The Book of Honor (24 page)

At the Agency Wally Deuel held a variety of midlevel and senior positions. He was made chief of staff overseeing all current intelligence publications, including those that each morning went directly to President Eisenhower and, later, Kennedy. From 1957 until 1968 he served as deputy chief and then chief of Foreign Intelligence/Requirements, overseeing those branches that collected, edited, and disseminated the CIA's secret intelligence. He was later assigned to the inspector general's staff, traveling to more than twenty countries, examining the conduct of the Agency's far-flung stations and bases. He even undertook a covert assignment to Beirut, where he made a study of why the Lebanese press was negative toward the United States and what could be done to influence that press and plant stories more favorable to American interests.

In February 1961 Deuel's immediate superior broke his arm, and Deuel was asked to fill in as the CIA's representative to the Kennedy White House. There he attended meetings with Pierre Salinger, Ed Murrow, Walt Rostow, McGeorge Bundy, and other senior officials advising Kennedy on how to deal with the press on sensitive political and intelligence matters. At one such meeting, held on February 21, 1961, Deuel noted that the State Department representative advised Kennedy that the United States should have used the recent assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo to its political advantage. The official argued that the United States “should have mounted a ‘black' effort designed to convince world opinion that the Russians were responsible for Lumumba's assassination.” Apparently the State Department official was unaware that the CIA had earlier ordered Agency operatives to poison the former Congolese leader.

At another White House meeting, on February 28, 1961, Deuel and others prepped Kennedy for an upcoming news conference. Kennedy was steamed at the CIA's apparent intelligence failures in the Congo, complaining that Agency reports were false or misleading. He turned to Deuel. “What's the matter—have you got only one man there in the Congo?” Kennedy asked.

“He smiled when he said it,” wrote Deuel in a memo to Dulles. “He made it clear however that he meant his criticisms seriously.”

In March Deuel was relieved of White House responsibilities. His replacement: his old friend Dick Helms.

But by May 1961 the White House and CIA were already the targets of fierce criticism in the wake of the Bay of Pigs debacle. Deuel understood that henceforth nothing would be the same. He wrote his son Mike: “We've been living—I won't say in a fool's paradise, but we've been living charmed lives all this time until now. Our immunity from exposure and attack has been partly luck, partly due to the laziness and lack of imagination of some editors and publishers, partly to self-restraint imposed by patriotism on the part of others, partly to trust in the Old Man [Allen Dulles], partly to the Old Man's skill in handling his public relations—and, above all, to the fact that we've had a series of fantastic successes. We've had a few failures too, but they either haven't amounted to much or we haven't been found out.”

With the Bay of Pigs, all that had now changed.

Mike Deuel inherited his father's intellect, but something else as well. Where Wally Deuel had always been most comfortable standing on the sidelines as observer or adviser, his son Mike was determined to be a player. Wherever the action was most intense, that was where Mike Deuel wanted to be. Mike was what his father always hungered to be— not the scribe but the doer, living on the edge. His son was all of that— a romantic and roguish figure in whom his father could realize a lifetime of pipe dreams.

Physically Mike Deuel was not particularly formidable, but he had little regard for his own well-being and even as a child took pride in throwing himself in the way of the biggest kid on the playing field. More than once he ended up in the hospital, not because he was accident-prone, but because caution was a concept foreign to him. On March 14, 1949, the
Washington Post
ran a picture of eleven-year-old Mike Deuel smiling in his hospital bed after plummeting thirty feet from a two-story house to a concrete pavement. He suffered a concussion, a fractured elbow, and a cracked vertebra, but was delighted to have the time to build a model plane. Even then, he viewed fear and pain as elements to test his will.

On November 9, 1953, sixteen-year-old Mike Deuel was in a bruising football game when, in the second quarter, he became aware of a pain in his side. He felt tired and unable to run. But he played through the entire game without complaining, and it was not until that evening that he mentioned his discomfort. Not long after, an ambulance arrived to take him off to Garfield Hospital. There he would remain for the next four weeks with a ruptured kidney. Two operations later his only concern was that it not interfere with the next season's football.

His father, Wally, was attracted to those in power but also somewhat awed by it. Son Mike was utterly unintimidated by title or rank. In May 1950 he wrote a letter to U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas: “I have recently red [sic] a slight story about your proposed vacation trip across Iran on horseback.

“Before I go any further I might introduce myself. I'm Mike Deuel, 12, my father is a foreign affairs correspondent for the Saint Louis Post Dispatch.” Deuel went on to explain that he had all As and Bs in school, a taste for adventure, and would very much like to accompany Justice Douglas on his next trip abroad.

On May 8, 1950, Justice Douglas replied:

“My dear Mike, I greatly enjoyed your recent letter. I am glad faraway places, high mountains and horses interest you. There is a great joy in exploration. I hope you find time in your life for a lot of it.

“I am not sure that I will make another trip abroad this summer. Should I do so it would be a great pleasure to have you along. But there is a difficulty. I have a son just 18 years old. He was with me last summer in the Middle East and we had a wonderful time together . . . He has first claim to go, as you know. If I cannot take him, I don't know how I could take you. You understand, I am sure. I am very sorry for I think you and I would have a great time together. Yours Truly, William O. Douglas.”

There was little that Mike Deuel did not excel at. Where natural talent failed, pure gumption kicked in. At Washington's Western High School he played fullback and made the All-Star D.C. team—while serving as president of the student council. Graduating in 1955, he went to Cornell as one of the school's twenty-five National Scholars.

At Cornell Deuel played lacrosse and eagerly awaited the day his team faced Syracuse and the chance to butt heads with that school's most fiercesome athlete. Butt heads he did, though in each collision he got the worse of the exchange. The player he was so determined to stop was named Jim Brown, and he would go on to become one of the greatest running backs in NFL history. Deuel's classmates watched in disbelief as the modest-sized Deuel time and again attempted in vain to stand his ground against the broad-shouldered juggernaut from Syracuse. Such pluck became the stuff of myth.

At Cornell's Sigma Phi fraternity Deuel was seen as a spirited and gutsy classmate, with a puckish, sometimes lusty playfulness. As editor of the fraternity newspaper his junior year, he once wrote an article describing the fiancée of a senior fraternity brother as “succulent and squab-like”—apparently an accurate enough description. But the senior whose fiancée was so described was not amused by the phrase, and a short time later a repentant Deuel was observed on hands and knees, indelible marker in hand, blacking out each such reference from a stack of yet-to-be-distributed newsletters.

With prematurely salt-and-pepper hair cropped to a perfect brush cut, a devil-may-care smile, and squared jaw, he was a dashing figure— never more so than when he once returned to Cornell from the marines in full dress uniform, starched blue collar, white gloves, scabbard, and swagger stick. He was the very image of the sturdy warrior but not quite able to fully conceal the little boy's thrill to be in uniform.

Deuel chose the marines because he hoped they would meet his own standards of toughness. It was not that he spoiled for a fight—he did not—but he was constantly looking for ways to test his mettle. During basic training, when it was his turn to lead a platoon, he inadvertently took his men into an ambush. Instead of capitulating, he yelled “Charge!” He was named that month's outstanding platoon leader.

But as a Marine Corps officer, he seemed oddly distanced from the tasks at hand. To a Cornell classmate he wrote on July 16, 1960: “We still take orders from mean men afflicted with chronic flatulence and we still run until puddles of earnest sweat accumulate around us.” He seemed mildly amused by the regimentation. “I'm drunk with power but clear of eye,” he wrote his family in 1961. “My hair is short and so is my patience. When I say ‘frog,' my men jump. When I say ‘merde' they say how much and what color?”

But for Mike Deuel, not even the marines supplied enough action. In a letter home, typically candid and irreverent for Deuel, he wrote: “Life here creeps on in an undetectable pace, so much so that I am thrown back on my strong inner resources—tobacco, (awful) whiskey and pornography.”

Hungry for more action, Deuel left the marines and in 1961 joined the CIA. He knew he was in the right place when an Agency lecturer told him: “You were brought into the service to provide new blood. Bleed a little.” Instead of a cushy desk job, Deuel sought out the clandestine service and the most rigorous training the CIA offered. While nearly all clandestine officers passed through Camp Perry with its indoctrination courses and basics in tradecraft, Deuel applied to undertake the specialized program in jungle warfare.

On April 2, 1962, Deuel and the toughest of his Camp Perry classmates began what was called Paramilitary Course 3, at the Jungle Warfare Training Center, in the Canal Zone. By 1962 most of the old guard of paramilitary experts trained in World War II were now too old to undertake paramilitary operations, and most of the paramilitary training had been discontinued a decade earlier. At the very time when President Kennedy resolved that the United States would blunt Soviet and Chinese aggression whenever and wherever it showed up, the Agency was woefully strapped for so-called paramilitary knuckledraggers. To the outside world such a term might have smacked of ridicule, suggesting Cro-Magnon-like warriors, but to the Agency it was an honorific term recalling the glory days of OSS operations, of raw courage and finely honed survival skills.

The course Deuel and his fourteen CIA classmates found themselves in was billed as “realistic, rough, and hazardous.” It was all this and more. The instructor was Eli Popovich, a former OSS operative who had, among countless hair-raising missions, rescued downed American crewmen from behind enemy lines in Yugoslavia during World War II. He had a well-deserved reputation for being afraid of no man and no terrain. Agency recruits would later recall him bagging a huge python, hacking it into steaks, and dining on it as if it were a tender fillet.

The course was designed to turn young CIA recruits into jungle warfare experts in a mere three weeks. Awaiting most of them were jungle assignments as case officers leading counterinsurgency movements in Southeast Asia, particularly the CIA's still-secret war in Laos. The course curriculum acquainted the CIA's junior-officers-in-training (JOTs) in such topics as “Effects of Heat,” “Snakes and Animals,” “Reconnaissance Patrolling,” “Ambush and Counter-Ambush,” “Evasion and Escape,” and “Guerrilla Operations.”

Even Popovich was astounded by the caliber of recruits. In a memo stamped “Secret” he noted: “Our JOT's, often called ‘intellectuals' and/or ‘Eggheads,' have demonstrated that they are not only intelligent young men, but also are capable of being physically and mentally tough when necessary to carry out the most difficult tasks under adverse tactical conditions . . . In spite of drastic change in climate, temperature, and humidity, and while being constantly harassed with cuts, bruises, bites from hornets, ants, and vampires [bats], and infections from black palm and sand box trees, they carried out their assigned tasks without undue gripes or complaints.”

Not everyone finished the course. One man fell to fever. Another broke his leg on the “slide for life,” a cable stretched across a river.

There was intense competition between the men, each one wanting not only to complete the course but to distinguish himself as the toughest, most resourceful and aggressive officer. Early on, Mike Deuel recognized that classmates Ralph McLean, Robert Manning, Andre LeGallo, and above all Richard Holm were his primary competitors.

But if the course brought out rivalries, it also imbued the men with a lasting esprit de corps. In the jungles of the Canal Zone were born friendships that would endure a lifetime. No greater friendships were forged than those between Deuel, McLean, Manning, and Holm. From the beginning, when Deuel and Holm entered the Agency as callow JOTs in June 1961, they had shared a special unspoken bond. They both adored sports, had a deep revulsion to Communism, were religious agnostics, and longed to make a difference in the world.

The two not only endured but reveled in the grueling jungle course, a program also given to elite military units. The CIA contingent was under cover as civilian employees of the U.S. Army Element, Joint Operational Group (8739). Each CIA officer was issued a false set of orders, fake IDs, and bogus medical records. Upon graduation the commanding officer of the exercise wryly noted: “There is a small group of civilians in this course from the United Fruit Company and although some of them have never been in uniform they have carried out their assigned tasks in this course as required with the rest of the class members in a manner that is worthy of praise and deserving of a fine hand.” As the applause died down, the officer told CIA Training Director Popovich that Mike Deuel was the top man in the class, though his friends Holm, McLean, and LeGallo had slightly outscored him.