Murder in the CIA (23 page)
Authors: Margaret Truman
Cahill realized she was sitting in the chair naked. She picked up her robe from where she’d tossed it on the floor and started a pot of coffee.
When he returned, he’d turned cold. He’d showered and dressed. He went through papers in a briefcase and started to leave.
“Don’t you want coffee?” Cahill asked.
“No, I have to go. Look, I may not see you before you leave.”
“Won’t you be back tonight?”
“Probably, only I may end up going out of town overnight. Anyway, have a nice vacation.”
“Thanks, I will.”
He was gone.
He didn’t return that night, and it bothered her. What had she done to turn such a warm, loving night into a frosty morning? Because she was going away? He was jealous, imagining that she’d be sleeping with someone else, an old or current boyfriend in the BVI. She wished she could have confided in him about the nature of her trip, but as that thought caused a jolt of sadness and frustration in her, it was tempered by knowing that he probably wasn’t being open with her, either.
She got up early Saturday morning and packed. At the last minute she looked for a paperback book to take with her. There were piles of them everywhere. She picked up a half dozen from a nighttable next to the bed and scanned the covers. One immediately caught her eye. Its title was
Hypnotism
, by someone named G. H. Estabrooks. She put it in a shoulder bag she intended to carry on board, called a local cab company, and was on her way to National Airport.
After the Pan Am flight attendant had served Collette a cup of coffee, she pulled the book from her bag and opened it to a page on which was a brief biographical sketch of the author. Estabrooks had been a Rhodes Scholar, held a 1926 doctorate in educational psychology from Harvard, and was a professor of psychology, specializing in abnormal and industrial
psychology at Colgate University. The book she held was first published in 1943, and had been revised in 1957.
The first few pages dealt with a murder trial in Denmark in which a man had hypnotized another to commit a murder. The chief state witness, Dr. P. J. Reiter, an authority on hypnotism, stated that any man is capable of any act while hypnotized.
She continued skimming until reaching page sixteen, where Estabrooks discussed the use of hypnotism in modern warfare. She read his thesis carefully.
Let us take an illustration from warfare, using a technique which has been called the “hypnotic messenger.” For obvious reasons the problem of transmitting messages in wartime, of communication within an army’s own forces, is a first-class headache to the military. They can use codes, but codes can be lost, stolen or, as we say, broken. They can use the dispatch carrier, but woe betide the messages if the enemy locates the messenger. They can send by word of mouth, but the third degree in any one of its many forms can get that message. War is a grim business and humans are human. So we invent a technique which is practically foolproof. We take a good hypnotic subject in, say, Washington, and in hypnotism we give him the message which we wish transferred. This message can be long and complicated, for his memory is excellent. Let us assume the war is still on and that we transfer him to Tokyo on a regular routine assignment, say, with the Army Service Corps.
Now note a very curious picture. Awake, he knows just one thing as far as his transfer to Tokyo is concerned; he is going on regular business which has nothing whatever to do with the Intelligence Department. But in his unconscious mind there is locked this very important message. Furthermore, we have arranged that there is only one person in all this world outside ourselves who can hypnotize this man and get this message, a Major McDonald in Tokyo. When he arrives in Tokyo, acting on posthypnotic suggestion, he will look up Major McDonald, who will hypnotize him and recover the message.
With this technique, there is no danger that the subject in an off-guard moment will let drop a statement to his wife or in public that might arouse suspicions. He is an Army Service Corps man going to Tokyo, that is all. There is no danger of getting himself in hot water when drunk. Should the enemy suspect the real purpose of his visit to Tokyo, they would waste their time with third-degree methods. Consciously, he knows nothing that is of any value to them. The message is locked in the unconscious and no amount of drugs, no attempts at hypnotism, can recover it until he sits before Major McDonald in Tokyo. The uses of hypnotism in warfare are extremely varied. We deal with this subject in a later chapter.
Collette went to the chapter on using hypnotism in warfare but found little to equal what she’d read on page sixteen. She closed the book, and her eyes, and replayed everything having to do with hypnosis and Barrie Mayer. Their college experience. Mayer had been such a willing and good subject.
Jason Tolker. He obviously had delved deeply into the subject, and had been Mayer’s contact. Had she been hypnotized in her role as a courier? Why bother? Estabrooks’s theory sounded exactly that—a theory.
MK
-
ULTRA
and Project Bluebird—those CIA experimental programs of the sixties and early seventies that resulted in public and congressional outrage. Those projects had been abandoned, according to official proclamations from the agency. Had they? Was Mayer simply another experimental subject who’d gone out of control? Or had Estabrooks’s theories, refined by the CIA, been put to practical use in her case?
For a moment, she lost concentration and her mind wandered. She’d soon need hypnosis to focus on the subject. Her eyes misted as she thought of Vern Wheatley—and then they opened wide. Why did Vern have Estabrooks’s book at his bedside? Hank Fox had said that Wheatley was digging into the supposedly defunct
ULTRA
and Bluebird projects. Maybe Fox was right. Maybe Wheatley was using her as a conduit for information.
“Damn,” she said to the back of the seat in front of her. She took a walk up and down the aisles of the aircraft, looking into the faces of other passengers, women and children, old and young, infants sleeping on mothers’ laps, young lovers wrapped around each other, businessmen toiling over spread sheets and lap-top computers, the whole spectrum of airborne humanity.
She returned to her seat, loosely buckled her seat belt and, for the first time since she’d joined the CIA, considered resigning. The hell with them and their cops-and-robbers games, hiding behind vague claims that the fate of the free world depended upon their clandestine behavior. Destroy the village to save it, she thought. The Company’s budgets were beyond scrutiny by any other branch of government because it was in “the national interest” to keep them secret. President Truman had been right when he’d eventually railed against the animal he’d created. It
was
an animal, free of all restraints, roaming loose in the world with men whose pockets were filled with secret money. Buy off someone here, overthrow someone there, turn decent people against their own countries, reduce everything to code words and collars turned up in the night. “Damn,” she repeated. Send her off to dig into the lives of other people while, undoubtedly, people were delving into her life. Trust no one. A Communist threat exists under every pebble on the shore.
The flight attendant asked if Cahill would like a drink. “Very much,” Cahill said; “a bloody Mary.”
She drank half the drink and her thoughts went to the reason for her trip to the British Virgin Islands. That was the problem, she realized. Some things were important, not only for America but for people in other parts of the world. Like Hungary.
Banana Quick.
She hadn’t been allowed access to all aspects of the plan—Need-to-know—but had learned enough to realize that the stakes were enormous.
She also knew that Banana Quick had been named after a tiny BVI bird, the bananaquit, and that someone within the CIA, whose job it was to assign names to projects, had decided to change it to Banana Quick. Quit was too negative,
went the reasoning. Quick was more like it, positive, promising action and speed, more in line with the agency’s vision of itself. There’d been laughter and snide remarks when the story had gotten around, but that was often the case in Central Intelligence. The international stakes might be high, but the internal machinations were often amusing.
Banana Quick was designed to set into motion a massive uprising by Hungarians against their Soviet keepers. The ’56 attempt had failed. No wonder. It was ill-conceived and carried out by poorly armed idealists who were no match for Soviet tanks and troops.
Now, however, with the backing of the major powers—the United States, Great Britain, France, and Canada—there was a good chance that it would succeed. The climate was right. The Soviets had lost control over Hungary in a social and artistic sense. Hungarians had been gradually living freer lives, thumbing their noses at the young men in drab uniforms who wore red stars on their caps. What had Árpád Hegedüs told her when she asked how to distinguish Hungarian soldiers from Russian soldiers? “The dumb-looking ones are Russian,” he’d answered.
Hungary had slowly turned in the direction of capitalism. Graft and corruption were rampant. Pay someone off and you’d have your new automobile in a month instead of six years. Condominiums were rising in the fashionable hills, available to anyone with enough hidden, hoarded illegal cash to buy in. More shops had been opened that were owned by individual entrepreneurs. They, too, had to pay some Russian, in some department, for the privilege, and that Russian was buying his own condo in the hills.
Banana Quick. A small bird flying free in the simple, excruciating beauty of the BVI. Stan Podgorsky had told her that they’d chosen the idyllic Mosquito Island as a planning center because, in his words, “Who’d ever think of looking there for planning a major uprising in an Eastern European country? Besides, we’re running out of remote places to meet, unless we go to Antarctica or Ethiopia, and I, for one, am not going to those hellholes.”
Who would look to the BVI for the brain trust behind a Hungarian uprising?
The Russians, for one. They’d taken over the private island because they knew something was up, knew the gray-haired men in dark suits flying in were anything but Canadian businessmen going over marketing strategies for a new product. The Soviets were many things; dumb wasn’t one of them. Something was up. They’d play the game, too, lie, claim they needed a place for their weary bureaucrats to unwind in the sun. They’d watch. We’d watch.
Eric Edwards. He was there to
watch
. To look into their telescopes through his own, eye to eye, think one step ahead, as each man reported back to the dark suits in his own country.
Games.
“Games!” she said as she finished her drink.
As she deplaned in San Juan, she’d come to peace with the fact that she was a player in this game, and would give her all. After that, she’d see. Maybe …
Maybe it was time to get out of the business.
In the meantime, she’d apply her father’s philosophy. “You take someone’s money, you owe them a decent day’s work.”
“Hello, my name is Jackie, I work for Mr. Edwards,” the slight native girl said in a loud voice.
“Yes, he told me you’d be here,” Cahill said. Edwards had also told her during the telephone conversation that the girl he was sending for her was almost totally deaf. “Talk loud and let her see your lips,” he’d said.
Jackie drove a battered yellow Land Rover. The back seat was piled high with junk, so Cahill sat in front with her. Edwards needn’t have bothered instructing her how to communicate with Jackie. There was no conversation. The girl drove on the left side of the road with a race car driver’s grim determination, lips pressed together, foot jamming the accelerator to the floor, one hand on the wheel, the heel of the other permanently against the horn. Men, women, children, dogs, cats, goats, cattle and other four-legged animals either heeded the horn or were run over.
The ride took them up and over steep hills. The views were spectacular—water like a painter’s palette, every hue of blue and green, lush forests that climbed the sides of mountains and, everywhere, white slashes in the water that were yachts, big and small, sails raised or lowered. It was,
at times, so breathtaking—their perch so high—that Cahill gasped.
They came down into Road Town, skirted Road Harbor, and then headed up a steep incline that took them through a clump of trees until reaching a plateau. A single house stood on it. It was one story and pristine white. The roof was covered with orange tiles. A black four-door Mercedes stood in front of a black garage door.
Collette got out and took a deep breath. A breeze from the harbor below rippled her hair and the elephant ears, kapok, white cedar, and manalikara trees that surrounded the house. The air was heavy with hibiscus and bougainvillea, and with the sound of tree frogs. Bananaquits flew from tree branch to tree branch.
Jackie helped bring the luggage into the house. It was open and airy. Furniture was at a minimum. The floors were white and yellow tile, the walls stark white. Flimsy yellow curtains fluttered in the breeze through the open windows. A huge birdcage that stood floor to ceiling housed four brilliantly colored, large parrots. “Hello, goodbye, hello, goodbye,” one of them repeated over and over.
“It’s just beautiful,” Cahill said from behind Jackie. She remembered, came around in front of the girl, and said, “Thank you.”
Jackie smiled. “He’ll be back later. He said for you to be comfortable. Come.” She led her to a rear guest bedroom with a double bed covered in a white-and-yellow comforter. There was a closet, dressing table, two cane chairs, and a battered steamer trunk. “For you,” Jackie said. “I have to go. He’ll be here soon.”
“Yes, thanks again.”
“Bye-bye.” The girl disappeared. Cahill heard the Land Rover start and pull away.
Well, she thought, not bad. She returned to the living room and talked to the parrots, then went to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and took out one of many bottles of club soda. She squeezed half a lime into it, walked to a terrace overlooking the harbor, closed her eyes, and purred. No matter what was in store for her, this particular moment was to be cherished.
