To Kill the Pope (6 page)

Tim had heard vaguely that while the Federal Bureau of Investigation was partial to Catholics, the CIA preferred White Anglo-Saxon Protestants and Ivy Leaguers, like those who had created the Agency from the wartime Office of Strategic Services veterans.

“But I'm a Catholic, you know,” Tim said, instantly regretting it as a sophomoric remark. Billington laughed expansively, filling his pipe.

“That wouldn't surprise me at Georgetown,” he replied. “That's why I'm here. You won't believe how many of your fellow students we've been able to hire here. All first-rate. Actually, I'm glad you mentioned religion. The Agency is very shorthanded on Islamic and Middle East specialists; we've been concentrating heavily on Europe, Asia, and Latin America. What we have in mind is to turn you into a Mideast expert, if it's okay with you. I am aware of your interest in the subject and I understand that you have applied to the Foreign Service School here. But I can assure you that the Agency will look very well after your education. I'm sure the Dean will agree . . .”

As Tim thought about it afterward, the idea appealed to him. He was to call Billington with an answer within a week at a special number he was given. The CIA seemed to be offering him the best of all worlds: advanced education, service to his country at this time of idealism, and a lifetime career surely full of exciting action. The Bay of Pigs fiasco notwithstanding, the CIA was still regarded with a touch of awe as a glamorous, mysterious elite service. The next day, Tim consulted Father Hugh Morgan, trusting his Jesuitic discretion. Billington had asked him not to discuss the CIA job offer with anyone except his parents and the closest of friends, if absolutely necessary to help him make up his mind.

“I'm all for it,” Morgan told him, all smiles. “You know, intelligence work is what we Jesuits used to do best for centuries. Maybe we still do. Who knows . . . So I'm glad you're joining the
CIA though you wouldn't join the Society of Jesus. I guess it's the next best choice.”

General Stella, his stepfather, naturally was delighted. That evening he opened a bottle of champagne.

“Let's celebrate—you, your mother, your brother, and me!” he exclaimed happily. “To your service to your country and to the future ace of the CIA!”

*  *  *

Tim spent two months at the CIA's Langley headquarters in Virginia, just outside Washington, learning the basics of the craft of intelligence at the Training Division. He was assigned briefly to the Directorate of Plans—the clandestine, or “black,” side of the agency that ran its worldwide covert operations. He had meetings with Directorate of Intelligence analysts who specialized in the Middle East, most of whom held doctorates from top universities, acquiring a general knowledge of the current political situation in the region. Next, Tim was shipped out to The Farm way south in Virginia to undergo the exceedingly tough training—physical, mental and psychological, and paramilitary—for future “case officers.” The Agency never refers to them as “agents,” a designation reserved for foreigners working secretly for the CIA abroad.

Late that autumn, Tim was summoned to a meeting with the chief of the Middle East Division in the Directorate of Plans.

“Well, it's time for you to go back to school,” he was told. “I'm really hurting for good case officers in the Middle East, and you are being sent back to Georgetown, which, we think, has the best program in this field. You don't need a cover: you are simply working on your advanced degree at your alma mater. And I don't need to see you until you have your doctorate in hand. Naturally, we pay your tuition and expenses and you stay on the payroll. We're investing seriously in you . . .”

At Georgetown, Tim enrolled in the Faculty of Arabic Language Literature and Linguistics and at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at the School of Foreign Service, which took him exactly where he had hoped to go in the first place. And, once again, he came across Father Morgan, this time in his incarnation as Islam scholar and teacher. Working seven days a week, Tim earned his master's degree in Middle East History late the
following spring. Within six months, studying all summer with Morgan's careful guidance and without a free moment for himself, he gained his doctorate in Islamic Studies in record time. The CIA was pushing him to be ready for field duty as rapidly as possible; the Six Day War between Israel and Arab states had just been fought, and the U.S. government was hungry for fresh intelligence. Tim became astonishingly fluent in Arabic during the short time at his disposal. He was on the verge of collapse from exhaustion by the time he was awarded his Ph.D., the youngest in Georgetown history. He was twenty-six. People in the know said, “What a fantastic career young Savage is making!”

*  *  *

In mid-January, 1969, Tim was ordered by the chief of the Middle East Division to leave immediately for Cairo, where he would join the CIA Station. It was the largest CIA outpost in the world, responsible not only for operations in Egypt, but across the entire sweep of Islam in Africa and the Middle East, from Mauritania on the Atlantic in the west to Syria and Iraq in the east, and including Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the Arab Emirates on the Persian Gulf. Non-Arabic Iran was a separate CIA jurisdiction. But the Cairo Station was, in effect, a regional CIA command, and its chief held more real political power than all the American ambassadors in the area put together, whether they realized it or not. CIA operatives were also active in the Israeli-occupied territories of the West Bank of the Jordan River and in the Gaza Strip on the Mediterranean to keep an eye on Palestinian militants.

Well over one hundred case officers were assigned to the Cairo Station. Some had diplomatic cover at the American Embassy, as the Station Chief did—and the Egyptians, of course, were aware of his real identity. Those with deep cover were spread all over Egypt and the region as businessmen, engineers, technicians, consultants, professors, and even journalists. Only the Station Chief knew their identities. The Station's section, concentrating both on the analysis of Islamic affairs and covert operations ordered by Langley or conceived by the Station Chief, was located in an office building housing the mission of the Agency for International Development and located two blocks away from the old Shephard's Hotel on the Nile. The AID mission in Egypt, as in many
other countries, provided cover for “black” CIA operatives. Tim was officially listed as an AID mission member.

He threw himself into his work with boundless enthusiasm. He studied Arabic language newspapers, magazines, and periodicals for clues in changes in the patterns of behavior of Islamic groups, including the nascent radical movement beginning to turn to terrorism. Then Tim began to establish personal contacts with Islamic scholars. His AID cover rendered his interests perfectly legitimate: the mission funded and supported cultural and educational projects while infiltrating the intellectual and scholarly community.

Soon, Tim developed friendly relations with several professors of theology at Cairo's Al-Azhar University, the oldest university in the world and still the most important in Islam. The professors were impressed with Tim's fluency in Arabic, his understanding of Islam and its
sharia
laws, and, above all, with his sincere interest in the subject. Except for a few American theologians, they had never met an American, and such a young one, who was so much at home with their religion and culture. Tim loved every moment of it. The only disturbing event in which he was peripherally involved related to “termination with extreme prejudice,” in CIA parlance, of a young Arab informer who turned out to be a double agent for Syrian intelligence and may have compromised some of the Station's far-flung activities. Tim had occasionally used him as a source, and was informed of his “termination” in a dark alley—with very gory details.

*  *  *

Tim Savage's love affair with Islam scholars and Egyptian intellectuals came to an abrupt end in less than a year. On Thanksgiving Day, 1969, the Cairo Station Chief informed him that the Agency had ordered his transfer to Vietnam in the shortest possible time—ASAP in bureaucratic jargon. Tim was indignant.

“But what about my training in Arabic and Middle East affairs?” he asked, his voice rising. “The Agency has invested a fortune in my education. And what about my contacts here? Haven't I done well? This is absurd! Aren't you going to protest?”

“No,” the Station Chief replied quietly. “No, I am not. It is ‘not ours to reason why' . . .”

1969

S
AIGON WAS DRENCHED
after three days of monsoon-like downpour when Tim Savage landed on a Sunday in December at fogbound Tan Son Thut Airport. In Vietnam, pilots landed and took off virtually regardless of weather, sometimes with spectacularly catastrophic results, sometimes smoothly. Tim crossed himself when the huge Air Force C-141 troop carrier came to a stop at the military terminal.

He was met at the foot of the ramp by a tall, thin American in a yellow slicker over a Hawaiian sports shirt and slacks who said, “Savage? Follow me,” and did not utter another word until the unmarked car, awaiting them a hundred yards away and driven by another silent American, had reached a three-story building in downtown Saigon. His escort led Tim inside and up the stairs to the top floor where he left him at the door to a large, carpeted office, with air-conditioning units humming below the windows.

A thin-lipped, unsmiling man who appeared to be in his fifties and wore a suit and tie, rose from behind his desk and extended his hand to Tim.

“I am Roger Stephens,” he announced. “Welcome to Vietnam. You will be working directly for me in CORDS, attached to a special pacification unit.”

Tim had heard back at the CIA in Langley that Stephens, something of a legendary figure in the Agency, had served as Saigon Station Chief in the first years of the war in Vietnam, Stephens regarded himself as the greatest American authority on Vietnam, tolerating no disagreements with his views, even from the Director of Central Intelligence, his nominal boss, who usually
deferred to him. An ardent Roman Catholic from Boston, Stephens felt deep affinity with South Vietnamese Catholics, starting with the president and his top generals, in their battle against the ungodly communists from the North and their southern Viet Cong minions. Buddhists had no say at all in Saigon, though they were the religious majority in the country, and their saffron-robed monks gained fame for burning themselves alive in protest against their dictatorial, American-backed government.

Now, as Tim learned, Stephens had the sonorous title of Deputy Commander for Pacification, COMUSMACV, and the personal rank of ambassador in the immense, convoluted American military-intelligence-civilian bureaucracy that was running the war from Saigon. COMUSMACV stood for United States Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, to keep alive President Kennedy's original fiction about “advisers” and “assistance” because America had never actually declared war on anybody in Vietnam. The Command, MAC-V for short, was commonly known as “Pentagon East” and its commander-in-chief was a four-star Army general from Washington who had never grasped the nature of the challenge he faced, including the question of what made the Viet Cong fight so stubbornly in the first place. MAC-V was ostensibly a dependency of the American Embassy in Saigon, as was the huge, powerful, and totally independent CIA Station there.

The fourth pillar of the American establishment in Vietnam was CORDS, linked with the military Command, the Embassy, and the CIA, and this was Roger Stephens' fief for which Tim Savage was being recruited. CORDS stood for Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support—all parties in Third World internal conflicts claimed the fashionable “Revolutionary” label for themselves. Technically, CORDS answered to the MAC-V Command, but Stephens enjoyed nearly complete autonomy. CORDS' official “cover” was economic development and, indeed, it ran a number of civilian programs, employing AID personnel.

The heart of CORDS, however, were Stephens' intelligence and elite “search and destroy” operations under his Pacification Program. Though using AID officials and American military officers as cover, the massive CORDS structure was dominated by senior CIA officers and staffed in the field by junior Agency officers.
For all practical purposes, Stephens had the run of the Saigon CIA Station, its chief unquestioningly making his resources available to him. The military likewise were at Stephens' disposal in providing Special Forces and Army Rangers for his operations.

Central in his clandestine enterprises was Stephens' brainchild, christened by him “Operation Phoenix” and designed as the principal American counterinsurgency weapon. And it was to Operation Phoenix that Tim Savage was assigned the moment he reached Saigon. Because the Vietnam War continued to go from bad to worse day after day—nine years after President Kennedy had dispatched the first American soldiers as “advisers” and started the buildup that finally reached a half-million troops—Stephens and his lieutenants conceived Operation Phoenix as a means of undermining the enemy. It was to complement the American war-fighting campaign that, at its peak, engaged hundreds of thousands of troops, tanks, heavy artillery, jet bombers and fighters, gunship helicopters, mountains of bombs, and rivers of napalm in support of the utterly incompetent and corrupt South Vietnamese Army.

Stephens was convinced that the communists would be defeated, the war won and Vietnam “pacified” only when Viet Cong guerrillas in the south—formally known to Americans as Viet Cong Infrastructure (VCI)—were liquidated. Their leaders and fighters, Stephens believed, had to be identified, captured, interrogated, and “terminated” in the villages where they ostensibly lived as peaceful and defenseless peasants, but, in reality, plotted and planned their guerrilla war, expanded their vital communications even as they tilled their soggy land, and turned into murderous nocturnal insurgents.