ahead. “Mr. McGarvey, on Tuesday you were asked if you wanted this appointment, and you told us no, that you did not. But that you would accept the job because President Haynes asked you to.”
“That’s correct, Senator.” “Then let me ask you a related question.
Why did you join the CIA in the first place: What was it, twenty-six, twenty-seven years ago? And two follow-up questions: Who recruited you and how was it done?” McGarvey went back. He’d been young, cocky, brash, certainly arrogant. He was doing something that counted, something that his father and mother could be proud of. He caught Brenda Madden’s eye. She was sitting back in her tall leather chair, fingers to her lips, a scowl on her face, her eyes narrowed. She looked like an animal ready to pounce. “The CIA recruiters were on campus in my senior year. I talked to them. But Vietnam was chewing up our people, and I thought that I could do some good in the military rather than dodging the draft. By the time I finished OCS and Intelligence Officers School it was the spring of 1972, and I was sent to Saigon. I did my two tours, came back to the States and resigned my commission in June of 1974.” “Our troops were being brought home by then,” Senator Pilcher said. “That’s correct, Senator. The drawdown began in 1973.” McGarvey was back in full force; all of his memories intact and vivid. “I’d been given a telephone number by the CIA recruiters, so I called it, and the next morning I met with Lawrence Danielle who was the deputy director of Operations. He knew my parents, or knew of them, and he told me that I could do just as important a job, maybe even more important than I had in the air force or than my parents were doing down at Los Alamos. I thought about it and agreed.”
“How long did you think about it?” Brenda Madden mumbled. But everyone heard her. “About five seconds, Senator. I believed in my country just as strongly then as I do now.” “What happened next?”
Pilcher asked. “I went through the CIA’s training program and worked on the Vietnam desk at headquarters until late 1975, when I was assigned back in-country.” Pilcher was startled. “Saigon had already fallen by then, hadn’t it?” “Yes, it had. But besides our POWs who were being repatriated, there were Vietnamese nationals who had worked for us who were marked for arrest and execution. I was sent in to help find them and then get them into Laos and eventually to Thailand.”
“Who were those people?” Brenda Madden asked. “The program was called CORDS. Civilian Operations Revolutionary Development Staff. They were part of what was being called the Hamlet Pacification Program to identify Viet Cong infiltrators at the village level.” “And mark them for assassination?” “No. The VC were being offered amnesty. If they didn’t want to switch allegiance to the south, they were treated as POWs for the duration.” “None of them were killed?” “Some of them were killed, yes, Senator.” “Then the real reason that you joined the CIA and went back to Vietnam was exactly as I suggested yesterday.
Because you wanted to involve yourself in the action by rescuing fellow assassins.” “By saving the lives of men and women who gave loyal service to the United States,” McGarvey countered. “If we could move along now,” Senator Hammond prompted. “We have a lot of material to get through ”
“Were your rescue efforts effective, Mr. McGarvey?”
Brenda Madden pressed. “Not very.” She glanced at her fellow committee members. “Don’t be modest. How many of the CORDS people, as you call them, did you actually rescue? I mean get across Laos to freedom in Thailand and then here to the United States. One hundred?
Two dozen? Five or ten?” “No.” “One?” Brenda Madden demanded.
“Isn’t it true that not a single one of those people was brought here?”
“There were some, I think,” McGarvey said. “But not by me.”
“Why?” All the frustration came back to him. He shook his head.
“They were not issued visas for one reason or another.” “You have no idea why not?” “It was political. The war was unpopular, and it was over. We lost. Nobody wanted to deal with it anymore.” “Which made you angry,” Brenda Madden said. She didn’t wait for his answer. “That was simply the first step in Mr. McGarvey’s disillusionment with his country, with the CIA, with power in general. With following orders.”
She glanced at the other senators while gesturing toward McGarvey. “It was the same in Berlin and Hong Kong and France. Every assignment ended up a disaster for one reason or another. But always it was Kirk McGarvey in the middle of it. Not following orders. Working outside of his charter. Taking matters into his own hands. Charging in, guns blazing.” McGarvey sat back in his chair to let her rant. She was right in more than one way. The CORDS rescue operation had been a total disaster. Not as a field exercise, but in the political arena at home. And she wasn’t far off the mark when she accused that the aftermath of the Vietnam War had started him on the path of disillusionment. But then she hadn’t brought up the sorry episode of James Jesus Angleton, who looked so hard for moles inside the CIA that he all but brought the Agency down. And she wasn’t aware of John Lyman Trotter, Jr.” McGarvey’s friend since the CORDS days, who turned out to be the mole that Angleton had sought. But that was much later, after McGarvey had been fired. Brenda Madden stopped to take a breath, and McGarvey stepped into the breach. “Was there a question in there, Senator?” Even Hammond seemed to be fascinated by the California senator’s hatred for McGarvey. But he was content for the moment to allow her to continue. His agenda in the hearings was a purely political one. He wanted to be president, and he wanted to cut President Haynes down to size at every possible opportunity. But Madden, who’d moved to San Francisco as a young woman, had shaped her political career as an activist. She was anti-nuclear power plants, anti-free world trade, and virulently anti- Republican and the party’s fiscal conservatism. In her estimation the only reason the social welfare programs of the last half century had failed was because not enough money had been spent on them. Instead of squandering our taxes on the B-2 bomber and stealth fighters, or nuclear submarines and fabulously expensive aircraft car tiers, the money could have been much better spent on educating young, black, single mothers. President Haynes and the Central Intelligence Agency were prime examples of the people and Beltway “old boys” clubs that she most despised. And McGarvey, who’d once inadvertently wondered out loud at a Washington cocktail party why Madden had never married, epitomized both. He was a friend of Haynes, and he was running the CIA. “Let’s cut to the chase,” she said. “Actually you weren’t in the CIA for very long. At least not as a card-carrying employee with a desk, a regular paycheck and benefits. Saigon, Berlin, Hong Kong, and Paris with stints at Langley, and then you were fired. Everything that you did afterward for the CIA was freelance. Isn’t that so?” “That’s correct, Senator.”
“Good. Let’s talk about Santiago, Chile. Operation Title Card.” She smiled. “You people at Langley come up with the most interesting code names.” “A machine picks them,” McGarvey said. “Yes, I know,” she said. “It’s too bad that the entire Agency couldn’t be run with such imagination.” Tide Card was not on Paterson’s list. It was a Track III ops, but tame by comparison with some of the other operations McGarvey had been involved with. But she would milk it for all it was worth.
Sensationalizing a dismal mission that had satisfied no one. Hopefully she was so blinded by her own agenda that she would miss the connection between Santiago and two other operations that sprung out of it. One involved a director of the CIA and a former U.S. senator. The other involved a president of the United States. “What would you like to know?” McGarvey asked. “Tell us about the operation, in your own words,” Brenda Madden said. “I was sent to assassinate Army general August Pifiar, who had been indicted by a U.S. court for ordering the deaths of more than two thousand civilians, most of them dissident students, some of them the wives and mothers of the opposition party, and several of them Americans.” No one stirred. This was the first time in history that such a high-ranking officer of the CIA had made such an open admission. “Actually I didn’t catch up with him until three days after I got to Santiago and checked in with the chief of station. The general suspected that he was being targeted by us and barricaded himself with his wife and three children in their compound in San Antonio, about sixty miles outside the capital on the coast. “I had seen the documentation, the pictures of the bodies lined up inside the Estadio Chile, audio recordings of torture sessions, and three film clips of three groups of women and some children lined up on their knees in front of a long trench. Officers walked down the line firing their pistols into the backs of the prisoners’ heads. The bodies fell or were pushed into mass graves. Some of them were still alive, raising their arms for mercy. “General Pifiar was in all three of the film clips. He personally shot at least a dozen women, and when it was over he refused to order his soldiers to fire the coups de grace into those still alive. Instead he ordered the bulldozers to bury them alive.” The picture had been so vivid in McGarvey’s mind that when he arrived in Santiago he was sure that he could smell the stench of the rotting corpses. He shuddered. All eyes were on him. Even Brenda Madden had nothing to say for the moment. Paterson looked at him with an expression of sorrow mixed with a horrified fascination. “I am what I am,” Mac had once admitted to Larry Danielle. “An assassin.” The acting DCI had been an old man then, with his own memories starting as a senior member of the OSS during the war, and participating in the formation of the CIA. The motto in the early days at the Agency had been Bigger than State by ‘48. They’d gotten their wish and then some.
