16

MARILYN MONROE MURDERED! I DECIDED EVERY MAN WAS ENTITLED TO one insane thesis. In any event, I was not eager to get back to my father about Mongoose. For months, I had been sending letters to Kittredge whose first line produced some variant of “I know I have not had much to say about our progress lately, but then there has not been a great deal to report.” Then, I made as much as I could of our small raids.

Nearly every night, one or more of our boats in Miami or the Keys would slip out to a rendezvous on the Cuban coast; there were weeks when as many as twenty craft took that hazardous round trip. Expanding on my father’s concept of mother ships, Harvey had acquired several yachts capable of carrying good-sized launches for the landing parties. We even had two Navy patrol craft, the Rex and the Leda, serving as our flagships. Each time I encountered them at a dock or in a marina, they had taken on new hues. A once peacock-green deck and aquamarine hull would now be a tawny-pink superstructure with a white hull. Harvey was determined to keep our fleet looking like pleasure craft rather than gunboats; the artillery—40mm naval cannon, .50-caliber machine guns and recoilless .57-caliber rifles—was kept below, and both flagships carried a knock-down crane on the fantail that could, when assembled, lower and raise our 120-horsepower inboard fiberglass boats for the short, quick run to shore. Harvey registered these men-of-war out of Nicaragua, and had them owned by paper corporations attached by more pieces of paper to ship companies owned by Somoza. The docking fees for the boats were picked up by Oceanic Mangrove, a company that operated out of a desk at Zenith. “I can play the shell game with a 180-foot ship,” Harvey liked to say. The salaries of the Cuban crew came out of a canning company in Key West. I kept looking to satisfy Kittredge’s passion for details, but letters to her had begun to weigh on my nerves. I kept contemplating the size of the disaster should Harlot discover our correspondence. That would be horrendous unless he chose to divorce her (and I could marry her), but what if some Agency man other than Hugh came across our correspondence? In that case, Kittredge and I could continue writing to one another from maximum security cells. While the danger itself must have appealed to her, I took on the calculated risk of these letters as but one more burden on Harry Hubbard’s mule-packing soul and kept pushing myself to tell her more. There was always more.

Harvey, to keep control, had built each network into a separate cluster of cells, and since he liked to keep each cell apart, we ended with custom espionage shops which often performed but one function. We had, for instance, a group of four accountants in the Ministry of Finance in Havana whose labors were elegant: They had succeeded in embezzling enough government funds to finance a good part of our operation in Cuba. I had images of Castro searching his desk for a particular paper in a mountain of office debris and never finding the document he needed because one of his personal secretaries had already passed it on to us. Cuba would rear up in my dreams as a compost heap; I had to wonder how the country could function at all; then I would decide that in its chaos was its strength. Cuba lived with so much disarray that whatever we added merely became part of the heap. It was the only answer to how Castro’s DGI could function at all when our intelligence, so closely guarded, could not control most of JM/WAVE’s Cubans. Sometimes, after a successful sortie, our exiles, on returning to Miami, would call an unauthorized press conference to boast of their exploits, and would follow that up by taking a processional down SW 8th Street in Little Havana. Adoring Cuban women would lay palm leaves on their path. Harvey, in a rage, would cut off these raiders’ salaries, but after a month or so, he would be obliged to take them back. We could hardly let JM/WAVE Cubans hook up with the wilder exiles. Even so, we often lost our best boatmen. After all, we discouraged publicity, they craved it. Good publicity, they told me, was equal to camburos maduros. If “ripe bananas” comes out to the literal meaning, “hot pussy” is the working American equivalent.

I would have liked to write to Kittredge about Roselli, who was particularly active all spring and summer, but he kept embarking on ventures that came to nothing. The pills we gave him would reach his final contact and go no further. “Conditions are not appropriate,” we would hear. I could be sympathetic to the honest fear endured by any waiter who would have to work each night with the anxiety that Fidel might or might not drop into the restaurant around midnight. Doubtless, such agents ended by flushing the pills away. ANCHOVY a.k.a. CAVIAR was going nowhere.

Sometimes I would write to her about the ongoing war between Lansdale and Harvey, but it, too, was predictable. Harvey had nothing but epithets for Lansdale: “All-American-boy-genius,” “peanut head,” “Li’l Abner,” and “whacko” were standouts. Lansdale, in turn, had his complaints. “It is impossible,” he would inform me, “to get anything working with Bill Harvey. If I ask for a full estimate on some serious undertaking, I count myself lucky if I get back a one-sentence memo. If I tell him that I want more, he will answer, ‘I don’t intend, General, to go into mouth-gagging detail on every last wrinkle of this endeavor.’ Once, I reached across the desk, looked Harvey in the eye, and, swear to this, nearly grabbed him—and I am not a physical man. ‘Bill Harvey, get one thing straight,’ I told him, ‘I am not the enemy.’ It did no good. No good at all. Care to hear his response? He lifted one of his overstuffed legs, rolled to the side and broke wind right in my presence.”

“Broke wind?” I interrupted, as if this were a matter to be confirmed.

“Yes. Farted. An atrocious-smelling production. No Shakespearean villain could have given me a clearer sense of odium. What an awful person Bill Harvey has to be! He reached down to his ankle, unstrapped his sheath knife, and proceeded to clean his nails. He is intolerable.”

I nodded from time to time as Lansdale was speaking to indicate that I was indeed listening. I did not reply. I did not know how to say a word without betraying Harvey, or myself, or sounding unsympathetic to Lansdale. I also realized by now that I was not supposed to answer. If I had commenced my work in liaison on the assumption that I was a connective principle, a conjunction, so to speak, I had by now decided that I was but a semicolon, installed to keep the elements in some kind of extended relation, well apart.