The lawyers-Adams’s in Hartford, Connecticut, and Bob’s, actually a recruited FBI surrogate in Boise, Idaho-dickered for a couple of weeks on issues that lawyers find fascinating: share of profits (equal), share of expenses (equal), no first-class travel (a major concession for Marty), equal exposure in the case of lawsuits for libel, misrepresentation, the expropriation of intellectual property, and so forth.
Meanwhile, Swagger heard from Kathy Reilly in Moscow that his friend and ally Stronski had been released from the hospital, with no charges filed, and had promptly disappeared, figuring he was on an Izzy hit list. A day later, Stronski himself checked in: “Am fine, brother. You saved my life. One second later on that shot, Stronski is dead. I owe all. See you soon.”
Then word came from the “lawyer” that the contract, basically boilerplate with a filigree or two, was okay. Swagger arranged to have it sent to him at the Adolphus, where he stayed in the open as Jack Brophy. Richard was witness to his signing, and it was sent off to Marty for countersigning along with Bob’s hastily written notebook, recording all his late-night ideas, for Marty’s perusal.
The word came back quickly, via an e-mail.
“This is brilliant. Much more than I expected, and it seems to dovetail exactly with what I have suspected but was unable to articulate. I especially like your focus on Oswald’s behavior in the two hours of freedom he had left. It seems you’ve noticed things nobody else has, and all point to a conspiracy of the sort that could easily involve our friends, the happy cousins Hugh and Lon and maybe a few others. Let me come to Dallas and meet with you, and I will tell you what my contribution to our cause is to be. I think you’ll be impressed. French Room again. On me! No need to split expenses on this one, I’m so happy!”
They met in the French Room three days later, ate more sliced carrots, filigreed celery, thigh of rabbit marinated for three weeks in squid broth, and plum-banana tart under a glaze of honey and strawberry, all to Marty’s narration, which was complete to all apostrophes and something he called an apercu. There wasn’t even a Richard Monk along to absorb some of Marty’s excess attention and keep the conversation from becoming too Marty to bear.
Finally, Marty relented and got to his tale over the last morsel of bunny.
“Suppose,” he started, “Lon Scott-after all, not a sociopath or natural-born killer by any means-returned to his home in Virginia on November 24, 1963, with two pieces of luggage. One contained clothes. The other contained a Model 70 Winchester rifle that he had used to put an exploding bullet into the head of John F. Kennedy.
“Like any man who’s never killed, Lon feels contrition, regret, doubt, self-loathing. This can but double, triple, multiply grotesquely as the week wears on, and after it the months and the years, and the man he’s killed is declared in the popular culture a secular saint, a martyred king-Camelot! — and, finally, a demigod. Lon cannot bear to confront the instrument by which the deed was done, for that is to acknowledge that he was the one who did it; and so he commands a servant to stuff it in a closet somewhere. There it sits and sits and sits.
“Let us consider such an object, the case in which the rifle is stored. It’s leather, possibly from Abercrombie and Fitch, about a yard long and half a yard wide, able to contain the two parts of the rifle, stock and action/scope, plus the tube of the suppressor, in parallel on velvet cushion. There’s plenty of room for the bolt, for the screws, maybe a two- or three-piece cleaning rod, a pack of patches, a brush, a small container of Hoppe’s 9, a small bottle of lubricating oil, and a rag or chamois for mopping up.
“Maybe in the case as well are two or three extra rounds, that is, of the counterfeit iteration on which you have such provocative insights. Suppose, further, a metallic residue could be removed carefully from the uncleaned barrel, and that residue, by neutron-activation hocus-pocus, would link it to only one kind of bullet at the exclusion of all others, the Mannlicher-Carcano 6.5 manufactured by Western Cartridge Company in the mid-fifties. That’s the point, if I understand it, right, Jack?”
“That’s right, Marty.”
“Let us further allow that in those days they always put a luggage destination tag on every suitcase, which one can fairly guess bore the initials of the ultimate destination-in his case, Richmond-and wrapped it around the handle, and there was some kind of adhesive or stickum by which the two ends were joined. And suppose they were always dated. And Lon’s name and address would have been validated by another tag.
“We have this object, linked by dated tags to Dallas, November 22, 1963, never opened, because Lon never again used or touched the rifle. It is physical proof that Lon was in Dallas that weekend; Lon, one of the greatest shots in the world. We have physical proof that he had a rifle capable of firing a bullet into the president. We have several samples of the cartridge, possibly with Lon’s fingerprints. We have the rifle itself with his fingerprints or DNA traces on it. The barrel of the rifle will contain metallic traces that can be linked metallurgically to the bullet that assassinated the president. Your Honor, I rest my case: whoever has possession of that case has physical proof of the conspiracy to murder the thirty-fifth president of the United States and, by fair inference, the identity of the man who pulled the trigger. Such a discovery would force a reopening of the case, and reopened, the case would lead straight to wherever it would lead, perhaps to the CIA cousin Hugh Meachum. The jig, as they say, would be up. Do I have your interest yet, Jack?”
Swagger stared at Marty intently. His mind was abuzz. Was this bullshit, a setup, or had the silly fool stumbled on exactly what he’d said and had the key to the whole goddamn thing?
“It’s very interesting,” said Swagger. “Are you saying-”
“Let’s continue. As I’ve said, Lon doesn’t like to look at it, so it’s stuffed away somewhere, in a closet or a storage room. In a few years, his paranoia gets the best of him, and he does some research and then clumsily fakes his own death and takes up a new persona. He’s not a professional, and that’s why it will be easy for anyone to learn that ‘John Thomas Albright’ is Lon Scott, cousin to the mysterious Hugh.
“After he ‘dies,’ a lot of Lon Scott’s shooting material-his beautiful rifles, his notebooks, the drafts of the articles he wrote for the gun press, his reloading and experimental records, all that is left to the National Rifle Association, and some of it is displayed in the National Firearms Museum, first in D.C. and later in Fairfax, Virginia.
“As for the gun case, it is incriminating, so he wouldn’t give it to the NRA. When he ‘died’ and became Albright, he took that with him, unopened. It was at his new very fine home in North Carolina when he died for real, this time as Albright, in 1993.
“To whom would he leave the case? He had no living relatives, no children, there were no women in his life; maybe Hugh? Maybe a faithful servant? A loyal lawyer? Another shooter? Another shooter’s son?
“Hmmm. Let’s go with that one. Maybe this son dumped it in an attic, having no interest in it but unwilling to dispose of it. Some years later, he was contacted by a writer. Not a real writer but one of those fellows whose obsession with the arcana of firearms impels him to pen volumes like Winchester, An American Tradition and The Guns of Ruger and so forth, and they are such beautiful volumes and he has such great connections in New York that he can get big firms to publish them. Maybe this writer has tumbled to the fact that famous shooter Lon Scott, mysteriously dead in 1964, became John Thomas Albright, famous shooter, who lived another thirty years before dying in a hunting accident in Arkansas. What an interesting life the fellow had, even absent the minor detail of November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas. He’s decided to write the biography.
“As I say, this writer contacts the son of another shooter who has unwittingly inherited all the John Thomas Albright material, and he sells the young man on his project. The young man agrees to turn over all the stuff-the gun case, a few other rifles, the Albright manuscripts, whatever is left, everything for and by and of John Thomas Albright-for research purposes. The deal is that when the book is published, the stuff will be returned to the son, he will donate the papers to the NRA, and sell whatever other goods remain at auction, and the provenance of ownership by Albright/Scott will make the stuff very valuable. Everybody wins: the writer gets his book, the son gets the profits of the sale, John Thomas Albright/Lon Scott gets his place in history.
“The writer is in receipt of the material at his domicile, and the first thing he does is make a catalog. That’s when he discovers the gun case, unopened, and he’s about to tear into it when he sees the date on the tag and the originating city. Ding-dong! Something goes off in his head. He puts it down, his own mind racing.
“He thinks and he thinks and he thinks. He sees how Lon Scott, later known as John Thomas Albright, could have been the Kennedy triggerman. That would explain the otherwise baffling, clumsy midlife identity change. He’s sitting on the scoop of the century. But he doesn’t know enough. He reads books, he tries to master the gears and flywheels of the event, he tries to figure angles and so forth. He realizes he needs help. So he goes to Dallas and discreetly looks around. He locates Richard Monk, who is, after all, a responsible figure in the assassination community, and after they bond, the writer tells him his story and admits he can’t handle it himself, he needs a better investigator, someone he can trust, someone with practical ballistics knowledge and experience, etc., etc. And that is where we are right now.”
Swagger said, “Wow. That’s a lot for one bite.”
“Oh, there’s more,” said Marty. He reached under the table to remove a briefcase, opened it, and produced two items. The first, unrolled, was an X-ray. It clearly delineated a Model 70 broken down into action and Monte Carlo stock, a tube that had to be a Maxim silencer, a disassembled cleaning rod, a few spare brushes, two small bottles, and three cartridges of oddly blunt configuration. The second was a photograph that displayed the sealed travel tag in close-up, with its inscription dated November 24, 1963, and its Braniff DFW-RIC route indicator and Lon’s name and signature and phone number, MOuntaincrest 6-0427.
Swagger’s response was explicit. “Do not open it. Do NOT open it.”
“Of course not,” said Marty.
“Is it secure?”
“It’s in my gun vault in Connecticut. In the country house.”
Swagger thought, feeling overwhelmed: Is this it? Does this idiot actually have it? He could only come up with security-arrangement questions. “Is the house guarded professionally?”
“No, but it’s locked in a vault that guarded my mother’s diamonds and my father’s rare guns for sixty years without a problem.”
“Okay,” he said. “This could be big. This could be it. We have to proceed carefully now.”
“I agree.”
“I think you should hire a security company to patrol your house. Or move it to some highly protected site.”
“Jack, I’m in the middle of nowhere. And nobody knows a thing except the two of us. No one is going to steal it, I guarantee.”
Swagger nodded. “You’re right. I do get paranoid.”
“Understandable. This is exciting.”
“I have to see it. I just have to look at it, to have a sense of it, so it’s settled in my own mind that it’s there. Oh, wait. Let’s get a handle on all this. Have you examined the provenance? Can we determine that the gun itself is linked to Lon outside of the case?”
“Doesn’t his name on the case make that point rather eloquently?”
“Yes, but if we could link the gun going to Lon, Lon possessing it, via an outside confirmation, the argument is so much stronger. Any idea where Lon got it?”
“This is the sort of practical detail I never think of. No, it didn’t occur to me. I’ve just kept it, trying to figure out my next step.”
“Aren’t the Winchester records all at the Cody Firearms Museum?” asked Bob.
“Yes, but no. There was a fire in the Winchester plant, and all the modern records were burned-among the casualties, all those on the Model 70. But Lon didn’t get his rifles directly from Winchester. He got them from the Abercrombie and Fitch gun room on Madison Avenue in New York City, where all the American swells got theirs. Teddy Roosevelt and his sons, Richard Byrd, Charles Lindbergh, Ernest Hemingway, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, probably through Lyndon Johnson, all the fancy big game hunters who went to Africa for short happy lives in the fifties. Abercrombie was purveyor to the aristocrats, the celebs, the nabobs, the millionaires for nearly a century. They went bankrupt in ’77, and the current outfit just has the brand name.” Marty snorted. “Now it’s a mall clothing company for twenty-year-olds with actual abdominals.”
“But the firearms records?” asked Bob. “Were they destroyed?”
“No,” said Marty. “Now that you mention it, they’re in a warehouse in Rutherford, New Jersey. Too valuable to throw out, I suppose, yet not valuable enough to catalog, index, and display.”
“Can we get in?”
“I do happen to know Tom Browner, who was the last manager of the room. Though he’s old and retired, I know he has some sway still. But Jack, it’s not like you can give a name to a clerk and he comes back with the files ten minutes later. It’s a bloody mess, years dumped into other years, shipping documents spread everywhere, correspondence half there and half not. Finding Lon in that mess would be like cleaning the stables.”
“I have cleaned some stables in my time,” said Swagger.
“I see it would make you happier to try. Maybe you’ll succeed. All right, I’ll call Tom Browner tomorrow and see what he has to say. When will you go?”
“Ah, better leave it open. Sometime soon. Early next week, say. Rutherford, New Jersey. Anyhow, when I get back, I’ll call you.”
“Do you want to make it one trip and go from-”
“No, New Jersey will wreck me for a week. I’ll need recovery, believe me. So we should set up a date for me to see the case in a couple of weeks.”
“Excellent,” said Marty.
“It was your idea to go to New Jersey?” asked Nick, in Seattle’s Best number eight, this one in Oak Cliff.
“Yeah,” said Swagger. “But it could easily be anticipated. It would have to be done sooner or later. You’d think Marty, with his connections up there already, would want to do it. But he let me come up with it and volunteer to do it, because he wants me to believe in the authenticity of the thing on my own. If I find anything in the Abercrombie files, that nails it.”
“On the other hand, it commits you to a known place and time, and if this is a setup, that’s where it could go down. Jack Brophy walks out of the warehouse into four guns, and that’s the end of Jack Brophy.”
“Sure. But my call is that neither Marty nor Richard have the stone cojones to get involved in a hit. Not their part of the forest. I don’t think they could hold it together mentally, setting something like that up. There’d be tells all the way through. Marty’d be sweating like a pig, and Richard couldn’t stop swallowing, licking his lips, avoiding eye contact. They’re not suited for the violent end of the game.”
“Maybe they don’t know. Maybe whoever’s pulling the string is lying to them, telling them it’s some other kind of scam; maybe they’re expendable to this guy, who, after all, is fighting for his life, his legacy, his family name, if he’s who you think he is and has done what you think he’s done.”
“But how can I not go? If I’m who I say I am, I have to go, or the whole deception falls apart and we’re left with nothing and I have to sit around and wait for Hugh to find me.”
“You tell me what to do.”
“I have no suggestions. Pray for luck, how’s that?”
“Okay, then I’ll make a suggestion. You set up your appointment. On that day, I’ll have a team from New York in the parking lot. No big deal, plainclothes, but with enough signs of serious operators on-site. Overcoats concealing long guns, vests under the coats, snail-cord earpieces, tactical shades, bloused boots, that sort of thing. If Hugh has people, the last thing he’ll want is a gunfight in the parking lot. They’ll take a powder fast, and there won’t be any action.”
“Okay,” said Bob. “It sounds good. You can pay for that?”
“It’s under the James Aptapton investigation and the Sergei Bodonski investigation. Capping Bodonski wasn’t enough; we have to find out who let the contract. It’s legit law enforcement initiative.”
“Great,” said Swagger. “I’m appreciative.”
“If we can take down the contract taker and he’s someone big, maybe even a once-dead Hugh Meachum, then we don’t have to go to JFK up front. And once we bag him, we can work for proof, and eventually, it gets out.”
“Not bad,” said Swagger. “There would be your career finisher. Your-what do they call it? Your capstone.”
“Just,” said Nick, “so it’s not your-what do they call it? Oh, yeah. Your tombstone.”
Like many Americans, I’m not sure if I saw Alek get his in real time, live on the network, or if I saw it a few minutes later, when the other networks ran the tape. I suppose it doesn’t matter.
I’d missed his brief encounter with the press Friday night, since I’d been ingloriously passed out. But I’d seen it on tape, as they had to fill the time when nothing was happening, and what I’d seen had seemed classical Alek. He was scruffy, as usual, hair a mess, and the shiner from the punch in the eye he’d taken earlier that day from a Dallas cop hadn’t subsided. He was surly, squint-eyed, radiating animus. The cops shoved him up on a riser, and immediately, a surge of newspeople surrounded him, shoving mikes in his face, yelling questions. Bulbs flashed; he winced and got to speak only a few words before the cops hauled him up to Homicide.
“I didn’t kill anybody,” he said, or words to that effect, and I suppose to him, it made perfect sense. He had to know he hadn’t fired the fatal shot. It would be a while before I worked out what had happened to him up there, but he must have seen the president’s head take its hit, and he knew in his feral way that there was a game going on, that he’d been played for a sucker and was now somebody’s prey, and off he went.
That’s why his cry of “I didn’t kill anybody” as he was taken away haunted me. What you heard in that plaintive tone was self-belief. He knew he hadn’t murdered anybody-it follows that if he was a setup, he had concluded that his shooting of the Dallas police officer was pure self-defense-and you hear it in that yell.
The next morning, after an alcohol-free, somewhat redemptive sleep, I returned to the television. It seemed all the TV people were grouchy too; they’d been working long hours without sleep, chasing witnesses and rumors, dealing with bureaucratic recalcitrance and ass-covering, shoved this way and that by defiantly unempathetic Dallas cops, being screamed at for being slow by network headquarters and screamed at louder for getting things wrong. What a life. I wouldn’t give it to a dog.
As I fought for clarity with my first cup of room-service coffee, I could sense the irritation everywhere. We were now in the basement of the police station, to witness Alek’s transfer from the supposedly vulnerable jail to one that offered more protection. To that order, an armored car had been arranged, so that only a bazooka rocketeer could kill Alek, and not even in Texas were bazookas legal.
But the transfer had fallen behind schedule. Things almost always do, don’t they? The reporters had been milling around listlessly for about an hour, and when anyone “reported,” it was time-filling banality, updates on the timing of the transfer or explanations on why it was late. Occasionally, they’d cut to Washington, where again, nothing was happening. They might run some old tape, to remind us what this was all about, not that we’d ever forget. Nobody did or could distinguish themselves under those circumstances, and I stayed with it only because it occupied all the channels. I’d decided to take a shower, get up, go for a walk, find a nice restaurant, head back, maybe watch some football-the NFL had decided, amid much controversy, not to cancel its slate of games. Tomorrow I’d fly back to somewhere under my fake identity, then to Washington under my real one, and rejoin the human race and my family.
Suddenly, on the television, it was as if a wave of energy had crackled through the black-and-white image of lolling, sullen reporters. Our correspondent-I have no idea who it was-informed us that Lee Harvey Oswald, indicted for the murder of Officer J. D. Tippit and the only suspect in the murder of John F. Kennedy, was on his way.
Why do I relive this incident? Surely any who read these pages will have seen it for himself. There’s no suspense; it turns out the same each time the tape is run, and as movie special effects have gotten almost too realistic, so the almost chaste, bloodless death by gunshot of this appalling man is of little consequence to anybody. That is the view from a comfortable perch in our present. Then it was all different: nobody knew what the next big twist in our giant American narrative would be. Nobody could have predicted it, not even I, who had made the unpredictable happen two days earlier. Nobody had any idea that Mr. Deus Ex Machina was about to introduce himself.
I saw the surly Alek emerge from a door at the rear of the crowded room. He was shackled to a cartoon figure out of the old west, some sort of gigantic cowpoke in a smallish Stetson-it was like mine, though light where mine was gray-and what had to be called a westerner’s suit, apparently khaki. It was Captain Fritz of the Dallas Homicide Squad, but he looked to our uneducated eyes like a foursquare avatar of Texas Ranger justice. He stood out in a sea of dark suits and snap-brim hats, as if intent on representing the best of Texas to a shocked world. Next to him, Alek jauntily, perhaps even smugly, set the pace. He’d been allowed to clean up and change clothes and wore a black sweater over some kind of sport shirt. He grasped his hands at his waist and, for some reason, projected a “Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up” sense of self-possession.
I have to say that the quality of the broadcast was exceedingly fine. Every detail stood out, almost as if iridescent; the lines were bold and sharp; the depth of the image was startling. I don’t think I ever saw anything so clearly in my life.
Alek never knew what hit him. Deus ex machina hit him. Fate hit him. Retribution hit him. The fellow Ruby stepped from nowhere and jammed the pistol-a gangster’s snub-nose, so appropriate to a strip club owner-into his side. I don’t think there was a flash, but the report was enough to carry the news.
The famous photo almost does the scene a disservice. It freezes and therefore distorts. You can see Captain Fritz bending backward in surprise, Ruby hunched like a boxer who’s delivered a solid gut hit, and Alek, mouth open in pain, eyes wincing. In reality, it was so damned fast, like a man slipping under the waves in the grasp of an undertow; he’s there and then he’s gone in the flashing of a nerve synapse.
Then chaos, disbelief, the whirls of spinning figures, as people fled the shot, Alek pulled Captain Fritz down with him, and various officers leaped on Ruby and shoved him to the ground. If the famous cry “Jack, you son of a bitch” was uttered, I missed it in my disbelief. I sat back and watched the melancholy play end. Alek, uncuffed, slid onto a stretcher and wheeled out, fast. Ruby pulled away. The reporters tried to make sense of it, interviewing each other to make certain the gigantic plot twist they’d just seen had actually happened.
I got a glimpse of Alek’s colorless, expressionless, perhaps breathless face as they wheeled him out and knew he was a goner. You don’t come back from that one, for I’d gotten a good fix on the bullet’s diagonal trajectory through innards, and I knew the violence it would do to the sweetbread of mysterious but crucial organs that the middle of the body conceals.
Perhaps you’ll think better of me for it, but my first thought was sadness at his death. Another man dead of violence in America, as if I hadn’t been the one who killed the last man dead of violence in America. It seemed like a contagion. You sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind, and I had to wonder when my whirlwind would come.
I’d known him and loathed him, as all did, while at the same time understanding that he was nevertheless human, like the rest of us. Did he “deserve” it? I suppose so; Jack Ruby thought so, and a few days later, I’d hear my oldest son say, “I’m glad they got him.”
Alek was a jerk, he was a fool, he was utterly incapable of doing a single thing right, but he was human and died as all too many humans do, alone, in pain, abruptly.
It wasn’t until that night that it occurred to me, amid the hysterical news reporting, that again we’d caught another gigantic break. Luck does favor the bold, no question of it. Now that Alek’s lips were forever closed, there’d be no crazed stories of manipulations by cynical red spies who set him up and played him as a sucker. A myth wouldn’t spring forth-others did, of course, all patently incorrect-to tantalize the imaginative for decades to come. Books wouldn’t be written, not about the Red Master at least, nor movies made, nor TV series commissioned. All Alek’s secrets would be buried with him, and the narrative would shift its focus to this apparition out of Chicago Confidential, this fireplug-like gunman with his titillating connection to the demimonde and women with improbably large hair and breasts and arcs of eye shadow. I thought, You know what? I don’t have to learn a goddamn thing about Mr. Jack Ruby, and that’s okay with me.
I viewed the end of Alek in solitude, because Lon and Jimmy had already left, both of them early on Sunday the twenty-fourth.
I saw Lon before he was gone. I gave him Jimmy’s report and delivered the rifle. I watched him put the parts in the gun case. He seemed dolorous and depressed; I got little out of him. Jimmy awakened and came by, and the two embraced. Then Lon was gone, and Jimmy was off to pack for his later flight, and I was enmeshed in the Oswald denouement.
Jimmy always got it more than Lon did, and he was too professional to let it affect him. I couldn’t have known then that within six months Jimmy would be dead. Another Clandestine Services colleague enlisted him to do a routine wiretap insertion on an East-bloc embassy in Canada. It was a low-level, routine thing. But somehow he was spotted-a first-and a Mountie, of all people, saw his shadow in the alley and drew. Jimmy knew he couldn’t surrender and testify; it would embarrass too many people. He turned, and the Mountie fired one shot and Jimmy fell dead on the streets of Ottowa, the death addressed as “mysterious,” as in “Why was an American businessman messing about in the alleys behind the Czechoslovakian embassy, and why did he flee the Mountie?” Requiescat in pace, good friend, loyal operative, hero.
As for Lon, I knew I wouldn’t hear from him for a long time, until he worked some things out. If you are thinking, Danger Man, he was the only one who knew, why didn’t you have him eliminated? you’ve seen too many movies. The answer is, I don’t eliminate. I don’t even like the euphemism “eliminate” for “kill”; it sounds like cheap fiction. I am a moral murderer. I can kill only for policy. I cannot kill for personal reasons, such as to deter threat or to earn money or for the pleasure of removing one of the world’s annoyances. What will come will come, and I will accept it. If Lon went mad with guilt and decided to confess, then I would accept that decision and ride the horse where it took me. But the world wasn’t worth living in if you didn’t trust the people you loved, so I let it go at that, and that is what happened; I didn’t see him again until 1993, when he had a different name and a different identity.
I stayed in the hotel until Monday the twenty-fifth, ironically, the day we’d planned the General Walker job. I stayed even though I was anxious to get home to Peg and the boys and help them through the emotional crisis that they couldn’t have suspected was my invention. But I couldn’t hurry, because I didn’t want anyone associating my coming and going with events in Dallas, the overcaution of an overcautious mind. I returned, took a day off, then went back to work in an effort to impose workaday normality on the inchoate grief that was everywhere.
Since this is memoir and not autobiography, allow me to skip details of the healing of the family, the stunned disbelief in Clandestine, the sorrow of even Cord Meyer, the lugubrious mourning of Washington, D.C., that seemed to last through winter and into spring. You’re familiar with the iconic images of the period, no doubt, the lasting one for me being the prancing of the riderless horse, Black Jack, with its single boot mounted backward in the stirrup. If I suggest, horribly, that I felt grief for the man I had murdered, it’s still the truth. Never did I feel joy except that one moment when Jimmy showed up and I knew we had done it, and that was a professional’s pride in craft, not a hunter’s exhortation of bloodlust after the kill.
I should not have been surprised, moreover, at the way in which Kennedy, a mild failure of a president who had shown a little promise and the barest possibility of intellectual growth, immediately became a symbol of greatness and his time in office christened “Camelot” and held up to the popular imagination as a bright and shining moment of moral excellence, star glamour, vivid beauty, and so forth. Yet I was not sickened. It happens that way, and in my mid-thirties, I was barely mature enough to get it. Nothing makes the heart grow fonder than a nice bloody martyr’s death, real or imagined.
Dully, I soldiered on. I lost myself in the Agency and began working the terrible hours that I later became famous for. I wasn’t escaping guilt or voices in my head or the sad faces of my family upon my return or anything like that. I didn’t feel that I owed anything or that redemption was in order. It just seemed the way to go, and if I wasn’t already the section star, I shortly became one, and in time a legend. It’s amazing what a little hard work can do.
God love Peggy, who stayed true as an arrow’s flight through it all, the travel, the intensity of the effort, the distraction. She was the real soldier. She raised three fine boys through difficult American teenage years almost on her own, though when around, I did try to get to the football and lacrosse games. I owe a great debt of gratitude to my forebears, who had the perspicuity to invest wisely so that we were always comfortable, which helps immensely when the father figure is absent. Nobody ever wanted for anything, and I also hope and believe I taught by example that dedication to task is its own reward, even at some personal cost. I’m happy to say that each son surfed through the horrors of the sixties without a major wipeout-no drugs, no binges, no criminal misdemeanors, no bombs planted in police stations-and each has prospered off the work-ethic lesson that was their real inheritance from me. My deepest regret is that in my present circumstances, I’m not able to enjoy the pleasures of grandfatherhood.
It would be a time yet before we realized the obvious: that my attempt to game history was an utter and inglorious failure. You might say the patient died, but the operation wasn’t a success. Who on earth would have guessed that the pea-brained egomaniac Lyndon Johnson would have wanted, as I’d predicted, his domestic revolution at the same time, as I had not predicted, that he decided to win a major land war in Asia? No one could be so foolish, but he-egged on by the slippery, weaselly opportunings of the Kennedy hotshots he inherited (until they deserted him, as was easily foretold)-proved himself equal to the task. No vain murderous folly has ever been more obvious and more unstoppable. Many is the time I wished I knew where Lon was and that Jimmy was alive so the old unit could go into action on LIBERTY VALANCE II.
It was madness, and by ’66, at least, it was obvious that the American future in Vietnam was bleak and bloody, that countless boys would die or come home in that dreadful steel chair for nothing beyond the vainglory of a stubborn old man hellbent on proving he was right. The more the Kennedy slime deserted him, the more stubborn he became. The pusillanimous Robert McNamara was the worst, in my book, later stating that he stayed long after he had quit believing, thus sending men to their death for no other reason than his own reputation in a cause he cared nothing about. When it was over and he grew tired of not being invited to the good parties on the Vineyard, he mea culpa’ed his way back into the good graces of the liberals who’d abandoned old LBJ years earlier. It was truly scoundrel time in America, and with my peculiar burdens of guilt and responsibility, I found the going difficult.
My answer was to offer myself up to the war gods. It was to taunt irony, which those gods do seem to enjoy a good deal, and let them kill me in the war I had committed blasphemy to stop. I suppose I felt I owed it to my sons, and that better I go and die than one of them, though by the time the eldest was fodder for the draft, Nixon had ended it, the one thing I thank him for.
As for me: three tours, each of a year’s length, the first running agents and supervising operations, 1966-’67; the second, 1970-’71, overseeing psywar ops against the North from a bunker inside Tan Son Nhut; and, as I have stated, the third as head of the murder program, Operation Phoenix, 1972-’73. I tried hard to get myself killed, and the North Vietnamese tried hard to kill me, even putting a reward on my head and coming damned close enough times to turn my hair gray, but even they, clever little devils, were never able to bring it off. I am proud to say that within Langley, I was known as the coldest of the cold warriors and the hottest of the hot warriors. Though I was a murderer, I made it clear to any who cared, and that would probably be only myself, that I was not a coward.
Here I leave off personal narrative only to say that after Vietnam, I was able to return to Soviet affairs, my true calling, and again I prospered. I grew a reputation for ruthless rationality-applying the precepts of the New Criticism again-and developed keen judgment; a vast network of sources inside Russia; savvy, superb reflexes; and a taste for vodka in the Russian style, neat in a peasant’s glass. I could drink that stuff all night, until Peggy finally objected, at which point I quit cold and didn’t take another drop until after her death, when, you might say, I made up for lost time. I’m still making up.
In September 1964, after employing hundreds and working eighteen-hour days, the Warren Commission released its report. You might think I’d gobble it up, but I didn’t. I read the news coverage in the Times and the Post and realized that no matter how diligent the eight hundred investigators had been, they still hadn’t a clue what happened. I left it at that and continued my total immersion in Agency affairs.
I can’t say I was surprised, but at the same time, I was annoyed when the first of the anti-commission books came out in ’65, Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment. My annoyance had more to do with the temerity of Lane: how easy it is to sit back and carp and bitch at the efforts of people who work so hard under a mission mandate to find out the truth and allay national fears; how easy to make a fortune out of nitpicking. It seemed likely that the report contained errors, as anything run by the government on so large a scale and compiled at such breakneck speed is bound to. What was called for was a second edition with a few corrections, not the initiation of a culture that would swell grotesquely and display its leftist tendencies and true agenda, which was to protect the left from any involvement in spite of the fact that Alek was created solely in the hothouse culture of screwball Commie crackpotism, and to sow general distrust of a government bent on winning its war in Asia, damn the cost in treasure and lives.
I watched from Washington and even abroad as the conspiracy theories metastasized into a huge tumor on the body politic, all of the conspiracies shamefully absurd and manufactured out of nothing more than occasional coincidence or good-faith errors in the rush, all of them driven by animus and the profit motive. I detested them: lefty scavengers picking at the bones to make political points and dough. Did I read them? No, but I read the reviews assiduously to see if anyone came close. I did see the Dal-Tex Building mentioned here and there, usually as a shooting site in either the four-rifle theory or the seven-rifle theory. I noted that the police did apprehend a fellow there, though they let him go the next day. Still, it was clear that we’d pulled it off, as all the theories and speculations remained comically off the mark. They seemed to think it was a “big” conspiracy, because only a huge governmental agency would have the wherewithal to make such an event happen, which included secretly influencing the Secret Service and the White House and poor Alek in a concerto of such exquisite timing and psychological acuity that it resembled a Swiss watch set to music by Mozart.
I suppose I should temper my contempt with a little understanding. After all, I knew things that no investigator did. For example, it was possible that the down-range sonic boom caused by Lon’s shot, obeying some unpredictable acoustical logic, rebounded weirdly in the echo chamber that was Dealey Plaza and caused a pressure spike or a reverberation or even a report-like sound, which would strike many ears as coming from the grassy knoll. Perhaps it was that confusion that spawned the thousand-odd theories.
As well, I knew that the extreme velocity of the bullet Lon fired could have easily unleashed a fragment that would travel another three hundred feet and draw blood from James Tague, situated at the triple overpass. Mr. Tague’s facial wound has long baffled and tantalized theorists because the Mannlicher-Carcano, grievously underpowered and slow-moving, wouldn’t have had the oomph to reach out and touch a person so far away. The detonation of Lon’s bullet, moving at close to three thousand feet per second, could have easily accomplished such a trick.
Anyhow, we succeeded exactly because we weren’t a government operation, despite my connections. It was my op, and the team was bound in blood and loyalty, working without pay, risking all for a belief system. It was the kind of highly professional, small-scale enterprise that is the only hope of success, that needed no documentation, no vetting committees, no senior supervisors, no cliques with their concomitant resenters and traitors, no office politics, no budget, nothing. It could be betrayed only from the inside; no detective could unravel it because there wasn’t one clever enough to read the signs in the dust, which were too subtle. We were too smart for them, for at least fifty years. The next few days? We’ll see.
Anyhow, back from my first tour in Vietnam as a kind of hero, with a few empty weeks to fill before a tour in Moscow, I decided it was time to read the damned report and see what they had learned. By that time, my own internal turmoil had settled and I felt I’d be able to confront the findings in a more or less rational manner. My conclusions were mainly that the operation had succeeded brilliantly, particularly Lon’s solution of the ballistics issue. If you recall, our problem was to shoot a man with a bullet that would leave no trace of itself except in tiny metallic residue that could be traced only to a specific bullet identified by category and lot but not to any particular rifle. (I suppose if Lon’s rifle were located, traces of the same metal might be found within its barrel. But Lon-though we never discussed this, I’m sure it’s so-would have destroyed the rifle so that no such discovery was possible.)
That is exactly what Lon managed: the head-shot bullet exploded dynamically when it hit the skull, leaving no fragment large enough to be tracked to Alek’s rifle and therefore no fragment that could be ID’d as not from Alek’s rifle. The investigators did locate two fragments in the limousine large enough to examine under the electron microscope, but clearly, they were not from the head shot. They were both pristine, without any contamination by blood or brain tissue, as the FBI expert explained in detail during his testimony. He also testified that, although fragments are generally hard to relate to a particular rifle, these two, one twenty-one grains, the other forty-four grains, did bear marks that related them to Alek’s rifle. The only explanation for their presence is that they were fragments from Alek’s first missed shot.
As I see it, he fired wretchedly, coming off a mistake that I will describe shortly, and the bullet (other testimony buttresses this argument) hit the curb immediately behind or adjacent to the limousine. Since the angle of refraction is always less than the angle of reflection, when the bullet tore itself to pieces against the hard stone, its “cloud” of fragments was projected in a conelike shape that almost perfectly intercepted the vehicle a few feet away, all of this in micro-time. Some think that one fragment hit the president in the scalp, stinging him. Maybe so, maybe not, but one hit the windshield from the inside, cracking it, and that fragment bounced downward and to the left, where it was found the next day by FBI searchers. Another fragment also landed there, but no one can identify the trajectory, other than to say that the energies released by explosions are madly random.
We know the two frags found in the car couldn’t have come from Lon’s rifle, because of the rifling marks already mentioned, but also because of the geometry of the head shot. It is not particularly enjoyable to focus on such a morbid topic, but in the interest of truth, I shall go onward. The detonation took place in the upper right-hand quadrant of the president’s skull, above his ear (suggesting, among other things, the left-to-right axis of Lon’s shot, given our position to the left of the sniper’s-nest corner; LHO’s theoretical shot would have created a necessarily right-to-left axis, which would have exploded out of JFK’s left-hand quadrant, maybe above his left eye). The salient point is that, given the physics of the “explosion,” all those fragments would have spewed at high energy from the right-hand upper quadrant of the skull along that axis, carrying metallic debris and brain tissue to the right, out of the car; there’s no way the widely documented head shot, as witnessed eventually by the whole world, would have deposited fragments radically twenty full feet to the left, and downward, no less, to the carpet near the pedals, where those two pieces were found.
My one criticism of the report is that its investigators quickly came to believe in the single-gunman theory. Lane was right about one thing: it was a rush to judgment. Though they worked hard and honorably, that precept framed their findings, shaping them, perhaps only at the unknowable subconscious level. Had they remained open to theories outside their own invented box, they might have seen indications, subtle but persistent, in Alek’s behavior that suggested strongly there were other players on the field.
Therefore, I shall walk you through Alek’s last hour or so of freedom. There were developments that baffled the commission’s investigators and continue to baffle the amateur assassinationologists, so let me lay out, for the sake of history, exactly what I think happened between 12:30 p.m., when Alek fired the first bullet, and 2:17 p.m., when he was nabbed in the Texas Theatre.
I doubt he was nervous. He was too exuberant, too happy, too coursing with energy. I can see him, crouched and hiding behind the fortress of boxes he’d arranged on the sixth floor of the Book Depository, his eyes beady, his face tight with the characteristic smugness that so exiled him from his fellow man, presidential assassin or no, thinking not What if I miss? but Hurry up, hurry up! He must have been hungry for his destiny, for his entry into history. He wasn’t giving escape or survival a thought, but concentrating entirely on getting the job done to the best of his meager abilities. Consider his mind at the moment: he was about to strike a blow not merely at the United States, which he claimed to loathe, but at all those who’d seen him as he was-a fringe man clearly unable to hold a job, much less have a career, a life of normalcy and contribution-and insisted on reporting the bad news: You are nobody. You are not equipped to compete. Your destiny is nothingness. So this was his moment: to all of them, he was saying I exist! in thunder. But do not abjure the political for the psychological: he was a true believer, so true that he could and would kill for his principles. That puts him at the very end of the spectrum of political behavior, though it does not push him off it. In some fashion that he probably could not articulate, he thought he was birthing a new socialist world, and his idealism loaned him the self-esteem nothing else had provided for him. Then there was greed, the treasure at the end of the rainbow. That was the idealized image of himself as hero of Havana, in the ’53 Cadillac convertible with Dr. Castro on the Malacon, waving to the throng. That was a risk worth dying for. He must have been, all taken into account, one of the world’s happiest men in the split second before he pulled the trigger.
As we were, he was alerted to the approach of the killing moment not by his watch but by the roar of the crowd as its crescendo followed the motorcade down Main like a human wave. He saw it emerge, the long boatlike vehicle, with its bounty of politicians and wives, as it turned for its one-block run down Houston. I’m guessing it was here that the rifle flew to his shoulder and he edged closer to the window, not caring if he was seen (several witnesses noted him all but hanging out of the frame). The car reached its 120-degree turn at Elm, rotating slowly to the left. Question: why didn’t he fire then? Car hardly moving, Kennedy as close as he would be, probably under seventy-five feet, head-on, pivoting slightly as the automobile pivoted; plus, instructions from his Russian control that this was the moment. Why would he go against his own instincts as well as orders from a superior whom he feared and loved? Again speculation: the safety? He pulls, ugh, nothing happens, so he breaks his line of vision through the scope, unshoulders the rifle, finds the safety-a poorly placed button half under the protruding rear of the firing pin assembly-and struggles to get it off. Perhaps his heavy sweating occluded the scope, and he saw nothing and had to quickly clean it with his shirt collar. Whatever, it was already going wrong for him, one tenth of a second in.
Desperately, he frees the mechanism, throws it to his shoulder, and fires the first shot in haste. True to form, a clean, clear, almost comical miss. I hold with many that the bullet, sailing along at that leisurely two-thousand-feet-per-second velocity, broke apart on the curb, depositing only its wan spray of fragments into the limo. He rushed, his trigger squeeze was a mess, the target was lost in the single tree that stood between him and his quarry, and the first shot, the closest shot, was a complete failure.
The man is haunted by folly. Now he’s in a panic, having missed pitifully, given up his position, fair game for counter-snipers (there weren’t any that day, though there would be evermore), and he hasn’t even hit the car!
He labors through the cocking motion, the rifle jerked from his shoulder by the raggedness of the manipulation, and he comes back “on target.” His finger lunges against the coarse grind of the pull, and my guess is that the crosshairs weren’t anywhere near the target when he fired, for the simple reason that he hit it.
Or did he? Yes, according to the commission, he did, with the famed magic bullet that drilled through the president’s upper back and exited his throat, its angle adjusted slightly by the muscle tissue through which it had traveled, which also cost it enormous velocity; then, spinning sideways, it hit Governor Connally in the back (its impression recorded indelibly in scar tissue), sliced through his body, exited much damaged (despite claims to the contrary), and drilled his wrist and his thigh. Then it tumbled, spent, hot, mangled, to rest in the folds of his jacket, to be discovered by a technician that afternoon at the hospital on the governor’s gurney after the governor was removed. Oh, what a bad boy that bullet was! The mischief it unleashed! What grist for the mills of the ignorant, the malicious, the embittered lefty proletariat-intellectuals! Yet I knew then and I know now that the bullet did what Arlen Specter said it did. It is beyond dispute.
What isn’t much thought about is the next issue. Alek thought he missed! I have seen a fair number of men shot. It’s not usually like the movies, which instruct us to the theory of the instant, spastic reaction, the firing of all nerves simultaneously and the twitchy-legged death tumble to Earth. It can happen that way. It happens other ways too. Often men don’t even know they’ve been hit. They think it’s a punch or they’ve bumped into a door or they notice nothing at all, and not until they look and see blood welling (and sometimes it doesn’t even well!) do they comprehend after putting two and two together that they’ve been shot. It cannot be predicted. Each wound is different, based on a thousand or so factors from velocity, bullet shape, angle of strike, muscles and/or bones encountered, vitality of target, blood pressure, speed of target, target’s relationship to solidity on Earth (standing, sitting, moving, whatever), weather, barometric pressure, and on and on and on. There is no knowing, so anybody who tells you what should have happened-and infers, from the fact that it didn’t happen, something is amiss-is a bald-faced liar.
Let us not concentrate on what was happening. Let us concentrate on what Alek thought was happening. What he saw through the fuzzy optics of his Hollywood-the brand, not the town-Japanese scope was. . nothing. Look at Zapruder’s film. We don’t see the hit because the president is behind the sign, but when he emerges, the only thing that’s happened is that he’s begun to lean forward a bit, and his hands have come up, which are probably not visible to Alek, if he’s looking at all, and he’s probably not because he’s lost in the drama of cocking the rifle for the second time. When Alek returns to the scope, Kennedy’s head and posture may be incrementally degraded, but that’s too subtle for Alek to note.
In his mind: utter panic, complete self-loathing. Physiology: fingers bloated with blood, oxygen debt, woozy vision, yips coursing through his arms and trunk, sweat sliding down his face and flanks, presentiment of doom. Target: small, getting smaller as the vehicle pulls away (though it doesn’t speed up), slight left-to-right movement produced by the angle of the street relative to the position of the shooter.
Our boy is not in a good spot to make the next shot.
He tries to steer the scope crosshairs onto-where? Having missed twice-from his point of view-he has no idea where to hold for a killing shot. He has no idea of the index between point of aim and point of impact, he’s in a shooter’s no-man’s-land, even as he’s taken the slack out of the trigger and sustains it right at the tipping point between shot and no shot.
Suddenly, the president’s head explodes.
Alek is so startled that his own trigger jerks and he fires his third bullet, but his jump at the sight of the destruction of the skull is so intense that his third bullet goes sailing off to the general southwest, presumably landing in some distant Oz beyond the triple overpass, never to be noted or found. It was an awesome break for us; it meant that witnesses saw him fire his third shot, it squared all accounting of bullets, shells, and wounds, it forever connected Alek to the event, lacking any tangible, empirical evidence of our existence, and it cemented all investigative effort to the Book Depository and to Alek. Cops are predictable; they want to put things in a box, and the sooner and tighter it fits, the happier they are, and the more outsiders tug and pull and poke at the contents of the box, the more stubborn and angry they become. It’s all personal to them.
Back to Alek, for whom the world has just changed mightily.
Given to paranoia anyway, he sees in that second that a conspiracy against him does exist, that he is a patsy, he is a chump, a fool. He’s been set up to take the fall, and that reality becomes instantly clear. (Let us also postulate that his narcissism is secretly pleased; he is important enough to destroy!)
He realizes that all he believed in was false, that there was no Russian agent, he is not working for KGB, there’s no escape car awaiting him, he will not be hustled away and secreted to Havana and the loving ministrations of Dr. Castro. Instead, he’s the sucker at the center of every James M. Cain novel, every film noir, lost in a nightmare city as forces so vast he cannot imagine them grind into position to crush him.
It occurs to him that his life might be in danger. He knows the sixth floor is empty only because it always has been empty, but that wisdom is no longer operative; it is from a different world. It occurs to him that his death is absolutely necessary for the new narrative. It may be that a detective, a security guard, an armed citizen in the know might already be there, hiding behind his own clump of boxes, ready to step out and issue the coup de grace and become both the hero of America and the secret lynchpin of the plot against Alek.
He does what any man in such circumstances would do.
He cocks the rifle, throwing another shell into the chamber, finger to trigger, slack removed, weapon at the ready, and like a patrolling infantryman in an ambush area, he hastens the ninety-five feet diagonally across the empty space to the one stairway down, ready to respond to any emerging attackers. Nobody’s there. And no bullet comes crashing through the windows to snipe him as he sought to snipe the president.
He pauses at the head of the stairs, hating to relinquish his weapon. But he knows that he can’t emerge into society at the site of a presidential assassination with a rifle in his hands. So he stuffs the rifle between two book crates at the top of the stairs, where it will be found an hour later by a detective. That is why it wasn’t found abandoned in the sniper’s nest; that is why it was loaded and cocked.
He heads downstairs, and his adventures in the building, back in society, have been well chronicled. He slides into a chair in the lunchroom, is accosted by a policeman and identified by a coworker, and once the policeman heads upstairs, Alek zips out the front door.
Now what? He knows there’ll be no pickup awaiting him at the corner of Houston and Pacific, and there may be ambushers. Instead of heading north up Houston, where we were nominally waiting to pick him up, he turns east and heads up Elm, past the Dal-Tex Building. That is where I see him as I am pulling Lon out of the lobby while we beat our own hasty retreat from the seventh floor.
Alek continues to surge up Elm for another four blocks. Let us assume it is in this period that he more or less returns to his rational mind. He knows it’s a matter of time before they locate the sniper’s nest and the rifle, take a canvass of employees at TBD and note that he’s the only one missing, though he’s been noted earlier as present, so they’ll know he left right after the shooting. Possibly that’s not paramount in his mind. He thinks he’s being hunted by his own co-conspirators, and he remembers my warning him against bringing the handgun, because I was gaming him into being the easy prey that would be the exclamation point on our operation.
I don’t believe he thinks he can get away, as in escape to a new life. Impossible. He wasn’t stupid, just incompetent. But at that point in his life, I think the one possibility of victory he saw, the one glimmer of hope, was to defend himself against his murderers, not the police or FBI. If he could shoot one of them and bring the bag to the cops, it would be proof of sorts that he’d been manipulated, though he hadn’t worked out the allegiance issues and didn’t know who had used him.
Again, as for any man on the run, his first impulse would have been to get a gun, which explains why, after walking away from the site of the assassination, he climbed aboard a bus headed down Elm Street back to the site of the assassination. No one has bothered to work out the destination of that bus: it was to the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. He wasn’t fleeing crazily, as so many have stated; he was going to get the gun.
Soon enough, the bus is moored in traffic a block east of the assassination site. Time is ticking by, he knows that the police effort is grinding along, possibilities are being examined, questions asked and answered, the winnowing process begun, and that it will cast him up quickly.
He vaults from the bus at the corner of Elm and Lamar and heads south down Lamar for two blocks and goes to. . the bus station! Does it occur to him to buy a ticket on the next bus out of town, to put distance between self and pursuers? He has seventeen dollars with him, which can get him as far as San Antonio or Lubbock or Midland or Austin. But his brain is not working that way; he is thinking, Get the gun. He hails what will be known as the only cab he took in his life. He’s in the cab at 12:45, in Oak Cliff, a block or two past his house so that the cabbie won’t associate his passenger with the soon-to-be-announced address of the suspect. He dashes into his house, goes straight to wherever he’s hidden it, snatches up his revolver, stuffs it into his waistband, throws on a jacket-to cover it, which shows he’s thinking tactically-and is gone in seconds.
Consider how dangerous a move he’s come up with. He knows they’ll know who he is and where he lives. He risks capture in a daring attempt to get back to the roominghouse because that’s where he left his S amp;W.38 snub-nose. The gun is more important to him than his life, and he takes an awesome chance to get it, because he knows that without the gun, he has no chance against his pursuers, who aren’t the cops but the members of the conspiracy who’ve betrayed him. He does this rather than, say, take the cab to a suburban bus station or train station and try to catch a ride or hop a freight out of town before the authorities can throw out their manhunters’ net. Time isn’t of the essence; the gun is of the essence.
Alek heads back down Beckley in the direction he’s come, diverts at Crawford to take a diagonal going nowhere, turns down Tenth, again seemingly arbitrarily, reaches the intersection of Patton and Tenth, and notices in horror that a black Dallas police car has just pulled over. The officer beckons him.
Now comes the tragedy of Officer Tippit. Had I known that the monster I created was capable of such violence, I would have put a.45 into him and walked away. That said, I must also say that I should have put a.45 into my own head as punishment for the mayhem that was about to transpire, which was entirely my own invention. What is the point of claiming responsibility if you don’t act on it? There is no point. I tried to use my sin as a motive for redemption and, over the years, gave my life in toto to Agency and country, knowing that I hadn’t the guts to punish myself as I should be punished. Perhaps my punishment lies ahead.
Poor Tippit. By accounts no genius, but a decent ex-GI who loved his job and did it well, content to be a patrolman forever, he was on the cusp of the biggest bust of the century when it all went bad on him. Moved from a farther patrol area into Oak Cliff as a precautionary measure and to stand by for orders, he had been alerted three times on his radio of the age, weight, height, and hair color of the suspect. He spies such a man walking down Tenth Street in Oak Cliff. Who knows what other tells Alek the idiot was broadcasting: walking too fast with his face screwed up in anguish, almost running, radiating the don’t-tread-on-me animosity that was his stock in trade, refusing eye contact while looking cautiously over his shoulder now and then. It could have been any or all of them.
No identification of Alek by name has yet been given over the radio, and none has linked him to Oak Cliff and the Beckley Avenue area. It’s just that his appearance is so right. That’s why Tippit tails him for a block or two and then pulls over. Yeats: “It’s old and it’s sad and it’s sad and it’s feary.” Yes, it was, especially “feary,” that is, fearful, horrifying, tragic. Had I but known. But I didn’t. Guilty, guilty, guilty.
Alek sees the black vehicle slow up and pull over. He realizes he’s been nabbed. He ambles off the sidewalk to the vehicle, where the officer, window rolled down, awaits him.
What could they have said? It’s pointless to imagine, and it was probably a banality, a cliche, nothing memorable. Witnesses-there were several, some close-report no hostility, no harsh words, no threats; it wasn’t an altercation, it was an exchange, and Alek may have gotten away with it for a second, for then he broke contact with the seated officer and turned to go on his way.
Tippit isn’t done with him but at the same time hasn’t made up his mind to make the pinch. He climbs from his squad car, gun definitely not in hand, and possibly calls to Alek.
Alek turns, walks around the car to place himself in range, draws, and fires three times point-blank. All three hits from close range are solid mortal blows, careening through center mass, upper body, blood-bearing organs, and as soon as he is hit, Tippit is down, bleeding out if not already dead.
Why?
After all, Alek is not without his verbal faculties; he’s a debater, an arguer from way back, a guy who’s always got an answer. That’s how he defines himself, part guerrilla warrior, part dialectical soldier. Why doesn’t he at least try to con his way out? The performance isn’t beyond him, and his intellectual vanity that he’s smarter than some cop would surely be in play.
From Alek’s point of view, the fact that the cop is already there-it’s only forty-five minutes after the shooting, and chaos and confusion reign-is proof that the man is part of the conspiracy. Whoever set Alek up either informed the authorities of his address or hired a professional killer dressed as a cop to ambush him when he returned home. Perhaps Dallas is full of professional killers in search of Alek, already equipped with his name, address, description, and likely whereabouts. That would be an easy intellectual leap for a man with Alek’s tendencies toward paranoia and conspiracy.
So Alek thinks the cop is a hit man. His rage, his paranoia, his violent nature, his fear, his self-hatred, and his other hatred were in full bloom in that single instant, and that and that alone can explain his next move, which utterly violates any principle of self-preservation.
If Alek has just shot a cop to escape, his next move has to be to turn and flee, race down alleyways, cut across yards, throw off any followers, catch a bus, get out of the area, fast.
Instead, he walks over to the downed Tippit and shoots him in the temple. From the autopsy: “[The bullet] is found to enter the right temporal lobe, coursed through the brain transecting the brain stem, severing the cerebral peduncles surrounded by extensive hemorrhage and found to exit from the brain substance in the calcarine gyrus to the left of the midline.” Of course he wasn’t shooting Officer Tippit; he was shooting me.
His vengeance expressed, Alek mutters, “Poor damn cop,” as he empties the shells from his cylinder and quickly reloads, then turns and heads up Patton, down Jefferson, cuts through a yard and dumps his jacket, then cuts back to Jefferson, which, in a half mile or so, will take him to the Texas Theatre. His absurd incompetence comes to the fore again. So lame is his attempt at escape and so ignorant is he of what’s going on around him, he is followed by a number of citizens. One of them has called the murder in to headquarters on Tippit’s radio. Two men snatch up Tippit’s revolver and begin to hunt Alek on their own.
In a brief while, a matter of several blocks down Jefferson, trailing trackers, Alek comes to a small commercial district. He’s consumed with evading his killers (even though he hasn’t bothered to look behind him), and his main thought is to get off the street. To the logic of his twisted brain, he seeks refuge by dodging into the Texas Theatre on that street. I suppose he thinks his killers will eventually be driven off the streets by the excess of Dallas policemen who will flood the zone in hours if not minutes. Perhaps he imagines a surrender, the revelation that the “cop” was a Mafia hit man, and some sort of redemption as he proves he never killed the president and he was manipulated by shadowy “others” of indeterminate origin. He might see himself as a hero, the subject of an admiring movie. In those ten minutes in the movie theater’s private darkness, he must have comforted himself by self-delusion. Facing the reality, for a man whose resources were so fragile, would have been too much.
And then the lights came on. His vacation had lasted ten minutes, and cops were closing in from both sides.
I first heard the name sometime in ’74 or ’75. I was in Moscow, working undercover in one of several well-documented Soviet identities. I was in and out of Moscow in those years under a variety of guises, and I have to say they were great years, maybe the best of my life. We knew we were getting somewhere and doing some good, and the economics and the demographics were breaking in our direction, so we were filled with hope and optimism. Moreover, Vietnam was managing to wind down without killing me or any of my sons, for which I was eternally grateful.
We were under pressure from Langley-or from the Defense Department by way of Langley-to come up with a gun. It was a new Soviet-issue semi-auto sniper rifle that bore the seemingly but not actually melodramatic name of Dragunov. It sounded like the SovMil had gotten all Hollywoody and called the thing the Dragon. No such luck. Soviet military nomenclature has always featured the name of the designer, which is why Sergeant Kalashnikov became world-famous, as did, in an earlier age, Comrade Tokarev, whose stubby little pistol snuffed out so many lives in the cellars of Lubyanka during the Great Purges of the thirties. In any event, although it seemed absurd in a world where giant rockets carrying nukes could obliterate millions in minutes, everyone in American military culture was in a frenzy over this Dragunov, and it went without saying that he who obtained either plans or working copies of the thing would be awarded a gigantic feather to be stuffed into his cap. I meant to get myself that feather. Petty ambition; I am diminished by the memory.
But Bob Lee Swagger beat me to it.
Can you imagine a name like that? What a moniker to conjure with. He was every Ole Miss quarterback, every NASCAR driver, every tiny-town police chief or state trooper rolled into one. He was actually a gunnery sergeant in the United States Marine Corps, with an intelligence background, as he’d worked with another Agency jamboree, called the Studies and Observation Group, on an earlier tour. That was particularly dangerous duty; it consisted of leading indigenous troops up near the Laotian border to run interdiction missions against the North Viet supply line. Lots and lots of combat, lots of shooting. The talent pool consisted of aggressive senior NCOs from either army special forces or marine infantry outfits, and they had themselves a dandy war amid the mountains and swamps of the Laotian border.
It was his third tour as a sniper in which he snatched up Comrade Dragunov. At a forlorn fire base somewhere in the jungle, he and his spotter worked a ruse, with an Agency team and the marines in full co-op mode, that resulted in our acquisition of the first Dragunov in Western hands. That rifle today is at the Agency museum on the first floor of the main building in Langley. Before it was put on display, I had a good hands-on experience with it at the Langley technical directorate’s shop. The very same one!
His twenty years after Vietnam were the most banal of hells. It seems sad that a man of such gifts should suffer so basely, but what are you going to do? Men of such dark fury and skill frequently turn it on themselves, as Pilgrim Swagger did, and the record is beyond melancholy and well into squalor. Alcoholism, business failure, brushes with the law, car wrecks, a failed marriage, a whole litany of messages to God requesting annihilation, since reality was too painful. God must have been busy that day, or perhaps he was saving Swagger to punish a real sinner, such as moi; somehow the sniper retreated to the woods, acquired a trailer, and rebuilt himself. Despite his many feats of arms, this was probably his greatest, bravest accomplishment. He became a reader, curious as to what had caused Vietnam and, beyond that, what had caused so much pain, from his traumatic wound and from the losses he suffered, his first Vietnamese wife and then his spotter. Swagger, I tried to save you from all that. I knew as early as ’63 that it would come to no good end and your story would be written in blood and pain a million times. Kill me if you can, goddamn you, Swagger, but I committed the crime of the century to save you. You should love me as you press the trigger, if that’s what is in store.
Alone in Arkansas except for a dog and a brace of rifles, he gave himself over to the history of the Vietnam War and then the history of war itself, which after all is paradoxically the history of civilization. He educated himself in the ways of a world he served but never knew. His mind refined itself, shed itself of childish notions like pride and bravado and domination, and became wise. He stopped talking, he started listening. He shot and shot and shot and turned his grade-A talent into something almost beyond knowing. He retrained himself for a mission, and at last one came along. I should know. It was my mission.
In ’93, I was sixty-three years old. I was a hoary old eminence grise, beloved by the younger men, known for steady advice, unquenchable rationality-I had never abandoned the New Criticism-and superb technical skills, especially at planning and funding black ops. I was Mr. Black in Agency lore. I was in high demand. Though I spent much of my time on Russia-it was I who put together the money train that enabled Yeltsin to take over after Gorbachev, and I don’t think he or anybody else ever knew I was an American, much less an American agent-I oversaw or advised on projects in other spheres as well.
That was how El Salvador came into my life. God-awful place, never want to go back. It reminded me of Vietnam, though the food was all mealy and saucy, nowhere near the level of the Mexican that Alek had introduced me to.
This need not be a long tale, and I will spare you details and dramatization. I begin with a personal note, although my memoir is by design professional, not personal. But the personal intrudes on the professional. In 1992 Peggy died of breast cancer after a six-week ordeal. It was a terrible thing to see, a woman so vital, so intelligent, so beautiful, so loyal, so terrific, the best of all her peers and the source of whatever strength I had, as well as an extraordinary mother to the boys, eaten alive by the crab. The boys and I were at her side when she passed, and she lived long enough to see them through college and through their own well-established careers and families. It was a devastation for me, one that hurt and hurt and hurt. I am not making excuses; I am merely explaining why I was not at my best in what followed. I made bad judgments, mistakes, my concentration slipped; it was far from my proudest hour. I was lucky to escape alive, even if I didn’t.
Let’s speed this up. Time may not be on our side, thanks to Mr. Swagger. It became necessary to eliminate a man, and it occurred to me to replicate Operation LIBERTY VALANCE. Same method: a patsy sniper, a real sniper, a ballistic deceit, the patsy caught during the op and eliminated, the home team getting away clean. The details are forever sealed in Langley’s files, but again I cast Lon as the real shooter; it turned out he was hungry for the adventure, having become bored stiff by his self-decreed “retirement.” I cast Swagger as Oswald.
Bad career move, as they say.
Swagger, unlike poor, stupid Alek, escaped, and it became a race and a chase. We had to get to Swagger before the FBI did. This was Shreck, my main operative’s, task, and Swagger outsmarted, outfought, and outshot him at every turn. My first mistake: not realizing he would have made a better shooter than patsy. Neither Shreck nor I saw until too late that the plot we had engineered for him generated not his death but his rebirth. He reentered the world he had abandoned stronger, smarter, more guileful, more cunning, and braver. All along, we weren’t hunting him, he was hunting us.
A final ambush was painstakingly set. I urged Lon to be the shooter, and I do think he enjoyed the whole thing. It was better than rotting away in a wheelchair in a secluded estate in the North Carolina countryside. For his heroism, his effort, his high morale, he was awarded a bullet in the head. I should regret this more than I do, but after all, given his tragedy, Lon enjoyed an interesting life because of my importuning. Better he passed that way than via decay. Shreck, for his part, was unhappy to discover that a shotgun slug could penetrate a bulletproof vest. He wasn’t as unhappy as his number two, a stumpy little ex-NCO of extremely violent tendencies named Jack Payne, who made the same discovery, but not until Swagger had blown off his arm with the same shotgun. Swagger: the best man I ever heard of in a gunfight, bar none.
Even then he had surprises. He was captured, and our deeper trap seemed to still be in place, by which he would swing for murder.
Oops, I say! He’d outthought even the great Hugh Meachum. He’d subtly disabled his rifle before the whole thing happened, so it was impossible for it to have fired the fatal shot. As far as I know, they’re still looking for the person who did, but it was at this point that Hugh Meachum decided to die.
Again I pull the screen of discretion between the reader and the details. Let me say that it should be beyond the ken of no professional intelligence operative-and I was one of the world’s best-to arrange a convincing fiction for his own death. I was, after all, a superb planner, a manipulator of documents and secret funding, and had long since made the necessary preparations for such a contingency. It helped that I lived alone and there was no spousal difficulty to contend with. It helped also that I was still under discipline, and I knew that once I made the break, I made it permanently: there could be no going back, no farewells, not a minute crack in the facade.
I put the operation into action on a Wednesday, and by Friday I was gone. I left without saying good-bye to the boys and their children. That hurt. That still hurts. But I knew them to be secure both financially and emotionally and that the lessons of labor and loyalty, as well as the dividends that Colt, Winchester (now FN), Smith amp; Wesson, and so forth and so on provided, would continue to comfort them against the rude buffeting of circumstance.
I enacted a certain computer code meant to eat all my files in the Agency database. I suppose that was overkill, but one can never be certain. It was doubtful that anyone would go trolling that deep in the distant past, particularly in a world that was changing as rapidly as this one, but safer is always to be preferred over sorrier.
And thus Hugh Meachum shuffled off this mortal coil.
As for the real me, he went where he went and became what he became. I prospered. I had been quietly looting money from the Agency for some years-if an old spy doesn’t look out for himself, who will? — and the ample fund in a Swiss bank account made my new life one of comfort. I had some contacts, I knew some things, I had some documents: in time, I improved my station, for my mind was still sharp. In time, I did more than improve; I became wealthy, even filthy wealthy. I lived in splendor.
In my new life, I developed a taste for flavors of decadence. I reacquainted myself with the nuances of delight that alcohol provided. I discovered the pleasures of sex with younger women, especially when amplified beyond the power of the man himself by drugs in all their variations. I found I excelled in business manipulations that produced munificence for me and all who sailed with me. I had fought so hard for capitalism, it seemed appropriate to enjoy its fruits. I became an entrepreneur, a builder, an investor; I devised layers and further layers of supernumeraries between myself and reality.
It has come to this: I live in a mansion hidden behind a thirty-foot steel wall off of Ulysse Nardin drive, in an area patrolled by a special battalion. I sit out on my veranda in the warm weather, and all I see is mine to the river a mile away. I am totally secure. I have mistresses and masseuses and chefs and sommeliers. The world has been kind to me, which I take as proper recompense for the efforts I put into my crusade to secure freedom and peace for the largest number of people, and which, despite some setbacks, I believe I accomplished.
What could possibly go wrong?
The answer came one night deep in sleep, when I was feeling most safe. I don’t know why it chose that moment to announce itself, but it did, and while I can’t say it changed my life (at least not yet), I will say it gave me a lesson in paranoia from which I’ve never recovered, and that is why my security arrangements are the most impenetrable in the world.
The coat.
The goddamned coat.
I hadn’t thought of those days in the ten years I’d been building my new life. It was so far behind, and all the players were dead. But I awakened in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, remembering.
Jimmy Costello had hidden in the elevator machinery house on the roof of the Dal-Tex Building for a long sixteen hours, and during that time, the bore solvent from Lon’s Winchester collected and migrated and ultimately seeped into the garment, soaking its breast from the inside, forever cursing it with the smell of the murder weapon. Even before that, it had been placed on the stack of swatch books we used to elevate Lon to the proper height, leaving a tire tread on the back.
Jimmy had wisely decided not to get it out of the building, in case he was stopped by a policeman who’d recognize the penetrative odor. He’d left it there, folded, as I recall, inside a pile of carpet remnants on a dark and deserted shelf in that little-visited area.
It seemed unimportant at the time, and Jimmy had said he’d come back at some point, reenter the building, and destroy it. But he had been killed prematurely, and in my grief over his passing, my mourning for Lon’s exit from my life, the press of my career, and whatever residue of subconscious guilt and regret remained from LIBERTY VALANCE, I had forgotten until that moment.
The next morning I dealt with the problem. My first thought was that I buy the damned building and tear it down and throw in a parking lot. It was well within my means. But I realized such a radical decision might attract more attention than necessary, the building having been declared officially “interesting” by too many who thought they knew something about architecture, and that a prudent first move was to determine the situation on the ground. Through the various levels of administrative anonymity I had arranged, I ordered a discreet Texas private investigator to penetrate the building and examine the room in question. In a week or so, the answer came back: the elevators had been completely modernized in 1995, and that machinery room demolished, and a new one constructed on its spot. All well and good. But also all sick and bad.
I had no idea of the coat’s disposition before the demolition. Perhaps some workers simply dumped the pile of carpeting remnants down a chute, and they’d gone into a Dumpster and thence to the landfill or the enviro-chummy reclamation plant. Yes, that was probably it.
But. . what if? What if someone had discovered it and remarked upon the oddity of such a coat with such a bounty of evidence being found in a building overlooking Dealey Plaza, and moreover, dating from sometime in a past easily as ancient 1963? Suppose this nugget of info, by some whimsical path, had drifted laterally and entered assassination lore? Given the hunger of the conspiracy theorists for new theories, new provocations, new possibilities, new evidence, such a tidbit could easily inspire a new area of research, a new book, a new focus.
Maybe with this new framing theory-a gunman in Dal-Tex-a brilliant investigator could rearrange the old evidence, find some new evidence, engage in brilliant speculation, and see into the heart of the thing. Could I be located? Highly unlikely. After all, I had disconnected myself from that possibility by conveniently dying in 1993.
But suppose someone got as far as Hugh Meachum? That would be far enough. My legacy would be destroyed, my memory in the minds of children and grandchildren, family members from mine, Peggy’s, and Lon’s family, even Jimmy’s. That presented a possibility I could not live with happily.
I arranged-through supernumeraries, layers of buffeting, clever financial manipulation so that the source of the funding could never be tracked back to my address-for a man to relocate to Dallas and join the “assassination community.” His announced career was to “solve” the Kennedy assassination mystery, so he had to be studious, highly intelligent, labor-intensive. He also needed delicate social skills, for I wanted his penetration to be aggressive enough that he could acquire a network of informants, all of whom had no idea they were informing, to keep him apprised of the latest in the theory and practice of the ongoing investigations.
To fit in with the culture down there, he needed one more salient attribute: he had to be insane. Despite his evident intelligence and charm, he would be seen as harmless. His “theory” would harm no one because it was so manifestly absurd. He had to put together a scenario that sounded rational until it reached a point and then twisted off crazily into the ether of the impossible, and he had to sell it with earnestness and passion, not estranging his allies.
I feel we did well in recruiting and am satisfied, even gratified, by his employment and performance and creativity. His name is Richard Monk, and he is a former major in army intelligence who retired honorably after his twenty with no sign of disgrace. His assignment: if anyone on the Net or anyone in Dallas shows an undue interest in the Dal-Tex theory of assassination, that subject is to be engaged at a deep level, his theories, his evidence, his capabilities all assessed for further monitoring. Ultimately, after reports are filed and analyzed and passed along, the information will arrive to me, and I will make a judgment as to disposition. Subtle methods will be explored as a means of dissuading the subject, but if it comes to that place, I will authorize, and have set up a structure to execute, a kill order.
I do not kill for money, I do not kill for anger, I do not kill for pleasure. I kill to preserve my legacy and the legacy of the institutions and people I served. That is enough. People have killed for a lot less, for pennies, or, more worthless, for pride.
The first victim was an amiable writer whose specialty was guns and the men who use them. I assume it was his analysis of the firearms issues that brought him to Dallas. As he explained to Richard Monk, he had come up with a theory that was suspiciously like the actual one Lon created all those years ago. And he had picked the Dal-Tex Building as his shooting site. Those two developments alone doomed him. Nothing personal.
Some months later, real trouble started.