Operation Solo (11 page)

In the eighth grade at Saint Patrick's, a tall, bent, and frail sister, Maria Helena, ordered him to stay after class, and he wondered what he had done wrong. “I think there is something special about you,” she began. “I want to talk to you about a special chance.”

A wealthy Catholic laywoman dreamed of an academy that would mold brilliant boys into a cadre of Catholic intelligentsia with an education equal to the best in the world. To this end, she built a handsome four-story building on East 84th Street between Madison and Park Avenues in New York and there founded and endowed Regis High School. The Church staffed it with gifted Jesuits and scholastics and imposed an inflexible, classic curriculum: Latin, four years; Greek, two years; French or Spanish, two years; logic and ethics, four years; Shakespeare, two years; literature, two years; English composition, four years; ancient and modern history, four years; math (algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus), four years; and religion, every day. The excellence of the school was so renowned that graduates were virtually guaranteed admission to any university, and it cost nothing to attend.

The problem was that thousands upon thousands of boys applied each year and only 140 were accepted. The sister told Boyle that she believed he could be one of them if he was willing to be tutored by her each day after school for the entrance exams.

Boyle entered Regis High School in September 1943, and from the first day it was tough. A Jesuit announced to the freshmen that the rules and standards of the school were unbending, and that probably only half of them would do well enough to be graduated. Boyle commuted by bus and subway from New Jersey, and had to get up at 5 A.M. to be on time for morning communion. Priests cheered the Regis basketball team that he captained but gave him no quarter the next morning, though they knew he could not have gotten home before 1 A.M. After a night game, he was sure to be called upon first. “Mr. Boyle, will you begin the reading?” Practices and games subtracted from his study time, and he struggled academically. But in 1947, he was one of 69 of the original 140 to be graduated.

Columbia University, being a proper Ivy League school, did not deign to offer athletic scholarships to buy professionals. A basketball coach put it to Boyle in a more sophisticated way: “You will receive a loan sufficient to pay all the costs of your tuition, books, clothes, and living expenses. At the end of four years, the loan will be forgiven. You will owe nothing.”

Boyle was proud. He could attend a great university, study physics, play basketball, and make his family proud without burdening them. His father, who had quit his job at the docks as a result of an ethical dispute with Henry Ford, president of the Ford Motor Company, gazed upon him with a look that connoted both dismay and sadness. “Borrow thousands of dollars without any intention of repaying them! That's swindling or stealing. Don't you know right from wrong? No son of mine will be part of such a fraud.”

Instead of an Ivy League university, Boyle enrolled in small Saint Peter's College, so close to home he could walk to it. He studied physics until the nuclear physics program was dropped for lack of students, then majored in mathematics. After Regis, college was easy; he starred in the classroom and at basketball, and looked forward to marrying a childhood sweetheart upon graduation in 1951. When the North Koreans invaded South Korea in 1950, he tried to join the Marine Corps only to be collared by his father. “An educated fighter is a better fighter. You get your degree first.”
¹⁰

Upon graduation, he joined the Marine Corps which, after officer training, commissioned him a second lieutenant and sent him to the army artillery school at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. He liked Oklahoma—vast plains perfumed by sage and wildflowers, limitless skies, the purest of air and friendliest of people. At the Bachelor Officers' Quarters, he for the first time in his life had a room all to himself. Some evenings he browsed at the bookstore in nearby Lawton; it was usually crowded, and the interest people out on the prairie evinced in books impressed him. Later he realized that the popularity of the bookstore might owe something to the fact that the town bootlegger dispensed his wares from the floor above it.

Boyle had requested and received orders that directed him to proceed from Fort Sill to Korea in July 1952. Late in the afternoon, the lieutenant colonel in charge of his class proposed a change in the orders. In return for the army training its personnel, the Marine Corps obligated itself to provide instructors at Fort
Sill. “You are a mathematician and artillery fire is based on mathematics. Men respect you. You are first in the class, and you can be an exceptional instructor. The army wants you to stay here, and the Marines have agreed. If you agree, your orders will be changed tomorrow and you will finish your tour of duty here.”

“Sir, I did not enlist in the Marine Corps to serve in Oklahoma. The war is in Korea.”

“Lieutenant, I don't doubt that if you go to Korea you will be one good artillery officer. If you do your duty here, there will be many good artillery officers.”

“Sir, I want to think about it.”

“I need your answer by 0800 tomorrow.”

That night Boyle walked around alone and aimlessly. He could marry his fiancée, live with her in a neat bungalow on the base, and take her to the Officers' Club on Saturday night and to church on Sunday morning where patriotic families would contest for the honor of taking them home to dinner. They could have children, buy a car, take correspondence courses, and arrange for a job after discharge. He would not be maimed or killed, and he would be honorable. Logically, the colonel's rationale was faultless. He knew he could be a good instructor and that it was the duty of any Marine to do what the service wanted rather than what he wanted.

“What is your decision, lieutenant?”

“Sir, I thank you and the army for wanting me. I do not want my orders changed.”

Along with other marines and several navy nurses, Boyle flew from California in a Mars Flying Boat equipped with comfortable reclining seats and a full galley. Having ministered to torn and dying bodies evacuated from Korea, the nurses knew what awaited the young men in combat and they treated them affectionately, acting of their own initiative as stewardesses. Boyle was twenty-three, and the nurses looked to him to be about his age; he guessed nobody in the cabin was much older than twenty-five. As they parted upon landing at Barbers Point, Hawaii, the nurses wished each marine good luck and some shamelessly bestowed unmilitary hugs and kisses. Their spontaneous sweetness and poorly masked sadness made Boyle feel like he was at his own
wake. Granted four hours' liberty, he drank cold beer and, having recoiled at the native dish of poi, enjoyed a memorable steak, and he thought with admiration of the women, to him really girls only a few years away from their dolls, who had volunteered to try to ease the agony of the maimed and dying brought from battle.

In a spartan and noisy yet rugged and reliable DC-3, they flew from island to island, down the Japanese archipelago, and on July 7, 1952, landed in Korea. At the airport, he received his first command as a forward observer (FO). It consisted of a scout who was a corporal; three communications specialists, privates; and a sixteen-year-old Korean interpreter, “Junior.” Contemporary technology lessens the need for human forward observers; in Korea they were essential. From a bunker on a barren hillside or snowy peak, they spotted enemy movements or positions and radioed to fire control centers behind the front line (main line of resistance, or MLR) mathematical coordinates of their location. As the American 155- or 105- or 7 5 -millimeter artillery fired, the FOs watched where the shells exploded and redirected the fire (500 yards right or left, increase or decrease range 700 yards) until the shells hit the target. The Chinese and North Koreans understood that the observers spying from posts as much as a mile and a half forward of the MLR called down death upon them; they made the killing of FOs a priority. In Korea an FO's life expectancy was short.

Boyle and his little unit proceeded immediately to the front to support South Korean Marines and within three hours were engaged in fierce battle. He quickly learned from the juvenile interpreter a Korean phrase,
Papyon
, which roughly translated into English as “a shell is on its way.” Through his battery commander's scope, he could see smoke that enemy artillery emitted upon firing and shouted to warn the Koreans to take cover. They in turn had learned to shout in English “corpsman, corpsman,” which meant someone had been hit and desperately needed medical help. On that first night and succeeding nights Boyle often heard the call for medics and often shouted that shells were on their way.

Later in the summer they moved to an outpost overlooking Panmunjan, where truce talks were taking place while fighting
raged unabated everywhere else. The United Nations and communist commands had agreed that neither side would fire into a demarcated zone around the negotiating site. But the Chinese sneaked artillery into the no-fire zone and each night lobbed shells at Boyle's bunker. Some rounds exploded on the mountainside in front of him, others on the slope behind him where troops were dug in. Hearing an anguished call for a corpsman, Boyle ran along a trench and came upon an American marine struggling to press his intestines back into his stomach, completely ripped open by shrapnel, and held him while he died.

Boyle had pinpointed exactly the location of the Chinese batteries in the no-fire zone, and back in the bunker he called for fire upon them. The fire direction center radioed back words to the effect of, “Sorry, those coordinates are in the no-fire zone.” He waited and then called for fire on fictitious enemy forces not far outside the no-fire zone, and shells from marine howitzers soon struck quite near the positions he had specified. But Boyle told the fire direction center that they were off target and radioed a string of adjustments which marched the barrage right onto the Chinese guns inside the zone. Once the first howitzer and its ammunition erupted in flame, he radioed, “You're on target. Fire for effect.” Spectacular fireworks from detonating Chinese artillery and munitions lit up the night sky until Boyle radioed, “Targets destroyed. Cease fire.”

By morning, the marine command had figured out what happened; Boyle was ordered down from the mountain. A jeep screeched up, and an irate lieutenant colonel jumped out. “Did you order those rounds into the no-fire zone last night?”

“I did, sir.”

“Did you know you were firing into the no-fire zone?”

“I did, sir.”

“Do you realize you have created an international incident?”

“Sir, I don't know about that. I know that those particular batteries won't be killing any more marines, sir.”

The Chinese could not protest without admitting their treachery in violating the truce zone, and Boyle heard nothing more about the incident.

Shortly before dusk on October 3, 1952, Boyle and his men
climbed into a bunker on Outpost 3 about a mile and a half forward to the front lines. The men they relieved left hastily, hoping to reach the MLR before darkness, and Boyle was trying to organize the outpost and find the maps when the Chinese initiated one of their fiercest offensives of the war. Boyle's service record told Freyman something of what transpired next and why he was decorated on the battlefield with a Bronze Star. The citation accompanying the medal said:

Boyle subsequently volunteered for even more dangerous duty as an aerial observer spotting over enemy territory from a light, slow,
unarmed, and unarmored single-engine aircraft. Freyman noted that between January 3 and 17, 1953, he flew twenty low-level missions and received the Air Medal for “courage and devotion to duty,” which the citation said were “an inspiration to all who served with him.” He made more than 180 additional flights over Chinese and North Korean lines, each lasting about four hours. After ground fire incapacitated the pilot on one mission, he brought the plane back and landed it safely even though he never had any flight training. Before he left Korea in April 1953, the Marine Corps awarded him four more decorations.

Boyle's record in the FBI was also impressive up until his outburst at the inspector. He had worked as a street agent only eleven months when the FBI promoted him to headquarters and made him a supervisor at age twenty-six. In Freyman's experience, that was unheard of. Yet Boyle had justified the decision by excelling in the demanding, frustrating, and lonely work of cryptanalysis.

In sum, Freyman saw in Boyle a young man with great talent and promise. Of course, he would have to behave.

In part because Boyle still looked young enough to be a college student, Freyman assigned him to investigate youthful radicals. Following two suspected bomb throwers, he drove onto the University of Chicago campus. Students photographed his car, identified him as an FBI agent, and raised howls of protests against this “Gestapo-like” intrusion into academe. Freyman tried to conceal the incident from headquarters, then minimize it, then put it in the best light. As a result, both he and Boyle were reprimanded.