The Negotiator (18 page)

The Crisis Management Group, the professionals, met through the day in the basement Situation Room, monitoring the information flow out of COBRA in London and reporting upstairs as and when necessary. The National Security Agency had stepped up its monitoring of all telephone communications into and out of Britain in case the kidnappers made a call via satellite. The FBI’s behavioral scientists at Quantico had come up with a list of psycho-portraits of previous kidnappers and a menu of things the Cormack kidnappers might or might not do, along with lists of do’s and don’ts for the Anglo-American authorities. Quantico firmly expected to be called in and flown to London en masse, and were perplexed at the delay, although none of them had ever operated in Europe.

In the Cabinet Room the committee was living on nerves, coffee, and antacid tablets. This was the first major crisis of the incumbency and the middle-aged politicians were learning the hard way the first rule of crisis management: It is going to cost a lot of sleep, so get what you can while you can. Having risen at 4:00
A.M
., the Cabinet members were still awake at midnight.

At that hour the VC20A was over the Atlantic, well west of the Azores, three and a half hours short of landfall and four hours short of touchdown. In the spacious rear compartment the two veterans, Weintraub and Quinn, were catching some sleep. Also sleeping, farther back, was the three-man crew who had flown the jet to Spain; the “slip” crew brought her home.

The men in the Cabinet Room browsed over the dossier on the man called Quinn, gouged out of the files at Langley, with additions from the Pentagon. Born on a farm in Delaware, it said; lost his mother at age ten; now aged forty-six. Joined the infantry at age eighteen in 1963, transferred two years later to the Special Forces and went to Vietnam four months after. Spent five years there.

“He never seems to use his first name,” complained Hubert Reed. “Says here even his intimates call him Quinn. Just Quinn. Odd.”

“He
is
odd,” observed Bill Walters, who had read further along. “It also says here he hates violence.”

“Nothing odd about that,” replied Jim Donaldson. “
I
hate violence.”

Unlike his predecessor at State, George Shultz, who had occasionally been known to give vent to a four-letter word, Jim Donaldson was a man of unrelieved primness, a characteristic that had often made him the unappreciative butt of Michael Odell’s leg-pulling jokes.

Thin and angular, even taller than John Cormack, he resembled a flamingo en route to a funeral, and was never seen without his three-piece charcoal-gray suit, gold-fob watch chain, and stiff white collar. Odell deliberately made mention of bodily functions whenever he wished to twit the astringent New Hampshire lawyer, and at each mention Donaldson’s narrow nose would wrinkle in distaste. His attitude to violence was similar to his distaste for crudeness.

“Yes,” rejoined Walters, “but you haven’t read page eighteen.”

Donaldson did so, as did Michael Odell. The Vice President whistled.

“He did
that
?” he queried. “They should have given the guy the Congressional Medal.”

“You need witnesses for the Congressional Medal,” Walters pointed out. “As you see, only two men survived that encounter on the Mekong, and Quinn brought the other one forty miles on his back. Then the man died of wounds at Danang USMC Military Hospital.”

“Still,” said Hubert Reed cheerfully, “he managed a Silver Star, two Bronze, and five Purple Hearts.” As if getting wounded was fun if they gave you more ribbons.

“With the campaign medals, that guy must have four rows,” mused Odell. “It doesn’t say how he and Weintraub met.”

It didn’t. Weintraub was now fifty-four, eight years older than Quinn. He had joined the CIA at age twenty-four, just out of college in 1961, gone through his training at the Farm—the nickname for Camp Peary on the York River in Virginia—and gone to Vietnam as a GS-12 provincial officer in 1965, about the time the young Green Beret called Quinn arrived from Fort Bragg.

Through 1961 and 1962 ten A-teams of the U.S. Special Forces had been deployed in Darlac Province, building strategic and fortified villages with the peasants, using the “oil-spot” theory developed by the British in beating the Communist guerrillas in Malaya: to deny the terrorists local support, supplies, food, safe-houses, information, and money. The Americans called it the hearts-and-minds policy. Under the Special Forces guidance, it was working.

In 1963, Lyndon Johnson came to power. The Army argued that Special Forces should be returned from CIA control to theirs. They won. It marked the end of hearts-and-minds, though it took another two years to collapse. Weintraub and Quinn met in those two years. The CIA man was concerned with gathering information on the Viet Cong, which he did by skill and cunning, abhorring the methods of men like Irving Moss (whom he did not encounter, since they were in different parts of Vietnam), even though he knew such methods were sometimes used in the Phoenix program, of which he was a part.

The Special Forces were increasingly taken away from their village program to be sent on search-and-destroy missions in the deepest jungle. The two men met in a bar over a beer; Quinn was twenty-one and had been out there a year; Weintraub was twenty-nine and also had a year in ’Nam behind him. They found common cause in a shared belief that the Army High Command was not going to win that kind of war just by throwing ordnance at it. Weintraub found he very much liked the fearless young soldier. Self-educated he might be; he had a first-rate brain and had taught himself fluent Vietnamese, a rarity among the military. They stayed in touch. The last time Weintraub had seen Quinn was during the run up to Son Tay.

“Says here the guy was at Son Tay,” said Michael Odell. “Son of a gun.”

“With a record like that, I wonder why he never made officer,” said Morton Stannard. “The Pentagon has some people with the same kind of decorations out of ’Nam, but they got themselves commissioned at the first opportunity.”

David Weintraub could have told them, but he was still sixty minutes short of touchdown. After taking back control of the Special Forces, the orthodox military—who hated S.F. because they could not understand it—slowly ran down the S.F. role over the six years to 1970, handing over more and more of the hearts-and-minds program, as well as the search-and-destroy missions, to the South Vietnamese ARVN—with dire results.

Still, the Green Berets kept going, trying to bring the fight to the Viet Cong through stealth and guile rather than mass bombing and defoliation, which simply fed the VC with recruits. There were projects like Omega, Sigma, Delta, and Blackjack. Quinn was in Delta, commanded by “Charging Charlie” Beckwith who would later, in 1977, set up the Delta Force at Fort Bragg and plead with Quinn to return from Paris to the Army.

The trouble with Quinn was that he thought orders were requests. Sometimes he did not agree with them. And he preferred to operate alone. Neither behavior constituted a good recommendation for a commission. He made corporal after six months, sergeant after ten. Then back to private, then sergeant, then private ... His career was like a yo-yo.

“I figure we have the answer to your question, Morton,” said Odell, “right here. The business after Son Tay.” He chuckled. “The guy busted a general’s jaw.”

The 5th Special Forces Group finally pulled out of Vietnam on December 31, 1970, three years before the full-scale military withdrawal that included Colonel Easterhouse, and five years before the embarrassing evacuation, via the embassy roof, of the last Americans in the country. Son Tay was in November 1970.

Reports had come in of a number of American prisoners of war being located at the Son Tay prison, twenty-four miles from Hanoi. It was decided the Special Forces should go in and bring them out. It was an operation of complexity and daring. The fifty-eight volunteers came from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, via Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, for jungle training. All save one: they needed a fluent Vietnamese speaker. Weintraub, who was in the affair on the intelligence side, said he knew one. Quinn joined the rest of the group in Thailand, and they flew in together.

The operation was commanded by Colonel Arthur “Bull” Simons, but the spearhead group that went right into the prison compound came under Captain Dick Meadows. Quinn was with them. He established from a stunned North Vietnamese guard within seconds of landing that the Americans had been moved—two weeks earlier. The S.F. soldiers came out intact, with a few flesh wounds.

Back at base, Quinn berated Weintraub for the lousy intelligence. The CIA man protested that the spooks knew the Americans had been taken away, and had told the commanding general so. Quinn walked into the officers’ club, strode up to the bar, and broke the general’s jaw. It was hushed up, of course. A good defense lawyer can make such a mess of a career over a thing like that. Quinn was busted to private—again—and flew home with the rest. He resigned a week later and went into insurance.

“The man’s a rebel,” said the Secretary of State with distaste as he closed the file. “He’s a loner, a maverick, and a violent one at that. I think we may have made a mistake here.”

“He also has an unmatched record of hostage negotiation,” pointed out the Attorney General. “It says he can use skill and subtlety when dealing with kidnappers. Fourteen successful recoveries in Ireland, France, Holland, Germany, and Italy. Either done by him, or with him advising.”

“All we want,” said Odell, “is for him to get Simon Cormack back home in one piece. It doesn’t matter to me if he punches generals or screws sheep.”

“Please,” begged Donaldson. “By the way, I’ve forgotten. Why did he quit?”

“He retired,” said Brad Johnson. “Something about a little girl being killed in Sicily three years back. Took his severance pay, cashed in his life insurance policies, and bought himself a spread in the South of Spain.”

An aide from the Communications Center put his head around the door. It was 4:00
A.M
., twenty-four hours since they had all been roused.

“The DDO and his companion have just landed at Andrews,” he said.

“Get them in here without delay,” ordered Odell, “and get the DCI, the Director of the FBI, and Mr. Kelly up here as well, by the time they arrive.”

Quinn still wore the clothes in which he had left Spain. Because of the cold he had pulled on a sweater from his gunnysack. His near-black trousers, part of his only suit, were adequate for attending mass in Alcántara del Rio, for in the villages of Andalusia, people still wear black for mass. But they were badly rumpled. The sweater had seen better days and he wore three days of stubble.

Despite their lack of sleep, the committee members looked in better shape. Relays of fresh laundry, pressed shirts, and suits had been ferried in from their distant homes; washroom facilities were right next door. Weintraub had not stopped the car between Andrews and the White House; Quinn looked like a reject from the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang.

Weintraub walked in first, stood aside for Quinn, and closed the door. The Washington officials stared at Quinn in silence.

The tall man walked without a word to the chair at the end of the table, sat down without invitation, and said, “I’m Quinn.”

Vice President Odell cleared his throat.

“Mr. Quinn, we have asked you here because we are considering asking you to take on the task of negotiating the safe return of Simon Cormack.”

Quinn nodded. He assumed he had not been brought this distance to discuss football.

“You have an update on the situation in London?” he asked.

It was a relief to the committee to have a practical matter brought up so early. Brad Johnson pushed a teletype printout down the table to Quinn, who studied it in silence.

“Coffee, Mr. Quinn?” asked Hubert Reed. Treasury Secretaries did not normally serve coffee, but he rose and went to the urn that now stood on a table against the wall. A lot of coffee had been drunk.

“Black,” said Quinn, reading. “They haven’t been in touch yet?”

There was no need to ask who “they” were.

“No,” said Odell. “Total silence. Of course there have been hundreds of hoax calls. Some in Britain. We’ve logged seventeen hundred in Washington alone. The crazies are having a field day.”

Quinn went on reading. On the flight, Weintraub had given him the entire background. He was just coming up to date with developments since. There were precious few.

“Mr. Quinn, would you have any idea who might have done this?” asked Donaldson.

Quinn looked up.

“Gentlemen, there are four kinds of kidnapper. Only four. The best from our point of view would be amateurs. They plan badly. If they succeed in the snatch, they leave traces. They can usually be located. They have little nerve, which can be dangerous. Usually the hostage-recovery teams move in, outwit them, and get the hostage back unharmed. But these weren’t amateurs.”

There was no argument. He had their attention.

“Worst of all are the maniacs—people like the Manson gang. Unapproachable, illogical. They want nothing material; they kill for fun. The good news is, these people don’t smell like maniacs. The preparations were meticulous, the training precise.”

“And the other two kinds?” asked Bill Walters.

“Of the other two, the worse are the fanatics, political or religious. Their demands are sometimes impossible to meet—literally. They seek glory, publicity—that above all. They have a Cause. Some will die for it; all will kill for it. We may think their Cause is lunatic. They don’t. And they are not stupid—just filled with hate for the Establishment and therefore their victim, who comes from it. They kill as a gesture, not in self-defense.”

“Who is the fourth type?” asked Morton Stannard.

“The professional criminal,” said Quinn without hesitation. “They want money—that’s the easy part. They have made a big investment, now locked up in the hostage. They won’t easily destroy that investment.”

“And
these
people?” asked Odell.

“Whoever they are, they suffer from one great disadvantage, which may work out to be good or bad for us. The guerrillas of Central and South America, the Mafia in Sicily, the Camorra in Calabria, the mountain men of Sardinia, or the Hezb’Allah in South Beirut—all operate within a safe, native environment. They don’t have to kill because they are not in a hurry. They can hold out forever. These people are holed up in Britain of all places; a very hostile environment—for them. So the strain is on them already. They will want to make their deal quickly and get away, which is good. But they may be spooked by the fear of imminent discovery, and cut and run. Leaving a body behind them, which is bad.”