The Case Officer (5 page)

The RMO doctor spoke. “Don’t try
to talk yet, Mac. Just nod if you can hear me.”

MacMurphy nodded and managed to
mumble, “I can hear you.”

“I told you not to talk…but then,
you’re not known for following orders, are you, Captain?” the doctor said
genially. The people around him smiled. “You’ve got a couple of pretty nasty
contusions on your back and chest, but no ribs are broken. Your body armor did
its job very well, especially this one,” indicating a spot just below his
throat. “You also took a round in the upper left arm and another in your left
leg. Both bullets passed through the muscle, so there wasn’t any significant
trauma to the bones. There were also some small cement fragments that I removed
from the right side of your neck and face—from ricochets, I guess—but we got
them out okay, and I don’t think they’ll mar your beauty.”

The doctor reached out and touched
MacMurphy’s good arm. “There’s one more thing I want to say, for me, and I
think I speak for everyone in this embassy, I want to say thank you for what
you did. I honestly think you saved all of our lives.”

The sick bay erupted in applause, and the gunny let out a
loud Marine “Uoo-rah!”

MacMurphy was feeling better already. He turned his head
toward Sergeant Bradshaw and mumbled, “And I want to thank you, Gunny, for
pulling me out of there before the bastards hacked me up, and for laying down
that covering fire, despite the ambassador’s orders…”

“Hey, Captain, I was just doin’ my job, protecting my
Marines. You can thank Sergeant Gillis as well. He did the heavy lifting.”

Spinelli said, “The evacuation of the embassy has begun, Captain.
We’ll all be out within the next couple of hours. And…of course you were right.
Aideed was planning to attack last night, and your actions, and those of your
Marines on the roof, gave us enough breathing room to get the hell out of here.
I will make sure your superiors know what a courageous thing you did last
night. You did indeed save all our lives, and we all owe you a deep debt of
gratitude for that.”

MacMurphy slurred his words, “Don’t forget Gunny Bradshaw
and his Marines. I’d be dead meat out there if it weren’t for them…”

“I won’t,” said Spinelli. “Don’t you worry about that…”

Chapter Eight

I
t took most of the day to destroy the remaining
classified information and communications equipment within the embassy, and to
evacuate the remaining Americans and foreigners to the aircraft carrier
Guam,
anchored offshore. The last CH-53 helicopter touched down on the
Guam
just before dark. Neatly folded under the ambassador’s arm was the last
American flag to fly over the embassy.

He was still clearly in a state of shock and appeared
disoriented when the
Guam
’s captain met him and quickly ushered him to
his quarters deep within the bowels of the ship. The massive gray naval vessel,
accompanied by the
Trenton
, then steamed north out to sea in the
direction of the Arabian Peninsula, where they were urgently needed for
Operation Desert Shield.

Within hours of the evacuation, Aideed’s forces breached
the walls of the embassy and used rocket-propelled grenades to blast down the
doors of the buildings inside the compound. They sacked the buildings, removing
office furniture, vehicles, and other movables. When Aideed’s men were through,
other looters came, many of them deserters from Siad Barre’s army, and finished
stripping the once-proud embassy of everything that could be removed.

The US Embassy in Mogadishu was one of the first built to a
new design incorporating tightened security standards such as fewer windows and
multiple walls of reinforced concrete. It was dedicated on 4 July 1989, and
went into use four months later. It was abandoned and sacked on 7 January 1991.

T
wo days later, Spinelli visited MacMurphy in
his hospital bed on the ship. He asked the nurse to leave them alone and pulled
the curtain separating them from the rest of the ward. He pulled up a chair
close to the bed and spoke softly. “You’re looking better, Captain.”

The cobwebs had left MacMurphy’s brain. Aside from some
stiffness and numbness, he was alert and well on the road to recovery. His left
arm and leg were heavily bandaged. “I feel okay,” he said, pulling himself into
more of an upright position in the COS’s presence. “I don’t know what’s worse,
the pain or the pain-killers.”

“I know what you mean, Mac. Having a clear head is worth a
little pain. Is your head clear now?”

     “Oh yeah, fog’s gone now. So…what happened after I got
shot?”

Spinelli spoke in hushed tones. “I’ve just been waiting for
you to recover enough to brief you. You must be anxious to hear what happened
after you got hit.”

“What am I going to face when I get back home…am I going to
be kicked out of the Corps for doing what I did?” MacMurphy’s eyebrow rose
questioningly.

 “Keep it down, Mac. There’s not much privacy in here, and
what I’ve got to say is for your ears only.” He scooted his chair closer.
“There’ll be no Court Martial of you or anyone else. The ambassador was furious
when the shooting broke out and he learned that you were out there picking off sentries.
He changed his tune the next morning when he received kudos from Washington for
taking action that prevented an attack on the embassy.”

MacMurphy closed his eyes, knowing what was coming and
feeling the disgust building.

Spinelli laughed and shook his head. “No shit, Mac. He came
out smelling like a rose. Apparently we got some new overhead photography that
showed the massing of Aideed’s troops around the compound, indicating an attack
was indeed imminent. ”

With a grunt of discomfort, MacMurphy painfully moved into
a somewhat less uncomfortable position. “So now he’s a real hero, eh?”

“You got it—he’s a hero. You just saved his career, Captain.
But look on the bright side, now you’ll be recognized as well. He’s got to say
that he sent you out there to do a reconnaissance and that he instructed the
Marines on the roof to return fire. All of his past fuck-ups will be quickly
forgotten. He averted the attack and got everyone out of there safely. That’s
the bottom line.”

MacMurphy shook his head incredulously. “Unbelievable.” A
wry smile started to twist the corners of his mouth.

“But the really good news is I wrote up a recommendation
for you to receive an award for your actions that night and shoved it under his
nose yesterday, while he was receiving all those attaboys from Foggy Bottom. He
signed it, grimacing the whole time, and it’s on its way to Headquarters Marine
Corps as we speak. Who knows, you may get the Silver Star for your actions. Its
high profile enough that even the Commandant of the Marine Corps will know
about what you did. Congratulations, Captain.”

He shook MacMurphy’s good hand and looked seriously into
his eyes. “And thanks again for doing what you did, despite the risks to your
career, not to mention your life.”

“Thanks, Mr. Spinelli. You didn’t have to do that. I really
appreciate it…”

“There’s one more thing, and then I’ll let you rest.” The
COS lowered his voice further and brought his lips close to MacMurphy’s ear. “I
understand you’re due to rotate out of this job pretty soon.”

“That’s right sir. In about three weeks, actually, but I
doubt they’ll bother to send me back to Nairobi in this condition.”

“You haven’t got much time left in the Corps, do you?”

“My current tour ends in April. April Fools Day, to be
exact. As far as I know I’m going to be transferred to Eighth and Eye to start
pushing paper. Why?”

“Because I’ve got another job for you, Mac – with my
outfit. I cabled them about you and they’re really interested. The director of
recruiting is an old buddy of mine, and as long as you don’t have anything
nasty in your background that would cause you to flunk the polygraph, you’ll be
invited to join the June Career Training class down at The Farm. What do you
think about that?”

“The CIA? Do you really think so? I mean….”

Spinelli reached out and put his hand on the Mac’s
shoulder. “You’re the stuff great case officers are made of, Mac. Take the job.
We want you to come aboard. It’s a done deal if you want it.”

“Aye, aye sir,” said MacMurphy. “I was wondering what I was
going to do when I grew up. Who would have thought…CIA….”

Chapter Nine

June 1991 – July 1993,

Langley and The Farm

H
arry Stephan “Mac” MacMurphy recovered fully
from the wounds he had received in Somalia.  By the time he entered the CIA’s
September Career Training class at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, he
had worked his way back to scoring 100% on the Marine Corps Personal Fitness
Test. The Marine PFT had been MacMurphy’s personal gauge of fitness since the
day he entered OCS training at Quantico, Virginia. He believed as long as he
could ace the PFT, he was at the top of his fitness game. Now he was there
again.

Physical fitness was always important to Mac. He had been a
“wiry” kid – a nice way of saying “scrawny.” But he made up for his small size
by being tough. He excelled at wrestling and boxing, and was a tenacious,
never-give-up kind of kid.

His father, a tough former amateur boxer, enrolled him in
karate and mixed martial arts classes at the age of four. By the time Mac
reached his tenth birthday he had earned his black belt. He continued with his
martial arts training through high school, reaching the level of a third degree
black belt.

But wrestling was where he really excelled. Here the
competition was real. No pulling punches and kicks and wearing heavy padding as
in karate. It was all out, man against man. Only the fastest and strongest and
best technique would win. He reveled in the one-on-one competition and was always
the fittest wrestler of his competition.

He left high school as the New York State champion in the
147 pound weight class and went on to win a wrestling scholarship at Oklahoma
State University, although as he gained in height and weight he moved up in
weight class to 157 and then to 165.

The bane of all collegiate wrestlers, constantly pulling
weight to get down to a lower weight class, became more and more of a challenge
as he shed the scrawny kid image and developed into a strapping, athletic young
man of nearly six feet.

When he entered the CIA training in September of 1991 he
was back in superb physical condition and the physical challenges of the
training were taken very much in stride. The mental aspects of the training
were the most challenging, but he took to them with the same enthusiasm that he
applied to his physical training.

Chapter Ten

T
he first six weeks of his training were spent
in the Operations Familiarization Course, held at a location nicknamed “Blue U”
in Arlington, Virginia. The class was taught the workings of the CIA and the
Intelligence Community, and introduced to the CIA’s four directorates
(administration, science and technology, intelligence and operations).

After that, Mac and his thirty-three classmates headed down
to “The Farm” – the CIA’s covert training facility – for the sixteen-week-long
Operations Course.

The weeks on The Farm passed quickly for Mac, loaded with
lectures, practical training exercises, lab work, and study. The mornings began
at seven o’clock with calisthenics and a leisurely two mile wake-up run, which
Mac would often run in his flip-flops, much to the chagrin of his less fit
colleagues.

They learned basic case officer skills and practiced these
skills on agent/instructors during live problem exercises. Mac excelled at
agent acquisition, although others, like his more technical minded classmate
Culler Santos, found this phase of instruction to be the most challenging.

The live exercises often ran late into the evenings.
Afterwards, the fledgling case officers returned to their classrooms to write
up their reports in order to have them on their instructor’s desk by eight
o’clock the following morning. Adhering to strict deadlines on The Farm
developed habits that would stick with them throughout their careers.

Mac was surrounded by exceptional people on The Farm. The
students were gregarious and outgoing, bright and self-assured. Most had lived
abroad and spoke one or more foreign languages. Mac, for one, had acquired
fluent French and German in the home from his polyglot mother, and had studied
Mandarin Chinese in college.

Spinelli had lured Mac away from what would have been a
great career track in the Corps and recruited him for the shadowy world of “The
Company,” and combat on a very different battlefield. Mac, it quickly became
apparent, was born to be a CIA case officer.

Chapter Eleven

O
ne of the highlights of the Operations Course
came when senior operations officers, division chiefs or their deputies, spent
the day at The Farm to sell the new officers on the merits of their respective
divisions and attempt to persuade the best ones to join them. These visits were
kicked off by a one or two hour talk to the entire class in the main arena,
followed by another smaller session in a classroom with just those students who
expressed an interest in joining the division. Later that evening the sessions
were followed by an informal cocktail reception and dinner with the interested
students at one of the instructor’s homes on the base.

It was at one of these evening sessions that Mac was
reunited with Tony Spinelli, the former COS in Mogadishu and current deputy
chief of Africa Division. Mac had heard Spinelli’s speech in the arena, but did
not attend the smaller classroom session as he had no particular interest in
joining Africa Division.