The Book of Honor (22 page)

Outside, a helicopter landed as the Johnsons prepared to leave for their Texas ranch. Before departing, Lady Bird handed Val Merriman a book on White House interiors. There was no inscription. A moment later the Johnsons were gone. Afterward the Merrimans were taken to the kitchen and served some finger sandwiches and iced tea. The two Merriman women, widow and mother, were then given an orchid corsage and led by a Secret Service agent on a rare tour of the upstairs residence.

After Merriman's death, Washington would continue to prop up Tshombe and later army strongman Mobuto. In the annals of the CIA the outcome in the Congo would be placed squarely in the win column, as Mobuto remained in the U.S. sphere of influence. He provided a share of his country's rich minerals (including tantalite, used in nuclear weapons) to the United States as well as a strategic base from which the CIA would launch later anti-Communist and counterinsurgency efforts in Angola.

For the people of the Congo, known as Zaire under Mobuto, it was not so clear a victory. For thirty-three years Mobuto's name was virtually synonymous with corruption and repression. Not since King Leopold II of Belgium a century before had the country been so plundered, its people so devastated. Mobuto became a billionaire, bankrupting his country. To describe the avarice and thievery of his regime, a new word had to be coined—kleptocracy. But though he betrayed his own people, in the Cold War era of “clientitis” he remained “faithful” to the West. As was said of many, he may have been a bastard, but he was our bastard.

Sidney Gottlieb, the eccentric CIA scientist who delivered poison meant for the Congo's Lumumba, died in 1999 at the age of eighty. He spent his final years caring for the dying, running a commune, and fending off lawsuits growing out of his secret CIA experiments decades earlier.

CIA Station Chief Lawrence Devlin, who had tossed the poison meant for Lumumba into the Congo River, later went to work for American diamond magnate Maurice Templesman, paramour and final companion to Kennedy's widow, Jacqueline Onassis. Devlin's courtship of Mobuto had proved most valuable.

As for the Cuban pilots who survived the Bay of Pigs to later fly with Merriman, they remained close comrades, though they took divergent paths. René García became Mobuto's personal pilot. From 1969 to 1985 he flew him everywhere, from Paris to China to North Korea to Disneyland. García watched as the diamonds from the mines of Katanga, the province in which Merriman had died while trying to prevent it from seceding, went to Belgium—except for the largest stones, which were lost to Mobuto's palace.

Gus Ponzoa would later fly for another CIA proprietary and ferry American weapons to an equally repressive U.S. client, the Shah of Iran. He is now retired and living in Miami.

Jack Varela, Merriman's wingman that fateful day, died in a Dominican prison where he was serving time on drug charges.

As for the Merrimans, John Merriman remains very much a daily presence in their lives. The oldest son, Bruce, joined the CIA in the Office of Security. Unbeknownst to him, his mother had gone to Gar Thorsrude and quietly persuaded him to promise that Bruce would never be placed in harm's way, a promise he honored. Bruce Merriman left the Agency after a decade.

The legacy of Agency service is often passed from parent to child, creating a kind of caste system in which sons and daughters are welcomed into the fold. Having been raised within the culture of secrecy, they need no reminders. Today Bruce wears his father's Rolex watch, the one whose bezel popped off in the crash.

Son Jon entered the 82nd Airborne just as his father had done before him. In 1980 he, too, interviewed for an Agency job. As a former fine arts major, he was asked if he was interested in the “manufacturing section,” and, in particular, where forgeries and false documents are prepared. Then they asked if he was willing to break the law. “Which laws,” asked Merriman, “foreign or domestic?” That question put the interviewers off and no job offer was received.

For years Jon pursued every lead that might shed light on his father's life and death. His den is a kind of living shrine to his father, about whom he speaks in soft and reverential tones.

Merriman's widow, Val, remarried—another pilot, David Folkins, who also flew for the CIA. Increasingly, as the Agency matured, it moved more and more into the role of extended family. But Val Merriman Folkins did not forget John. His portrait hangs in their bedroom. Her second husband had no wish to expunge him from their lives, or to allow John Merriman's sons to forget him. No one had to convince him of the honor and remembrance Merriman was due. And in her purse, just as she did the day of the funeral, Val continues to carry a picture of John Merriman. Not a day goes by when she does not speak with him, silently communing with his spirit.

The CIA's Syd Stembridge, who told Val Merriman the story of her husband's passing in the Puerto Rican hospital and of his request for ice cream, is retired now. He attended the 1977 wedding of Merriman's son Jon. But when the wedding pictures were developed, Jon noticed that the only pictures of Stembridge were of the back of his head. A consummate professional in security matters, he was a study in anonymity.

Stembridge will still not speak of the circumstances surrounding Merriman's death. “It's security reasons with me,” he says. “Once you start down that road, I would say something and you will want to know why and that will lead to something else. I've just made it a policy. I knew John Merriman well, and I know John is resting easy if I abide by what he knew to be the rules of the game.”

But in 1996 the Merrimans made a dramatic discovery. It came not by way of the Agency, but from Janet Weininger, daughter of the Alabama pilot Pete Ray, who died at the Bay of Pigs. As Weininger pursued her lifelong search for answers about her own father, interviewing veterans of the Bay of Pigs, she came upon a pilot who told her the story of John Merriman. He asked her to help him track down Merriman's family. Later the Merrimans were introduced to the Cuban pilots who served with John Merriman. They told her of his suffering and of what they believed was the U.S. government's inexcusable delay in getting him proper treatment. They were convinced that Merriman had suffered needlessly and that, had he received proper care, he might well be alive today.

Val Merriman was appalled. She contacted several lawyers in an effort to sue the Agency for wrongful death, but each one declined to take the case. So thorough was the Agency's security that she had not a shred of paper to document the circumstances surrounding Merriman's death. What Val Merriman said she wanted was not money, but someone to say “I'm sorry.”

That same year Merriman's son Jon was idly thumbing through a magazine when he came upon a photo of the CIA's Book of Honor. There on the open page he saw inscribed his father's name. No one from the Agency had bothered to tell the family that Merriman had been so honored.

The next year the Merriman family once again approached the Agency pleading with them to release the file on John. At a December 16, 1997, meeting, CIA officers told the family it would take a prodigious effort on the Agency's part to retrieve the records. A few months earlier one of those same officers had said the file had been lost. But first the Agency insisted that the Merrimans sign a secrecy agreement pledging not to divulge whatever information they might learn. This they did.

It was only the latest in a series of bizarre negotiations between the CIA and the Merriman family. Several months earlier the Agency had made an even more unusual request. In return for any cooperation, the family would be required to tender their copy of Merriman's death certificate, the one that said he had been in an auto accident in Puerto Rico. This, too, the family did.

The only thing the Merrimans came away with from that December 1997 meeting that they did not have before was Merriman's autopsy report detailing the awful extent of his injuries. Val Merriman could not help but remember when the CIA had told her John had not suffered and had received the best of care.

The Agency maintained that it had done all it could for John Merriman, that his delicate condition would not permit him to have been moved any earlier. The idea that it abandoned one of its own in the field strikes a raw nerve even today at an Agency that prides itself in getting its people out when they are in danger. But that's not how the Merrimans see it. “They let him die,” says Val Merriman. “I really hope he didn't realize that. He thought the Agency was the greatest thing in the world. He was a flyboy. He would never have thought they would have deserted him.”

CHAPTER 7

The Two Mikes

Alas, but Michael fell young:
Hee never fell, thou fallest my tongue.
He stood, a Souldier to the last right end,
A perfect Patriot, and noble friend,
But most a virtuous Sonne.

FROM AN ELEGY BY BEN JONSON

AT TEN O'CLOCK
on a sunlit Sunday morning—October 10, 1965— two young men in khakis, both named Mike, hoisted themselves aboard an Air America chopper and lifted off from a tiny air base in Pakse, Laos. One was named Mike Deuel. The other, Mike Maloney. Both were said to be with the Agency for International Development, AID, helping to resettle displaced refugees. Their true purpose, stamped “Top Secret,” would, for decades, keep the Central Intelligence Agency from speaking of their mission or even uttering their names aloud, though not for lack of pride.

From the vantage point of far-off Langley, these two young bulls— Deuel was twenty-eight, Maloney twenty-five—were as close to royalty as the CIA possessed. In their faces the Agency's leadership could read the CIA's proud past and what it took to be its illustrious future.

What set the two Mikes apart from other young covert operatives was that they were among the first sons of CIA career officers to take to the field. That Sunday morning flight—the first time the two Mikes would link up—was in itself of no great political or military consequence. But to the few at Langley who were cleared to know the names behind the code names and who were familiar with the lineage of these two men, it was something of an epochal event.

It marked the beginning of the end for that first generation of CIA officer who had come out of World War II and Donovan's OSS, and it ushered in a whole new era of clandestine warrior. By 1965, two full decades after World War II, the CIA's wartime veterans were entering their fifties and sixties. Balding and slower of step, they were sagelike presences in the halls of Langley, already cast in supervisory and support roles and, but for a defiant few, reluctantly accepting desk jobs. They understood it was time to leave the action to the “kids,” as those of the successive generation were sometimes called. The old-timers had passed along their tradecraft and their vision of a world in peril, one whose salvation rested upon constant vigilance and sometimes desperate measures.

The two Mikes were the very embodiment of that legacy, eager to demonstrate their courage and their skills. Over time, the novelty of a second generation of CIA officer would fade. More and more sons and daughters, nieces and nephews, were drawn into the fold of clandestine service. It was no accident. Through summer jobs and internships, through preferences accorded the scions of Agency employees, and through the natural patterns of socializing among themselves, the CIA's intergenerational ranks swelled.

In time, they would come to form an unseen clandestine class and a culture all its own. Raised within a raucously open society and yet a breed apart, they were reared to believe in the indispensability of espionage and the virtues of secrecy. They came to accept what the wider population could not—that even the ultimate sacrifice must sometimes go unrecognized and unrecorded. As public suspicions of the Agency deepened in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs and the quagmire of Vietnam, the CIA increasingly gathered unto itself its own sons and daughters. They, above all others, could be trusted and demanded little explanation.

Mike Maloney and Mike Deuel were a part of that second generation of CIA officer who came of age in the early and mid-1960s and who would leave their own unique hallmark on the clandestine service for decades to come. To understand this second generation of Cold Warrior and its vision of the world, you must first come to know the stock from which they came and why, for the two Mikes, clandestine service was not merely a choice of career but an honored birthright, foreordained.

Mike Maloney's father, Arthur, was born in Connecticut in 1914. To his friends he was known as Art or Mal. No one ever doubted that he had the makings of a tough son of a bitch. He was a barrel-chested, Camel-smoking Irishman with a square jaw, teacup ears, a boxer's nose, and wild, bushy brows. His skin was pinkish and quick to sunburn. He could be gruff and intimidating but in an instant erupt with a roguish laugh from which neither funeral nor High Mass would have been safe.

He attended West Point, where he was the very embodiment of gung ho, even as a member of the backup lacrosse squad. One admiring observer wrote: “A whack from a lacrosse stick spread Maloney's schnoz so he could smell his ears. That normally is an annoying injury in sport but to a B-team player who picks his teeth with the cleats of the varsity stars a smeared bugle is no worse than a bad, but brief, cold.” Maloney took his soldiering seriously, but not himself. In the Academy's production of a musical comedy, he played an utterly ridiculous Romeo. He graduated from West Point in 1938 and one year later married Mary Evangeline Arens, a chestnut-haired coed with a will all her own. A year later they had a child, a son named Michael Arthur Maloney—one of “The Two Mikes.”

But Mal Maloney's homelife, like that of his generation, was interrupted by World War II. Maloney, a crack paratrooper, would find himself in charge of the 3rd Battalion of the 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment, part of the fabled 82nd Airborne Division. At 2:30 A.M., June 6, 1944— D-Day—he was the first among his nineteen parachute troops to leap from the plane into occupied France. In addition to his own burly 200 pounds, he shouldered a carbine, a pistol, two knives, a land mine, four grenades, ammo, a watertight escape kit, $40 in French currency, a silk handkerchief map, a compass, and a file—350 pounds in all. Never before had he jumped with so little space between himself and the ground.

He landed in a pasture on the west side of the Merderet River. Soon after, his battalion commander was killed, and Maloney took charge. He was not yet thirty, making him by some accounts the youngest commander in the European theater. Seeing that his battalion was being pushed back under withering fire, he reorganized them and led them forward, personally taking a bazooka team to destroy an enemy tank. He showed complete contempt for his own safety. At Chef-du-Pont a bullet from a German sniper pierced his helmet, tore through the toilet paper he carried there, and exited out the other side. His shoulder holster was scarred by a second bullet that bounced off the barrel of his .45. Unshaven and with dried blood streaking his reddish beard, he was a forbidding presence, and damn proud of it. “I was probably the ugliest soldier in Normandy,” he later boasted.

On July 7, 1944, on the forward slope of Hill 95 at La Poterie Ridge, a bullet tore through his right leg, grazed his groin, and ripped through his left leg, severing several nerves. A British doctor had him fully prepped and was about to amputate his right leg when Maloney persuaded him otherwise: “No fucking way,” he barked. And though he had been told it was doubtful he would ever walk again or be able to have more children, he went on to be a father three times more (he already had two children) and took great pride in proving the doctors wrong. For a year he was in a stateside hospital. He received the Purple Heart, three Bronze Stars, and the coveted Distinguished Service Cross. Upon winning the latter, the
Hartford Times
ran a photo of Mal and his son Mike, as the two posed with the colonel's perforated helmet. The caption read: “ ‘And that's where it came out.' Little Michael explains the two bullet holes in the helmet of his daddy, Lt. Col. Arthur A. Maloney.” Already “Little Michael” had been introduced to soldiering. Baptized in the chapel at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, Little Michael was given a toy plane and a toy soldier for his first birthday.

In August 1946 Mal retired from the military as a full colonel. Few doubted that, but for his wound, he would soon have been a general. He worked for a time at Colt's Patent Firearms Manufacturing Company and later the Aetna Insurance Company, but he chafed at desk jobs and hankered for military life. “You couldn't keep him away from anywhere there was shooting going on,” recalled his friend Major General Paul F. Smith. With the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 Mal Maloney volunteered for duty but was rejected because of his bum leg. His beloved military wouldn't have him.

And so it was by default that he came to the CIA in March 1951. The CIA was as close as he could get to the front lines. It was never to be a perfect fit, but his paramilitary skills and command experience proved a valuable asset to the Agency, and he was promptly put to work first in the CIA's Office of Training and later the War Plans Division.

In 1957 Maloney received orders that he was to be transferred to Hawaii, where he would be under military cover—hardly a stretch for the colonel. He was to dress in uniform and report daily to a nonexistent entity within the Department of Defense, the so-called Pacific Research Office. His actual CIA position was to be chief of the war plans staff, Far East Division, under the deputy director for plans. Specifically he was to help draft contingency war plans should North Korea, China, or both suddenly reach beyond their borders.

But the flight to Hawaii was to be even more harrowing than that which dropped him over wartime France. Maloney, his wife, Mary, sons Mike, Dennis, and Timothy, and daughters Erin and two-month-old Sheila took off from Travis Air Force Base in California in a four-engine Military Air Transport C-97 on August 8, 1957. The destination: Honolulu. Just over halfway to Hawaii, Dennis, then fourteen, looked out the window and saw the propeller from the number one engine on the left wing fly off, loop over the wing, and strike the fuselage. Moments later the second engine on the left wing also died.

With still another thousand miles to the nearest landfall in Hawaii, the plane limped on, barely a hundred feet above the black Pacific. The captain ordered everyone to put on life jackets and sent out a distress signal alerting ships in the area to be ready to help if the plane should need to ditch at sea. In an effort to stabilize the aircraft, the pilot had the Maloney family and the other fifty-two passengers shunted from one side to the other. Finally the captain ordered the passengers to dump their luggage into the sea.

A rear door was opened and seventeen-year-old Mike Maloney, together with the other passengers, formed a line and passed along suitcases as well as fifty-three bags of mail, shoveling them out the back, low enough to hear them splash. Included in the jettisoned baggage was an entire wardrobe of new military uniforms that Mal was to wear as part of his military cover. For six hours the ordeal continued, as the plane skimmed above the waves. Mary Maloney swore that if the flight landed safely she would forever give up cigarettes and potatoes.

As they approached Hilo, the captain discovered that the landing gear had been damaged. Mal Maloney offered to climb down and crank it by hand, but the captain had a crew member do it instead. Finally the plane landed without incident. Mary Maloney would honor her oath never again to smoke a cigarette—though twenty years later she would eat potatoes after a doctor told her she needed the potassium. In 1958, a year after that traumatic flight, when Mike went off to Fairfield College in Connecticut, Mary Maloney insisted that her son take the cruise ship
Matsonia
to the States. No Maloney was taking another plane, not if Mary Maloney had anything to say about it. She would forever have a bad feeling about planes.

Nor was it the last trauma for the Maloneys in Hawaii. Mal Maloney enjoyed robust health, but he had acquired something of a shake or palsy. When he held a cup of coffee, it rattled against the saucer. His friends called it nerves. Whether it was a result of the war or something else, he was not always the best of drivers.

A year after arriving in Hawaii, shortly after noon on October 7, 1958, Mal Maloney struck a sixty-one-year-old woman who was crossing at the corner of Hotel and Punchbowl Streets. The woman died in hospital hours later. Maloney was charged with negligent homicide. The trial hung over the Maloney family for six months. The shock of the accident weighed heavily on Maloney. So, too, did the newspaper articles that drew attention to him, identifying him by his cover, as a Defense Department researcher. From the witness stand, Maloney described the accident to the jurors and concluded, “I will see it for the rest of my life.”

On March 18, 1960, after six hours of deliberation, a jury found him not guilty. But the accident left a deeper scar on him than even the casualties suffered in combat.

Mal Maloney transferred back to CIA headquarters in August 1961. He was a familiar presence in the halls, the sight of his husky figure dragging his leg, braced and inflexible. Without the brace his left foot flopped in front of him like a flipper, and even with the brace he would on occasion stumble and collapse in a heap like a huge rag doll. Such falls would be followed by a moment of concerned silence, inevitably broken by Mal Maloney's own boisterous laugh as he gathered himself and got up. Except on the golf course where he occasionally cited his injuries in an unsuccessful bid for a few strokes' advantage, he never played up his wounds. Indeed, he disdained such attention. “Sympathy is a word between ‘shit' and ‘syphilis' in the dictionary,” he would often declare until it became a mantra in the Maloney family.

Besides, at the Agency, such injuries were too common to merit special notice. In the years after World War II there were many men like Mal Maloney who loved the military but who, because of disabling combat injuries, were not able to return to active service. Like Maloney, they joined the CIA by default. Among these was one of Mal's dear friends, Ben Vandervoort, a fellow veteran of D-Day, who lost an eye and would later be played by John Wayne in the film
The Longest Day.
Another was the CIA's executive director, Colonel Lawrence K. “Red” White, who lost the use of one leg in combat. In the halls of Langley such injuries merely enhanced one's credibility. For Maloney and the others the curse of such injuries was that it had prematurely reduced men of action to bureaucrats and desk jockeys.