The Book of Honor (18 page)

The plaque Janet carried with her that day was inscribed with the words “In Recognition and Appreciation for Gallant Services Rendered During The Bay of Pigs Military Operations. . . . . You Are One of Us.” Bissell was visibly moved, though perhaps not nearly as much as Janet wished to believe. They spoke for several hours. After being subjected to years of government lies and evasion, Janet felt that at last she was getting the truth about the campaign that claimed her father's life. She would remember their meeting as a moment when a tremendous burden was lifted from her shoulders. Bissell, too, seemed to feel a sense of liberation. In coming together on a blustery winter day in Connecticut, the two had managed, at least momentarily, to exorcise some of the demons that had tormented them both for so many years.

Bissell's health continued to deteriorate, but it was his spirit more than his body that capitulated. On February 6, 1994, he was told that it might be necessary to place him in a hospital or nursing home. He did not voice any protest, but there was no concealing his disdain for his own disabilities and growing dependence on others.

That night he did not awaken from his sleep. He was found in his twin bed in a large bedroom painted red and flushed with sunlight. The newspapers said it was a heart condition, but his family knew better. At age eighty-four Richard Bissell had simply decided to let go of life.

His body was cremated, but it was not until June 26 that there was a memorial service for him. That had always been his favorite time of year. For such a public figure, once the standard-bearer of the Cold War, it was a decidedly private affair. That was how Bissell would have wanted it. It was a brilliant sunlit day. Only about thirty people were to gather to pay their remembrances, none of them from his Agency days. But among those who were in attendance was Janet Ray Weininger. A short time before the memorial service, members of Bissell's immediate family and Janet gathered in the living room, a long two-story room filled with books on politics, military history, economics, and mysteries, and even some Mark Twain. Once again, Janet had come with a gift. This time it was the blue and gold flag of Brigade 2506, which she presented to Bissell's widow. There were few words spoken.

After that, the thirty or so family members and close friends assembled on a sunlit hillside overlooking the Farmington River. Across the river was a quiltwork of cultivated fields. Bissell's ashes were placed beneath a simple granite stone that lay flush with the grass. The marker bore nothing but his name and dates of birth and death.

Neither the return of her father's body nor the hours spent with Bissell brought any lasting peace to Janet Weininger, so consumed was she by the loss of her father. But for opposition from other family members, she would have had her father's body exhumed and moved from Montgomery, Alabama, to Miami—closer to her home. And in the spring of 1997, three years after her time with Bissell, she could be found trekking through the jungles of Nicaragua in an effort to find and recover the bodies of two Cuban pilots who had crashed after taking part in the Bay of Pigs operation.

That operation had been a tragic comedy of errors, a futile quest concocted by men of great power and intellect and carried out by men of unquestioning courage. At least in part, it was the contemporaneous demand for deniability that had doomed the mission, and subsequent decades of denials and secrecy that kept public fascination with the fiasco alive. All but one of the original twenty copies of the CIA inspector general's scathing reports examining the Bay of Pigs were destroyed. The lone surviving copy was for thirty-six years securely locked in the CIA director's safe, as if it were the last of some virulent strain of pox that could once again wreak havoc on the world. Not until February 1998 did the Agency release the remaining copy, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

Visitors to the CIA, perusing the pages of the revered Book of Honor, would find four nameless stars beside the year 1961, one for each of the Alabama Air National Guardsmen who died in the Bay of Pigs. Long after their names had appeared in the national press and histories of the invasion, the Agency still steadfastly refused to publicly acknowledge the men or to inscribe their names in the Book of Honor. It was as if, by refusing to utter their names, the Agency did not have to look them or itself in the eye, as if accountability could be so easily sidestepped. This, too, is a fiction.

One of those four stars belongs to Thomas “Pete” Ray. His daughter, Janet, is still in pursuit of answers as if they might fill the void of her grief. In this way, she, too, has come to be counted among the casualties of the Bay of Pigs.

PART TWO

A Time to Question

CHAPTER 6

Deception

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”

THE AFTERNOON
of August 25, 1964, was hot and steamy as a tiny knot of mourners—a mother and father, a sister and a widow—gathered on a grassy Chattanooga hillside to say a last good-bye to thirty-four-year-old John Gaither Merriman. There, in grave 172, section BB, Merriman took his place in the national cemetery among many honored dead. Interred around him were more than six thousand unknown Civil War casualties who fell at Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, and Lookout Mountain, as well as six recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor. John Merriman would have been proud to be in the company of such men, and they in his.

All that August day, Merriman's widow, Val, had done what she could to steel herself. The night before, she had spoken with the minister, Brother Paul, and told him only that her husband had been involved in “a terrible accident.” Those were the very words he used from the pulpit of the Church of Christ addressing some thirty-five mourners, among them many brawny young men with weathered faces and aviator glasses tucked into their coat pockets.

In a pew close to Val sat Dorothy “Dot” Kreinheder, a casual friend who had worked with John and now took a more than casual interest in Val's well-being. If she was there to offer Val Merriman emotional support, she was also there to ensure that the widow said nothing that might raise questions about Merriman's death or implicate the CIA. Kreinheder had made herself indispensable, even purchasing Val's mourning dress (a black affair with a low circular collar and white inset), a snug black pill-box hat, and the black fabric purse Val would clutch to her side, knowing it held a picture of her husband.

By all accounts, Merriman's was an utterly unremarkable and prosaic passing. The local newspaper reported what the family had told them: that Merriman had been in an auto accident the evening of August 20 while at Ramey Air Force Base in Puerto Rico. The precise cause of death, it was said, was a pulmonary embolism. It was all in black and white on his death certificate, his autopsy report, and his cemetery record. Merriman had had the misfortune to somehow strike “a road abutment”—the words appearing on his official death certificate. As a common traffic fatality he hardly seemed worthy of such hallowed ground.

But Val Merriman knew otherwise. She knew the death certificate had been dummied up, the newspapers duped, and the pathologist misled. She knew it was all part of one grand lie—everything, that is, except the one undeniable fact: John Merriman was dead. Still, she was determined to be a good CIA wife to the very end, to cling to the cover story and not ask questions. It was nobody's business but “the Company's.” In the midst of her sorrow, she would deliver the performance of a lifetime. She was not even to tell her three young sons the truth of their father's death, at least not until years later when the boys could be trusted not to tell a soul. Jon, Bruce, and Eric were not even to be there at their father's funeral.

At least thirty-three-year-old Val Merriman might draw some small comfort from knowing that her husband had received the best of medical attention in his final hours and that he died among people who cared about him in the Puerto Rican hospital. Syd Stembridge, a senior CIA officer and friend, had shared with Val a detailed account of Merriman's final evening. John, he told her, had known little pain. He had been resting quietly that evening and was well provided for. He even asked for a bowl of ice cream, which the nurse promptly brought him. He polished it off with boyish delight, then lapsed into a peaceful sleep from which he did not awaken. What Val Merriman could not know was that her husband was never in a Puerto Rican hospital and that the story of the ice cream was pure invention, a fiction within a fiction. No one at the Agency could bring themselves to tell her the truth. It was that gruesome.

What she did know was that her husband possessed the stuff of which heroes are made. Others knew it too. A quiet man of modest height and build, he had a glint of mischief in his eyes and a pencil-thin mustache that gave him the look of a dashing Hollywood roué. He was ruggedly individualistic, with an insatiable yen for action and a confidence in his skills that was easily mistaken as a disdain for risk.

But he also had a gentler side. In his spare time he painted with oils, especially seascapes and aircraft. He wrote short stories and poems, designed sailboats, and could turn the Sunday newspaper into a soaring box kite to the delight of his sons. A crack marksman and able gun-smith, he once brought down a monster of a Kodiak bear but was so distressed at the loss of such a majestic creature that ever after he swore off hunting.

His passion for flying dated back to earliest boyhood. At five he cajoled his parents into buying him a ticket to ride with a barnstormer who took him up for a series of stomach-churning stunts above the Chattanooga skies. After that, Merriman was intent on getting his own wings. At fourteen he soloed for the first time. At sixteen he had his pilot's license. At seventeen he dropped out of high school to join the 82nd Airborne. As a young man he once tried to put his feelings for flying into words:

The wind on the wings strong and tight
The clouds around me fleecy and white
The cars going in and out of town
Like ants to and from a mound.

Like a high spirited steed
With head held high
This vision with speed
wings across the sky . . .

If I'm ever sent to heaven, and paradise I see,
It can never be more beautiful than flying seems to me.

Long before he had thrown his lot in with the CIA, before the cloak of secrecy obscured his life, Merriman had demonstrated ample valor. For one fleeting instant he was even thrust into the public spotlight. It was July 9, 1953. Merriman was then a twenty-four-year-old pilot assigned to the Civil Air Patrol's Yakutat Squadron in Alaska. On that day another pilot flying mail and supplies to a remote climbing expedition discovered a distress signal written in the snow. The message indicated that a member of the party had come down with appendicitis and needed to be airlifted out immediately.

The pilot sent a message to Elmendorf Field, which dispatched a Grumman SA-16 Albatross in the hope that it could land safely on the glacier and retrieve the stricken climber. But the pilot found it too treacherous to land at the 7,600-foot base camp and was forced to turn back.

Merriman, then a meteorological aid, a lowly GS-5 with the U.S. Weather Bureau, heard of the situation and volunteered to make a rescue attempt. Already an experienced bush pilot, he flew a Piper Super Cruiser to the nearby Malaspina Glacier, carrying on board a set of skis to be attached to the plane for a glacial landing. The mission was perilous from the outset. Merriman's Piper aircraft was not designed for landings and takeoffs above six thousand feet. The gnatlike plane, a mere twenty-two feet in length and fueled by a one-hundred-horsepower engine, had a top speed of 114 miles per hour. As Merriman's superior would observe, “No one should have to use it” at such altitudes. When the plane landed at a midway site, the aircraft was damaged by rocks protruding through the ice. Merriman pressed on, further damaging the plane as he took off, his craft now outfitted with skis.

As Merriman flew on toward the site of the climbers' camp, the winds picked up. A driving rain pelted the windshield. By the time he reached Seward Gap, visibility was down to three miles. Only his familiarity with the wilds of the Yukon Territory allowed him to navigate. Even so, the skis of his plane twice skidded across the icy terrain at full cruising speed, violently rattling his aircraft. Merriman's commanding officer later likened it to “flying inside of a milk bottle.” Finally he spied the campers' site, which had been marked off with a piece of canvas and a cargo parachute. After a week of bad weather and thawing, the snow had rotted through and barely supported the weight of the aircraft. Merriman's plane came to a slamming halt after touchdown on a glacier at the foot of Mount McArthur.

By then it was dusk. The weather was too hostile to risk taking off. Merriman grabbed a few hours' sleep while members of the trekking party swept clear a 4,300-foot runway with their snowshoes. At daybreak Merriman and his patient, Dick Long, took off, requiring every foot of the runway. Unable to put the tires back on his plane, Merriman landed on his skis in the tall grass beside the airport in Yakutat. A doctor was waiting to take Long to the lower forty-eight.

For Merriman the flight was nothing extraordinary. Four days later he was off on another mercy mission, this one to the Situck River to pick up a fisherman sick with pneumonia. But Merriman's daring rescue of Dick Long had caught the attention of his superior in Anchorage who relayed a description of Merriman's exploits on to Washington.

Six months later, on February 16, 1954, Merriman found himself standing on the stage of a cavernous auditorium in Washington, D.C., as Secretary of Commerce Sinclair Weeks presented him with a gold medallion, the esteemed Exceptional Service Award. The citation read: “For heroic action involving jeopardy of life in piloting the plane which under adverse weather and extremely hazardous operating conditions effected the rescue of a stricken mountain climber from the Malaspina Glacier.”

Merriman was then just six blocks from CIA headquarters, but the thought of covert operations had yet to cross his mind. In an otherwise totally private life, this moment onstage was the one time John Merriman would come to public attention. Already, though, within the community of bush pilots and smoke jumpers, he was becoming something of a legend, as much for his guts as for his gift as an aviator. It was said of him that he could fly the box the airplane came in.

A decade later some of those same pilots who admired him most and who shared his secrets would gather inside the Church of Christ to pay their last respects to Merriman. To some it seemed a cruel irony that one who had been so willing to risk his life to rescue others should have met such an unconscionable end.

For many years John Merriman worked as a commercial pilot, but the tedium of fixed schedules and the routine of routes did not agree with him. Then in 1962 he took a job as pilot to the royal family in Saudi Arabia. But that job was cut short after less than two years when King Saud was deposed. After that, Merriman put out feelers for a job within the community of clandestine operatives.

In 1963 he was contacted by Intermountain Aviation, ostensibly a private firm, but one that, in reality, was part of the CIA's growing stable of wholly owned airlines called proprietaries. Collectively this network of seemingly private companies created a virtually invisible air force at the disposal of the CIA, permitting it to expand its clandestine paramilitary activities around the globe. Undetected, such CIA front companies as Civil Air Transport, Air America, Evergreen, and Intermountain could move vast amounts of matériel—weapons, communications gear, and provisions—and men in support of America's proxy wars against the Communists, be they in Europe, Africa, Asia, or Latin America. Such firms were always on the lookout for savvy pilots. There was none better than John Merriman.

During the year that Merriman underwent an extensive CIA background and security check, he signed on with Johnson's Flying Service in Missoula, Montana. There he ferried smoke jumpers to forest fires. In its wisdom the Agency had steered him to a job that would polish precisely those treetop turns and acrobatic flying skills needed in counterinsurgency operations. It would also allow him to gain the trust and confidence of many of the very men who were to become the backbone of the CIA's daring covert paramilitary efforts in places like the Congo, Laos, and Vietnam. Even the smoke jumpers were impressed with Merriman's sangfroid. Before taking off, he calmly slipped a leather glove over his left hand. On it was written the word “Bandersnatch.” Many of the jumpers took to calling him that as a nickname of affection and respect.

When he had finally cleared Agency scrutiny, Merriman and his family were moved to Intermountain's headquarters at a vast top secret facility a half hour northwest of Tucson, Arizona. Its name was Marana Air Base. A former World War II facility, it offered three runways intersecting in a triangle and set upon a perfectly flat stretch of barren earth. In the distance to the west, the Sawtooth Mountains broke the monotony of land and sky. For years it would be the premier CIA training ground for paramilitary air operations, offering a kind of postgraduate curriculum in air ops. Merriman was jubilant. In a letter to a friend he wrote, “I'm sure I've found my life's work if I don't get fired.”

From around the country the CIA had recruited top experts in all the arcane arts needed to carry out covert operations—smoke jumpers and “riggers” adept not only in making complex jumps but in the packing of specialized parachutes, “kickers” capable of designing and delivering pallets and chutes for extraordinary supply drops, pilots willing and able to fly through torturous weather conditions, and mechanics, armaments experts, and engineers eager to convert conventional aircraft and apparatus to meet the needs of the most exotic missions. Together they formed a tightly knit community—all of them sworn to absolute secrecy. The unseen instrument of U.S. foreign policy, they were warriors in a world of undeclared wars.

More than a mere training base, Marana was a realm unto itself, withdrawn from all the world. Ordinarily there was little visible security that might call unwanted attention to the base. It was said that not even Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater was privy to its mission and that when he finally learned of it he went to the CIA's Dick Helms demanding to be briefed. When sensitive equipment was being tested, signs would go up that read, “Warning: Do Not Proceed Further; Use of Deadly Force Authorized.”