17

1968–1969

Before the CIA established Air Opium, the KMT had been able to get only 7 percent of the total Meo opium crop to market. Between March and June the great KMT caravans would begin their massive, slow descent from the heights of the north; a gorgeous elephant train carrying twenty tons of raw opium under the guard of five hundred troops.

When Bart Simms was put in charge of reorganizing the opium arm of the huge CIA airline in Asia called Air America, it was already one of the largest publicly or privately owned airlines in the world (in combination with its other airline labels—Air Asia, the Pacific Corporation, and Southern Air Transport). The entire CIA facility was an airline and maintenance service with 160 heavy transport planes and 20,000 employees—3,500 employees more than the CIA itself. The maintenance company was larger than any military facility. It was based on Taiwan.

Air Opium, Bart’s operation, was by far the most complex of the four agency units because it involved agricultural supervision of the opium (growing it to U.S. Department of Agriculture standards), the collection of the crop at the ninety-one USAID airstrips in five countries of Southeast Asia, and the operation of seven heroin conversion plants. Air Opium traveled from coordination of the primary work of the Meo tribesmen in high, burnt-out mountain clearings right down into the veins of American youth itself.

Bart worked out of a company that existed behind a door marked G. Wherry and Company in Ta Pae Street in Muang Phayao. The war continued in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, but Bart moved freely across all inimical boundaries, tending the world’s opium patch for his government. He made fast friendships in China and in Hanoi. One of his closest friends in Asia was Lieutenant General Franklin Marx Heller, the bag man for the MACV command’s share of the heroin industry. Heller was based in Taiwan, the staging area for distribution. Heller was a fabulous host. He had the Air Force working for him and he put that organization to a lot of trouble when he entertained Bart in Taipeh. General Heller had all his own and his entertainment food cooked in the States because he said the fucking Chinks didn’t know anything about real food. With Heller, Bart would eat baked beans and clam chowder and codfish cakes straight from Boston. He was served schnitz un knepp: apples, dumplings, and ham from the Pennsylvania Dutch. Every time Bart flew into Taipeh they had something different: Kentucky burgoo made with squirrel meat; chicken and lamb with plenty of red peppers; Alabama fried pies filled with peach butter; catfish fry; and Milwaukee cheesecake flavored with lemon rind. Heller was such a stickler for the American Way that he got his hot dogs directly from the Sheboygan Bratwurst Festival and his kalbwurst straight from the Wurstfest at New Braunfels in the Hill Country of Texas. For a highly placed narcotics executive General Heller was an affable, pseudo-kindly man, but then, he was making a tremendous amount of money while still protecting his Army pension. Bart always hated to leave when the time came to go back to Muang Phayao. He made the trip to Taiwan after each delivery by his airline of one hundred tons of opium or ten tons of heroin, whichever had been invoiced.

“There are an awful lot of people who haven’t bothered to find out the facts,” Bart told Enid. “I mean people who prefer to frown on The Agency’s operating in the narcotics business. My operation is making possible an enormous saving in foreign aid to those greedy Chinese ruling families on Formosa. By helping the Gissimo and the Soongs we are actually helping the American taxpayer. Just look at the facts. Taiwan is about the greediest country for foreign aid anywhere today. In World War Two, General Heller says, they ripped off eight hundred and eighty million in gold bullion, for heaven’s sake. I mean—shit.”

“Try to watch the swearing, hon,” Enid said.

What enabled Bart to fly in and out of China and North Vietnam was that his plane carried special identification status (OPI-1) because of the economic importance of his work. He had to be away from Enid for an average of two days and one night a week while he traveled among the Meo farmers. No amount of Enid’s wheedling could get him to consent to take her along with him. It was too dangerous flying across those downdrafts in the mountain passes and there was also a war on.

The Meo tribespeople were the last primitives to arrive in the Golden Triangle from the south of China. In upper Tonkin, Bart worked with opium-growing tribal resources of 40,000 Meo. He supervised the crops and crop delivery of 20,000 more on the Tranninh plateau of northern Laos. In Thailand he coordinated 30,000 Akha and Lahu. The Shan grew the crop for him in Burma.

Because the Meo had come into the region only two or three centuries before, they had found the fertile valley bottoms occupied by Thai tribes and the lower mountainous slopes inhabited by Man tribesmen up to an altitude of about 3,000 feet. The Meo had had to accept the steep higher slopes. Opium was the only crop that would grow for them at altitudes of about 4,500 feet. They practiced ray, or forest clearing, by felling all growth, then reducing it to burnt ashes. The ashes produced good fertilizer for a year or two, but after that the soil became sterile and was abandoned. The method had disastrous consequences in the gradual deforestation of the country, but it made rich opium crops. Bart nursed along the industry of post-Stone Age people who toiled at the crop that was destroying western civilization to a greater degree than any plague or famine, shepherding his flock from a Chinook helicopter with a payload capacity of seven tons over a mission radius of 140 miles with 907 kilograms of bolted-on, built-in armor protection. Bart traveled with his own bodyguard of thirty Thai troops. His flying office ranged from the Yunnan Province of China down through Bun Thai and Pak Seng in North Vietnam to Xieng Mi and Muong Ki in Laos.

On the morning of the seventeenth of March, while the St. Patrick’s Day parade was raging in New York and Boston, after twelve marvelous days of R&R with Enid in Hong Kong, Bart’s special identification status aircraft was ambushed by a band of ignorant Pathet Lao guerrillas who had never taken the trouble to understand special identification status. As Bart stepped down from his Chinook onto USAID Strip No. 42 at Nam Kheum, after the Thai troops had been deployed to make sure everything was secure, Bart’s left kneecap was shattered by a Pathet Lao bullet. “I swear you’d think they were waiting for me,” he told Enid much later.

“But why should they be waiting to shoot you,” Enid asked indignantly, “the only CIA manager who ever brought real prosperity to this region?”

The Chinook left the Thai troops at Nam Kheum and flew Bart out immediately to the nearest U.S. Army Base Hospital at Quang Tri in South Vietnam. The hospital was deep within the war zone but, as per their contract with the Simmses, the agency flew Enid across the mountains from Muang Phayao to be with her brother.

The pain was bad. Enid held his hand tightly, staring desperately into his eyes, pleading with her eyes not to feel the pain or, somehow, to transfer the pain to herself. After the first operation (there would be twenty-three), because she was there to make him feel safe and because of the salvation in the morphine of his own manufacture, Bart relaxed into some limbo while Enid read Jane Austen aloud to him.

“Did you get word to Uncle Herbert?” he whispered.

“Yes, darling.”

“Is he working on moving me into Spider?”

“Everything is being taken care of, darling.”

“Those Pathet Lao solved everything,” Bart murmured.

“Those Pathet Lao may have transferred you right into the White House, sweetheart,” Enid said. She kissed him softly on the temple, the forehead, then on the lips. “We’re going back to Langley, dear,” she said.

The agency flew Bart and Enid back to Washington as soon as the doctors would allow it. Bart spent a ghastly year at Walter Reed in surgery and rehabilitation, with a CIA substitute surgeon and anesthetist standing by in the operating rooms in case the patient began to “talk deliriously,” at which point all other personnel would have to leave the room regardless of the stage of the operation. Bart would walk stiff-legged for the rest of his life but, as Enid told him earnestly, that would give him a certain novelty, a distinction as a politician. Sometimes the pain was quite bearable. It depended on the weather, Enid told him, but the very best day for his knee was when Enid marched Uncle Herbert into the hospital room and Bart listened to Uncle Herbert say that he had just come from seeing Mr. Ehrlichmann at the White House where final arrangements had been made for Bart’s transfer to the job as Assistant Curator at Spider. “The plain fact, Bart,” Uncle Herbert said, “is that the agency indicated they’ll be darned glad to have you there.”

Bart and Enid spent the last two weeks before he reported to Langley at White Sulphur Springs. They had a marvelous time. When they got back to Washington, they discovered that Uncle Herbert had arranged to get them a really sweet little house in Georgetown. Although Uncle Herbert sort of pretended he was lending them the house, it wasn’t really his. It was government property, a CIA laboratory house, wired for tape recording and sound transmission, equipped with still and sound motion picture cameras that worked behind one-way mirrors or through apertures in all rooms throughout the house. During the time Bart worked at Spider, and he and Enid lived in the house, they were under the agency’s surveillance every minute.

Bart’s imagination of what the Spider archive must be like had fallen short by 70 percent. The files were the most protean, personal, preternaturally prying records ever assembled on the most deeply concealed and regretted deeds of the foremost men and women of the time. Each day Bart pored over them, committing them to memory. Each night he typed out the information he had carried back to the little house, within his head, on a mathematical symbols typewriter. In the history of the agency he became the only CIA employee who had ever seen this archive from AA to ZZZ. The Curator of Spider was always busy on Admin problems. No one else in the agency, including the Director of Central Intelligence, was allowed to see more than fractional parts of the files because the overall functioning policy of the agency was based upon the “need to know.” If the need to know wasn’t justified, no Spider information could be released.

Bart accumulated and recorded in mathematical symbols information on terrorists, presidents, educators, actresses, generals, organized criminals, conglomerate operators, bankers, journalists, cardinals, pornographers, philanthropists, politicians and movers and shakers all across the board.

On the eighty-seventh night of their work, Enid leaned across the table and rested her hands lightly on his on the typewriter keyboard. “I think you’ve found it,” she said. “This looks like it.”

“Which?”

“That last card.”

He picked it up and studied it. “Why?”

“Because he needs you. Maybe to these other people you’d just be a blackmailer and they’d find a way to get rid of you. But not this one. He is very greedy and you can make him richer and richer and richer.”

“This fellow? He’s a hoodlum in narcotics.”

“So?”

“Ah! Aaaaaahhhh!”

“Of course.”

“It will take a lot of refining.”

“You have the time.”

“But you’re right. How did I miss him? We’ve found our angel. We have found the seven million bucks it takes to make an instant senator.”

Enid hugged him from behind his chair. “And I think we’ve found the fifty million it takes to be nominated as president. Oh, Bart! Now how will you get to him?”

“Love will find a way,” Bart said.

“Get out the vice-president’s cards. Have him call this man for you.”

“That would be using a shotgun on an ant.”

“Then lay it out for that kinky senator in the K file. The one from Pennsylvania.”

“That’s just right. I’ll call him tomorrow and explain the facts of life.”

In January 1971, Bart was happy that the CIA phase of his life was almost over. In two more days, after his meeting with this leading criminal in New York, he would resign from the agency on medical grounds. He certainly wouldn’t have to lie about the trouble his leg was giving him. He was ready, and exhausted by pain, to move up and out into national politics. He and Enid had hated killing just as much as they hated heroin and blackmail, but sacrifices had to be made if one had purpose. And, as Enid said, the plain fact was that there would always be people who had to be killed by some control representing the common good because people like that just lived cross-ways. And what is dope? Enid had asked. Dope is alcohol, a narcotic in a different form. But no one had too much objection to alcohol, did they? When you came right down to it, alcohol and heroin were merely culture-cushions, weren’t they? Bart had to agree. He thought about it: “I will hold up my end of the bargain with the American people and do my best to serve them as well as every other statesman.”

“I know you will, darling,” Enid said.