See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (4 page)

‘Tell the truth and your perspiration, heartbeat, and breathing will remain pretty close to normal,’ the good doctor advised.

I was too tense at first to get a good reading, but after a pause to let my heartbeat go down, we restarted with better results. The questions came in a steady rhythm, and my answers followed in even yeses and nos. He asked me about drugs, whether I’d tried anything aside from marijuana, whether I’d had homosexual relations, whether I’d stolen anything or had any relationship with a foreign government, and so on.

The exam lasted a little under four hours. After running through the same questions three times, Jarmen gathered up his charts and went out of the room. He came back ten minutes later, unhooked me, and said he wasn’t sure whether I’d passed or not. He would have to show the charts to his supervisor. It could take up to a week for a decision.

When I told Scott how long the polygraph lasted, he gave me the thumbs-up. ‘You passed.’

I was feeling pretty good about my trip until I got back to San Francisco and saw the boa constrictor sleeping on the landing outside my apartment door.

The boa constrictor was my roommates’ pet, not mine. When it came time to move out of Mike’s apartment, I had gone to the Berkeley student union to check the bulletin boards. Two students, a couple, had a vacant room in an apartment close to campus that would have been perfect if I had ended up at Berkeley in the fall. I noticed the boa in its aquarium when I inspected the place - there was no way to miss it - but I didn’t mind snakes, and the couple seemed pleasant enough. It was only after I moved in that I learned they were dyed-in-the-wool anarchists and that from time to time the boa would escape the aquarium.

Then, it had all seemed part of the local color. Now that I was job-shopping at the heart of the American establishment, it mattered deeply. I figured it would take some CIA gumshoe about five minutes of talking to the neighbors to find out about the anarchists and the boa - evidence enough of a serious character flaw on my part. I’d be lucky if the CIA didn’t turn my application over to the FBI. I hadn’t even been hired, and already I was developing a streak of paranoia.

One morning about six weeks after I came back from my Washington interviews, the doorbell rang. I was alone in the apartment. A gray-haired man in his early sixties, wearing a suit and tie, was standing on the stoop. He had a briefcase in one hand and a map in the other. I thought he was one of those evangelical Christian missionaries who would sometimes try their luck in Berkeley.

He apologized for disturbing me so early and asked if I was so-and-so. Geez, I thought, what a coincidence, he’s looking for one of my Berkeley friends. I was about to give him the proper address when it occurred to me who my visitor was - a CIA background investigator who had mixed up my address with that of a friend I’d listed as a reference. He was in mid-sentence, apologizing for the mistake, when I began to push him out the door. I didn’t want him to catch sight of the poster of Mao on the landing, underneath which was neatly written THE EAST WIND BLOWS RED, or the boa, which was sure to slither around the corner at any minute. Admittedly, if I had thought about it a little harder, I might have realized that an organization that couldn’t even get a legman to the right address was unlikely to pick up such subtle cues as anarchist landlords.

I was asleep on the last Monday morning of July when the telephone rang a little after eight. It took me a moment to recognize Scott’s voice on the other end.

‘Can you be in Washington in two weeks? Security cleared you, and the Directorate of Operations is offering you a job.’

A job? I hadn’t had any contact with the CIA in three months. The DO, I figured, was toast. The only thing remotely long-term on my mind was Mandarin Chinese, which I’d started during the summer session at Berkeley.

Scott was impatient. ‘If you can’t make it in two weeks, it may be at least six months before I can get you into another class.’

‘Are you absolutely sure security cleared me?’

Hadn’t the CIA checked with the FBI and found out about Ron Kovick or the trips to Paris and Prague? The motorcycle through the library? The anarchists and the boa? I couldn’t believe they hadn’t put it all together.

‘Yes, at least for three years,’ Scott said.

I took a quick look around my shabby apartment. I thought about how far behind I was in Mandarin. I thought about another night standing at my teller’s window. And then I thought about a ski run I’d made when I was fifteen. There were six of us on our last trip down when we ran into two ski patrolmen we knew, probably the wildest pair in Aspen. They invited us to come look at a new jump they’d built. We followed them off the main run to an old, abandoned mining camp. In a clearing sat three houses in a line on a steep incline. Their roofs were collapsed. Right above the highest house was a six-foot-high jump. The idea was to pick up enough speed to clear all three houses. If you took it too slowly, you risked landing short - in the middle of a house. When one of the ski patrolmen pushed off, I followed without a second thought. As I sighted the jump between my ski tips, the line of houses began to look like a high-rise, but I felt a sense of inevitability. It was totally irrational. At any moment I could have turned off and avoided the jump. But I didn’t. I just kept going.

I now felt the same way about the CIA. ‘Sure, Jim. I can be there in two weeks. I could even be there next week.’

After I hung up the phone, I thought, What the hell. I’d finagle an assignment to Switzerland, meet from time to time with one of those shady agents Scott had talked about, gather up a few pieces of information that would save the world, and spend the rest of my time on the ski slopes. A tour in Switzerland and then out. How much trouble could I get in?

Crouching in the door of the C-46, I couldn’t see anything. It was like looking into a bottomless well. When I leaned forward a little to look directly below the plane, the engines’ backwash hit me like a fifty-pound sack of cement, almost yanking me out the door.

We’d spent more than three hours on the tarmac, waiting for God knows what, cinched up in our parachute harnesses and sizzling on the plane’s hot metal floor. The swamp mosquitoes were drilling right through my Korean War-vintage fatigues. At that point I would have happily jumped onto the North Pole. Anything to get out of that Damn place.

Come on, Red, tap me out.

‘Red’ Winstead, the jumpmaster, had his head out the door, russet hair pasted against the side of his face. He was looking intently at the ground. The rest of the stick, my team of jumpers that night, had already gone and was probably close to touching down by now. Red was spreading us out intentionally. ‘You don’t drop everyone in a tight cluster in a combat jump,’ he’d drummed into our heads in ground school. ‘It’s bad operational security.’ Still, it seemed like an eternity since the last jumper had gone out the door. There would be no second chance if we overshot the jump zone. I’d be going back with the plane, the only one who hadn’t jumped.

A big, tough Minnesota Swede, Red was a veteran of almost every CIA covert war. No one anywhere knew more about combat jumps behind enemy lines. Legend had it that Red came up with a technique to drop Tibetans into the Himalayas. At altitudes of twenty-five to thirty thousand feet, the crosswinds made it a treacherous ride down, so Red took the Tibetans out to Camp Hale, Colorado, and taught them to wait until the very last second to pull their rip cords. Dropping like a rock into a Himalayan valley was the only way to beat the winds.

Red had started us out in jump training with parachute-landing falls into a sawdust pit. The idea was to first touch down on the balls of your feet and then roll onto your calf, thigh, hip, and back, all in smooth succession, distributing the impact as evenly as you could. Red made certain we understood.

‘You goddamn well didn’t hit all five points,’ he’d yell, leaning over me as I wiped the sawdust and sweat off my face.

Just to make sure we got the message, Red produced a former paramilitary officer who had survived a jump thanks to good technique. One night - in Laos, I think - his chute didn’t open all the way, and he came barreling in at twenty or thirty miles an hour. If he hadn’t hit all five points, he would have died. As it was, he walked with a marked limp. Point made. At night we took to practicing five-point landings off the bar. The other trainees, who were in the operations course and wouldn’t be going through the paramilitary training, would turn away, embarrassed.

After we mastered the sawdust pit, Red introduced us to the dreaded tower, which everyone agreed was much worse than jumping out of a plane. Thanks to some weird psychological quirk, jumping out from forty feet hooked up to harness and steel cable was scarier than jumping out of an airplane from a thousand feet - if you ever got to jump, that is, and on this particular night I was beginning to have serious doubts.

Red, let’s go, we’re gonna miss it.

Without warning, Red slapped me on the ass, and I was out the door. A sharp yank of the harness, and then the quiet. It surprised me each time. The roar of the plane’s engines faded almost immediately to a monumental silence, but at less than a thousand feet, there wasn’t much time to enjoy the ride. Check the canopy. I did, and it was fine. It was still too dark to see much, but as I pulled the right toggle hard, turning the chute in a 360-degree circle, I dimly made out the tree line in the distance. I silently thanked Red for his timing. I wouldn’t be landing in the forest canopy tonight. .

Never look at the ground.

Red had pounded the lesson into our heads: Look at the ground as you’re about to hit and you’ll unintentionally straighten and lock your legs, which is the best way to break one. I turned the chute into the wind at the last minute, slowing my speed enough so I could have landed standing up if I’d wanted. All the while I kept my eyes fixed on the horizon. I hit with my knees bent. Not quite a five-pointer, but it didn’t matter; the ground was soft and wet.

I stood up and reeled in my chute, looking around for the rest of the team. I could just make out Alan. It was too dark to see the other three members of the team: Peter, Curt, and Eric.

Alan caught sight of me and pointed to a clump of trees, signaling to follow him there after I’d buried my chute. He and the rest of the team were crouching in some high sedge. We’d been warned that the bad guys had passive night-vision binoculars, and it was best to stay out of the open.

My team that night was fairly representative of the DO class I had come in with - about a sixty-forty split between ex-military officers and civilians. I would spend the next two decades watching the CIA evolve into an organization where garnering promotions and pleasing political masters became more important than collecting secrets, but back then the spirit of the CIA’s World War II predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), still lived. We were all adventurers - after all, we had chosen operations over the stay-at-home DI side - but a public-service ethos burned in us, too. We believed the United States needed a competent intelligence service, and we wanted to serve a higher cause.

Alan, the team leader for the night’s exercise, had been a pilot in the air force. After he had pushed the envelope one time too many with the big equipment, he was switched from jets to Caribous, twin-engine planes that could take off and land on a dime and were also a lot less expensive to replace.

Alan never talked about his tour in Vietnam, but we heard about it at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where we had gone for heavy-weapons training with the special forces. It happened one night when we were out drinking with a couple of sergeants on Fayetteville’s sleazy strip.

‘One of the damnedest things I saw in Nam was at an ‘A’ camp on the border of Laos,’ a crusty sergeant said as the waitress brought us our third round of beers. ‘We were surrounded, and Charlie was about to overrun us. We were out of everything except bullshit excuses why we couldn’t be re-supplied. We maybe had a day or two of ammunition left. Charlie was too close for a chopper to come in. But the captain thought a fixed-wing coming in low and fast could make it. The air force told us to stuff it because it was too dangerous.

‘But then, son of a bitch if not two hours later, we heard an airplane. It was a Caribou, and it came right in at tree level, so low it clipped the tops of the trees. Branches and leaves flew everywhere. A goddamn flying lawn mower. It was the most beautiful thing I ever saw. And when it taxied up to us, we could see it was packed with ammo.’

The sergeant stopped for a swig of beer, indicating the best part of the story was yet to come.

‘But you know what that crazy fucking pilot did then?’ the sergeant asked, looking around at us.

No one said anything.

‘He jumped out of that damn Caribou, and without saying a word, he reached behind his seat and pulled out two new props to replace the ones he had chipped to pieces flying in. Then he shouted at us,’ Hurry up and unload this sucker because I’m coming back again - today.’

‘As soon as the Caribou was unloaded, he took off, missing the tops of the trees by an inch. Sure enough, he came back that afternoon. New props and all. He did that for a whole week until we got regular supplies. Craziest fucker I ever met over there,’ the sergeant said, shaking his head.

When Alan quietly mentioned the name of the camp, the sergeant . stared at him in stunned silence. The only way Alan could have known the name of the camp was if he was the crazy fucking pilot who had supplied it.

Peter was next in command. A Berkeley graduate, Peter spent a few years in the blue-water navy, including a tour in Vietnam, until he was forced to resign after carelessly signing an antiwar petition while on shore leave in San Francisco. For the navy, there were no second chances, but as my own case showed, the CIA was willing to forgive a few youthful indiscretions. Peter was in fantastic shape, running five to six miles a day. He was also an obsessive fisherman. Years later I would run into him again in West Africa, where he was chief in a small country. He’d managed to persuade the CIA to buy a Boston Whaler and spent his free time fishing for barracuda.

Curt, a former marine captain who had been passed over for promotion, left the service to sell computers for IBM but soon got bored and joined the CIA to fight in the cold war. Every once in a while I’d catch him with a mad-dog grin that said he really believed he’d be dropped behind the Iron Curtain one day on some commando operation. Not surprisingly, Curt lasted only a few years in the CIA.

And then there was Eric. Like me, he’d never served in the military. Before he joined the CIA, he was an English professor at a small East Coast liberal arts college. With his thick glasses and somewhat pompous manner, he still looked and acted like he belonged in front of a classroom. At the drop of a hat he would recite some obscure passage from Milton.

One day when we were waiting in a mess line at Fort Bragg, Eric had a run-in with an 82nd Airborne Division colonel. Although Eric had a mandatory buzz cut and wore standard army camouflage like everyone else at Fort Bragg, he didn’t see the point of adapting completely to military etiquette - he refused to give up his pipe. As soon as the colonel caught sight of Eric and his unlit pipe, he marched across the mess with murder in his eyes. Planting his nose about an inch from Eric’s, the colonel growled: ‘Goddammit, soldier, get that dildo out of your mouth.’ We could see ‘Fuck you’ forming on Eric’s lips just as our escort, a special forces captain, stepped between Eric and the colonel, whispering in the colonel’s ear,’ A civilian, sir’ - no doubt saving the five of us from being awarded Purple Hearts.

The five of us had parachuted into Tidewater Virginia on the final exercise of a four-month paramilitary course, the last phase of the DO’s yearlong training cycle and probably the most intense, grueling, expensive training offered by the US government, short of something like the SEAL basic course. The next stop for many of us would be an overseas assignment.

Our exercise mission that night was to meet what was supposed to be an agent on the lam and escort him to a waiting boat. The meeting point was only a mile and a half away from the landing zone. From there to the inlet was less than a mile. What’s more, we had twelve hours to do it all, and if the agent wasn’t at the meeting point right on time, we weren’t supposed to wait for him. A walk in the park, or so we thought.

It took Alan about five minutes to find us on the map and plot a course. We’d studied the terrain from satellite photographs and a couple of aerial reconnaissance shots. There didn’t seem to be any major obstacles. Alan thought it would take less than an hour to get to the meeting point, but we decided to get as close to our destination as was prudent and wait there.

It was lucky we started early. About ten yards into the trees we ran into a wall of bramble, vines, and wild berry bushes. We had one machete between us, and the brush might as well have been made of cement. Alan started hacking through it first. After about half an hour, his hands were too bloody to continue, so Eric took over. We continued that way, taking turns, for the next two hours. So much for getting to the meeting site in an hour.

As soon as we got through, we collapsed on the ground, exhausted but heartened by what appeared in the darkness to be clear sailing ahead. Alan got everyone up after about ten minutes. Peter started off on point. As he walked along, he systematically checked for trip wires by putting the back of his hand on the ground and raising it slowly above his head.

We were making good time until we hit one of the most putrid swamps I’d ever seen. On the bottom was sucking muck; on top, thick saw grass. We quickly decided we couldn’t walk around it. It was too big, and we would have been thrown badly off course. Alan checked his compass, pointed at a big tree on the other side of the swamp, and stepped into the muck. We followed in single file, sinking to our necks.

The only pleasant thought I could summon when we got to the other side was that there was no fool big enough to follow us across. If they were going to catch us, it would have to be from the front. We threw ourselves on the ground, bleeding from the saw grass, for another fifteen-minute breather.

A little after midnight, we arrived at a low hill flanked by several large boulders. Peter, Curt, Eric, and I were to wait there while Alan went ahead to pick up the agent. We couldn’t be sure we had not been compromised. If an ambush was waiting, there was no point in losing the whole team.

At 0330 we got up and started to move due east and then north to intercept the route Alan would be taking with the agent. At the rallying point, Eric and Curt waited at the bottom of the ravine Alan was to follow, while Peter and I climbed the slopes to make sure we weren’t being tracked in parallel ravines.

An hour later, I heard faintly one then another person moving with difficulty through the bottom of the ravine. No one had mentioned that the agent was seriously overweight and ill. We took turns holding him up by the arms and even carrying him every ten minutes. By the time we came to the gravel road, I felt like I’d just spent the last twelve hours in Everest’s Death Zone.

It was now a little before six. Dawn was starting to crack, and we had yet to find the boat - if it was still there. Alan went ahead to check the inlet. We had just sat down in some bushes by the road when a car door slammed, and then a second, followed by an engine starting up less than a hundred feet away.

Eric and I each grabbed the agent by an arm, lifted him, and dragged him across the road. The car was grinding through its gears, speeding up and coming our way. We crashed through the bushes and plunged into water as the headlights lit up the foliage, and then it was complete confusion: sirens, shouts, and the burst of a machine gun. We could hear people coming through the underbrush. A grenade exploded in the water. I knew it was just a harmless flash-bang grenade, but my grip on reality was slipping.