The Second Shooter (16 page)

"Read history," Gordon said. "The Soviet Union was trying to take over all those places. Just one year earlier they put ballistic missiles in Cuba. Two years before that, Khrushchev banged his shoe at the UN General Assembly and shouted at the British Prime Minister, We will bury you! And we did end up fighting a ten-year war in Vietnam that cost fifty thousand American lives."

Gordon dug a second accordion folder from another stack of boxes and dropped a thick sheaf of paper onto the coffee table. It landed with a thud. "And then there's this."

The document was held together by a rubber band and looked to Jake to be almost two hundred pages thick. The cover sheet indicated that the original had been printed by the U.S. Government Printing Office in 1977.

PROJECT MK-ULTRA, THE CIA'S PROGRAM OF

RESEARCH IN BEHAVIORAL MODIFICATION

JOINT HEARING

Before The

SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE

And The

SUBCOMMITTEE ON

HEALTH AND SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH

Of The

COMMITTEE ON HUMAN RESOURCES

***

UNITED STATES SENATE

NINETY-FIFTH CONGRESS

FIRST SESSION

***

AUGUST 3, 1977

"What is that?" Jake asked.

"A report by the United States Senate," Gordon said. "Detailing the CIA's efforts to brainwash ordinary people and turn them into assassins."

***

At 10:45 a.m., the Chevrolet Suburban blasted past a sign on the side of a rural two-lane blacktop that read 'Welcome to Oklahoma'. There were no other vehicles in sight.

Blackstone had a laptop open. He turned it to show Garcia. Filling the screen was a high-altitude zero-degree picture of a rural trailer park. "That's a real-time satellite image." Blackstone tapped a finger on what looked like the roof of an old motorhome. "And that's the target."

Garcia nodded. "How long?"

"Twenty minutes," Blackstone said. Then grinned. "Depending on traffic, of course."

Garcia didn't crack a smile. He turned back to the side window to watch the passing desolate countryside. It was mostly farmland, dotted with ramshackle wooden homes and sagging aluminum trailers. It reminded him of the kind of places people sang about in American country and western songs.

There was a verse in one of those old songs flitting around the edge of his memory. He couldn't recall the exact lyrics or who sang them, but he remembered that on the surface the song was about a game of poker. But it was more than that. The song was an allegory. The cards just a metaphor. The point the singer was making was that in cards, as in life, you had to know when to hold onto your hand, when to fold it, when to walk away from the table, and when to run for your life.

Garcia wondered which he should do now.

"So we're in this beat-up RV in the middle of nowhere, and he drops all this information on us. All this history. I'm talking about Gordon McCay now, who, like I said, I hadn't seen or heard from in years. I was pissed about being there, sure. But still, I had to admit, some of what he was saying was starting to make sense to me."

***

Gordon McCay tapped the thick government report. "In 1977, the Senate forced the CIA to disclose a top secret project called MK-ULTRA. The project began in the 1950s and was developed by an Agency psychiatrist named Dr. Ewen Cameron. The goal was total mind control. Cameron used experimental techniques like subliminal messaging, electric shock, deep hypnosis, and lots of drugs-including a new one called LSD-to find a way to program assassins."

"What do you mean, program assassins?" Jake asked. "Are you talking about training people to kill?"

"No," Gordon said. "I mean program, like in the Manchurian Candidate, except the real thing. I'm talking about programming a person to kill someone, anyone, on command."

"Like the president," Stacy said.

Gordon nodded. "Like the president."

Jake jumped to his feet, still talking to Gordon but jabbing a finger at Favreau. "You're as crazy as he is if you expect me to believe the CIA programmed him to assassinate John F. Kennedy because he was having an affair with a German woman who might have been working for the Russians."

"No, I don't expect you to believe that," Gordon said. "Because that's not what happened. That was just the cover story."

"The cover story?" Jake said.

Gordon motioned for Jake to sit back down on the sofa. "Just hear me out."

Jake didn't move.

"Please," Gordon said.

Reluctantly, Jake sat down.

"Kennedy's affair with Ellen Rometsch ended quietly and was never a serious threat to national security," Gordon said. "Hoover told the attorney general that his brother was screwing a suspected Soviet agent, and Bobby, who always cleaned up Jack's messes, had her deported. End of story. The real reason Kennedy was killed was because he was about to disband the CIA."

Jake sighed and leaned back against the thin cushion. "None of this is helping. I want to know the reason why people are chasing us today, right now."

"I'm telling you the reason," Gordon said. "You just don't want to hear it because it contradicts what you think you know, what you've been taught all your life."

Jake stared at him for a long time. There were people chasing them. Powerful people. There was no denying that. Maybe, if he listened to Gordon McCay's roundabout explanation, it might swerve toward something close to the truth. "Okay," Jake said. "So tell me why Kennedy was going to disband the CIA."

Gordon raised a finger for each point. "The Bay of Pigs in '61. The Cuban Missile Crisis in '62. And not one, not two, but three failed attempts to assassinate Castro." Gordon held up all five fingers of one hand. "Every one of them was an Agency disaster. The first two, of course, were international news for months, and although history painted Kennedy as the hero of the missile crisis for forcing Khrushchev to back down, the real question was, how did the Soviets sneak those missiles into Cuba right under the CIA's nose? The three attempts the Agency made to kill Castro, as boneheaded and unrealistic as a couple of them were, stayed secret until much later, but by the summer of 1963, Kennedy had lost all faith in the CIA.

"In fact, he was becoming convinced that the Agency was actually working against him. So he decided to shut it down and split its functions between DOD and the State Department, but he was smart enough to know that the timing was crucial. He had to do it before the 1964 presidential election so the Agency couldn't use its covert resources to back the Republican candidate."

"How do you shut down the CIA?" Stacy asked.

"By executive order," Gordon said. "Bobby was already working on a draft of the order, and the president was going to sign it January 1, 1964, ten months before the election." He paused, then said, "But the agency found out what the president was planning and decided to shut him down first."

"Who in the CIA signed off on that?" Stacy said, the disbelief clear in her voice. "What did they do, pass a memo around outlining the plan to kill the president?"

"One or two senior people inside the Agency is all it would have taken," Gordon said. "The rest of the operation was outsourced. And remember, we're talking about an agency with a lot of practical experience in coups and assassinations: Iran in '53, Guatemala in '54, Laos in '57, Laos again in '58, Haiti in '59, Ecuador in '61."

Stacy looked hard at Gordon. "So you're saying a handful of people inside the CIA killed the president of the United States to protect their government jobs?"

"There was a lot more at stake than just salaries and pensions," Gordon said. "The Mandarins at the Agency dug into the goat entrails and saw the future."

"What future?" Stacy asked.

"A future with a bottomless and untraceable black budget that would allow them to stick their grubby little fingers into any crooked pie they wanted, anywhere in the world. And there was only one man standing in their way."

"So this black budget," Jake said. "Where was it—"

"Heroin," Gordon said without waiting for Jake to finish asking the question. "From the Golden Triangle."

"Hold on," Jake said, raising his hand like a traffic cop. "Are you suggesting that the CIA—"

"I'm not suggesting anything," Gordon said, interrupting Jake again. "I'm telling you that for more than a decade, while we had soldiers getting blown up in rice paddies, the CIA was smuggling heroin into Vietnam and shipping it, by air freight companies that it owned, to the biggest and most lucrative drug market in the world, the United States of America."

"Like Air America," Stacy said in a low voice, almost like a whisper.

Gordon nodded. "Like Air America and half a dozen others that it used to make tens of millions of dollars in the heroin racket."

"That's ridiculous," Jake said.

"You're right," Gordon said. "It is ridiculous. But it's also true. Our premier intelligence agency was willing to poison a whole generation of Americans so it could rig elections in other countries and assassinate foreign leaders whose policies it disagreed with. And that is certainly ridiculous."

Jake dismissed the allegations with a wave of his hand. "I've heard all this conspiracy crap before." He glared at Gordon. "All my life, in fact, thanks to you."

"Like I told you, read history," Gordon said. "It's all there. Some of it between the lines, but it's there. All the covert shit the CIA is guilty of: coups in Haiti and Ecuador, assassinations in the Dominican Republic and the Congo, a secret war in Angola. They even toppled the government of Australia, for God's sake. And it all costs money, lots of money. Ask any DEA agent. Drugs are the currency of the covert world, and heroin is the gold standard."

Stacy stared at Gordon. Finally, she said, "Holy shit."

Gordon nodded. "Yeah. Holy shit."

For a long moment no one spoke. Then Jake said, "I'm not buying it."

"Not buying what, exactly?" Gordon asked.

"Any of it. That the US government is in the heroin smuggling business or that there's a way to brainwash people into becoming assassins. You mentioned The Manchurian Candidate. Well, I saw the movie. Not only was it fiction, it was stupid." He turned to Favreau. "What did they do, call you on the telephone with a code word or a phrase from a nursery rhyme that they had embedded in your brain? And then what? You walked around like a zombie until you wound up on the grassy knoll. Then you shot the president."

"No," Favreau said. "That's not what happened."

"Then tell me what did happen," Jake said. "Tell me how this brainwashing program worked."

"I didn't know they were putting me through the program," Favreau said. "I didn't even know there was a program."

"But how exactly did they do it?"

"They put me in a house in Virginia, out in the country. They said it was a safe house. They played music all the time, even at night when I was sleeping. It was always there in the background. Sometimes weird sounds would come through the speakers. Harsh sounds that made me jump. Just randomly. And they showed me lots of films. Crazy movies that made no sense."

"What kind of movies?"

Favreau closed his eyes. "I don't remember them. Nothing but bits and pieces. Just little scenes."

"Tell me about one of the scenes."

Opening his eyes, Favreau said, "There was one...I saw over and over. A man in a white coat, a lab coat, like a scientist would wear. Or a doctor. He was explaining how to boil a rabbit, and he was doing it while he talked. He set a pot of water on a stove, I assume it was water, and heated it until it was boiling. Then he threw a live rabbit into the pot. He held the rabbit down in the water with some kind of...cooking device, like something you might mash potatoes with."

"That's disgusting," Stacy said.

As Favreau spoke, Jake noticed a peculiar look come over his face, almost like he was getting sick. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine," Favreau said. "It's just that every time I think about it, it's almost like I'm back there. Like it's happening all over again."

"Didn't you find all of that really strange," Jake asked, "the twenty-four-hour music, the weird sounds, the crazy movies?"

"I learned later that everything they gave me to eat or drink was drugged. Even the toothpaste. At first they told me I was there for a briefing. They didn't say what it was about. Just some mission they wanted me to do. The first couple of days we went over basic techniques. Tradecraft they call it. Getting from here to there unobserved. Shooting. Wireless communications."

"And then?" Jake asked.

Favreau closed his eyes again as if trying to recall. Then he opened them and shook his head. "After a while you stop wondering what's going on. From then on the days get kind of blurry."

"How long were you there?" Stacy asked.

"Three weeks," Favreau said. "But it didn't feel like that. It felt like a week at most. There were no calendars in the house, no newspapers, no television. No clocks even. I didn't find out how long I'd been there until after, until I saw a newspaper."

Jake snapped his fingers. "And just like that you were programmed to kill the president?"

Favreau smiled. "To be honest, I didn't need much programming. Not after seeing the evidence, the surveillance films and the dossier on Ellen Rometsch. I was already convinced the president had been compromised and that he was acting as a Soviet agent."

"What about Lee Harvey Oswald?" Jake asked. "Did they brainwash him too?"

"He went through the program, but his was an even longer version," Favreau said. "I heard he was there for two months."

"Why Oswald?" Jake said. "What was so special about him?"

"I don't know why they picked him," Favreau said.

"I can answer that," Gordon said.

Jake looked at him.

"If you think about it," Gordon said, "Oswald was the perfect candidate. An ex-Marine with a history of disciplinary problems. A communist who defected to the Soviet Union and renounced his American citizenship but who later came back with a Russian wife. A Castro supporter who started a one-man chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and got himself arrested in New Orleans for passing out pro-Castro flyers. The CIA couldn't have asked for a better patsy."