It was that second paper that led to enquiries being made into Symons’s academic and private background, and two months later he was approached and recruited by the CIA. The package of temptation that had been put together to attract him had been based on a shrewd evaluation of the obvious pattern in his academic background. Symons was demonstrably ambitious, having sacrificed his practical day-to-day experience with patients to the demands of his published papers. In addition it had been carefully noted that his ambition was to a large extent power-motivated. Symons had a need, some thought a compulsion, for power over people, and as a charismatic man he found no difficulty in finding suitable subjects.
Most charismatic figures inevitably use their power over an extensive audience. Like Stalin, Jack Kennedy or Winston Churchill in the manipulation of whole nations, or like certain film stars and entertainers in the manipulation of national and international audiences. Some charismatic figures are content to be the sun in quite small constellations. Schweitzer in Lambarene. Whether your interest or satisfaction is to do good or evil, it is more recognizable when the canvas is small. If your urge is towards power over individuals then the CIA provides an ideal camouflage and a constant flow of human material.
The operations room was busy. Marines sat watching the radar screens and directing the US Marine jet fighters and US Navy Constellations back to base. Atsugi base, a few miles south-west of Tokyo, was responsible for controlling a vast area of air-space, using radar to direct aircraft to their targets, and radio for communications with pilots in the air.
All the Marines on the base were hand-picked, their backgrounds checked out by the CIA. Marine Oswald was highly thought of, and that evening he accepted an extra hour’s duty to cover a colleague’s absence. And for the first time, Marine Oswald and his fellow operators heard a radio call from a pilot requesting weather details for an altitude of ninety thousand feet, an altitude far higher than that used by any plane they had ever heard of. Similar requests for weather information at this extraordinary altitude were to come over the air in code during the next few weeks, but it was almost a month before they learned that the planes were U-2s. The so-called spy planes that were flying deep into Soviet and Chinese air-space to bring back revealing photographs of army, navy and air-force bases, seaports and factories.
When his relief came Marine Oswald showered, changed, and took the base bus into Tokyo. He didn’t join the return bus which took his fellows back to the base just before midnight. He had a free morning the following day when an operator was allowed to lie in before his afternoon shift.
The “Queen Bee” was Tokyo’s most expensive and exclusive nightclub. Mainly patronized by Japanese businessmen, diplomats and US officers, its hostesses were reckoned to be the prettiest in Japan. Marine Oswald, in civilian clothes, was a regular visitor to the nightclub and his girl-friend was one of the prettiest of the girls, and apart from dancing with her most of the evening he generally spent the night with her. And spending the night with one of the pretty hostesses cost roughly what a US marine earned in a month, including overseas and specialist allowances. He was the envy of most of his colleagues and disliked by the others.
When orders came through that the unit was being transferred to the Philippines there was disappointment all round. It was at that point that Marine Oswald’s excellent service record ended. He shot himself in the arm before the unit left, to try and avoid the posting. It was only a minor wound but it earned him a fine and twenty days’ hard labour. Not long afterwards Marine Oswald applied for, and was granted, release on the grounds that he had to look after his sick mother. Nobody had checked but his mother was, in fact, in excellent health.
2
The girl sang with her lips close to the microphone, her hands lovingly caressing its chromium stand. Her voice was thin and little-girlish, its range too narrow for the song she was singing. But in a Texas army camp if you’re young and pretty and you sing “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree” you’re going to get applause enough to satisfy your show-biz ego. And if you’re a stunning blonde in a pale blue bikini you’re going to bring the house down. As the applause crashed around the hall she smiled and bowed, the deep, pseudo-humble bow that singers give to kid the audience that they are sole arbiters of the singer’s fate. Then, against the roar of the applause, she sang the opening lines of “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and the soldiers fell silent again. And when she had finished they clapped and shouted and stamped enough for half a dozen curtain calls before the spotlight was cut off to allow her to escape.
Debbie Rawlins was born in Bradford, Yorkshire. She had escaped to London when she was fifteen, and with her pretty face, her long legs and well-developed breasts she had earned her living performing in half a dozen Soho strip clubs night after night. Freed from a father who abused her sexually, and a mother who hated her with a fury and energy that were frightening, her life in the sleazy clubs suited her well. The middle-aged Maltese who
