about what lay ahead.
We were finally ready and I sent Imelda to bring in the first witness. It took a few minutes, during which we all sat around nervously and waited.
Finally the door opened and Imelda came through, followed by Chief Persico. She formally announced him, as though she were a court bailiff. He casually, but not at all casually, looked around and studied the new setup. Again, I had the impression of a man checking the field of battle, trying to calculate his odds.
“Please sit down, Chief,” I said, indicating a chair we had positioned in the middle of the floor. The chair sat isolated, without the protective comfort of a desk or table.
He sat down, folded his legs, and spent a brief moment studying Morrow, who was holding a tape recorder. Then his gray eyes shifted to me. “Mind if I smoke?”
He hadn’t smoked the first time we talked. The cool demeanor aside, I guessed that something about this session made him more nervous.
“If you’d like,” I told him.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of Camels, unfiltered, knocked a fag out of the packet, tapped the end a few times on the palm of his hand, then stuffed it between his lips and lit it. All this was accomplished in a smooth, flowing, almost instinctive motion.
I said, “Please state your full name and rank for the record.”
He blew smoke as he talked. “Michael John Persico. Chief Warrant Officer Four.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Our last meeting was merely an interrogatory, an informal exploratory session, to discuss the events that transpired between 14 June and 18 June 1999. The purpose of this session is to take your full formal statement concerning the same time period. Are you sure you want to waive your right to have an attorney present?”
“I’m sure,” he said.
“At your interrogatory, you stated that you and your team were in Kosovo participating in Operation Guardian Angel. You were lying, weren’t you? You were participating in Avenging Angel, which involved the performance of combat missions against Serbian forces in Kosovo. Isn’t this correct?”
Morrow and I had decided the best way to handle Persico was to come barging out of our corner and shock him with our best punch. We knew now why he, and the rest of his team, had been such confident, able liars. They had the U.S. government behind them. Who couldn’t tell a great whopper when NSA was building evidence to support you, when the CIA was fronting for you, when the United States Army was tying the hands of your listeners? I could tell a perfectly good lie even without all that help.
Persico took a long draw from his cigarette. Aside from that, he showed no visible signs of anxiety or distress. Finally, he said, “I ain’t got the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”
I said, “Jack Tretorne and General Murphy cleared Captain Morrow and me on the details of Avenging Angel. Now, please answer my question, or I will add obstruction of justice and lying under oath to whatever other possible charges we come up with today.”
He considered this only a moment. “Okay,” he said, “we were part of Avenging Angel.”
“Let’s deal with another lie,” I said. “When Captain Akhan’s unit raided the police station in Piluca, was this an approved and authorized operation?”
He said, “No.”
“Why did you lie to Colonel Smothers about what happened that day?”
“We didn’t lie,” he calmly said.
I withdrew the notes of the team’s debrief that Smothers had kindly provided. I looked down and pretended to study the sheet.
I looked up. “On the nineteenth, you informed Major Grenfeld, your battalion operations officer, that throughout the day of the thirteenth, you and Captain Sanchez attempted to stop Captain Akhan from raiding the police station at Piluca. Do you still stand by that statement?”
He took another heavy drag, looked around for an ashtray, then flicked his ashes on the floor. Then he turned back to me. “I do,” he said. “I tried damned hard to keep Captain Akhan from going after that station.”
“You tried damned hard? What about Captain Sanchez?”
“Well… he, uh, he tried, too.”
“He tried what, too?”
“Look,” Persico said, “it was a risky operation.”
A nice attempt at evasion, I thought. “Why was it risky, Chief?”
“Kinda obvious when you consider what happened, don’t ya think?”
“Right. But you said you tried hard to stop them. You must have had some strong reasons. What were they?”
“The target wasn’t approved by Group. Ain’t that reason enough?”
“There was more, though, wasn’t there, Chief?”
“Maybe.”
“What more was there, Chief? Why were you so opposed to that raid?”
“For starters, never go into an operation that ain’t well planned. That one wasn’t just poorly planned, it was hardly planned at all.”
“Not well planned?”
“That’s right. Captain Akhan and his guys just wanted to do it. Hardly any recon. No rehearsal. Since it wasn’t an approved target, there was no intell prep like we normally got from NSA or the CIA. They just wanted to march down there and kick some ass.”
“When Akhan insisted on doing it anyway, why didn’t you call Group and report that?”
He said, “That was Sanchez’s call. Ask him.”
I made an instinctive guess. “Was it because Sanchez wanted them to do the raid? Was that the reason you didn’t call Group?”
He hesitated, and that was his first mistake. “You’re asking the wrong man,” he said. “I ain’t no mind reader.”
“You and Captain Sanchez discussed it, though, didn’t you?”
“All right,” he said. “We discussed it. What’s your point?”
This was a very smart move on his part. He was unsure how much I knew. Maybe I was fishing, or maybe I was building a house from a blueprint. He was calling my bluff.
There was nothing to do but make another guess. “My point is that Sanchez wanted Akhan to do the raid, whereas you didn’t. When they were all killed, you blamed Sanchez.”
I was right. I could see it in his eyes. I was right.
But what he said was, “That ain’t the way it went down, Counselor. You’re sitting on your ass, here in this nice warm room tryin’ to figure things that happened in the heat of combat. You ain’t got a clue.”
He was angry, and in my mind there could only be one reason why. I said, “Then, afterward, you took control of the team away from Sanchez. Was it a mutiny?”
He reached into his pocket and withdrew the pack of Camels again. He had just ground out his other butt on the floor, but he dug out a fresh one and pounded it on his palm. He hit it so hard he broke it, and had to ditch it on the floor and take out another.
He lit it, then said, “Look, I didn’t have no problem with Sanchez. Like I told you earlier, he’s a good guy.”
I ignored him. “Then Colonel Smothers gave your team the order to extricate. That was around noon on the fourteenth. Sanchez spoke to the ops center at 1800 hours that evening. He said the area was thick with Serbs, and he did not consider movement advisable at that time.”
“That’s right,” he said. “I remember that call.”
“Then the next morning, at the 0600 sitrep, he repeated the same message. Then again, at the 1800 hours sitrep on the evening of the fifteenth.”
“That’s right.”
“Who was detecting all this Serb activity?”
“Perrite and Machusco were on security. Occasionally we rotated them out with the Moore brothers, to give Perrite and Machusco some rest.”
