To Kill the Pope (11 page)

Stephens was staring down at his desk, playing with a steel letter opener, as if ready to thrust it into an enemy. At length, he dropped it and looked straight at Tim. For the first time.

“You are a Catholic, aren't you?” he asked. “And you graduated from Georgetown.”

“Yes,” Tim replied, puzzled. “You've read my file, so . . .”

“Then you must be familiar with Catholic teachings on ‘just wars,'
Ius Bellum,”
Stephens said. “They go back all the way to St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas . . . You see, I went to Notre Dame . . . Anyway, in the fourth and fifth century, Augustine had proclaimed the legitimacy of military service. And St. Thomas, rediscovering Aristotle, developed the idea that, much as the Church is devoted to the sanctity of human life, war is acceptable in a just cause, even an offensive war for a just cause, if it is so declared by civil authority. And, as you must know, war
is
ethical if it causes less harm than
not
going to war. The Church calls it ‘proportionality.' In the case of Vietnam, we are unquestionably fighting for a just cause: for democracy and against Godless communist tyranny. So we are not talking about good and evil in a basic sense. But, sadly, war results in deaths. For example, Cardinal O'Connor in New York, so admired by Catholics and others, is a doctrinaire supporter of the Vietnam War. He even wrote a book in its defense. So, Tim, don't think you are the only Catholic who has given thought to this whole philosophical matter. I have, too, believe it or not . . .”

As it happened, Tim had taken courses in ethics at Georgetown taught by Father Morgan, his friend and adviser, and had read his famous treatise on “just wars.” Morgan also made his students familiarize themselves with Augustine's
The City of God.
It all came back to him in a rush as he listened to Stephens' tutorial on what was just.

“You are absolutely right about Augustine and Thomas and Church teachings,” he said. “But, then, you surely remember what the Church has called the criterion of ‘civilian immunity.' It affirms, as you know, that civilians must not be attacked even in the pursuit of a ‘just war.' It is also called, I think, ‘Non-Combatant Immunity.' But we have violated it, especially through Phoenix, because we
do
kill civilians, and kill them indiscriminately in the villages, and I am as guilty as everybody else here. It has finally dawned on me that I am an assassin, directly or indirectly, hiding behind political excuses, even though I never killed anybody personally. But I must share the blame. And now I hear you invoking
Ius Bellum
to justify killing old women and little kids. And, you know, I just read Cardinal O'Connor's new book in which he says that he had been wrong in supporting the war, having concluded that, in accordance with Church teachings, our use of more and more unjust means results in robbing ourselves of a justification for being in this war at all. Here, I brought a copy of O'Connor's book so that you can see for yourself. I bought it yesterday at the PX down the street.”

Stephens seemed faintly amused.

“This is the first time in my career that I've had a theological argument concerning the work of the Agency,” he told Tim. “But, as a fellow Catholic, I must say I totally disagree with your interpretation of
Ius Bellum
. Vietnam
is
a just cause, and collateral damage—what you call ‘attacks on civilians'—is tragically, but inevitably the price for what I know will be a moral victory for our side . . . O'Connor's ‘conversion' notwithstanding.”

“You mean we have to destroy them in order to save them?” Tim asked sarcastically. “Is that what we are doing in Vietnam, in someone else's country? This is insane . . .”

“No, it's not insane, Tim,” Stephens answered. “We Christians do not believe in killing—Thou Shall Not Kill and all that stuff—even to protect ourselves. But the Christian teaching is that if someone is attacked, we must go to the defense. This applied to attacks against barbarians way back and it applies to Vietnam today. We are defending the Vietnamese against barbarian communists who attacked them. Do you understand?”

“No, I really do not,” Tim said. “I recall reading in college
about the Albigenois Cathar heretics. If memory serves, it was the pope—I think it was Innocent III, in the thirteenth century—who had proclaimed the crusade against them in the south of France as a ‘just war' and thousands and thousands of perfectly nice, decent people were burned at the stake. Was that really justified? And the Great Inquisition was born from it. Next, the use of torture was legitimized by Pope Innocent IV for flushing out heretics—it's in that O'Connor book. Is that something the Church is proud of? Are we replaying it in Vietnam, with Washington in the role of imperial Rome? We kill and we torture . . .”

“Look,” Stephens replied, “this is not the time nor the place to debate Church history. We must deal with the realities of today.”

He got up from behind his desk, standing almost at attention below a government-issue photograph of Richard Nixon in statesman pose.

“Well, you are the one who brought up this whole business of the ‘just war' to make me accept, as a good Catholic, what is unacceptable,” Tim said. “That's why I want to resign from the Agency and wash my hands of this thing. I believe it was Cromwell who said that in a war every king is convinced that God is on his side.”

“Fine. Have it your way—if you really think you can put the last two years behind you and be pristine again, even if you never pulled a trigger yourself,” Stephens declared. “You admit that once you believed in what we are doing here. So you can't be like Lady Macbeth and say, ‘Out damned spot!' Yes, if you think we are sinning, you are just as much of a sinner as the rest of us. You're trapped, my boy, you're trapped by your own reasoning. But there's one more thing I want to tell you before you quit . . .”

“What? A new justification?”

“In a sense, yes. I'm going to let you in on a secret. Back in 1961, it was the CIA, on Kennedy's orders, that organized the assassination of that dictator Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. I was the executive officer on the project. Trujillo was a bloodthirsty tyrant and we all agreed that he had to go. And do you know what the Dominicans called this assassination? They called it
ajusticiamento,
which in Spanish means ‘the bringing of justice.' Would you argue that it was not a ‘just' act on our part? Don't forget, Tim, that there are all kinds of moralities and ethics and judgments in our lives.”

Tim nodded.

“Of course, you are right,” he remarked. “But one assassination does not justify another. I've made my judgment.”

Stephens put out his hand to Tim Savage.

“Then, go with God,” he said. “Godspeed.”

1972

T
HE FIRST CALL
Tim Savage made on his return from Vietnam to Washington, after seeing his family, was to his former professor Father Hugh Morgan at Georgetown, a cheerful, corpulent Jesuit. In addition to teaching him when Tim was an undergraduate student, Morgan later shepherded him through the graduate school in pursuit of his master's degree and his doctorate in Islamic history and culture and Arabic language studies.

In ways that would serve him so well in Cairo and then in Rome, Tim had developed an abiding interest in Islam and the Middle East under Morgan's tutelage at the university: Mecca and Medina, the Prophet and the Koran, the glorious days of the caliphates and the Arab learning in philosophy and mathematics, the Moorish conquest of Iberia, the greatness and the fall; the scholars, warriors, and poets; the modern age of kings and nationalists, and the incalculable wealth of petroleum destined to recreate the ancient power of Islam—or lead to another collapse.

In Father Morgan, Tim had found the perfect mentor. Himself an Islamic scholar, Morgan progressed from his own earlier work on ethics to the Christian concepts of “Just Wars” and, consequently, to the role of the Church in Holy Land crusades and, inevitably, to Islam proper. Now Morgan was president of Georgetown University's new Center of Islamic Studies. In his late fifties, he exuded energy as a teacher, administrator, and friend and adviser to as many students as time would allow.

And to Tim, Father Morgan had probably been the single most important influence from the day he had first entered Georgetown at the age of eighteen. In those days, Morgan was in the habit of
inviting his most promising students to lunch or tea on weekends to sound them out on the possibility of joining in the future the Society of Jesus. At a time when Church vocations were already diminishing sharply, Father Hugh Morgan was a tireless recruiter for the Jesuits. He referred to himself in proud jest as “The Proselytizer,” but he was extremely selective and discerning in his choices. He had made not too veiled a pitch to Tim at one of his lunches, encountering an absolute lack of interest. Morgan remarked, “well, it's too bad: you'd make a fine Jesuit,” and never again returned to the subject. Nevertheless a deep friendship grew between the professor and his pupil. Tim seldom made serious decisions without consulting him.

*  *  *

Back in Washington, Tim had to decide—soon—what he proposed to do with the rest of his life. He had already lived a remarkably full one: a Ph.D. at an uncommonly young age, service with the CIA in Cairo, then Vietnam, the frightening backlash of Phoenix, and his crisis of conscience.

But to be with Morgan and unload on him loomed to Tim as the first step in his search for solutions. The process of resigning from the Agency was an impersonal, automatic experience. He had driven to the CIA headquarters in Langley, on the Virginia side of the Potomac and a short distance from Washington, to meet with Personnel and Security officials, and his resignation was formalized immediately. He was not even asked why he was quitting; nobody seemed to be interested. All he had to do was to sign a standard secrecy pledge that he would never reveal anything about the Agency and its “Sources and Methods” or anything secret he might have learned during his years with the CIA.

At home, however, Tim had to play it with extraordinary care. Jim Stella, his stepfather, was an unflinching patriot who never questioned his government's policies. Like so many professional officers of his generation, he was idealistic when it came to America's actions in the world and profoundly conservative in domestic politics. He had no use for “bleeding heart” liberals. In the 1964 presidential campaign, Stella had worked enthusiastically for Senator Barry Goldwater, a fellow combat pilot. He had
applauded Tim for signing up with the CIA—though he might have preferred the Air Force for his stepson—and was wholeheartedly behind the American engagement in the Vietnam War.

A rock-ribbed Roman Catholic, Stella saw Vietnam as a quasireligious crusade against atheistic communism and he was proud that Tim was serving in Indochina. To him it was exactly the same cause for which he had risked his life in World War Two, where he had lost his best friend. Stella, to be sure, knew nothing about Phoenix, a top-secret project, and Tim could not allude to it. The retired general no longer had security clearances. Personally, he was deeply offended when he realized that the Church in America was split over Vietnam and its morality; he was shocked to see priests on television demonstrating against the war, like the four who had poured their own blood onto draft files. He simply could not understand it.

This was why Tim was convinced that his stepfather would never understand or condone his disenchantment—and his resignation from the CIA. Stella might have regarded it as a virtually treasonable act, and Tim, determined not to trigger a bitter controversy within the family, chose to lie. During dinner at home the evening of his return from Saigon, he told them that he had been transferred back to Langley for another assignment, but, in the meantime, had a month's leave. This made it possible for Tim to live with his family during the transition period, at least for a while. He planned to tell them the truth after deciding on his future course. The general was too disciplined an officer to inquire about Tim's supposed new Agency assignment: In the military, one did not ask about classified work, even of one's own children.

*  *  *

“As usual, I need your advice,” Tim said to Father Morgan. They were sitting on a rainy December afternoon in front of a blazing fireplace in the living room of the priest's tiny house on Thirty-fifth Street, just around the corner from Georgetown University's massive main tower-graced building.

“I have resigned from the CIA,” he went on, “because I couldn't continue to be part of the assassination program our government runs in Vietnam. I had become an assassin myself though I have never actually assassinated a Viet Cong prisoner there. But I was
the commander of a team that specialized in assassinations and therefore I must share in the guilt.”

Morgan cleared his throat. “And now?” he asked.

“Well, I don't know,” Tim said. “That's why I want your advice. Here I am, an unemployed Middle Eastern spook, a former Vietnam assassin. Oh, God! I guess I must first come to terms with my guilt, my sins . . .”

The Jesuit added a stubby log to the fire and flames burst out merrily, encouragingly, the wood crackling.

“Have you been to confession?” he inquired.

“The truth is that I haven't been to confession since high school,” Tim replied, shifting uneasily in the armchair. “I'm not sure why, and I lied to my mother about going to confession. But I imagine it can't do any harm now, can it?”

“Would you like me to hear your confession?” Morgan offered.

“Here? Now?” Tim wondered as if to gain time, the thought not having occurred to him.

“Why not? I don't have to sit in a confessional to hear your confession,” the Jesuit told him. “Even though I'm wearing blue jeans and a red sweater right now. I doubt God cares about my sartorial habits.”