Laughter in the Shadows Page 3

  —MATTHEW PEARL, The Dante Club

  The course on first aid began with a slide show depicting ripped abdomens, severed limbs, and distended intestines. When the lights came on at the end of the slide show, two instructors were standing on either side of a stainless steel operating table holding down a live rabbit.

  We sat transfixed like premed students at their first postmortem. One instructor held up a bottle of chloroform, sprinkled a few drops on a wad of cotton, and put the wad over the rabbit’s nose. When the rabbit stopped twitching, the instructor held up a scalpel for our inspection and then made an incision along the rabbit’s stomach, leaving a thin red trickle to mark the scalpel’s route.

  The instructor then held up a needle and began to sew up the rabbit, pausing to identify the “I,” “H,” and “T” stitches. He completed the operation with the “X” tie-off stitch and held up the sutured comatose rabbit up for our inspection. He seemed disappointed we didn’t applaud.

  Several minutes later the rabbit stumbled off the table and groggily hopped out the door. That was when we applauded.

  No one had noticed that a member of our class had slipped out the back when the stitching operation began. Cauley didn’t return until the operation was over, and the instructor was announcing that the class would be divided into two-man teams for a live suturing exercise the following day.

  Cauley

  Cauley was a study in perpetual motion. A feisty redhead, he was unable to sit still, continually slapping his knees and cracking his knuckles and coming out with Gaelic aphorisms only he understood. In the field Cauley was the class leprechaun, somersaulting down trails, darting out from behind trees, and playing Puck’s bad boy.

  The evening following the suture demonstration, we were sitting around the bar in the recreation room when Cauley burst in, jumped up on one of the bar stools, and called for silence. “Tonight the bells of freedom are ringing out over The Farm!” he said. “This Irish mother’s son has just liberated all those pink-eyed prisoners on death row! No scalpel will cut into their pink tummies, because at this very minute they are hopping down the freedom bunny trail!”

  Cauley’s outbursts were usually ignored, but this time he had our full attention. He told us how he had broken into the lab where the rabbits were kept, opened all their cages, and sent them hopping off into the woods.

  Cauley the clown had now become the “great rabbit liberator”!

  When the empty cages were discovered, neither the training staff nor Hodacil were amused. An extra mile was added to our morning run, but we didn’t mind, because Hodacil had to run with us to make sure we went the distance.

  The Air Drop

  Using powdered lime, we had marked out the “T” on an open field selected as the drop zone (DZ). When the plane appeared overhead, we threw out a smoke grenade to indicate the wind direction and that the DZ was secure. We had been ordered to remain concealed off the field until the drop was over and the plane dropped down to “buzz” the DZ.

  The airdrop almost went as planned. The plane made several passes, parachuting bundles rumored to contain beer and cigarettes. Instead of waiting for the signal that the drop was over, the impatient Cauley rushed out onto the DZ and began tearing at the straps of the nearest bundle. Concentrating on untangling the straps, Cauley didn’t hear the plane coming in over the trees to buzz the DZ. It was heading straight for Cauley.

  We shouted warnings to Cauley, who couldn’t hear over the noise of the plane’s engines. When he finally did look up and saw that the plane heading directly at him, he froze. Then he panicked and apparently lost his bearings, because he suddenly began running down the field in the same direction as the plane. We watched in disbelief as our “Charlie Chaplin” churned down the DZ, the plane almost nipping at his heels. Cauley and the plane reached the end of the DZ at almost the same time. The plane pulled up sharply over the trees, but the downdraft from the engines sucked Cauley up into the air and then dropped him unceremoniously back onto the DZ. Yesterday’s rabbit liberator lay spread-eagled in the mud as his classmates rushed out to retrieve the spoils.

  Out the Door

  I didn’t look forward to parachute training. Defying gravity with a flimsy nylon canopy was risky at best, and Hodacil’s jokes about “streamers” and ripped crotches and his song about “blood upon his risers and blood upon his chute, his intestines were a hangin’ from his paratrooper’s boot,” didn’t help.

  Hodacil was a seasoned paratrooper, however, and an excellent trainer and in two weeks had turned us into mindless jump-happy automatons, standing up, hooking up, and jumping out the door with only slight pushes.

  We made five jumps. I preferred the night jumps, because I couldn’t see the ground coming up at me. After our last jump, Hodacil pinned on our parachute wings, then took them back the next day “for security reasons.”

  The Comp

  The finale to our training was The Comp (comprehensive field exercise), the field test putting into practice what we had or had not learned over the past six months.

  The day before it began, we were issued French identity cards and told to stand by. At midnight two trucks drove up to the barracks, disgorging hooded figures shouting French epithets: Emmerdeurs! Shitheads. Cochons! Pigs. Prodding us with bayonets, they herded us into trucks. After an hour’s jarring ride scraping trees and slipping in and out of ruts, we pulled up in front of Stalag 13.

  Searchlights swept along the ten-foot-high fence around the stalag. Triple strands of barbed wire were strung along the top. Sentinels with guard dogs patrolled the perimeter.

  We were shoved through the gate into the stockade and marched off to be interrogated. The interrogators handed us confessions to sign, but since heroics come easy in make-believe, we all refused. We were then hauled outside and put in “the hole.” Hunger and the chill of a long cold night broke our resistance, and we all signed confessions.

  We were split up into four-man teams. Team Fox—Equipe Renard—consisted of Jean Gabin, Jacques Pipi, Con Rouge, and Jules Salaud, myself. We were locked in a cell, where we stayed until nightfall, when a figure darted by our cell and tossed a packet through the bars. The packet was our escape kit and contained a compass, canine repellent, and a map marked with the coordinates of the rendezvous point where we were to wait to be contacted by the “Resistance.”

  I almost botched the escape. Con Rouge left first, breaking out of the cell and spraying canine repellent along the bottom of the fence before climbing over, followed by Pipi and Jean Gabin. Dropping down on the other side, the three crouched in the woods waiting for me to join them. When I got to the fence, I threw my poncho up on top to protect me when I climbed over the barbed wire. I threw too hard, however, and the poncho went over the fence, dropping on the other side. When I climbed up the fence and swung a leg over, my pant leg ripped, and I suddenly found myself pilloried like a scarecrow. Cold air rushed through my crotch as the others yelled at me to hurry.

  I tugged frantically at my pant leg until it finally tore off, and I swung over and dropped down on the other side just as the searchlight beam came to a stop on my pant leg, fluttering in the wind like a tattered pennant. We could hear laughter drifting out of the stalag. Bert was probably sitting there smiling.

  We arrived at the rendezvous point and made camp under a fallen tree. The next morning we thatched our lean-to, set snares, baited fish lines, and waited to be contacted.

  For five days while we waited, we went out only long enough to inspect our snares and fishhooks. The rain didn’t let up, and we spent most of the time sitting inside the lean-to watching the fire. Our snares remained empty, our fishhooks denuded. On the fifth day we heard noises coming from the back of the lean-to, and we thought a bear had gotten at our rations. We had been issued emergency rations with the warning that breaking into them for anything other than a real emergency, was cause for a failing grade in survival training.

  When we peered back into the back of the lean-to, two wi
de eyes belonging to “Pipi” Cauley peered back. He was biting into a chocolate bar from his rations, and when he saw us staring at him, he growled that he was starving and “sick of this Mahatma Gandhi routine.” He added that that he couldn’t care less if he got an “F” in survival. Without comment, we turned around and went back to watching the fire.

  While we had been preoccupied with Cauley, someone had dropped an oilskin packet in front of the lean-to. It contained directions to a cached rubber boat and signal codes for contacting the submarine standing by offshore.

  We broke camp and were putting out the fire when Con Rouge, who had gone for a final check of the snares, came back with a partridge. We toasted it over the coals and ate it in front of the sulking Cauley.

  We located the rubber boat cached under a log and at midnight signaled the submarine. When the all clear was flashed we paddled out to the “submarine,” a rusting fishing trawler fitted out with a stovepipe periscope. The captain invited us on board for coffee and donuts and handed us a new set of orders that instructed us to proceed to the village of L’Espion and contact the Resistance leader at the Le Chat Noir Café.

  The main street of L’Espion was lined on either side with plywood mock-ups of la patisserie, la boulangerie, le Hotel de Ville, and Le Chat Noir—the bakery, butcher shop, town hall, and the Black Cat Café.

  Candles flickered on red-checked tablecloths inside the Chat Noir. As we entered, we noticed Monsieur Moulin (Hodacil) sitting at the far table. Gabin walked over to the table and introduced himself as the “foie gras salesman.” Hodacil’s reply that foie gras was for fat “bourgeois-zees.” Our bona fides established, he invited to sit down to join him in a glass of wine.

  Hodacil toasted Les Reynards, slid an envelope across the table containing our missions for the next month, and got up. He wished us Bon Chance and said the wine was “on the house.”

  We read over our assigned missions, finished the wine, and went out to pick up supplies behind La Boulangerie. The Team Fox duffle bag contained four Swedish Ks and ammunition, several packets of C-3 plastic explosive along with fuses, detonating cords, and time pencils. We buried the duffel bag, divided up the weapons and supplies, and headed back into the woods.

  For the next four weeks we covered an area bigger than most state parks, blowing bridges, ambushing enemy patrols, mining roads, and derailing trains. Blowing up the fuel dump, however, almost spelled finis to Team Fox.

  The dump consisted of ten oil drums lashed together behind a wire fence. We cut through the fence and taped a shape charge of C3 explosive onto one of the drums. We set the time pencil for thirty seconds, giving us enough time to get away before the charge blew.

  Time pencils, like fever thermometers, are delicate instruments and not always reliable. Whether it was human error or a defective time pencil that set the charge off prematurely, we never knew. We were on our way out through the fence when the charge exploded, knocking us all to the ground and sending a geyser of crankcase oil fifty feet into the air. The black oil raining down from the geyser soaked our fatigues and left us smelling like the crew from the Amoco Cadiz tanker that ran aground off Alaska.

  When we walked into L’Espion for the final exercise, the teams already there made a point of holding their noses when we passed.

  The last week of the Comp in L’Espion was a simulated run-up to the D-day landings. Teams stumbled over each other trying to recruit agents in the Chat Noir, putting sugar in the gas tanks of SS armored cars, and cranking out leaflets. Radio antennas that sprouted around the town were pointed toward London, waiting for the “dit-dit-dit-dah” of Beethoven’s Fifth to signal that the landings were under way.

  When the “V” signal came over the air, we ran out tossing cherry bombs, firing Swedish Ks in the air, and marching out to welcome the “liberators” in the form of Hodacil parachuting in for a stand-up landing with a bottle of champagne. When he popped the cork, it was the signal that The Comp was over.

  Two days later we became the first class to graduate from The Farm. A Headquarters VIP delivered the commencement address and told us we were now members of the Agency’s elite. Just how “elite” we would find out when we got back to Washington.

  Hodacil came by the day we left. He said he had mixed feelings—joy and jubilation—about our leaving and presented a rabbit’s foot to Cauley. He said that he would sleep better knowing we were out there “stemming the tide of red aggression.” The old shitter to the end. The flashbacks for that first class are still fresh, the paramilitary catechisms, the suturing and stilettos, living off the land, the moonlight parachute jumps, and the campfire comraderie.

  The curriculum, however, was an anomaly. We were immersed in a World War II resistance culture, which had long since given way to doctrines of Che Guevarra and Mao Zedong. Although we were never called on to garrote a Nazi sentinel or blow up the guns of Navarone, the fundamentals still applied whether winning hearts and minds in Southeast Asia or tunneling under East Berlin.

  Most enduring were the ties that bound us. When meeting later, eating sticky rice along the Mekong, drinking Singapore Slings at Raffles, or watching pirogues paddling up the Congo, we would hark back to liberated rabbits, “stiletto” Ski, and the “old shitter.”

  As I write, Jean Gabin and I are the only members of Team Fox still alive. Jacques Pipi and Con Rouge “bought the farm,” and their names are inscribed on the rotunda wall.

  CHAPTER 3: The Flap

  For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither anything hid, that shall not be known and come abroad.

  —Gospel of Luke

  J building, along with I, K, and L, was once located behind the trees lining the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool. The temporary prefabs served as temporary government offices during World War II but for some reason had been bypassed by postwar demolition crews.

  J building’s frame was reverberating from couriers pounding along the warped linoleum corridors, delivering “OPERATIONAL IMMEDIATE” and “FLASH” messages. Branch chiefs and desk officers nervously awaited their summons from the deputy director of operations. A flap was in the air.

  “Flap” is a semantic holdover from the days of steaming open flaps of envelopes to “read other peoples mail.” It currently refers to a “blown” or “compromised” activity, an operational meltdown.

  The epicenter of the flap rocking J building was Kaltenborn, a small town in Bavaria. A displaced persons (DP) camp had been taken over to serve as a training site for political action cadre. The townspeople jokingly referred to the site as Wienerschnitzel.

  The political action trainees were mostly from East Germany, and after their training in Kaltenborn, they were reinfiltrated into their home country either to sow the seeds of counterrevolution or to go underground as “sleepers” and wait for the anticipated uprising. Kaltenborn citizens joked about Wienerschnitzel but didn’t really worry about the strange goings-on in the camp, because local merchants were Wienerschnitzel’s primary suppliers.

  One day, however, a reporter passing through Kaltenborn heard talk about a “secret” installation outside of town and decided to investigate. He drove out past the camp, parked his jeep, and climbed a knoll overlooking the camp. His camera was equipped with a long-range lens, and he took photographs of the DPs mixing Molotov cocktails, printing leaflets, and engaging in hand-to-hand combat.

  His photographs appeared a week later on the front page of a Frankfurt newspaper under the caption “CIA cooks Wienerschnitzel in Kaltenborn.”

  The exposé was officially denounced by the German government as a “KGB fabrication.” Privately, the German chancellor was furious and called the U.S. high commissioner on the carpet to complain about the flap and the embarrassment it had caused. The high commissioner ordered the Station to shut down the operation immediately, and in less than a week, more than a hundred CIA case officer trainers were on their way back to Headquarters.

  The ignominious return of these officers to
Headquarters coincided unfortunately with our return from The Farm. The dual influx from Germany and The Farm led the deputy director of operations to issue a directive putting a temporary “hold” on further overseas assignments.

  The recent graduates from the Farm were sent to “the pool” to wait for the dust to settle.

  The Pool

  The pool is a way station, a dumping ground for the unassigned. Our group spent most of the day in the cafeteria drinking coffee, grousing about our “limbo” status, and sitting around waiting to be called.

  We were occasionally given odd jobs in Registry, sorting and filing the backlog of documents yellowing with age in an Arlington warehouse. Going through these old documents reminded me of rummaging through old family letters in an attic trunk. These letters, however, were dispatches from overseas Stations, and we read the best of them out loud, vicariously transporting ourselves to locales such as Hong Kong, Calcutta, or Montevideo, where we hoped one day to be assigned.

  Some of the dispatches read like pulp fiction, with passages describing agent concubines nibbling the ears of Middle East potentates, chauffeurs blackmailing Balkan ambassadors, double agents being “tripled” and then sent back to their Soviet KGB handlers. While the dispatches made good reading, they reminded us of an operational world of which it seemed we would never be a part. Two months had passed, and we were still treading water in the pool, unassigned.

  Three members of our group tired of waiting and signed on as polygraph operator trainees. The rest of us decided to strike out on our own and approach the country desks directly.

  Trading on my rubber company experience, I arranged an interview with a Southeast Asia personnel officer. The interviewer seemed impressed with my background in the rubber company and told me he thought there was an opening coming up soon. He was going to tell me more when something in my file caught his attention. He quickly closed the file and told me he had been mistaken. The opening had already been filled.