20

July 1971

The Operation Enigma committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was composed entirely of General officers. Lieutenant General Ludlow “Petey” Doncaster chaired the meeting. General Richards “Biff” Marek represented the Special Intelligence Section. Fleet Admiral Harold “Seagull” Matson sat in for the Navy even though the Navy could not have anything to do with this kind of operation. Two Major-Generals, Luther “Bosco” Beemis and Gordon “Kiddo” Manning completed the committee. Every man in the room was a preeminent Intelligence specialist; cold war or hot.

There were no recording stenographers, full clearance or not. General Doncaster didn’t want any of the proceedings leaking to the White House.

“I’ll set down some rules for procedure. We will refer to our operative as the Agent because it makes no difference whether that agent is a man or a woman. And the Chairman, Joint Chiefs, regards this as such an important mission that we do not—I repeat, not—even want to refer to the Agent by the name of the person replaced. Now—not everything has worked out as planned. The first subject debriefed by Dr. Baum survived only long enough to provide insufficient information to shape up a vitally necessary new profile for the Agent and we had to start over again. General Marek got some lucky breaks when his people worked with prison and probation information records and with personnel at Joliet, Dannemora and Canon City. We were able to begin again, in a post-mortem way, and Dr. Baum was able to complete the shape of the person’s background and psychical profile without difficulty.

“Well, the Agent is now operating. The group must be inside China now. General Marek?”

Marek was an enormous man whose shoulders looked like they had come in pre-fab sections and were going to fall out through the sleeves of his tunic. He was an intent, possessed man with a fanatic’s eye.

“More importantly, the Agent must have had time to reach the destination, which we assume is China. Now—it is absolutely in-evitable that the instant those persons reach a base inside China, wherever that base may be, and we have the most sensitive Air Force reconnaissance working on that, it is in-evitable that everyone in that party, including our Agent, is going to be de-briefed. The question is this: is the seal Dr. Baum locked into the Agent’s consciousness and unconsciousness going to be strong enough to withstand a really painstaking Chinese brainwash? I mean, that’s it. Right there. Everything stands or falls on that.”

General Manning cleared his throat. Manning was a psychiatrist. He did not approve of Dr. Baum or of the Intelligence Services’ use of Dr. Baum. “Well, speaking for myself, and this area is slightly more my field than anybody else’s here today, I don’t see how this Agent has any more chance than a snowball in hell to beat an expert Chinese de-briefing. Those guys invented these kinds of tactics. They’ve been at it centuries longer than Baum or any other German sadist-quack.”

“Well, the hell with that, Kiddo,” General Doncaster said. “We’ve got to go along. And I don’t give a good goddam what you think of Baum. He hasn’t failed us yet, and if he says the Agent is sealed then that Agent is sealed.”

“All right then, Petey! But for the record, of which there is none present, I say right now that the Chinese, with their guile and techniques, are going to nail this Agent.”

Bosco Beemis spoke delicately, to get them on to a new subject. “Did anybody figure out any way for the Agent to get intelligence out of China?”

“Well, maybe it could be done, General Beemis, if we knew where he was. We could probably pay some Chinese to go in from Hong Kong to contact him, but there are two things wrong with that,” Marek said. “First, we can’t let go of the identity of the Agent, and certainly not to some makeshift Chinese drop. Secondly, finding where those people have been sent in a country the size of China is really going to be like finding a needle in a haystack. We’ve got to start with some educated guesses as to where we would establish a base camp for people like that, then we’ve got to begin to overfly it and photograph it systematically and take our chances on the political flack.”

“Well,” Gordon Manning said, “I’ll tell you something that is no news to anyone here. This thing purely scares the shit out of me.”