29

February 1972

Major General Luther “Bosco” Beemis was the CIA’s plant for Pentagon operations. He reported regularly to his masters at Langley the progress of the Army’s penetration of China: i.e., that they had succeeded in planting an agent there, that they were conducting a full-scale secret investigation of all members of the American cadre whom the Chinese had taken inside, to try to uncover the American instigators and managers of the movement within the United States, and that they were waiting—and sweating—for their agent to get out of China so the agent could be de-briefed and the plot totally uncovered without any help whatever from any other governmental investigative agency.

The Director of the CIA instructed his White House undercover agent to leak the information of the Army discovery upward through the White House. The CIA White House plant told an assistant legal counsel that he had heard on the cocktail circuit the night before that the Army had planted a man inside China. The legal counsel told his boss, Special Counsel to the President, who ran it straight in to the President’s Chief of Staff.

“Im-possible!” the Chief of Staff said, waving the man out of the room. When the door had closed, he got the President on the telephone.

“I have a crazy rumor on my desk that the Army has planted a man inside China. What do you want done about it?”

“Check it out.”

The Chief of Staff called the Director of the National Security Council. “The President wants us to check out a story that the Army have planted an agent inside China.”

“Oh, my God! A newspaper story?”

“No. Call it a rumor right now.”

“This is terrible. Just when everything is going smoothly some crafty cluck has to pull a thing like this.”

“Maybe it never happened, but he wants it checked out.”

The Director of the National Security Council called the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a fleet admiral, and put the question to him.

“How the hell would I know a crappy little thing like that? If the Army has agents they must move them around, right?”

“Admiral?”

“What?”

“You have a choice—either spend the rest of the goddam week”—the Director’s voice rose in anger—“checking this story out—or if you prefer it that way, I’ll have the President call you and ask you.”

The Admiral hung up on him, but he wasted no time in calling the head of Army Intelligence. “Do you have a plant inside China, Petey?” he asked.

“Butch—if we did—and I did not say we do—that is the kind of operation I can’t talk about.”

“You know how come I asked?”

“How?”

“The President told NSC to check it out.”

“Why is he always interfering?” General Doncaster said wildly. “Why don’t these goddam civilians stay behind their desks and take their little goddam bows and let us run this country the way it should be run?”

“Call the Chaplain-General, for Christ’s sake!” Admiral Melvin barked. “Do you have a plant in there or don’t you?”

“Yas—YAS! We have a plant in there. The first American agent ever successfully sited in that country in twenty-seven years! The first! I mean the CIA with their billions couldn’t do it but we did it! The United States Army Intelligence Corps planted their agent inside a Chinese secret operation and now these civilian fuck-ups want to muddy the water before we can even begin to fish!”

“I’m sorry, Petey,” Melvin said. “But we need these people. They provide the money we have to have to win.”

“This is very, very delicate stuff. I say this—it better be between you and the President—for his ears only. Will you do that, Butch?”

“I’ll try it on,” Admiral Melvin said.

The agenda of the National Security Council meeting held in the Cabinet Room three months later at the White House was routine. The first twenty-eight minutes were devoted to Vietnam. All statutory members of NSC were present except the President. The meeting was chaired by the NSC Director, the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs.

The Director said he had something he wanted to read into the record. He said, “I have a lulu today. Wait till I tell you what took ninety days to turn up because it was put in a ninety-day file. The world isn’t crazy enough. Army Intelligence has succeeded in planting an agent inside China.” There was an instant rhubarb. Everybody tried to speak at once. The Director waited for quiet. “You have anything on that, Sam?” he asked the Defense Secretary.

“Jesus, no.”

“You, Butch?” the Director asked the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“I’m knocked out. I never heard of it. A ninety-day file? Why, for Christ’s sake, this is a historic event.”

“When the memo crossed my desk,” the Director told them, “we sent out a query to all friendlies for any knowledge they might have picked up about camps inside China, and interrogations of captured PLO thugs, Japanese Red Army members and Tupamaros made clear that facilities do exist, as we have suspected, where Chinese are training not only people of many other countries, but also our own, including, ah, American women …”

“Women! My God, Al! American women?”

“We thought we should send Dr. Baum out to de-brief the captured PLOs and the rest”—everyone at the table looked uncomfortable—“and his transcript is unequivocal. The women appear to have reached the Far East by ship from South America. That’s all we know about them.

“On the basis of the de-briefees’ information I asked for an overfly and we got photos of two identical camps about forty miles apart on Lake Kokonor. Army Intelligence knows only that their agent went in with six other Americans, some of whom were ex-convicts.”

“Odd, you didn’t know anything about a thing as big as this, Al,” the Director, CIA, said.

“It gets more interesting, gentlemen,” the NSC Director said. “Before the de-briefees—ah—before they died, they testified that they were graduates of a guerrilla training camp facility at Ssu-hsin, in Tsinghai, where urban—repeat urban—guerrilla warfare is taught. They told Dr. Baum that there is only one exception to these courses of study as laid down by the Chinese. Our American group is being trained under the plans of their own leaders in a four-year course, not an eighteen-month course as are all others.”

“Well, Jesus Christ, Henry! Who the hell would want to fight a war like that?”

“The question is, what are we going to do about all this? And the first and most important thing to remember, gentlemen,” the Director said, “is that the President does not want the Chinese disturbed whatsoever. I can tell you that he was very, very touchy about the Army putting their agent inside China at all, this year. But, of course, he understands the need. I mean—that goes without saying.”

“You mean our people can’t go and even talk to the Chinese about it?” the Vice President demanded.

“I have an idea of what we can do,” the Director said.

“What?”

“We will give the Army Intelligence agent a nice present on graduation day.”

As the meeting broke up, the NSC Director asked the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency to meet him in his basement office in fifteen minutes. When the two men were locked in, facing each other, the NSC Director said, “In consideration of the enormous favor Army Intelligence was willing to do for the President in sharing with him the information that they had succeeded—a first in twenty-seven years for any of our agencies—in planting an agent inside China, I took the liberty of checking with the President before coming down here to see you, and he has instructed me to order you to tell me, so that I may tell him, whether or not the CIA has been able to plant an agent somewhere in that same grouping in China.”

“Yes,” the Director of the CIA said. “I’m glad you asked me that. As a matter of fact, we have.”