Covert Warriors

THREE

Office of the Director Central Intelligence Agency McLean, Virginia 1310 20 April 2007

“And what can the CIA do for the most important general in the world today?” A. Franklin Lammelle answered his telephone.

“You know I don’t think that’s funny, Frank,” General Allan B. Naylor said.

“It was a perfectly serious question.”

“You can tell me where I can find Vic D’Alessandro.”

“Two questions,” Lammelle said. “What makes you think I would know, and why do you want to know?”

Lammelle held the commander in chief of the United States Central Command in the highest possible regard in terms of ability and integrity. But he didn’t like him very much-and sometimes not at all.

Naylor was deeply into the West Pointer’s creed of duty, honor, country. And while that was certainly commendable, Naylor, Lammelle had decided over the years, just went too goddamn far with it.

The best example of this was Naylor’s relationship with Charley Castillo. He had known Charley since he was a child. Charley and Naylor’s son had been a year apart in a private elementary school in Germany when Charley’s mother, suffering from terminal cancer, announced her desire to find Charley’s father. She had told Mrs. Naylor, her friend, that she’d been impregnated at seventeen by a dashing nineteen-year-old Army chopper jockey, who’d then disappeared. Mrs. Naylor pressed her husband, then-Major Naylor, to find the boy’s only living relative.

Naylor had been happy to do it. He was a highly moral man who really loathed officers who knocked up young German women and never made the slightest effort to meet their responsibilities vis-a-vis their love child.

Castillo’s father hadn’t been hard to find. He was buried in the Fort Sam National Cemetery beneath a headstone onto which had been chiseled a representation of the Medal of Honor.

Charley’s status changed from that of a poor German bastard who had been shamefully treated by a U.S. Army officer-whose ass Naylor intended to burn-into the son of an officer who had been awarded the nation’s highest award for valor on the battlefield.

The first thing Naylor had done was set in motion the legal wheels which would keep Charley’s substantial inheritance from being squandered by his newfound family. When that hadn’t proved to be necessary-Charley’s father’s family turned out to be as well off-stinking rich, to put a point on it-as his mother’s, “Uncle Allan,” as Naylor had quickly become, now turned his efforts into getting Charley into the Long Gray Line. His father’s Medal of Honor gave him a pass into West Point, and at West Point he would be imbued with the duty, honor, country philosophy which had guided Naylor all of his life.

A. Franklin Lammelle knew that that had almost-but not quite-turned out the way Naylor had planned.

Charley had graduated from the Military Academy toward the top of his class and been commissioned into Armor. Five generations of generals named Naylor had been Cavalry and then Armored officers.

The Naylor plan for Carlos G. Castillo was working. Most of Naylor’s plans for anything worked; he was by then already a three-star general, and serving as General “Stormin’” Norman Schwarzkopf’s operations officer for Desert Storm.

But then the plan went off the tracks.

Some publicity conscious brass hats had decided it would be good public relations if the son of a MOH helicopter pilot also flew as a helicopter pilot in the upcoming Desert War I. A training slot at Fort Rucker “was found” for him, and Castillo was sent there to learn how to fly the Bell HU-1 helicopter. On his second day at the aviation school, it was learned that not only did Castillo already know how to fly but had more than 230 hours as pilot-in-command of the twin-engine version Huey. One of the subsidiaries of Castillo Enterprises was Castillo Aviation, which serviced oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico. Castillo had begun flying for Castillo Aviation as soon as he acquired his commercial rotary wing pilot’s license, which he had done when he was sixteen and a high school junior.

The brass had regarded this as a fortuitous circumstance. The hero pilot’s son could go into Operation Desert Storm, once he finished transition training, flying the Army’s glamour machine, the Apache AH-64 attack helicopter.

Once he got to Arabia, and realizing the twenty-one-year-old second lieutenant was not qualified to fly the Apache, the brass did the best thing they could think of to keep him alive. He was assigned as co-pilot to the most skilled and experienced Apache pilot in the unit.

That plan went awry, too.

Two hours into Desert Storm, the Apache, on a mission to take out Iraqi antiaircraft weapons, was struck, the pilot blinded, and Castillo wounded. Castillo was faced with the choice of landing the shot-up helicopter and waiting for help, or trying to get the pilot medical attention. He flew the smoking and shuddering Apache, at fifty feet above the desert, back two hundred miles.

General Naylor learned for the first time that Second Lieutenant Castillo was not where he was supposed to be-at Fort Knox, undergoing Basic Officer’s Course training-when Castillo was marched into Desert Storm headquarters so that he could receive the “impact awards”-in other words, get the medals immediately-of the Distinguished Flying Cross and Purple Heart medals from the hands of General Schwarzkopf himself.

Appropriate counseling was given to the officers who had put Castillo in the cockpit of an Apache he was clearly unqualified to fly, but that left the problem of what to do with Second Lieutenant Castillo. Loading him on the next airplane for Fort Knox would suggest that Castillo had done something wrong, and that was clearly not the case. And so would taking him off flight status.

Checking the roster of units assigned to Desert Storm, Naylor thought he had found just what he needed: the 2303rd Civil Government Detachment. It was commanded by Colonel Bruce J. McNab, a classmate of Naylor’s. He hadn’t liked McNab at West Point, thought him to be an inferior officer, and was not surprised that he was still a colonel commanding an insignificant civil government unit. But the roster showed that the 2303rd had half a dozen Hueys assigned to it.

Naylor called McNab and told him the story and said he was sending Castillo to him, and McNab was expected to keep the young officer out of harm’s way.

“Just have him fly you around, McNab. Nothing more.”

McNab had said, “Yes, sir.”

The next time Naylor saw Castillo was just after the Iraqi surrender, when Colonel McNab showed up at Desert Storm headquarters with Castillo at the controls of McNab’s heavily armed Huey.

They were there to personally receive from the hands of General Schwarzkopf impact awards of the Distinguished Service Cross (McNab), Silver Star (Castillo), and Purple Heart (both) medals. McNab also had the star of brigadier general and Castillo the Combat Infantry Badge pinned to their tunics by General Schwarzkopf.

Naylor had learned only then that the “Civil Government Detachment” part of the 2303rd’s unit designation was disinformation. Its actual role in Desert Storm had been the direction, under the Central Intelligence Agency, of covert Special Operations.

Naylor had been quietly furious that he had been kept in the dark, even more furious that Castillo had not been kept out of the line of fire, and had almost-but not quite-lost control when McNab told him he was taking Castillo, whom he described as a “natural warrior,” with him to Fort Bragg as his aide-de-camp.

As far as A. Franklin Lammelle was concerned, what McNab “had done” to Castillo-turned him over the years into a legendary special operator-was the real source of the friction between McNab and Naylor. There was something in Naylor’s makeup that made him hate unconventional warfare and its practitioners.

And, in Lammelle’s judgment, it was Naylor’s close personal relationship with Castillo that made Charley unwilling on two significant occasions to accept that his Uncle Allan had been perfectly willing to throw him under the bus when ordered to do so.

The first instance had been when Castillo, by then an Army lieutenant colonel heading up the President’s secretive Office of Organizational Analysis, had embarrassed the CIA by flying two senior SVR defectors out of Vienna to Argentina under the noses of Vladimir Putin and the CIA station chief in Vienna.

Charles W. Montvale, then the director of National Intelligence, was not interested in Castillo’s explanation that he had done so because the Russian defectors had good reason to believe the SVR was waiting to grab them in Vienna’s Westbahnhof station, and that he had been unaware the CIA station chief in Vienna had been trying to set up their defection for some time.

What concerned Montvale was that the CIA station chief had gone to syndicated columnist C. Harry Whelan, Jr., with the story that the President was illegally operating his own private CIA headed by Castillo, and that Presidential Agent Castillo had snatched the defectors.

Montvale’s solution to that potential embarrassment to the President and the CIA was simple: Castillo would be retired from the Army for psychological reasons-that would explain his erratic behavior-and then turn the defectors over to the CIA.

General Naylor, seeing the protection of the President as his primary duty, had gone along with Montvale. Castillo, the unconventional warrior molded by Bruce McNab, had to be shut down, and he sent one of his Adjutant General Corps colonels to Buenos Aires with Montvale to order Castillo: “Sign here. You’re now retired. Don’t let the doorknob hit you in the ass on your way out.”

Castillo refused. The Russian defectors had told him that the SVR and others were operating a biological weapons laboratory and factory in the Congo-what the CIA had dismissed as being only a “fish farm.” Castillo saw it as his duty to prove, or disprove, what the Russian defectors said, and managed to convince McNab, by then a lieutenant general commanding SPECOPSCOM, that the allegations deserved to be investigated.

McNab put his own career at risk. He arranged for a Gray Fox team to secretly infiltrate the “fish farm” in the Congo, taking with them the Army’s preeminent expert in biological warfare, Colonel J. Porter Hamilton, MC.

Hamilton reported to the President that the situation was even more dangerous-he called it “an abomination before God”-than the Russians had said.

The President immediately launched a preemptive strike against the fish farm, using every air-deliverable weapon in the U.S. arsenal except for nuclear weapons. That solved the problem of the incredibly lethal substance called “Congo-X.”

But it did not solve the problem of Presidential Agent C. G. Castillo.

The political damage of having the world learn that the President had brought the nation to the cusp of a nuclear exchange on the word of a lowly lieutenant colonel would destroy his presidency. So he gave Castillo a final order: “Go fall off the edge of the earth, and don’t ever be seen again.”

Castillo had barely arrived in Argentina when word came that the President had suddenly died of an aortal rupture.

Castillo had just begun to adapt to his new status of having fallen off the edge of the earth when he learned that the Army’s biological warfare laboratory had received-via FedEx-a container of Congo-X.

While that development was being evaluated, the SVR rezident in Washington invited the CIA’s deputy chief for operations-A. Franklin Lammelle-for drinks at the Russian embassy compound outside Washington. There he offered a deal. If the Americans turned over to Russia the two Russian defectors and Lieutenant Colonel C. G. Castillo, then the Russians would turn over what stocks of Congo-X they had, and give their solemn word that was all of it, and none of it would ever appear again.

The new President, Joshua Ezekiel Clendennen, thought this to be a satisfactory solution to the program, and ordered Director of National Intelligence Montvale to start looking for Castillo and the Russians and then load them on an Aeroflot plane for Moscow. He also ordered General Allan Naylor to participate in the search and exchange.

A. Franklin Lammelle knew all this because the CIA director also ordered him to assist Montvale-and by the time Lammelle found Castillo, he had decided that what Clendennen was trying to do to Castillo was unconscionable. He wanted no part of it.

And this became the second time that Lammelle found Naylor blindly prepared to throw Castillo under the bus.

When Naylor finally found Castillo-and was prepared to order him to return to the United States, there to hold himself in readiness to obey what orders the President might have for him-Castillo and his Merry Band of Outlaws had already learned how the Congo-X had reached the United States and were in the final stages of planning an ad hoc assault on a Venezuelan island where the remaining stock of Congo-X could be found.

Despite this, Naylor delivered his orders, whereupon Castillo very politely placed him under arrest. Lammelle had witnessed the surreal exchange-and what followed.

Naylor-concluding that the assault’s failure would be more damaging to the United States than its success-finally decided to help. He provided a Navy helicopter carrier and three 160th Black Hawks that probably guaranteed the success of the assault.

Naylor’s change of heart had nothing to do with Castillo attempting the obviously right thing to do in the circumstances. And it certainly had nothing to do with their personal relationship. Lammelle understood that Naylor’s decision could easily have gone the other way.

Lammelle had then decided that it was a case of not if, but when, they faced another situation where Castillo was going to try something of which Naylor might not approve and Naylor would decide not to help.

Or, worse, that Naylor’s duty was to prevent Castillo from doing what he planned to do-thus once again throwing him under that proverbial bus.

This was one of those times, Lammelle now decided, when he didn’t like General Allan B. Naylor at all, and that meant he wasn’t going to tell him anything at all that might in any way hurt Charley Castillo.

When Naylor did not immediately respond to Lammelle’s questions about why he thought Lammelle would know where Vic D’Alessandro was, and why did he want to know, Lammelle asked a third: “Why don’t you ask Terry O’Toole where he is? Vic works for him.”

“General O’Toole doesn’t know where he is. That’s why I’m asking you, Lammelle.”

“That brings us back to my original question: Why do you want to know?”

“We have a mission for him. An important mission. I’m sorry, but that’s all I can tell you.”

“That’s all you want to tell me, Allan. And that’s not enough.”

“POTUS made it clear that he doesn’t want the CIA involved in any way in this mission.”

“Which is?”

When Naylor didn’t immediately reply, Lammelle went on: “I’m sure you find this distasteful, General, but once in a while you have to disobey an order. Particularly an order from Clendennen, who we are agreed is not playing with a full deck.”

“You’re speaking, Lammelle, of the President of the United States.”

“Yes, I am.”

There was a long pause.

“I was going to begin this by saying this has to go no further,” Naylor finally said. “But that would be a waste of my breath, wouldn’t it?”

“General, what I try to do is live up to my oath to protect the U.S. from all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

Naylor ignored that. He said: “The original communication from the kidnappers ordered us to take this fellow Abrego by helicopter from the La Tuna prison to Juarez International Airport, just across the border, accompanied by two U.S. Marshals. This was to be tomorrow morning. The exchange was to take place then. The President feels that if this plan were followed, they would be met by an overwhelming force who would relieve them of Abrego and-the phrase he used was ‘wave bye-bye’-with the result being they would have Abrego and we would not have Colonel Ferris.”

“That makes sense. So what’s Plan B?”

“This is what the President does not want the CIA involved with in any way.”

“Involved with what?”

“President Martinez sent him a letter saying that Abrego should be taken to the Oaxaca State Prison for interrogation by the chief of the Policia Federal for Oaxaca State, a man named Juan Carlos Pena.”

“And he’s going to do this?”

“Martinez said contact should be established with this man Pena.”

“And you want to send Vic to make contact?”

“Yes. Now, where is he?”

Lammelle was quiet a moment, then said: “I don’t think you’re telling me everything, Allan. Why should Clendennen be worried about me knowing about something as simple as sending Vic to see this cop?”

“That’s all I can tell you,” Naylor said. “I’ve already told you more than I should.”

“But not as much as you’re going to tell me if you want me to put you in touch with Vic.”

“So you do know where he is?” Naylor snapped.

“I’m the head of the CIA, Allan. I know everything. What else have you got to tell me?”

Lammelle could hear Naylor exhaling audibly before Naylor said, “When Abrego is taken to the prison, after we establish that Ferris is there, the President is sending three Black Hawks loaded with Gray Fox operators with him. They will free Ferris.”

“Gray Fox?” Lammelle asked, incredulously.

“He’s set up a command post in his study,” Naylor said. “General O’Toole is there with him. Colonel Kingsolving has been sent for.”

“And once they grab Ferris, how are they going to get him out of Mexico? That prison is in southern Mexico, almost to the Guatemalan border.”

“Why do I think you know more than you’re telling me?”

“Allan, Vic is in the El Paso Marriott, on Airport Boulevard, registered as Jose Gomez. If you’ve got a pencil, I’ll give you the number.”

“If you know something I should, Frank. .”

“The area code is 915. .”

“Hold one,” Naylor said. “Okay. Give me that number again.” Lammelle gave it to him, and then said, “Give me five minutes, Allan, and I’ll call him and tell him you’ll be calling.”

“What have you got him doing down there?”

“It’s always a pleasure to talk to you, Allan,” Lammelle said, and hung up.