A week passed before Swagger dropped in on Richard again, this time intercepting him at a pharmacy where he was picking up prescriptions. “Damn!” said Richard, jumping visibly when his old pal Jack Brophy showed up from nowhere. “You are tricky,” he declared.
“I’m paranoid as hell,” Swagger said. “I’ve done some work and have made some progress. Don’t want any of those other boys knocking me off.”
“You might be better off to relax and let me introduce you to some people who might be able to help you.”
“Too shaky for that, Richard. You mean well, but I’ve got spiders in my mind telling me every-goddamned-body is spying on me.”
“I got it, I got it. Well, how about this-I think I could help you, no one else involved.”
“How’s that?”
Richard laid out his plan. He knew someone in the Dallas Association of Nursing Homes, which put out a weekly bulletin. His idea was to run an ad requesting that anyone who had worked in the Dal-Tex Building in ’63 and wanted to share memories with a researcher contact Richard. Then Richard, with Jack along, would interview. That way they could at least get a sense of how likely it was that a brazen penetration like the one Jack envisioned had happened.
Swagger thanked him, thought it over, watched him surreptitiously for a number of days, then okayed the idea.
The next week they visited three homes and talked to three old gadflies, two of whom said it was possible, one who said it wasn’t.
“The building was particularly deserted that day,” Mrs. Kolodny recalled. “We all rushed down at noon to get good spots to see the president. And afterward, who wanted to go back to work? I didn’t go back to work until Monday. It was so sad.”
Mr. O’Farrell disagreed, primarily because, it turned out, he was an amateur assassinologist.
“If you look, you’ll see that the Houston Street side of the building had a fire escape. And there was a bunch of people sitting there watching the president. Now, if someone fired a rifle shot, they’d be the closest, they’d be the ones who’d hear it and testify that a shot came from just forty or fifty feet above them. Yet there’s no testimony to that effect, goddammit. So how could it be?”
Swagger said, “Possibly they used a silencer.”
“Silencer, shmilencer,” said the old guy. “Hollywood crap! That’s what you get from TV and the goddamn movies! No silencer really silences. You can’t make a sound that loud and sharp go away. It might be lowered somewhat, but if he was shooting out the window, they’d feel the shock wave and they’d hear something damn suspicious. The only thing any of those folks heard was what everyone else heard, which was three loud cracks from the rifle of no one other than Mr. Lee Harvey Oswald.”
Swagger knew this not to be the case absolutely, as the sound itself could be modulated by a variety of techniques, primarily the efficacy of the suppressor and its location in an otherwise sealed room. A savvy shooter would place himself well back from the narrowly opened window, containing much of the sound and much of the shock wave. Unless the people beneath were listening for it and had experience with the vibratory patterns of suppressed weapons, it was unlikely that any lower-floor fire-escape sitters noticed a thing, what with so much else going on simultaneously.
Swagger ambushed Richard at the Palm over his weekly steak and martini.
“Mind if I join you?” Swagger said, appearing from nowhere just as Richard had finished his meat and put in an order for coffee and Key lime pie.
“Man,” said Richard, “you were in the spy business. I know you were. You move too silently, you follow too well.”
“Ain’t true a bit,” said Swagger. “I picked up my skills by being worried about Communist guerrillas in the mountains of Ecuador. Had a run-in with the same mob, different race, in Malaysia. Those were men who wanted us exploiters of the wonderful peasants dead. I developed a sixth sense for danger, and I learned how to disappear in plain sight. I was once three feet away from two guerrillas with AK-47s and went so still, they looked right past me, and here I am to tell the tale.”
“You could have fooled me.”
“Anyway, I wanted to tell you about something I discovered on the Net that’s interesting to me. A lot of it is shit, but this gal seems to know a thing or two.”
Swagger went on for a few minutes about the discovery. Some researcher had noted that when the FBI expert Robert Frazier had talked about the relative zero of the Hollywood scope on the Oswald rifle, it was clear that Frazier, a distinguished high-power marksman, was unfamiliar with scopes and unaware that if a scope is miszeroed, it will shoot groups in the same spot on the target relative to its miscalculated aiming point, altered only by the geometric progression of the range. If it’s an inch low and an inch to the right at fifty yards, it will be two inches low and two inches to the right at a hundred yards, and three inches low and three inches to the right at 150 yards, out until the distance where gravity and falling velocity have a larger influence than the scope misadjustment.
“The point is,” said Bob, “how can this guy say the rifle is accurate if he doesn’t know the most fundamental thing about the physics of the scope? How can he say a scoped rifle is easy to shoot? He doesn’t know enough to make either of those judgments, but those are key factors in the commission’s conclusion that Oswald was capable of making the third, longest shot at the smallest and most quickly moving target.”
“It’s not really my thing,” said Richard. “I guess I get it, but it would be helpful if you could show me some of this stuff.”
“I will, I will,” said Swagger. “When I’ve got it all put together, I want to fly you out to Boise and take you to my range. You’ll see it. In the meantime, please be thinking of ways I could package this or someone I could write it up with.”
“Oh, all this on the rifles,” Richard said, as if a new thought had kicked its way into his head. “It reminds me. I’ve been meaning to mention this to you. Ever hear of a guy named Adams? In the gun world, I mean.”
“Nah,” said Swagger. “Can’t say-Oh, wait, there’s a guy named Marion Adams, a writer. Does these big fancy picture books on, say, Ruger or Winchester, like corporate histories or historical collections. That the guy?”
Richard handed him a card. “Marion F. Adams,” it said. “Firearms Historian and Appraisal Expert.” It had a cell number, an e-mail address, and a little picture of a seven-and-a-half-inch Colt Peace-maker.
Richard said, “He came by a couple of weeks ago. He told me some story about his theory of the case-I hear a lot of those, you know. But his was very gun-centric. It was sort of like yours, I thought, having to do with some Winchester gun firing bullets meant for the Carcano at a much faster speed.”
“Shit,” Swagger said. “Goddammit, that’s my theory. It’s my intellectual property. You’re telling me another guy who-”
“No, no, wait a sec. Here’s the deal. He said he was way behind the curve on what did or did not happen in the event, and he could never catch up. The websites gave him a headache. He’s not a Net guy. He wanted to shortcut the process. Did I know an investigator who was conversant with the facts of the assassination, the state of the art of assassination research and theory, and firearms. Does that sound like somebody we know?”
Swagger didn’t say a thing. His face darkened as if his mood were tanking fast. His eyes narrowed. Finally, he barked, “It took me years to get where I am. I sure don’t want to give it away to some fellow with fancy friends who writes the words nobody reads in picture books. It’s my intellectual property. It’d be like giving away a piece of land with a mineral claim on it.”
“Jack,” said Richard, “I see your point. Don’t let it upset you. I didn’t get the impression he was too organized or anything.”
“Did you tell him about me?”
“Not by name. I told him I had a guy in mind who would fit the bill perfectly. And I’ll get back to him and tell him you’re not-”
“Hold off on that. If he’s published, it means he knows publishers, I mean, real New York publishers, like Simon and Schuster and Knopf and Random House, the big guys whose books get noticed by everybody. I had an idea that if I got it together somehow, I’d take it to them, even if they’d probably steal more than the little guys.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Oh,” said Swagger, going a little over the top on the angry-proprietor thing, “hold off a bit. Let me look into this guy. I’m not a writer, I’m an engineer. Maybe he could help me, I could help him. But goddammit, don’t tell him no more about me!”
Memphis got Agent Neal working again, and the results came back quickly enough. He summed them up for Swagger a few days later, in their weekly coffee-shop meet at a randomly selected Seattle’s Best in the suburbs.
“Okay, once again, we get a clean read,” he said. “Marion Adams, fifty-nine. Born into gun aristocracy. His father was CEO of a now-defunct Connecticut gun valley company that mainly produced.22 target pistols of very high quality. When target shooting got small in the late sixties, the company folded. But Marty, as he is called, knew everybody, he was, er, connected, and he was able to forge a career as a writer and consultant. He’s published nineteen books, many on the big-ticket manufacturers. His connections get him in the doors, he writes whitewashed company histories, he knows everybody, and he produces what many people consider technically beautiful volumes.”
“I’ve seen ’em,” said Bob. “May even own a few.”
“He seems to service the high-end gun trade. You know, the big-dollar guys who go on safaris with gun-bearers and hunt doves in Argentina with Purdey shotguns and pay fifteen grand for a painting called Ducks on a Chesapeake Morn.”
“Got the picture,” said Bob, knowing the kind of huntcult gent who was secretly in love with the traditions of thirties big-game hunting, and yearned to tramp the savannah with Hemingway and Philip Percival at his side, and would have cocktails with the memsahib under the lanterns before dining on linen every night in camp, while the boys did all the work.
“He makes most of his money advising these guys on what and what not to add to their collections. It’s a tricky market, and the main problem is counterfeiting. Turns out that counterfeiting a rare gun is much easier than counterfeiting a thousand-dollar bill or a Rembrandt. Marty works both sides of the trade: he matches collectors to guns, gets a fee from both sides of the deal, and ‘validates’ the authenticity. You don’t want to spend two hundred thousand on a rare early Colt and get it home and hold it to the light and find ‘Made in Italy’ stamped on it.”
“No,” said Swagger, “you don’t. It does seem like a world where a crook could make a ton of loot.”
“That’s why someone of Marty’s integrity is valued. Now, there have been rumors. It’s so psychological. Guy buys a big-dollar piece on Marty’s recommendation, but his buddy says, ‘Hmm, looks fake to me,’ and the guy who was proud and confident is now full of doubts, and he says something and it gets repeated. But nothing substantial that we could find. Like Richard, he seems on the up-and-up, and there’s no record of contacts with exotic operators, no hint of criminal malfeasance.”
“Got it,” said Bob.
“Are you going to meet with the guy?”
“Absolutely.”
“I think it’s the right decision. I can find no suggestion that anyone here in Dallas is on to you. Those two exvice PIs are out to pasture, there’s no underworld interest, and our random intercepts never turn up surveillors; everything is looking like Hugh or whoever he is has either lost interest or hasn’t picked you up yet.”
Swagger nodded, albeit a bit grimly. “That’s what every man I ever killed thought one second before the bullet arrived.”
I am fully aware that as I write, I am being hunted. I await word from the various agents I have afield, confident that my disguises, my barriers, my fortifications, my confusions are impenetrable. I am sublimely confident. Hmm, then why am I drinking so much Vod?
Anyhow, let us return to the far more interesting past and my courtship of the fool called Lee Harvey Oswald. After our dinner meet, I let him stew a day or so. Let him think it through, get himself ginned up, not force too much on him at once. I spent the next day in West Dallas, trying two more Mexican restaurants, truly enjoying each one. I read the Times at lunch, thoroughly, as was my custom, noting yet another White House conference on the Republic of South Vietnam, which was disappointing everyone in its military’s lack of improvement in the wake of the coup that killed Diem a few weeks earlier. I don’t know what they expected, and it began to make me mad again, not merely that my report had been twisted to nonproductive ends but that another parade seemed to be forming, and I fancied I could hear the drums drum-drum-drumming and the bugles blow-blow-blowing. I had spent six months there, from October ’62 through March ’63, and I saw little in the place worth dying or killing for. The Southerners weren’t a warlike people, and without a great deal of aid, they’d never stand up to a Soviet-fortified and Soviet-advised North Vietnamese army. I was long gone by the time of the coup, which seemed to me a clear doubling-down on an unwinnable bet. But I heard reports and could imagine the look of fiery anger on Captain Nhung’s face after he’d shot the Diem brothers in the head, in the back of the armored personnel carrier, on the way to general staff headquarters at Tan Son Nhut. I saw the picture that circulated in Langley: President Diem, a pleasant enough fellow in my dealings with him, with his head blown in at close range.
Anyway, I tried to put my anger aside and pursue my true goal in Dallas, to look around at a cocktail lounge called the Patio a few miles north of downtown, in another dreary suburban neighborhood. The place had little appeal to me, but it was said to be a favorite of General Walker’s, where he loved to sit on the outdoor platform and drink margaritas, whatever they were, with his staff. He was slated to give a speech at SMU November 25, and having spent some time with the Dallas Times Herald, I knew it was likely that he and his “boys” (a few years later, though I was out of the country at the time, he earned the quotation marks around “boys”) would head there for the hooch. It didn’t take much time for me to figure where to put Alek so that he couldn’t miss, although he would, and where to put whomever was shooting backup so he wouldn’t miss. Yes, I had a pretty good idea who that would be, but that lay in the future at least a week.
I made notes to myself, considered angles, heights, and so forth, tracked getaway routes, and although the planning of sniper assassinations wasn’t one of my strong points, I satisfied myself that late on a Monday evening, with vehicular and pedestrian traffic low, Alek could easily cut through the alleyway across the street, hide his rifle, then cut through backyards to a pickup spot. Meanwhile, if needed, our real shooter would have undisturbed escape by vehicle; all that would take place in the four minutes that in those days was the norm for Dallas Police Department response, again according to the Times Herald. I felt we could probably do it in two with practice, maybe even one. Within a day or so, everything would be back to normal in cowtown, and a certain nasty piece of work would trouble nobody, least of all the United States of America, again.
I think I should say that committing to this murder made the next murder seem not so great a reach. In Clandestine Services, we had a culture of leader killing. We had done it before; we would do it again. As I have said, a few weeks earlier, the APC had clanked into Tan Son Nhut with its bloody cargo aboard, and everybody was convinced the killer had done the right thing and was willing to assume the mantle of murderer for the sake of his country. There were others, a red puppet in Africa, a series of strongmen in Guatemala, an appalling boss in the ever-troublesome Dominican. Des FitzGerald was, by rumor at least, currently planning the removal by violence of Fidel Castro. That’s who we were; that’s what we did. There wasn’t all this weepy nonsense about the sanctity of life, the preciousness of each human soul. Someone had to do the man’s work, and we were the men who did it, took pride in it, felt righteous about it. Orwell never said it, I am told, but whoever did must have worked for Clandestine Services in the fifties and sixties: “People sleep warm in their beds at night because rough men do violence on their behalf.” We were the rough men, although we had very smooth manners.
That night he got off the bus and started down North Beckley again, and I pulled up.
“Good evening, Alek,” I said. “Possibly some vodka tonight? Agent Hotsy’s son has another game.”
He looked either way, then jumped in, and off I sped.
He didn’t wait for me. “I’ll do it. I’ll help any way I can. It’s my duty, I’ll do it.”
“Congratulations, Alek,” I said, “three complete sentences without a grammatical error. You’re learning quickly.”
“This time,” he said, “there won’t be not any mistakes.”
“There goes the record,” I said.
“Anyhow,” I went on, “let us move beyond grammar. I take it you have understood what I have not yet stated but only inferred, and what it is I require of you. I mean not just your heart and mind and body, your faith in revolution and the righteousness of our way, but what in the practical sense it is I want you to do.”
“I do.”
“I have to hear you say it, Comrade.”
He took a big breath, and broke eye contact. He knew he was leaving shore, sailing off again on uncharted waters to what he hoped would be his destiny.
“I will this time succeed. I will shoot and kill General Edwin Walker, for crimes against peace and the revolution. I can do it. I can be the assassin. There won’t be any mistakes.”
“No, there won’t be any mistakes. Because this time I have drawn up a plan, an approach route, an escape route. We will time things to the second, we will measure the distance, we will know that there are no impediments to shooting. Our intelligence will be sound, our preparations thorough. We will do this professionally.”
“Yes sir.”
“Now, tell me, Alek, why is it we’re doing this?”
“What? Why? Because you asked me.”
“Forget that part. I mean politically, strategically, morally, what is the purpose? This is murder we’re talking here. It’s not to be done lightly, on a whim, or for shabby psychological needs.”
“He’s a bad man. He needs to die. That’s all.”
“And that’s enough for you?”
“It is. It isn’t for you?”
“Not for authorization. In my memo to authority, I argued that General Walker applied rightist pressure to President Kennedy, and Kennedy wasn’t politically able to stand up to it after failures at the Bay of Pigs, Vienna, and the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
“I thought America won that. I was angry.”
“Propaganda. Khrushchev traded him Russian missiles in Cuba for American missiles in Turkey. We won, as our missiles were far less valuable than yours. Kennedy knows this and is spoiling for a fight, and General Walker is shoving him into it. Wherever he chooses to fight, it will be a mistake. Possibly the Republic of South Vietnam, possibly Cuba, possibly somewhere in South America, perhaps even Europe. Walker’s popularity squeezes Kennedy, and something tragic for both our peoples happens, because of Walker’s insanity and Kennedy’s weakness. So we take Walker out of the equation. By taking one life, perhaps we save many.”
“I agree, I agree,” said Alek, his face lit with inner zeal. Again I thought I saw a tear.
Why did I do this? It is odd. I’m not sure I know. Alek was an easy mark; I could have gotten him to wear ladies’ clothes in Times Square, shouting “Long live Russia,” if I had wanted to. I think I was arguing with myself and using him as a surrogate. I wanted to hear the arguments said out loud, and I thought in some way, I might speak from my subconscious and say something more honest than I intended. I might learn something of my own true motives, as opposed to the policy mumbo jumbo by which I justified the killing, knowing that policy is malleable and that it could be used to justify anything. I suppose I was also preparing for upcoming seductions, knowing I would have to convince the man who would act as backup shooter to do so, and he was far smarter than Alek and might have come up with unexpected counterarguments.
In another sense, I felt I owed it to him. He was the expendable one, the sacrifice. If it happened, he would be left to burn to death in the Texas electric chair, screaming of red agents who’d given him orders straight from SMERSH. I doubted if the officials who executed him could keep a straight face during the operation. I wanted to give him at least an idea of where it fit in in the grand scheme of things and the belief that he had somehow made a contribution. It might help get him through the long night before they turned the switch.
“In a few days, I will contact you again. At that meeting I will present you with a plan and a map. I want you prepared; do not get in any arguments, do not read any papers, do not trouble your mind with new information. I want your mind unagitated. Since you’re a fighter and a yapper, I know that’s hard for you, but do your best for me. I want you ready to read and commit to memory, do you see? You have to concentrate for me, because you cannot possess the plan on paper. If things should go wrong, you cannot be found with a plan written in Russian. It would cause problems. Security, do you see?”
“I do. But what should I do if I’m caught?”
“You won’t be caught.”
“I know, but plans can backfire. It could happen.”
“Then be patient. Say nothing. We will get you out somehow. Possibly a prisoner trade, possibly a breakout, I don’t know. We always get our people back, that’s our reputation. If it goes sour and you keep the faith, we’ll spring you, and you’ll spend your life in Havana as a valued citizen who sacrificed for the Revolution. We’ll even work out a way for Marina and Junie and the new child to come to you.”
“I knew I could count on you, Comrade,” he said.
“Okay, now go. I will get you the plan, you will memorize it. You have the ammunition; do you have the rifle?”
“It’s with Marina in Fort Worth. She doesn’t know I still have it. I can get it anytime.”
“Excellent. Leave it there for the time being; concentrate on concentrating. In all likelihood, you will do this thing, get away with it, and in months to come, possibly we will find other wet tasks for you to do. You will help the Revolution. This is what you want, correct?”
“I will show you.” He reached into his shirt and pulled out an envelope that he had been careful not to fold. He pulled a photograph out of it. “See,” he said, “this is who I really am.”
I pulled to the side of the road and turned on the light in the car. The photo later became world-famous when it appeared on the cover of Life magazine and a thousand crazed conspiracy books. You’ve seen it. Alek in black, holding his rifle across his body, his pistol tucked into his belt, and in his other hand copies of the Daily Worker and the Trotskyist International-he had no idea that these two organs, like the parties they represented, were in blood opposition to each other-staring forthrightly at the camera lens in poor Marina’s hand, wearing that eternal smirk of the sucker who thinks he’s figured the game as the game is figuring him. I could see that it was a kind of romantic image of the red guerrilla that animated his deepest fantasies, like something out of the 1910s, an assassin, a bomber with a bowling-ball explosive and a long, sparkling fuse, a Gavrilo Princip, a figure out of Conrad. I felt sorry for a man who could be so deluded even as I said, “Yes, Alek. That is it. That’s the spirit we need!”
I spent the next few days holed up, working on The Plan. I went back to the operational zone a couple of times, I took public transportation to and from, I walked the distances, I charted the police activity, I noted the mileages to the police stations, I had margaritas at the Patio so I could determine whether Alek’s movement on the roof or my shooter in the car where I would place him would be particularly visible. I even climbed up on the roof in old blue jeans and boat shoes, Yale poof playing Jedburgh commando! I got a good look at Alek’s shooting position and tried to imagine his actions.
I knew certain things. First, that the immediate result of the shot would be a frozen moment of fear followed by absolute chaos. As I saw it, my shooter would have the general zeroed and be well prepared for Alek’s shot. If Alek missed, he would fire a silenced shot (I took on faith that Lon would solve all problems), finishing the issue. But witnesses would remember it differently; some would say there came a shot and the general’s head exploded, and others would say there was a shot and the general’s head exploded a full second later. What if Alek missed and the bullet was recovered? That would be dicey, yes, but it would be so confusing to everybody that no one would get it. There would be-assuming Lon had worked it out-no record of a second bullet existing. Since the Patio was brick, the building behind it stone, there was a good chance that a miss by Alek would shatter on a hard surface. In any event, the worst-case scenario seemed to amount to confusion, conflicting theories, an eternal mystery, a suspicion that there was more to know-but nothing substantial leading to our plot, except a theoretically captured Alek’s crazed insistence that the reds had made him do it.
The difficult part wasn’t the plan itself but reducing it to easily remembered components. I tried to find a mnemonic device that would help Alek’s pea brain retain the information. I came up with APPLE: approach, position, patience, liquidation, escape. I knew that “liquidation” was weak, but I had to get a known word out of the puzzle. Since it was a word associated in the popular imagination with old NKVD practices and employed frequently by the patron saint of agents, Ian Fleming, in his Bond books (which Alek had read devotedly), it was okay but not optimal. I thought that authorities would consider it the kind of hokey nonsense a fantasist like Alek would come up with.
Each letter had further information associated with it. APPROACH had a set of numbers, 830 15-33-15, which meant 8:30 bus no. 15 to Thirty-third Street, fifteen-minute walk down Thirty-third to target area.
And so forth and so on, very secret agent-like. I thought Alek would enjoy the primitive spycraft, and if I got his imagination fired up, maybe he’d apply himself.
I sent him a postcard, knowing in those days of postal efficiency, it would be delivered the next day. It simply said, “Texas Theatre, 8 p.m. show.” That was the movie house a mile or so from his roominghouse, where, ironically, he would be arrested on November 22.
That night he showed up. The movie was absurd, something about teenagers on a beach, and I could not stand it. I’d noted him when he came in. I went, sat next to him for a second, and dropped the plan (in an envelope) in his hands.
I whispered, “Take it home, commit it to memory, and copy it in your own hand. Do not destroy it. It must be returned to me when next I make contact. Every night study it until you know it by heart. Run through it one night and be sure you can make all the connections. I will be back in contact in ten days or so, the week of the eighteenth. Our target date is November twenty-fifth, that Monday night.”
Then I left. You must remember, in those days there were no easily accessible copying machines. Xerox had yet to take over the world, there was no fax, and the only “copiers” were extremely expensive photocopiers of the sort that produced negative imagery, to which Alek, in his reduced circumstances, would be unlikely to have access. I knew that making a copy of it was beyond him.
I left him in the Texas Theatre, while silly California girls did the frug and the monkey on-screen, and disappeared into the night. I had become an expert on Dallas transportation, so I walked a few blocks west and caught a bus downtown. The next day I flew back to Boston and then back to D.C. My next mission was to see what Lon had come up with.
It took most of the day to get back from Dallas. I had to pay cash for the flight to Boston, take a cab to Cambridge, sneak upstairs, come down and check out of the hotel, take another cab back to Logan, then the flight to National. The only problem was the checkout, where the clerk said, “Was everything all right, sir? We noticed you didn’t seem to sleep in the bed.”
I said, “Yes, it was fine. Look, if anyone should ever ask, it’ll be my wife’s private detectives. So take this”-I winked and handed him two twenties, after having considered the whole flight back to Boston how much to pay, twenty being too little and apt to annoy him and fifty being too generous and apt to prove memorable-“and remember to forget that I never mussed the sheets.”
“Yes sir,” he said with a smile. “And I bet the housekeeping reports disappear too!” In those days, all us “wolves” hung together; manhood was a national adultery culture, possibly under the influence of Playboy magazine, which made such activities hep, like jazz and hi-fi. I never once cheated on Peggy, but many was the time I used the pretense of such a thing to help me out of a tight one.
I called Peggy from National and told her I was back, I’d be home, but first I wanted to run to the office. It made sense, because once I was on the GW Memorial Parkway, it was just a few exits beyond the Key Bridge, and I was at our big shiny new campus.
I went to my office-it was more than half empty because I arrived around 5-and quickly typed up a fictional report on my PEACOCK adventures, what young writing stars I had talked to, which of them were likely to go into journalism, which would waste their lives writing movies or potboilers or even, God help them, television. I should say as an aside that after Dallas, I moved PEACOCK from its fictional guise to an actual existence, and it was one of the Agency’s enduring successes. I made friends through PEACOCK who served me the remainder of my years at Langley, particularly in Vietnam, when I ran Phoenix and wanted to get the Agency’s side of the story told in the right papers; it exists, in slightly different form, to this day.
I also checked on three operations I was in charge of that seemed to require no immediate influence and whose details will only bore the reader, as they would bore the writer; I sent inter-office notes to a few colleagues with updates, questions, requests, to get back into the flow of things and make sure my absence hadn’t been noted.
Then it was home by 9; Peggy had a highball waiting, and before I had a sip, I visited each of the boys to find that the pattern was the same. Jack had missed me and showed it and gave me a big hug; Peter, my middle boy, never had much use for me and more or less communicated his indifference (yet I am told he gave the most passionate oration at my “funeral” in 1993); and Will hadn’t really noticed, as he’d had games or practice on all the days when I was gone. Peggy and I had a late supper, and she went to bed and I poured another highball and told her I’d be up in a bit, I just wanted to check the mail.
I’m glad I did. Mostly, it was bills, but there was one strange, rather large envelope without a return address. Hefting it, I suspected it contained some kind of tabular matter; it had the weight of heavy paper. I noted that it was postmarked Roanoke, near Lon’s place in southwestern Virginia.
I opened it up. It was a copy of a magazine called Guns amp; Ammo, and it was full of pictures of various firearms and articles on such things as “Remington’s New 700: A Challenger to the Model 70?” and “Llama’s Big.44 Mag Makes Its Point Loud and Clear,” whatever those things meant. Flipping through it once, I noted nothing. Flipping through it a second time, I noted that one of the center pages seemed heavier or less flimsy than the others. I looked closely and realized that pages 42 and 43 had been glued together. I peeled them apart, and a letter fell out on the floor. I had to laugh; Lon was playing cloak-and-dagger tricks on me, to his own merriment.
I picked it up and read the salutation:
To: Commander Bond 007
From: Technical Department
Re: The Assassination of Dr. No
Disposition: Burn After Reading
Good old Lon. Ever the cheerful gamesman, and it was in that vein he began.
Commander Bond, I have given much thought and some experimentation to your requirements and believe I have just found a solution. Put a pot of coffee on because you’ve got a long night or afternoon ahead of you, much of it boring, unless you’re like me and find the arcana of firearms and ballistics fascinating in and of their own. But since that’s about.0001 percent of the population, I wish you luck.
I should hereby give the same admonition to the reader. Henry James’s explication of the prose narrative-“Dramatize, dramatize, dramatize!”-will hereby be put aside and replaced by “explain, explain, explain.” For you to understand how we managed to fool the world for half a century, you must steel yourself to the assault of the details.
After reading Lon’s letter, I burned it in the fireplace. Probably a week hasn’t gone by in the fifty years since that I haven’t thought of it, for it made, as I knew it would, what happened possible. It was the fulcrum of the event. I think I remember it pretty well, so I will now give it to you as I got it from my great and tragic cousin Lon:
Let me begin by narrowly defining the technical requirements. You, James Bond, have been assigned to eliminate one Dr. No for his multifarious crimes. Yet you cannot be caught, and there can be no evidence of your involvement or the British Secret Service’s involvement. Fortunately, you have a handy patsy, Felix Leiter of the American CIA, that dunderheaded American would-be intelligence service. Poor Felix: you can manipulate him into almost anything because he so wants to be like the debonair, suave, bunny-bagging Commander Bond. So you have easily conned him into taking a sniper shot at Dr. No. Alas, he has only one weapon available, and that is a surplus war rifle of Italian vintage, namely a Model 38 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano carbine with a dreary Japanese telescopic sight of questionable utility. You worry that Felix is incapable of making the shot, so you have arranged for a backup shooter of much higher ability to be present at the moment of the killing. If Felix, as is probable, misses, the agile backup shooter will take the kill in the next second or so. But all ballistic evidence must point at Felix; he is the Judas goat in the operation.
I will not worry here about firing angles, getaways, placement, any of that stuff. That is your department. I will not worry about the disposition of poor Felix; that is yours as well. Mine is simply the technical: how can backup Shooter X put a bullet into Dr. No’s cerebellum and leave no trace of his existence so that the apprehended Felix Leiter is held responsible for the shot, as proved by the ballistic forensics scientifically applied by experts. It’s the case of the bullet that never was.
This is what I would do. First, I would provide Felix with the ammunition he is to use, having previously secured an example of it myself [this I had already done, basically on instinct, so I was ahead of the game]. So we give Felix a box of 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano ammunition manufactured by the Western Cartridge Company under contract from the Italian government, declared surplus by the Italians, resold to American wholesalers, and packaged in a nice white box. The bullet Shooter X fires is basically identical to Felix’s and off the same cartridge-manufacturing line at Western’s St. Louis manufacturing facility.
We have before us one of those cartridges. Let us examine it. It is blunt-tipped with a copper-coated bullet protruding from its brass case that has an unusually exaggerated length given the overall size of the cartridge. It doesn’t look like a missile so much as a cartridge case with a cigar stuck in it. It is a heavy, dense item for its size, speaking eloquently of its seriousness of purpose.
You are aware, Commander Bond, that firearms and ammunition are not the stolid, imperturbable things they seem? They are plastic; they may be altered, customized, improved, their tasks changed, their performance envelope shifted, all kinds of magical tweaking and petting may be applied to them. That is what we are going to do with our 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano cartridge.
(If you’ve forgotten or never knew: a cartridge is composed of several units. It contains a bullet, which is propelled down the barrel to terminal effect. The bullet is powered by rapidly burning-not exploding-powder, which is contained in a brass vessel often called a shell or a case. The rear of the shell, called the head, contains a rim which is machined to fit tightly, held in perfect alignment by cleverly machined grooves on the bolt, thus locking it into the chamber of the rifle. The head also contains, wedged tightly into its center, a magic gizmo called the primer, a chemically potent nubbin of specific materials that becomes a spear of flame when struck by the hammer, lighting the powder and producing the expanding gas that propels the bullet down the barrel and into history. Not that it matters, but the cartridge is an extraordinary device, so efficient and well designed that it has not been replaced in over a hundred years and will not be for another hundred years. But back to our cartridge, our 6.5 M-C.)
The first thing we do is pull the bullet from the shell, easily done with a common reloading implement. We throw out the cartridge case, full of powder, with its primer. Don’t need ’em. This is about bullets, not cartridges. Now let us examine (as I have done at length) what is before us. It is 1.25 inches long. It weighs 162 grains. It is copper-covered, and its copper covering is somewhat thick, thicker than normal, as it is designed to be a hard object that does not deform when it strikes flesh but penetrates deeply. The copper is wrapped around a lead core, which can be seen by looking at the base of the bullet, observing the lead interior where the copper hasn’t covered.
We put this bullet in a vise, upside down. Or we put it on a lathe, horizontally. Any advanced hobbyist’s shop has one or the other. We drill a.200-inch tunnel through the latitudinal (lengthwise) center of the bullet, that is, through the lead from the base, up toward the nose of the bullet, though we stop at 1 inch depth, leaving the nose of the bullet intact.
Now what have we got? We have a bullet that weighs probably 20 grains less than it did originally but has been substantially altered in terms of its performance, without sacrificing any of its accuracy.
Next we return the bullet to the vise and we carefully saw or file off about an eighth of an inch of its blunt nose, removing enough copper to open up the lead (which is much softer) to the impact point of the bullet.
It is now substantially more volatile than it was, and instead of being counted upon, by virtue of its structural integrity-its hardness-to penetrate and stay more or less together on penetration, it may be counted upon to disintegrate when it strikes a living target, particularly if it strikes the skull or other bone structure. That is because of two dynamics: first, the nose of the bullet, which is now soft lead, will rupture on impact, peeling backward, almost blooming like a flower. Second, from within, the bored-out center has left the whole far more fragile; it will atomize in the violence of the explosion. Expect massive brain damage if the round hits the brain.
Next we take that doctored bullet and reload it in a case for shooting at Dr. No. But wait! We threw out the Mannlicher-Carcano case and its powder. Why, we have a dressed-up bullet with no place to go. Or do we?
Here’s the key: we reload that bullet into the case of a cartridge called the.264 Winchester Magnum!
How is such a thing possible? Stop and think, Commander Bond. The 6.5 mm Italian cartridge is simply measured in metric-system terminology: 6.5 mm equals.264 inches diameter, or close enough for government work, like assassinations. The Carcano bullet fits neatly into the.264 Win Mag case and produces a new cartridge, the hybrid.264/Carcano, which slides neatly into the chamber of a.264 Winchester Magnum rifle. In the interest of making this less boring, I simplify. You might have to make slight adjustments to the hybrid cartridge or the rifle to get it to fit. The actual diameter of the 6.5 is.267, three thousandths of an inch larger than the barrel diameter of the.264 rifle. That might make a difference in the cartridge fit to the chamber, but it doesn’t require surgery to fix, only minor alterations. For example, you might turn the Carcano bullet on a lathe against a hard blade held at a precision measurement and whittle it down three thousandths of an inch. Or you might “neck turn” the cartridge casing, meaning you mount the shell in a fixture and rotate it by hand against a blade set to a particular depth. Benchrest shooters do this all the time, because manufactured cartridge shells are frequently inconsistent in their neck thickness, and in that game, regularity-ZZZZZZZZ! Wake up, Bond! More coffee, damn you! — is the key to accuracy.
What have you accomplished?
First of all, you’ve made the bullet, now explosive, much more lethal. So what? It was lethal to begin with, as any object that strikes a human skull at over 3,000 feet per second will result in death. The subject, I assure you, won’t notice the difference. He won’t be deader with one round than the other. There is no deader than dead.
More important, you’ve made the bullet more accurate. Not in itself, but now it can be fired in the Model 70 Winchester with, as mine has, a Unertl 10X Vulture scope, one of the best, if not the best, rifles currently manufactured in the United States (of course the idiots are changing it next year!). And absolutely the best scope. The reasons a rifle is accurate have to do with a variety of factors, all of which the Model 70 enjoys and the Mannlicher Model 38 does not: the precision fit of metal to metal and metal to wood; the crispness of trigger pull; the fit of the rifle to the human body; the precision with which the scope has been mounted to the receiver; the quality of the rifling in the barrel and the kind and grade of metal used in the barrel; the quality of the glass in the optical system. Maybe there are others that I have forgotten, but you get the picture: the shooter with the Model 70 has extraordinary technical advantages over the shooter with the 38, and this is before the quality of the shooters, their experience, their natural levels of talent, their strength, health, stamina, and mental preparedness, are factored in.
You’ve made the bullet invisible. You say, do you not, Commander Bond, sir, You’re mad! I am not at all.
Here is another key point: by making sure the bullet explodes upon striking the skull and renders itself into fragments and powder eviscerating the cerebral vault, you guarantee that it cannot be read for rifle signature! That is, no piece will be recovered that will bear any marks from the lands and grooves on the interior of the barrel it was fired through. It cannot reveal its fraudulence. It cannot be linked to Felix Leiter’s barrel, but it cannot be linked to any other barrel either. From the physical evidence available, there is no suggestion or inference that you, Commander Bond, were firing your fine Model 70 at almost the same time poor Leiter was firing his Eye-tie eyesore.
Don’t the witnesses hear two shots when there was only one?
Not at all. You’ve seen-good God, Bond, you’ve starred in! — movies with silencers, no? Of all the Hollywood gun gimmicks, those devices are the most accurately portrayed. No, they do not work on revolvers, and no, they do not sound like a midget sneezing. But a suppressor-the real name-can blunt and diffuse the sound of the report considerably, so that people around it are unable to associate it with a gunshot and equally unable to say from what direction it emanated. Your Yank colleagues in the war, the OSS, fixed them on High Standard.22s and Thompson and Sten submachine guns and used them creatively; you Brits had a gizmo called the Welrod pistol, same thing. I’ll spare you the long description, since I know you’re drifting, drifting, drifting, but a bolt-action rifle is admirably suited for such a device, which consists of a tube attached to the muzzle. That tube contains a series of baffles or waffles within it, a series of chambers and holes so that the expanding gas is slowed down as it wends its way through the thing, until it escapes with a fizzle rather than a pop. Any competent machinist can put one together for you in a day; or you can obtain a professionally manufactured item, as they’ve been available to certain markets for a long time. It so happens that in my collection, I have a Schalldaempher Type 3, the 8 mm silencer the Luftwaffe paratroopers used during the war. They’re pretty rare, but a friend of a friend wanted to move one he’d brought back and. . you can guess the rest of the story. Out of curiosity and enthusiasm, I went ahead and machined a steel application to fit it to my Model 70 so that affixing the German device was a snap, even with supersonic ammunition, which emits a crack downrange but not at the shooting site.
Oh, I sense your suspicion. It all turns, does it not, the deception, the getaway, the mission itself, on that bullet. How do you know the bullet will explode? In gun events, something always goes wrong, something anomalous or untoward happens, nothing can be predicted with 100 percent confidence, it’s too big a risk, and on and on and on.
I left the best for last. This.264 Winchester Magnum isn’t just any cartridge. It’s brand-new from New Haven, a cartridge designed specifically for western plains game shooting-that is, long-distance shots at antelope and mulie way out beyond the briar patch, possibly in the next county. It shoots flat, it shoots fast. It shoots faster-I’m talking about bullet velocity-than any bullet known to man. The metallurgy of the Model 70 is such that, unlike the 38, it can stand up to the highest pressures of modern chemistry that the geniuses at Olin can conjure. That means our doctored bullet will strike Dr. No not at the velocity of a Mannlicher Carcano, which is just under 2,000 feet per second, but at the full vel of the.264, which is over 3,000 feet per second. It will explode! It is guaranteed by the laws not of man but of God: that is, the laws of physics.
And still more. If it leaves any trace amounts of metal in the destroyed head of Dr. No, and the autopsy doctor manages to salvage them, the only possible test will be metallurgical. By looking with an electronic device, they will be able to determine by comparison with other metallic samples what kind of bullet felled Dr. No. It will prove undisputedly that Dr. No was shot with a 6.5 Mannlicher-Carcano bullet manufactured by the Western Cartridge Company and no other.
I’ve appended a drawing to chart these developments.
I want a nightful of martinis for all this labor, Bond, and the sooner the better.
There was no signature, of course. I read it over and over, then burned it and its envelope in the fireplace, having committed the salient points to mind. I had trouble sleeping, I was so excited, but eventually, the long day of travel caught up with me and I drifted off.
The next morning at breakfast, I said to Peggy, “Sweetie, I think we should take a weekend in Virginia. I haven’t seen Lon in several years, and I’m feeling bad about it.”
Peggy said, “But Will’s team is playing Gilman in Baltimore on Saturday. He’ll be so disappointed if we miss it.”
“Oh, gosh,” I said. “Oh, I hate to disappoint him. On the other hand, Lon is family also, and I feel that we haven’t seen him in too long. It’ll be okay with Will; he’ll understand?”
Peggy knew when I had my mind set on something, and she also knew my defying her was so rare that when I did so, it was for a purpose. She relented. Such was the rarely deployed but nevertheless uncontested power of the husband, father, and provider in those days. I called Lon that afternoon-it was an easy call from cousin to cousin, sure not to rouse any suspicion from Mr. Angleton’s theoretical eavesdroppers, so no subterfuge was required-and told him we’d be down for a visit and dinner on Saturday. That night I had a man-to-man with Will. He was never a rebellious or resentful son. He understood, and by that time, the boys were old enough to be left alone, so there were no difficulties with last-minute babysitters.
I had one last task other than convincing Lon to join my little crusade. That was to recruit a third member to the team. If Lon was to handle the shooting and I the driving and logistics as well as running Alek, I needed an action guy who could navigate us out of trouble’s way and handle with aplomb any unseen difficulties or tough stuff that could come up (though I had planned assiduously to avoid that) while Lon and I concentrated on our task. I needed someone who was a field agent’s field agent, slick, quick-thinking, tough, with a burglar’s guts. Naturally, I chose a burglar.
I will call him Jimmy Costello, not his real name, because he has sons alive in the Washington, D.C., area, all, like mine, prosperous and well-regarded members of the community. I want no shame affixed to them on account of their father’s deeds. Years later, I wrote the middle one a letter that got him in to Yale; it was the least I could do for Jimmy Costello.
Jimmy was in his forties by this time and well known in the intelligence trade. Though we assumed he had learned the trade on the far side of the law, he had somehow turned to the side of us angels and now worked strictly for the Agency or the Agency’s friends, some other agencies, and a number of divorce lawyers. He may have been the best burglar in Washington. He could get into any place because he had a natural genius for locks. I’m guessing he was raised in the locksmith’s trade, as no one could pick up so much any other way. He simply looked at a lock and understood how it worked, and carried with him always a set of picks and, in a matter of seconds, could spring any secured door. Safes took a little longer, but not much. He had no fear of heights or of walking at midnight along the precipice of an embassy roof, gymnastically lowering himself to a window under the eaves, hanging by one hand from a gutter and with the other popping the lock, then propelling himself through the open orifice. Our embassy section used him to plant microphones and wire, and with his nimble fingers, he could loot an inner sanctum of its secrets in a matter of minutes, then be gone and leave no trace of having been there, and from that night on, we were a third party to any discussions between Igor and Boris and their supervisor just in from Ye Olde Country. I don’t know if we used the intelligence cleverly or not, but we got it cleverly. The FBI used him against both Sov agents and the Italian mafia; divorce lawyers against wealthy philanderers, so that after the proceedings, they were not so wealthy. He could have stolen the recipe to Coca-Cola for the Pepsi people if it had come to that, and he could have gotten us the bomb diagrams if we hadn’t beaten the reds to it.
The best thing about Jimmy was his loyalty. He could be counted on. He was a stand-up guy; all you have to do is look at the history of the Irish to understand how that attribute ran in his veins. He would have kept mum to the point of torture; it was bred into him by long centuries on the bog plotting against my ancestors, and leaving them dead more often than not, and never snitching when caught, out of fear of facing the eternal hell of the traitor. That he would never be; that he never was.
His other skill-it goes with his profile-was his charming brazenness or possibly his brazen charm. He had that Irish gift of conviction, and when the sneak wouldn’t do, bullshit would. He could talk you out of your underpants and send you home happy. I suppose he was a complete psychopath, but he was our psychopath, and that was exactly what the proposition demanded.
I met him in the bar of the Willard, where he hung out every night when he wasn’t working.
“Jimmy, me boy,” I said in my phoniest movie brogue, a joke between us.
“I am,” he said, affecting his own version of a brogue, which he’d probably learned from Bing Crosby movies, “and how’s his eminence Mr. Meachum?” He always called me Mr. Meachum, as if I were of the castle and he of the cottage, and no amount of argument could convince him to do differently.
“Don’t know about his eminence,” I said, “but I’m fine.” It was an old line, but he pretended otherwise and laughed.
We exchanged banal chitchat for a few minutes, each consciously eyeing the room to see that no known adversaries happened to be there. When we were satisfied that we were publicly in private, we proceeded to business.
“Might you have a few days toward the end of the month for your old pal Meachum?”
“I might, though I am busy this time of year. Is there any flexibility?”
“Alas, no. My sales plan is cued to something I cannot control. It would require your presence in the city of Dallas, Texas-our expense, of course-from the nineteenth to the twenty-fifth. We’ll stay at the Adolphus-”
“A first-class joint.”
“Indeed, it is. I need a trusted fellow at my side while I deal with problems as they may come up. Someone smart, tough, fast. He’s not available, so I thought of you.”
He laughed. “They do keep James Bond busy these days, do they not?” James Bond was on everybody’s mind then.
“Never have trusted the Brits, Jimmy,” I said. “Wouldn’t take him if I could have him. Give me a son of the auld sod, with a twinkle in his eye and steel in his fists.”
He liked the compliment, even if we both seemed to be playing movie roles. “So, Dallas?” he said. “Not your usual sales area, Mr. Meachum.”
He was drinking Glenlivet on the rocks, myself Pinch and soda.
“Duty takes us where it takes us, Jimmy. I’d rather it were Paris myself. I do pay well, and if there’s hardship involved and some schedule shuffling, then I’ll pay for that; a kind of schedule-rearrangement bonus, as it were.”
“Well, Mr. Meachum, yours is my own favorite firm, and continuing in their favor is definitely in my interest, so aside from travel expenses, I’ll not charge more, and I will see you where you want me in Dallas at any time on the nineteenth.”
Simple as that, I got Jimmy, and as with Lon’s genius and talent for rifles, what happened could not have happened without his contribution. He was always a rogue and hero, the bravest of the brave, the truest of the true. You see, we weren’t monsters. I suppose that’s the lesson. You’ve been taught that if we existed, we were the vilest of the vile, snatching greatness from the young prince and sending our nation on its way to hell. But to us, we were professionals, patriots, and men of honor. We weren’t in it for the money, or to sell more Bell helicopters and McDonnell-Douglas fighter jets, but to save lives and lead the nation through the swamp to the hilltop. Besides, we were only going to kill a screwball right-wing general.