Mexico way, p.22
Mexico Way, page 22
"Every CIA officer undergoes psychiatric evaluations from time to time," said Kreeger. "They are quite routine. Like medical check-ups."
"I'm not talking about routine. It is my understanding that this psychiatric evaluation was not voluntary. That it was requested by your superior officers because of allegations of a homosexual network within the CIA."
The din in the committee room drowned out the rest of Senator Pike's statement. Kreeger flushed damson-purple. Not just because of the lying insinuations, based on an incident buried twenty years in his past, but because he was quite sure that the senator's knowledge was based on his confidential CIA medical records. The only people authorized access to those were Director Wagoner and Dr. Alvin Glass, the Chief of Medical Services. And Kreeger was damn sure that A1 Glass was not the source of the leak.
"Mr. Senator," Kreeger said, with such calm as he could muster when he could again make himself audible, "you are referring to an incident that took place twenty years ago. Since you seem to have gotten access to confidential files, you might have mentioned that there were four CIA officers, including myself, who were called in for evaluation. This was done at the insistence of a supervisor—a branch chief—with serious personal problems. Nothing adverse was recorded against any of the officers, including myself, who were tested. I hope I will not be accused of defaming homosexuals if I mention, for the record, that the supervisor in question resigned from the Agency after his own homosexual activities came to light.
I believe that he was briefly employed by a member of your own Committee before committing suicide some years back."
"Thank you, Mr. Kreeger," the Senate chairman intervened. "I think we have spent more than enough time on this distasteful topic. I commend you for your patience, as well as your frankness."
"Mr. Chairman," Kreeger responded, "I have an additional statement I wish to make at this time. It is not part of my prepared deposition, and it has in no way been : cleared by the Central Intelligence Agency. It concerns the illicit, immoral, and probably illegal involvement of a section of the U.S. intelligence community and of the military establishment, with a plot to destabilize a friendly country."
There was uproar in the committee room.
Senator Pike, red-faced, was bawling, "Traitor! Another goddamn bleeding heart!"
The senior CIA counsel rushed to the table, and leaned over to whisper to the Chairman, who covered the microphone with his hand.
"In view of unexpected developments," the Chairman announced after hurried consultation, "we are going to take a brief adjournment."
Kreeger was sipping coffee and placing bets with himself on how long it would take the Director to get on the phone—and whether Bill Wagoner's reaction would be to bludgeon, to appeal to loyalty, or to trade.
It took less than ten minutes for the CIA counsel to reappear. He grabbed Kreeger's arm. "Quick. Director Wagoner's on the phone."
"Where?"
"In the hall."
Kreeger squeezed as much of his solid frame as was possible into the cramped booth, to shield his dialogue with the Director from the people milling about outside the committee room.
"Fuck you," Director Wagoner began.
"You try it, Bill, and I'll blow you wide open. The Safari operation. The payoffs. The drug connections. The theft of secret intelligence for Art Colgate and his paymasters."
Kreeger was bluffing, to a certain extent. He was certainly affecting to have exact information about relationships that he was still guessing about.
When he said, "Shelley Hayes," the Director shouted over him, "Enough! What do you want?"
"I want to go back to Mexico Station. I want to save the Agency—my Agency, the one you don't even know about—from being torn apart. I want a fishing license. I want your goddamn desk jockeys off my back."
Through the volleys of four-letter words that came over the line, Kreeger was given to understand that he had his deal: He had his station back.
After more consultations with the CIA counsel, the Chairman announced that Kreeger's personal statement
would be postponed, sine die, for reasons of national security.
Joel Stein walked Kreeger to his car, and expressed both admiration and disappointment.
"You had my heart skipping a beat for a minute or two in there. I thought I'd gone into a time warp, that we were on the Church Committee hearings and you were about to unburden yourself at holy confession. Shit. That would have been great."
"You don't understand a damn thing, do you? I'm trying to save American Intelligence. Your guys in the seventies were trying to destroy it."
"I guess we are coming out into no-man's land from opposite trenches, aren't we? That's okay. It's kinda fun. Listen, I don't know why your Director is out to screw you, but I'll stand up for any guy who'll take on the Two Bills and can face down Jonah Pike. If there's anything you ever need, give me a call."
SEVENTEEN
□ □ □
1
Months had slipped by since Shelley Hayes, unknown to Kreeger, had called on President Butler at the Executive Office Building. Mexico had returned to familiar patterns. The violence continued, especially in rural areas, but gradually the interest of the American media had shifted away. Overtly, cordial relations between Washington and the Mexican government had been restored, since Harry Butler had finally agreed to sit down with Paz Gallardo. But Kreeger knew, from the secret cable traffic —and from successive drafts of the much-delayed and much-debated Mexico Estimate—that the Two Bills and others in the Butler Administration were still praying, and planning, for a blow-up in Mexico.
Fausto gave every appearance of being entirely relaxed about the political situation inside Mexico, which was starting to look like folie de grandeur, or something more sinister, since Miliano Rojas's movement was continuing to gather support, from the border to the Isthmus. Kreeger wondered whether Fausto was falling into the secret policeman's trap of confusing omniscience with omnipotence. In the days of the tsars, he remembered, the head of the terrorist movement had been a tsarist agent; this had not prevented the terrorists from killing the tsar.
Most suggestive of all, Fausto had said not a single word about his relationship with Shelley Hayes, Carvajal's inamorata—and Harry Butler's former mistress.
Yet Kreeger knew, from Lois, that Fausto had taken Shelley to dinner at least once. According to Lois, the chief of SIN had “behaved like a perfect gentleman."
We Mexicans are better at dying than at living," said Fausto García. He offered the silver brandy flask to Kreeger, who took a small mouthful. They were walking a dozen paces behind their wives, over the stony ground of a cemetery set high on a hillside, above Guanajuato. The night was held at bay by a thousand candles—heavy stumps of beeswax, cheap, evanescent paraffin tapers— burning among the tombstones. Below, in the city of the buried river, all the church bells were tolling. Not the measured, funereal knoll that announced the spirits of departed adults, but a happy, joyous ringing, to welcome the little ones. It was the night of the Little Angels, when dead children returned to their families.
"It is the one thing that binds us together," said Fausto, wiping his mouth. "Believer and non believer. Mestizo and gachupin. We know that the dead come back. We honor our dead together. The Indians call it weeping the bone."
Karla and Gabriela García had stopped at a tiny headstone, no more than knee-high. The men watched while Fausto's wife, and her three surviving children, laid out a feast for the one that had been taken from them. Dead man's bread from the pastry shop, baked with corn and sugar and dnnamon. Candy skulls, with maraschino cherries for eyes. Ribs and thigh bones of chocolate and frosted sugar. Tasty sweets made from pumpkin seed.
The grave was already decked with gladioli and cornflowers, and vivid yellow bunches of cempoalxuchitl, brought all the way from Xochimilco.
Gabriela was on her knees, invoking the spirit of her lost child. "My beloved, I beseech you. Come to visit us this night."
Kreeger saw tears glistening on Karla's cheeks.
"Congenital heart disease," said Fausto. "My boy has it too."
Kreeger looked at Fausto's son. He was seven or eight, but he looked like an old man in miniature, with his high, bony forehead, his deep-set eyes, his sunken chest.
It was rare to glimpse Fausto like this, the father, the husband, in the midst of his official family. Kreeger couldn't decide if it made the man more human or more sinister.
"She is a good woman," said Fausto as he watched his wife. Gabriela García was like a porcelain doll, her jet-black hair accentuating the whiteness of her skin. She wore a gold cross at her throat. "But muy mocha. Excessively religious." He pushed the flask at Kreeger. "Y ándale! Let's get on with it!"
The next morning, as the church bells tolled throughout the town, just before the Kreegers drove back to the capital, Fausto García presented them with a memento of Guanajuato. It was a walnut shell which opened on a tiny brass hinge.
"These are made by the convicts at our jail," Fausto explained. "I believe they are quite unique."
Inside the shell, carved in extraordinary detail, was a scene very like the one Kreeger had witnessed the night before, of Mexicans picnicking in a cemetery. One significant difference: the picnickers were skeletons.
Fausto watched as Kreeger admired the gift, clicking the walnut shell open and shut. "We are artists of death," he observed.
2
When Kreeger got home from the office later that week, he felt his insides were ready to drop out. He was unsure whether to attribute his condition to overindulgence in pumpkin-seed snacks, maize atole, and stewed haws at Fausto's country table, or simply to renewed immersion in the fug of the Mexican capital.
By the time he emerged from the bathroom, Karla had gotten home from her class at the university.
"You up to making us a drink?" Karla asked as she gave Kreeger's neck a quick squeeze. He noticed that Karla was wearing what he called her sixties outfit— jeans and high boots and a loose mock turtleneck tunic, painted with bold designs, reminiscent of Aztec plumed serpents, inset with tiny mirrors. Karla maintained she was less conspicuous in gear like this when she drove across town once a week for her class at the university.
"Class go well?" he inquired.
"Wait till I tell you." There was suppressed excitement in her voice. Kreeger wondered what arcane gem of information she'd brought home this week.
He tasted his manhattan, pursed his lips, and dribbled in a little more dry vermouth. He walked through into the living room, where Karla had stretched out on the sofa.
She took a sip of her vodka. "Mmmm. That's good."
"Okay. What was it this week? Toltec methods of birth control?"
"I stayed after class."
"Yeah? That Pablo doing a number on you?" Pablo was her bearded instructor.
"I wish. I think Pablo's kinda cute."
Kreeger growled.
"Pablo took me to a Miliano rally."
"He did what?" Kreeger set his glass down on the coffee table so hard that the liquor sloshed over the cherrywood and onto the creamy rug. "I'll get it." He thumped out to the kitchen and returned with the soda siphon.
In between squirts at the rug, he said, "You must have been out of your mind."
"Don't yell at me, Jim!"
"I'm—not—yelling!" he said slowly, as if to convince himself.
"Jeez, Karla," he said when he thought he had his emotions on a leash. "Did you stop to consider what could have happened if someone knew who you were? If someone recognized you? You're a kidnap target."
"Hell, Jim. They just thought I was a good ol' girl looking for a pickup. I got a coupla offers, too. You can't bitch about it, honey. I don't know what you do in the middle of the night, but it sure ain't with me."
He told himself, I am a rock. I just let it roll over me. In a thousand years or so, it might wear me down, but not until then.
"You gonna tell me how I messed up your life again, or you gonna tell me about the rally?"
In response, Karla downed the vodka remaining in her glass and got up to fix herself a refill. Kreeger knew that if he wanted to get a clear picture of the rally, he had better get Karla talking now. Karla tended to get combustible after three or four drinks.
"Was Miliano at that rally?"
"He may be crazy, but he ain't dumb," said Karla, reentering the living room. "I reckon somebody told him if he came to Mexico City now, your friend Fausto would put him in a box next to Batman."
"Fausto's not stupid either," Kreeger said quietly.
"But he bumped off Moctezuma Morelos. Him and Fernando Ramírez ."
"I think Fausto's smarter than Ramírez ." He decided to spare himself a debate with Karla when she was in this
kind of mood. "So how many people were at this meeting? Who were they?"
"Kids. Faculty. I guess there were a couple of thousand."
"Who spoke?"
"Miliano."
"Wait a minute. I thought you said Miliano wasn't there."
"They used a projector and a big screen. Just like at a movie house. It was a helluva show. Maybe better than a live performance."
"Color film?"
"You bet. It started with this train steaming straight at the audience, like the Pancho Villa express. The kids in the front row were screaming."
"You mean they used special effects."
"Uh-huh. And they had this scene of Miliano, dressed like a cotton picker, surrounded by children in white, like snowdrifts. It was a tender sight."
This was all new information to Kreeger. New, and utterly foreign. Since when had Mexican politicians— even the Mexican government—used sophisticated visual effects and state-of-the-art video techniques to get their messages across? The Safari crowd probably had that kind of money. But why would they invest in a socialist? Where had a small-town labor lawyer gotten the money and equipment and technical advice to put on a show like the one Karla described? Someone was clearly making a heavy investment in Miliano.
EIGHTEEN
□ □ □
1
Incidents of violence throughout Mexico increased daily. Leaders of the Mexican Human Rights Committee were toppled like ninepins. In the south, there were reports the army and the landowners' pistoleros had shot squatters by the thousands, dumping their bodies in mass graves. In Tabasco, radical petroleum workers took revenge on their crooked union boss by hanging him from the chandelier in a restaurant where he was dining with visiting Japanese bigwigs.
Such Mexican-against-Mexican violence normally might rate a page-seven item in a Houston newspaper, and perhaps in Miami as well. In most other cities north of the border, however, such news would receive little notice, even when the shooting was going on a few miles outside Acapulco, a place dear to tourists everywhere. To the men behind the Safari Project, this situation presented a problem, since their success hinged on winning the right kind of news coverage—and above all, the right TV exposure—in Washington and New York.
Colgate was sitting in a private room at the Casino de Monterrey, making this point to a group of wealthy men presided over by Raúl Carvajal.
"So what will it take?" Carranza demanded of Colgate.
"We need visuals."
"So we blow up the bridges. We do it good this time. Everything stops. The businessmen are hurting. Everyone's screaming for Harry Butler to do something."
"We get hurt too," Raúl reminded him. "And we've done that before; it lacks novelty."
"So we hang a few PRI party bosses. I want to start with the Governor of Chihuahua. That hijo de puta has been shaking me down for years."
"They're Mexicans." Colgate developed a twitch in his right cheek. "I mean no offense, but we need impact. Mexican politicians get killed all the time, and in all sorts of ways—some of them truly ingenious. Still it doesn't matter. I bet already nobody up north even remembers who Moctezuma Morelos was."
"He was a fucking communist," spat Carranza. "That's one good thing Ramírez did, offing that piece of shit." Paco Carranza was still having some difficulty accepting one of the core elements in Colgate's plan: a tacit alliance with the left, necessary if they were to capitalize on Miliano's ability to mobilize mass support.
Fortunately, Raúl Carvajal had been smart enough, and strong enough, to ensure their cooperation. They were working on Miliano through a cut-out, an editor of a Monterrey newspaper. Miliano was grateful for the unexpected flow of cash and video technology from obscurely identified sympathizers, but he would no doubt be more than a little disquieted if he found out his beneficiaries included brutos like Carranza.
"We are open to suggestion." Raúl spoke to Colgate.
"The way I see it, there are two hot issues in Mexico. I'm talking about media focus, not what people are talking about at Chase Manhattan or the National Security Council. To get TV coverage, it has to be simple, and visual. Sound bites. Footage. People have to be able to see it. One of the issues is drugs."
Paco Carranza's mouth turned down, and an omi- | nous growl rose up from his belly. j
"I guess we played that already, right?"
Carranza seemed slightly mollified.
"The second issue . . ." Here Colgate paused; his facial tic became more pronounced. He put a hand to his cheekbone. "Well, it comes down to this. Any threat to American citizens is a grabber. Hostages. Grieving families. Widows and orphans. It gets people mad. The media can't stay away from it." He removed his hand from his face and said, "It's what got us into Panama."
Rico Sanchez drove Colgate to the airport so they could talk in private. Colgate was to fly to Mexico City for a chat with Maury Atthowe. Kreeger had caused a helluva stink in Washington. Now, a Senate staffer named Joel Stein was snooping around the Global Assistance office, and he had recently dropped in at Two Jacks Gilly's shop over at the Pentagon.
