The Book of Honor (47 page)

With hardly a break in service, he joined the CIA. For the Agency it was something of a coup. There were few employees at Langley that possessed Freedman's paramilitary skills. In 1947 when the Agency was founded, virtually all employees of the clandestine service were veterans of military service. The early 1950s saw an influx of men seasoned in battle on the Korean peninsula.

But by 1990 those in the Agency who had served in the military were in the distinct minority, and many of those still there were either too old or ill-conditioned to meet the physical demands of a covert paramilitary officer. Even at fifty Freedman carried a chiseled physique, a young man's stamina, and a wide array of skills rarely found in one person.

But for Freedman it was not the perfect fit. Once out of the military, he grew a ponytail and sported a full white beard. At Langley he was constantly being pushed to get a haircut. But more than that, something about the culture of the Agency put him off. He continued to harbor some distrust dating back to his days on Delta Force.

Like Freedman, the Agency itself was going through a period of self-doubt and reexamination. In 1991 William Webster resigned after four years as head of the CIA. The Agency had come under criticism from both the Bush White House and Congress. Specifically cited were intelligence failures connected to the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama, the collapse of the Soviet economy, and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait a year later. In November 1991 Webster was replaced by Robert M. Gates, a veteran Agency analyst known as something of a hard-liner.

For Gates and the Agency there was little time to reflect on the past or celebrate the collapse of its archenemy, the Soviet Union. The CIA was faced with nothing less than redefining its future. Its raison d'être—the Cold War—was history. If Langley did not quickly embrace a new mission, it risked being identified as an anachronism and disemboweled, not unlike the fate of the OSS in the immediate aftermath of World War II. That was the same situation Larry Freedman found himself in as a warrior in middle age having consecrated himself to fighting Communists.

But Gates was an unabashed believer in the CIA's accomplishments. He counted the Agency's multibillion-dollar support of the mujahedin against the Soviets in Afghanistan as one of its finest hours. Even Angola, decimated by war and superpower intervention, he put in the Agency's win column, as one more strain on the Kremlin. That the Agency helped prop up, even install, many despotic regimes was simply a necessity of containing Communism. He would later muse that the CIA had “ended up with some strange and often unsavory bedfellows. Most you wouldn't bring home to Mom.” But it was the future, not the past, that preoccupied Gates and the thousands of overt and undercover Agency employees. The CIA's resources, once directed against Moscow, Beijing, and Havana, now were increasingly being deployed to gather economic intelligence and to fight terrorism, international crime syndicates, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction—biological, chemical, and nuclear—and the international narcotics trade. Each of these areas was affected by the demise of the Soviet Union. If “the evil empire” was gone, so, too, was the restraint and stability with which it held sway over its client states in the long era of superpower rivalry. In its absence, age-old strains of nationalism and ethnic conflict erupted, drawing the CIA into them.

For Langley and for Freedman it was an unfamiliar world, one in which containing chaos, not Communism, often seemed to be center-stage. Both wondered how they would fit in and what their new role would be. Freedman did not have to wait long to find out. He was repeatedly dispatched to Africa, primarily in the north, returning again to Ethiopia. He also is said to have been sent to Poland. That mission, too, remains a mystery.

It had been almost more than Freedman could bear that he was not sent to the Gulf War in 1991, but had to sit by and watch as Desert Storm unfolded.

“Haven't you had enough?” his lifelong friend Paul Weinberg asked him.

“No,” Freedman fired back. “One more war. I could go for a good war.”

Years of Special Forces training had sharpened his skills but had also implanted in him a wariness and hair-trigger reaction that sometimes frightened those around him. And with reason. He could be the perfect killing machine and was now paying a price for his expertise. A hunter so long, he had come to know a little too much about what it was to be hunted.

He would not sit before windows or doors, aware that snipers like himself looked for just such opportunities to fell their prey. Always, he insisted on sitting with his back to the wall where he could survey everything and everyone around him. As his training increased, so, too, did the ferocity with which he reacted to perceived threats. In his profession deliberation meant death.

Late one evening in 1990, while on leave, he was staying with his sister, Sylvia. Sitting in a black leather chair, he was watching television. Even in Sylvia's suburban living room, he had strapped to his ankle his .357 Smith & Wesson with a two-and-a-half-inch barrel. It was loaded with special Teflon-pointed bullets. Sylvia entered the room a little too quietly, padding about in her slippers. She came upon him from behind and gently placed her hand upon his shoulder.

Before she knew it, Freedman had leaped over the back of the chair and was an instant away from delivering a potentially fatal strike. “I saw the look in his eyes and I learned never to do that again,” Sylvia would say. After that she announced her entrances. Others of Freedman's friends had their own such encounters. They knew to approach him face-to-face and never to surprise him.

The Larry Freedman that Wynne Crocetto knew was a man who pulled the chair out for her, never cursed, and through the years remembered her on birthdays and Valentine's Day. But she, too, caught a terrifying glimpse of the other Larry Freedman, the master of close-quarters combat. “I'm really sorry,” he told her. “I'll never do that again.”

But it was not something he had control over. The skills that kept him alive in times of peril stalked him in times of peace. Even waking him could unleash the warrior's fury.

But there were by now other, more pressing problems in Freedman's life. His marriage to Teresa had worn hopelessly thin. Freedman wanted out. He may well have loved her but he could not live with her any longer. He took an apartment in Arlington, Virginia. Teresa remained in Fayetteville. He called it “a separation.” It was headed inexorably toward divorce.

He still had a roving eye but little expectation of meeting someone special. He had had enough of marriage. But a year after he joined the CIA, in 1991, he found himself enamored with one of his female colleagues, a thin and athletic divorcée. She had even accompanied him on the back of his blackberry-colored Harley FXRT to Sturgis, South Dakota, where annually tens of thousands of bikers gather. It was the first time he had been with a woman who both understood and shared his passion for action and intrigue. At fifty Freedman had found a soulmate.

Freedman was even giving some thought to what life might be like in retirement. He and his buddy Larry Walz had spoken of buying Harleys in Anchorage, Alaska, and driving them for a year all the way to the tip of South America.

But he was also conscious that between now and retirement his life was fraught with risk. Late one afternoon Freedman was in his sister's backyard, rocking slowly in the hammock. Sylvia pulled up a lawn chair and they began to talk. He said that when he died he wanted to be buried in Arlington Cemetery and to have the complete military ceremony and even the small white government-issued tombstone. “I deserve that,” he told her, “and I want to be among my peers.”

By December 1992 Freedman's bona fides as one of the CIA's premier paramilitary operatives were well established. He had become one of the Agency's “go-to” players, someone who could be counted on to perform well even in the most hazardous of situations. One such situation was quickly taking shape in an area already familiar to Freedman—the horn of Africa.

The country of Somalia was virtually disintegrating before the eyes of the world. Warlords and factionalism had plunged it into a hellish chaos in which even the most dedicated relief workers could not get food and medicine to the country's 8 million people. At the White House President Bush had determined that the United States would not sit by while countless Somalis starved to death. A decision was made, on humanitarian grounds, that the U.S. would send a military force into the country to reestablish some semblance of order so that the “nongovernmental entities,” or NGOs, could go about their work of bringing relief to the country. Already some 350,000 people had died from hunger or fighting.

As a preface to such military intervention, the National Security Council (NSC) decided it wanted the CIA to send operatives into Somalia to ensure that the airports would be open and secure. They did not want the NGOs to return only to become targets or to have their food looted or taken by militias. The CIA team could also provide U.S. troops with a clearer idea of what they might expect in country.

The Agency officers, operating under cover, were to arrive in advance of the military. It would be a risky operation because CIA operatives would be inserted into a conflict in which there was no way to distinguish between good guys and bad guys. All sides were heavily armed.

The call for a CIA team went to Tom Twetten, then deputy director for operations, the man who oversaw the Agency's clandestine service. He understood only too well the risk of deploying people in areas where factionalism was rife.

It was not that Twetten was squeamish about putting his officers into the field when it was necessary, but he was skeptical about the need for Agency people in Somalia. He had good reason to have his doubts.

Over the years, demands on the Agency increased while its budget remained the same or shrank. Cuts were made in personnel and operations. Resources had to be husbanded. An internal CIA study was conducted to identify those countries in Africa in which the United States had little or no political, economic, or strategic interests. The idea was that in those countries the Agency could afford not to have a presence. The study was undertaken in the aftermath of the Cold War and was completed in 1991.

It concluded that there were four countries in which the United States had no significant interests and that the Agency would therefore cease collecting intelligence on those nations. That list was forwarded to the State Department and the NSC.

“The Cold War was over and there was no more interest in those countries, ” recalls Twetten. “There was no U.S. presence there. They were essentially off our screen. We were trying to remold ourselves, so we were going to drop off what was least important and we listed those four countries in rank order and at the top of the list, that which was least important, in which there was no embassy, no American presence, and nobody had asked any question about for the last year—the name of that country was Somalia.”

Now the Agency was being asked to put its officers at risk in a country it had determined was not even worthy of routine collection efforts. Twetten had a second reservation about Agency involvement. He viewed it as a request for military assistance, something the CIA tried to avoid unless there was a presidential finding. In Twetten's view it was the military who should fill the need.

Unspoken was yet a third reason. The Panama operation three years earlier had left some residual “bad blood” between Langley and the Pentagon. Twetten politely declined what he took to be an invitation for assistance and heard no more on the matter for a short time.

But a week later a second call came in. This time the NSC spoke to the Director Central Intelligence, Robert Gates. This time it was no longer a request, but a directive. The Agency was to field a team in Somalia. End of discussion.

“I was given the instruction ‘You will do it,' ” recalled Twetten. “The director of operations will organize an intelligence-gathering effort in several villages including Bardera and you will confirm that the airports are secure so that the NGOs can arrive. You will do that by working with the local authorities, whoever is in charge of the area. You have to go out on the ground and figure out who that is.”

There was little discussion about who would be the right person to send. “Freedman was a character and really well known for his bravery and audacity,” remembers Twetten. Besides, Freedman knew the landscape of the country, had the requisite skills, and was, as always, itching to go. A desk in Langley had never agreed with him. This was what he had joined the Agency to do. Twetten spoke with him personally as he readied himself for the assignment.

But Freedman was to be part of a second phase of the CIA operation. Even before he was to go into Somalia, the Agency had hired some bush pilots in Kenya to bring in pre-positioned Agency officers who had previous experience in Somalia. Once in country, the CIA case officers contacted Somali agents they had known from earlier operations and assigned them to collect intelligence on specific airports. Only then was Freedman to go in as part of a combined CIA and U.S. Army reconnaissance squadron.

A few days before Freedman was to leave he flew to Phoenix, Arizona, to visit a longtime friend, Gale McMillan. It was part business, part pleasure. McMillan was a specialty weapons maker who had outfitted elite Special Forces units. Freedman was there to pick up a ten-power sniper's scope to fit his .308 rifle.

But McMillan was much more than just a source of weapons. Freedman had known him since his days on Delta and had come to view him as a surrogate father. “He was kind of like a third son,” said McMillan. One of the nights Freedman was in town McMillan put on a demonstration of his night scopes at the local police firing range and turned to Freedman to prove the accuracy of the rifle and scope. In the blackness of night Freedman set up his rifle, poised on a bipod that rested on a table. He sighted the target and squeezed off five shots at a target the distance of two football fields away. All five shots found their mark, dead center— all within three-tenths of an inch of each other. The police had never seen such a thing before.