hear from about me?”

  “The Attorney General.”

  Blackford whistled. “I have only once met the Attorney General, and I’m not certain he would even remember me.”

  “That does not matter. I trust Robert Kennedy. He is on our side.”

  “But if he does not know me personally, how could an assurance even from him satisfy you?”

  “I trust that he would not give that seguro without first being absolutely certain.”

  “Very well,” said Blackford, thinking quickly. “I will get you word from him. And from whom should I expect to hear about you?”

  “Well,” Pano looked at his watch. “Exactly twenty-four hours ago, you could have heard from my … late companion.”

  “We have a logical problem, Pano. Because suppose your late companion, as you describe him, actually was on our side? Theoretically he might have been disposed of because he discovered … your true allegiance.”

  “Ah, Blackforrd, you have a fine punto.” Pano’s smile was clearly genuine. “But before you came to me, you must have seen the order by the Supreme Military Court pronouncing me a condemned traitor, to be shot on sight?”

  “Yes. And of course that is kindergarten cover.”

  “What do you want? Confirmation from, from—AM/ LASH?”

  “That would do nicely.”

  Pano spoke now more slowly. “That must mean that you have your own channels to AM/LASH.”

  “Yes, that is what I mean. One of the things I mean.” He got up and stretched his arms. “Let us agree to work together as we have been doing, but to put off any communication by your channels to—LASH, let’s call him—until I deliver the Attorney General, and you deliver—LASH. I guess both these operations will take a few days. Meanwhile,” he picked up the tray with the empty bottles, walked to the door which he opened, setting the tray on the floor outside, “meanwhile, you can acquaint me with the Miami scene. But before you do that,” he smiled, “we can both get some sleep.”

  Pano had risen and reached for his blazer and large briefcase. “My great pleasure to be with you, Blackforrd. We will go forward as brothers—provided you are not Cain!” He laughed, gripped Blackford’s outstretched hand and went cheerfully to the door. “Muy buenas, Blackforrd. Hasta mañana.”

  5

  It had been a pretty heavy day—the routine stuff plus the meeting with the congressional leaders, plus the new Canadian ambassador, plus the Farmers’ Bureau speech, and ahead lay the state dinner, with all the movie stars coming in because Lollabrigida was getting the medal … But he had a few minutes, and went to his rocking chair.

  Hmm. Heavy day. Well, has it ever been different? Arthur was telling me the other day about those long naps of Coolidge. Well, Professor Schlesinger, I take naps. He stretched out his hands, yawning.

  They help. Good old Churchill. What a mind for detail. Told me a nap didn’t count unless you got undressed. When he told me that at first I thought he had something else in mind, but no: Churchill was never that way. At least, not that I know of. Certainly not now, poor guy. Maybe I should ask Macmillan. God, Super Mac knows everything. When he told me that Philip II had naps even when he went off to the monastery, I had, goddamnit, to think real hard who Philip II was. But I remembered, just in time. Should ask Macmillan—Harold—about the younger Churchill. Poor guy, nap is what he does n
ow most of the time. Must remember to drop him a note. He reached up and brought the pad from the coffee table to his lap, pulled out a pen, and scribbled.

  Damn if I didn’t dream of that Cuban bastard even during my forty-five-minute nap. When Mac Bundy brought me that paragraph from his speech I was tempted to tell him about Mongoose, but Bobby is right—nobody. Nobody is to know except Hicock. Even McCone doesn’t know. At least Bobby tells me he doesn’t know. Beats me how the goddamn Director of CIA doesn’t know about Mongoose, a CIA operation. When the subject did come up—real theoretical—the day Tad Szulc came in here and plop I ask him, like I was asking about the World Series, what about assassinating Castro? He was shocked. Just hypothetical, I said.

  I could have been an actor. Come to think of it, lots of people’ve said I could have rivaled Clark Gable. Would rather have rivaled Joe DiMaggio, ho ho, though you can’t slight Carole Lombard. Anyway, I said all the right things and then McCone, my Number One Papist, blurts out that assassination is a mortal sin. Can’t remember whether I got around to dissociating myself from mortal sin when I gave the Baptists that speech in Houston. “And what’s more, gentlemen, not only do I believe in the separation of church and state, I believe in separating myself from the Ten Commandments.” No—he smiled. No. I think even Nixon would have picked that up. “What’s more, the Democratic candidate for President of the United States in Houston yesterday said he was in favor of dishonoring your father and mother, lying, murdering, coveting your neighbor’s goods and your neighbors’ wives …” Well, I mean, I don’t think that would have been the time publicly to challenge Tricky Dick to a polygraph test. He had a little chuckle.

  Now that would blow up our democratic system. Polygraph tests for all presidential candidates after every speech. Instead of a debate. Maybe I’ll shoot a memo to John Bailey on that, just to see the expression on Arthur’s face the next day. Would be worth it. “Dear John. I know it may be early to think about the election campaign in 1964, but what do you think of the idea of challenging the Republican candidate to take joint truth tests in mid-October? We could agree to one question each from Larry Spivak, James Reston, David Lawrence, and Arthur Krock. Let me have your thoughts on this …”

  He began to rock evenly, studiedly, in his chair. Castro said—I won’t forget his exact words—after my talk to the Cubans in Miami: “President Kennedy is a vulgar pirate chief. He has degraded the dignity of his position.” Then he said I had “probably had too much to drink. “Dumb bastard doesn’t even know I don’t drink. Except every now and then a Ballantine. Correction: I had that vodka in Vienna toasting to Soviet-U.S. relations with Khrushchev. No wonder I don’t drink more. If it had been two drinks maybe Khrushchev would have built his Berlin Wall a hundred miles west.

  Hmm. Sometimes I think that first idea of Rusk’s and Bundy’s during the missile crisis—letting Havana have it in October with all our military might—was the right one.

  We let him get away with it in October and he’s the cock of the walk. Now he’s even kissing Chinese ass! Well, no more, no more, and tomorrow I’ll say yes to Bobby. He is right. Can’t let that fucker stay around, and no more of the half-ass stuff we’ve been up to since 1961, got to do it right.

  Bobby’s right on the organizational level too. Two operations. Hicock will be in charge of Mongoose where there isn’t any political involvement—a falling star lands on Castro during a parade, that kind of thing, whadyaknow. The other, what Bobby is primarily counting on and he’s right—that will be for Rufus. Rufus will go along with a coup, but not with the Mickey Mouse.

  Talk about Mickey Mouse.

  They’ve tried everything except an overdose of poison ivy. I like the one that involved the cigar that would make Castro lose his hair. Arthur would call Hicock “a humorist.” That and some of the other things were crazy, though who knows, one of them might have worked. But no Mickey-Mousing with Rufus. The LASH fellow, that’s our ace. Good, clean, vintage South American coup. After all, they’ve been practicing coups since the Spanish left. Rich Goodwin has an interesting thesis, got it from some Chilean scholar. Up until the Spaniards left the hemisphere, you couldn’t double-park in Latin America without the Spanish colonial governor sending a boat off to Madrid or to the Vatican to ask what was the appropriate penalty. They still haven’t learned how to govern themselves. I’m all for the Alliance for Progress, but somebody told me they have had forty-three coups in Bolivia during this century. So what is one more?

  And so what if this LASH fellow, after the coup, approaches us—real suspicious-like, like he was not going to have American imperialism substitute for Soviet imperialism, the whole bit—to decompress the Castro loyalists. Hell, Dick Goodwin could write the speech for him. He’d sound real tough about us the day after the coup. Then, a month later, just a few sensible overtures. After all, LASH can tell them—wonder if LASH is a speech-making type? If he gives three-hour speeches, I’m going to suggest a coup against LASH—he can tell them in his next speech that there isn’t any point in continuing “mutually damaging economic hostilities”—something like that—with the United States. He can get U Thant to appoint a committee full of U.N. people etc., etc., to suggest “mutual concessions.”

  And by the time November 1964 comes around, maybe we will be up to a state visit over here for LASH. No. I’ll go there first. Big concession. The Colossus of the North travels to little Cuba. I’ll say some real pretty things about Cuban independence, and Cuban pride, and Cuban patriotism.

  Would I say anything about Castro? Hell no, Stupid. LASH’s big number is how he saved Cuba from Castro. No, no mention of Castro, but a whole lot of the other stuff.

  He looked out at the Rose Garden. The muted lights showed the remaining flecks of the recent snowfall. He resumed his slow, rhythmic rocking.

  Gotta keep it secret. Bobby says JM WAVE in Miami is making a lot of noise, but everybody puts that station’s activities down to psy-war, which is fine, perfect cover for Mongoose. We got to clean up that business down there on that island, and there’s no other way to do it, Bobby is right, no o-t-h-e-r way. Damned convenient, having your brother as AG. He tells me even Hoover doesn’t know. Wish I knew that was so. But I can handle Hoover. Come to think of it, I can handle just about anybody. Wish Castro was a she, would be easier. As I told Bill Manchester when he asked me how come I make out all the time when he doesn’t, I said, Bill, some people have it, some people don’t … Not my fault, is it? Gotta have confidence. And the CIA is a hell of a lot more useful than I thought it was back after the Bay of Pigs. Only you got to remember the CIA is a big machine made up of little CIAs. And they don’t always work with—what did Acheson say?—“reciprocating gears.” So tomorrow, just me and Bobby, and go with Mongoose. Period. Period, end Castro.

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Mr. President, the First Lady asked me to remind you it’s almost seven.”

  6

  It was inevitable, Larry Fillmore ruminated, walking home in the January chill from the safe house at the Hamilton Arms on Thirty-first Street where Operation Mongoose, or at least one part of it, had its headquarters. Anyone baptized “William Hicock” was going to be called Wild Bill somewhere along the line. Granted, if the baby William grew up acting like Caspar Milquetoast, or Donald Meek, or Adlai Stevenson perhaps, he might have got through life without anyone’s being tempted.

  But not this Hicock. Larry shook his head. He hadn’t known much about Wild Bill’s background—colleagues’ bios don’t get passed around in the Agency, not in the covert encampments. Obviously he had grown up in the West. Larry could only guess that Wild Bill (at the office the senior colleagues referred to him as “WB”—“as in Yeats,” Hicock had said to his deputy on first meeting him) must have been captain of the hazing committee at his fraternity at college. He looked and dressed as one might expect a Wild Bill Hicock to look and dress. He wore cowboy boots, though the heel was not fag-high, just a stocky little nipple there, and the
n the conventional embroidery on the leather halfway up to his knee. Larry had never seen him with his shirt buttoned, but then Larry had never seen WB at any function, come to think of it, at which a superior official was present. WB was the boss at the safe house, boss of the four men and two Cuban-American women who worked there. And if anybody from Operation Mongoose field operations came into the safe house, why should WB put on coat and tie? After all, he was paying them, not the other way around.

  And although WB had now five consecutive failures, he was always cheerful and optimistic. “Next time, next time,” he would say. And perhaps it would be so; no one at the shop doubted that they were dealing with an experienced and resourceful field official. Still, details were in short supply.

  Looking about for a memo he had written for WB a few weeks earlier, one day when WB was out of town, Larry absent-mindedly thought he might have left it on WB’s desk. He went in, didn’t see it, and began opening the central drawer. Perhaps Conchita, who did cryptography for WB, had put it there. He didn’t find the memo (which all the time was sitting in one of the baskets on Larry’s own desk). But he did stumble on a picture of a younger WB. He was being decorated. Larry turned the picture over. Taped to the back was a faded Stars & Stripes clipping with the headline, “General Roy S. Geiger Decorates 1st Lieutenant Hicock.” The picture caption read, “Major General Roy S. Geiger today hung a second Silver Star on 1st Lieutenant William Hicock for conspicuous gallantry in action in Okinawa. Lt. Hicock, from Laramie, Wyoming, received his first Silver Star, also for conspicuous gallantry, in Tarawa.”

  As he walked to the parking lot, Larry Fillmore paused at the corner of Thirty-first and M, waiting for the light. He wondered vaguely what exactly WB had done in the field. He never doubted that WB had earned his medals, but Larry would like to have known the details. He had to suppose that Wild Bill had emerged from the Japanese concentration camp before breakfast, shot a half dozen, and taken the rest prisoner. Or maybe he had hung down from a helicopter and lassoed a Japanese intelligence officer, whisking him off behind U.S. lines for interrogation. That was the kind of thing Wild Bill went in for.