Mission Compromised (4 page)

The CIA's top counterterrorist officer then got up from his desk, went to his door, locked it, and, using a key from his pocket, opened a drawer in his desk and removed a device that looked remarkably similar to a TV remote control. On the plastic shell in small raised letters was the word
EncryptionLok-1A.

Charles disconnected the line to his phone and plugged it into the end of the little device labeled
OUTPUT.
From a jack on the wall beside his desk, he then disconnected the wire running from his computer modem and plugged it into the opposite end of the EncryptionLok-lA labeled
INPUT.
Only then did he sit down at his computer keyboard.

Typing quickly and flawlessly, the CIA's director of counterterrorism drafted a message that would go only to four men: one each at the State Department, the Pentagon, the FBI, and the White House:

 

DTG:      151900RNOV86

FROM:  DIR CT OPS CIA

TO:        CTG

SUBJ:    URGENT TERMINATION NOTICE

 

1. THREE FOREIGN NATIONALS WORKING IN EUROPE WITH GOODE ON NIC RESISTANCE INITIATIVE HAVE BEEN KILLED WITHIN PAST 12 HOURS. ALL DECEASED WERE ENGAGED IN DIVERSION OF SOVIET-BLOC WEAPONS FROM POLAND TO NIC RESISTANCE LAST FEB.

2. DCI BELIEVES GOODE TO BE IN JEOPARDY AND THAT ENTIRE OPERATION HAS BEEN COMPROMISED. DCI HAS ORDERED URGENT SHUTDOWN OF ALL CTG OPERATIONS IN SUPPORT OF GOODE. GOODE TO BE REASSIGNED TO USMC ON RETURN TO CONUS.

3. GOODE PHONE DROP IN MARYLAND IS TERMINATED EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.

4. ALL CTG CONTACT WITH GOODE TO BE SEVERED EFFECTIVE 0800 HOURS LOCAL 16 NOVEMBER EXCEPT AS INDICATED BELOW.

FOLLOWING GUIDANCE APPLIES AS INDICATED:

STATE: CONTACT AMEMB BEIRUT ASAP AND ADVISE GOODE TO RETURN CONUS DIRECTLY. REQ ADVISE GOODE OF PERSONAL JEOPARDY.

DOD/JCS: REQUEST U.S. MIL ASSIST TO MOVE GOODE FROM BEIRUT TO LARNACA, CYPRUS, FOR TRANSPORT TO CONUS ASAP.

FBI: POST COUNTERSURVEILLANCE LOOKOUT ON GOODE FAMILY IN VA TO ENSURE SAFETY. ACTIVATE PROTECTIVE MEASURES WITH DOD IF THREAT SITUATION WARRANTS.

ALL: DCI ADVISES ALL MATERIAL PERTAINING TO GOODE AND ANY REFERENCES TO SOVIET ARMS DIVERSION AND NICARAGUAN RESISTANCE ACTIVITIES BE PURGED FROM FILES ASAP. ALL FURTHER COMMS RE GOODE AND HIS ACTIVITIES VIA THIS CHANNEL ONLY. NO REPEAT NO COMMS RE GOODE THROUGH NORMAL CLASSIFIED COMMS.

DO NOT PRINT/RETAIN THIS MSG IN FILES.

BT

 

Ten days later, on Tuesday, November 25, at five minutes past noon, President Ronald Reagan and Attorney General Edwin Meese marched into a crowded White House briefing room to tell the press and the world about what came to be called the “Iran-Contra affair.”

Exactly a month later, the director of the CIA was stricken during a routine medical examination at his office at Langley. He was rushed to Georgetown University Hospital where he was operated on for a brain tumor but never regained consciousness.

The Iran-Contra affair continued with congressional hearings, trials, and investigations well into the 1990s. There was more to the story.

 

CHAPTER ONE

Office of the National Security Advisor

________________________________________

The White House

Washington, D.C.

Tuesday, 29 November 1994

1000 Hours, Local

 

M
ajor Peter J. Newman, U.S. Marines, reporting as ordered, sir.”

You don't have to call me, ‘sir,' Major. I'm a civilian,” replied the President's National Security Advisor seemingly absorbed by the papers on his desk. For more than a minute he never looked up.

Major Peter Newman was a startling contrast to the bloated and disheveled man in the two-thousand-dollar Armani suit seated before him. The Marine stood just over six feet and was trim and muscular. He was thirty-eight but looked much younger. His only “blemishes”
were a broken nose that he'd earned during the second round of a Naval Academy boxing match and a two-inch scar above his left eyebrow made from a piece of hot shrapnel during the Gulf War. Major Newman stood at rigid attention in front of the desk.

Dr. Simon Harrod looked up at the ramrod-straight Marine standing in front of him, eyes fixed at the wall in the space above Harrod's head. Harrod was annoyed. Apparently letting this military martinet cool his well-polished heels for two hours in the West Wing reception lobby hadn't done much to instill timidity. He decided to put this Marine in his place right away.

“Look at
me
when I'm talking to you, not the wall! In this administration, we don't go for all that military mumbo jumbo!” Harrod barked.

“Whatever you say, sir.”

It wasn't that Simon Harrod, Ph.D., disliked military men. Like the President, he
loathed
them. He'd had his fill of these close-cropped, cleanly shaven boneheads when he had been a professor of international studies at Harvard's Kennedy School. Now the grossly overweight, rumpled, former antiwar activist had a dozen high-ranking Army, Navy, and Air Force officers toiling for him on the National Security Council staff. And he knew that behind his back, they contemptuously referred to him as “Jabba the Hutt.” He didn't care. He was content that now they had to dance to the beat of
his
drum or their careers were finished.

“Sit down.” The Marine did as ordered, and Harrod went back to perusing the
Officer's Qualification Record and Confidential Personnel Summary
before him in the disarray of his desk. Newman's “short” bio ran seven pages, and the National Security Advisor took his time with it even though he already knew everything he needed to know about the officer now sitting as stiffly as he'd been standing. Without looking
up, Harrod ticked off the high points: “You're a regular military machine aren't you, Newman? Father is a retired Army brigadier… mother was an Army nurse… born at the post hospital at Fort Drum, New York… graduate of the Naval Academy… served in Grenada, Beirut, Panama, Desert Storm.” Newman said nothing as Harrod continued reading.

“It says here that you didn't want this assignment, Major Newman. Why?”

“I'd rather be commanding Marines, sir.”

“I told you not to call me ‘sir.' I thought Marines were capable of following a simple order.”

“What do you want me to call you—Mr. Harrod?”

“Dr.
Harrod will do,” said Jabba the Hutt.

Newman nodded but said nothing, so Harrod went back to the file and the
Personnel Summary
and started asking questions to which he already had the answers.

“You're married. What does your wife do?” asked Harrod in a more conciliatory tone.

“She's a flight attendant.”

“Children?”

“No.”

“You talk to your wife about your work?”

“Not if I'm not supposed to,” replied the Marine.

“Well, here you're not supposed to. You got it?”

Newman nodded, knowing as he did so that he and his wife were barely speaking about anything of significance anyway, so this directive hardly mattered.

“What year did you graduate from Annapolis, Newman?”

“Class of '78.”

“What was your class standing?”

“Number 143, top 15 percent.”

“It says here you were ‘deep selected for captain and major.' What's ‘deep selected' mean?”

“I was promoted early, as they say, ‘ahead of my peers.'”

“Is that because you have the Navy Cross and a Purple Heart from Desert Storm?” Harrod asked with a thinly disguised sneer.

“I don't know.”

“Well, I'm not impressed. If you guys had done the job right, we wouldn't have this mess on our hands with Saddam Hussein.”

Once more Newman didn't reply, so Harrod again buried himself in the officer's paperwork for a full five minutes. The Marine looked around the well-appointed office. Thick carpet. Nice furniture. Three phones. Large mahogany desk covered with piles of paper, many bearing classified cover sheets labeled
TOP SECRET.
Several bore the additional admonition
EYES ONLY FOR THE PRESIDENT.
On the walls, an eclectic collection of what appeared to Newman's unschooled eye to be original artwork: he recognized some of them—a Wyeth nude, a Remington landscape, and several modern pieces that he didn't recognize. Behind the cluttered desk was a watercolor of uncertain origin, depicting what could only be the grisly violence of General George Armstrong Custer's final moments at the Little Big Horn.

The National Security Advisor looked up to see Newman staring at the painting. “It's by a Native American artist. I got the idea from Hafez al Assad. In his presidential palace in Damascus, he has a painting of Saladin and the Saracens butchering crusaders. It reminds his visitors whom they are dealing with. I put this one here to remind all you green- and blue-suit types how stupid and costly military operations can be.”

Harrod glanced down at the file and then back at Newman. “Now, it says here that up until yesterday you were assigned to the Operations and Plans Division at the Marine headquarters here in Washington. Is that right?”

“At the Navy Annex, yes.”

“What did they tell you when they ordered you to report to the Secretary of the Navy and SecDef? Did any of them tell you what your assignment here on the NSC staff was to be?”

“No, I was only told that I should report to you for a two-year assignment.”

“You may not last two years if you don't lighten up. You probably know this already, but I want to reiterate—you're the only Marine on the White House staff besides the captain who's assigned as one of the President's military aides.”

“That's what I understand.”

“Do you also understand that as long as you are assigned here you are to have
nothing
to do with the White House military office or your Marine Corps, and that after today you are not to wear a uniform here, ever, and that as the head of the NSC's Special Projects Office, you report only to me?”

“I do now.”

“Good. I want you to go now and take care of the necessary paperwork to keep the paper shufflers happy. After you've done that, go home and get out of that monkey suit with all those ribbons, bells, and whistles. Medals and ribbons don't impress me or anyone else around here. Put on some civilian attire. You do have real clothes, don't you?”

“Yes,” Newman said to the bloated figure behind the desk.

“Good. After you take care of filling out all the forms and get changed, come back here at 3:00 P.M. sharp. Tell my secretary to take
care of getting you a White House ID badge. And tell her I said to get you a staff-parking pass to hang on your rearview mirror so you can park inside ‘the fence.' That's a big perk around here. And as fast as you can, grow some hair on your head. That GI haircut looks ridiculous. Go.”

Major Newman stood, did an about-face, and left. It felt good to get a final military dig at his new boss.

 

 

Notwithstanding rumors Newman had heard to the contrary about this White House administration, the National Security Council's administrative and security office in the Old Executive Office Building was a hub of efficiency. The people who worked in the third-floor office of this gray stone building next door to the White House were older. He surmised that these were professionals, not political appointees. Unlike others he had seen that morning in the West Wing, the men were wearing coats and ties instead of jeans, and the women had on dresses and skirts. He noted, as any U.S. Marine would, that the men in this office had what he considered to be decent haircuts, and here, at least, it was the
women
who wore ponytails and earrings.