More than a decade later, in secret deliberations, another Senate committee would attempt to determine if the CIA had permitted the assassination of John F. Kennedy in deadly retribution for his act of independence from “the company.”
The CIA — which gradually became known as the company and then the Langley company or Langley firm — tried three times to kill off the alternative agency. The first attempt came in 1964, when it blitzed the accidental president, Lyndon B. Johnson, with a cornucopia of information on Communist activities in Southeast Asia and suggested that it take over the intelligence-gathering function of R Section — which had acknowledged Communist activities in the same area but recommended a hands-off attitude on the part of the U.S.
Johnson had been undecided and, in keeping with his senatorial background, kept looking for a way toward compromise of the opposing recommendations. The reports from the two agencies puzzled him: CIA warned the North Vietnamese were about to take over South Vietnam, that Laos was on the verge of totally falling into a Communist dictatorship, and that mild Cambodia was also endangered. The report from R Section downplayed dangers at the moment in Cambodia and Laos and said that U.S. involvement in Vietnam was not justified by the level of guerrilla activity there.
Johnson finally chose to follow the CIA reports when the agencies could not be reconciled.
R Section went into decline and was kept alive for two years only by funding pushed through by a handful of powerful senators — including VerDer Cook — who still did not trust the CIA and the growing American involvement in Southeast Asia.
In 1966, Johnson privately rebuked the CIA for its inflammatory reports and personally breathed new life into R Section. A young R Section agent named Devereaux, working in Vietnam at the time, filed a long coded cable report accurately predicting the 1968 Tet offensive some four months before that event. Unfortunately, the President of the United States simply did not believe it, and Johnson’s generals in Vietnam had downplayed the report’s accuracy.
In 1969, the CIA again approached a President — this time, Richard M. Nixon — and sought to have him terminate the stubborn life of R Section. Nixon, on the advice of Henry Kissinger, then his National Security Council advisor, decided not to act.
(There is some fragmentary evidence now that certain members of that administration considered giving R Section a domestic-intelligence function but that the plan was not pursued.)
A third attempt to kill R Section was made in 1972 when the CIA informed the President, through the usual courier, that they had information of the extraordinary facts behind the simple burglary that June in the Watergate building complex.
With traditional stubbornness and anger, Nixon ignored the company’s veiled blackmail attempt. He is reported to have said, “If those goddamned spooks think they can blackmail the President of the United States, I’ll show those goddamned sonsofbitches just what the power of the President means.”
Eighteen months later, Nixon resigned. The company made no attempt to influence Gerald Ford, Nixon’s unelected successor. They assumed — correctly — that Ford would be a mere interregnery. But the eventual Democratic president who succeeded Ford appalled the Council inside the CIA: Jimmy Carter had served in the Navy under the late Admiral John Stapleton, who had become the first head of R Section and might properly be called its father.
Carter, however, turned out to be the CIA’s first ally in an attempt to kill R Section: Carter privately told senators concerned with maintaining R that he did not believe in multiple intelligence-gathering agencies and would like to see R die a quiet death. But the Senate — made feisty by Watergate — was in no mood to blindly follow the recommendations of a President. The life of R Section — maintained by slender, strong supports — seemed assured.
Why R Section?
Like most designations, it came as an afterthought.
In the original appropriation setting up the agency in the 1963 fiscal budget (submitted in 1961), the cloudy description of the “research and development” section of the Department of Agriculture was listed in Agriculture’s budget in paragraph 789, subparagraph R.
So it would always be.
4
Devereaux awoke shortly after nine, his face to the window. Gray mist outside obscured the world. He knew someone was sitting by the door.
He lay, his eyes open, breathing regularly. He thought of Hastings naked, dead. Saw himself.
He could roll off the side of the bed. He rejected that. He couldn’t see whoever was at the door. He had no weapon at hand. He decided there was nothing to do. He didn’t move as he spoke: “I don’t suppose you’re the maid?”
There was a low chuckle. He heard the familiar snap of a gun clicked off safety.
“No, I’d not be being the maid, atall.”
“I’m going to turn over,” said Devereaux. “I’m tired of this view.”
“Ah, very slowly then, lad. Believe me when I say it.”
Devereaux believed.
Rolling on his back, the covers bunching up behind him, he faced the man. And the barrel of a .45 caliber automatic that was pointed in his general direction.
“Did I leave my money at the bar?” Devereaux asked.
“Naw,” laughed O’Neill, still wearing the same dirty-collared white shirt and tightly knotted red tie. “No, lad, ya didn’t atall. Quite generous, though; did I thank ya for that last whisky? It was a pleasure to talk with you. I mean that quite sincerely, sur.”
“I’m sure you do,” said Devereaux.
They stared at each other silently. Slowly, the stage Irishman receded into the depths of that dark, mottled Irish face. Now there was no smile, no frown. The voice lowered and a nasty edge came into it.
“Where’s the bloody money, Yank?”
“Money?”
“Me ten thousand Yank dollars! Hastings’ ten thousand! Be quick now. Up and about and give me that roll or you’ll be the deadest Yank in Scotland this mornin’.”
The voice had turned hard. The kidding, soft Irish lilt of last night had been swallowed up somewhere in the barrel of the .45 automatic.
“You want both shares — Hastings’ and yours?”
“And what’s poor bloody Hastings gonna do with his now?”
O’Neill knew Hastings was dead, then.
Devereaux smiled and slowly extended his naked legs from beneath the covers over the side of the bed. He stood up slowly.
The gunman did not speak but kept the gun barrel pointed at Devereaux’s bare belly.
Devereaux bent and pushed the upper mattress aside and revealed a brown envelope. He reached for it.
For a moment, as he knew would happen, the gunman’s eyes glanced at the envelope. It was tricky. They were about three feet apart, which was just enough room. Devereaux held his breath as he moved.
His left foot struck O’Neill full on the face, breaking his nose with a crunch of bone; blood welled out of both nostrils. His toe caught O’Neill’s eye. At the same moment, Devereaux’s right foot clattered the gun aside, though O’Neill pulled the trigger reflexively and sent a wild bullet into the plaster ceiling.
Bruce Lee would be proud, Devereaux thought as his body hit the floor. He never managed the act with grace, even in training. He was only effective.
In a second, he had rolled to his feet and kicked O’Neill — still sitting in the chair — hard in the lower abdomen. O’Neill vomited on the spot and continued to fall forward in the chair. Devereaux pulled O’Neill out of the chair by his hair and kicked him in the left kidney, sending him sprawling to the floor.
Picking up the brutish gun, Devereaux waited for O’Neill to stop being sick on the rug.