I WAS A TEENY-BOPPER FOR THE CIA
Lolly Popstick was the most sizzling teeny-bopper he had ever seen, and when Vance Powers first let his eyes rove over her shapely mini-skirted figure, he was glad he had taken this assignment... to find out if she was a double agent for the other side.
Here is espionage as you have never known it before, where the only skill a spy needs to use is the ability to make love— in a hundred “way-out” ways. A swinging novel about between-the-covers work by a new kind of undercover agent from the bestselling author of the “O.R.G.Y.” series.
I WAS A TEENY-BOPPER FOR THE CIA
Ted Mark
1967
“I AM NOT NOW AND HAVE
NEVER BEEN A MEMBER OF
THE CIA.”
—TED MARK
Chapter One
ALL EYES on the teeny-bopper! What there was of her miniskirt flared out to display bikini panties that gave the impression of being about to reveal more than they revealed. It was hard to tell because her bottom was in constant frenzied motion, a sort of derriére movement in double-time to the dance the rest of her was doing.
The dance was called “The Shing-A-Ling,” and it was done to Mo-Town music. Which is to say that the tempo was Detroit—-Motor Town; Mo-Town—-soul music with a pronounced R & B-—rhythm and b1ues—beat. What the melody lacked in structure it made up in loudness. The teeny-bopper lacked nothing in structure—particularly derriére-wise.
That was the focal point. High, round, firm with youth, it was a bobbling magnet creating an optic field. And male optics were fielding its curves from every corner of the party-filled room.
Indeed, the vibrating adolescent fundament had stolen the wingding’s thunder. The blast was to celebrate the presentation earlier in the evening of the Pine Glen Drama Group’s latest production. Now the glories of crabgrass theatrics were being obscured by the teeny-bopper’s performance and the suburban sirens were smouldering with resentment. After all, it was a cast party attended by amateur actors, actresses, and their respective spouses. As the date of an unattached male in the drama group, the teeny-bopper was an interloper.
So was I. I’d lived in Pine Glen, a typical split-level community on the South Shore of New York’s Long Island, for about five years, but I’d never been involved in little theatre. Also, like the teeny-bopper, I wasn't married to anyone in the Drama Group. These days I wasn’t married at all. I was nursing a divorce that was almost a year old and still struggling for life. And there was something else that set me aside from the others at the party, the teeny-bopper included. That something was my reason for wangling an invitation to the cast blast in the first place.
I was a secret agent!
It was lousy casting. A counterspy should be suave, handsome, debonair. I’m an over-tall gangling type with a fat Adam’s apple where a square and dimpled chin ought to be, and the sort of muscular coordination that keeps me tripping all over my two left feet. By profession I'm a corporation lawyer, junior partner in the firm of Birnbach, O'Neill & Powers. Powers is me — Vance Powers, Columbia, Class of '60 — an ordinary Joe who still commuted from Pine Glen to my Williams Street office in the heart of the Manhattan financial district because I’d been having trouble unloading my house since the divorce. Splitsville had been rocky, but outside of that my life was as unexciting as any of my neighbors. I wasn’t the type to develop delusions of Bond-eur. Yet here I was — in, of all unlikely settings, Pine Glen — trying to make like a male Mata Hari.
It began with the letter from Senator Hawthorne summoning me to Washington. I'd known Uriah Hawthorne many years before his election as junior senator from a mid-Western state. He'd been one of my professors at law school. In those days a rapport had grown between us which went far beyond the usual student-teacher relationship.
The closeness was such that shortly after graduation when I found myself catching a plane to San Francisco, the first leg of a journey that would end in Vietnam, Professor Hawthorne saw me off at the airport. “I wish there was some meaningful advice I could give you, Vance,” he said as we waited for the departure of my flight to be announced.
“No thanks,” I told him. “Your last advice to me was that I join the ROTC. I did, and here I am on my way to some God-forsaken dot on the map as a “Military Observer.” Just what the hell is a “Military Observer anyway?”
“I presume it means you observe the Vietnamese Army and report what you've seen to our military.”
About law the Professor knew a lot. About the ways of the Army, he knew but nothing. It didn’t take me long in Vietnam to determine that. Still, I did remember his parting words at the airport: “If things get very rough, my boy, let me know. I have a few friends in Washington. I can pull a few strings. So, if there's anything I can do -”
A month later, finding myself up to my nostrils in excrement, I took him up on it. As a “Military Observer” and First Lieutenant in the U.S. Army, I was put in charge of a platoon of South Vietnamese soldiers assigned to fill in a series of latrine trenches so overloaded that they were a health hazard. As a graduate lawyer, I wrote Professor Hawthorne, I didn*t feel this duty was in keeping with my abilities. Also, the constant close association with the by-products of dysentery had brought on a condition of daily nausea which deeply affected my ability to swallow and retain K-rations. I urged the Professor to pull his string before my gorge itself was permanently disgorged.
I was transferred to an Army Intelligence Unit based in Saigon a few weeks after sending my letter to the Professor. Wonder of Wonders, the Army actually decided to utilize my talents as a lawyer. I was assigned to help prepare the defenses of accused South Vietnamese draft dodgers and deserters. A Vietnamese lawyer would represent the malefactors in court; it was my job to draw up the brief. Since roughly seventy-five percent of the able-bodied men in South Vietnam connive to avoid the draft, desert after they’ve been drafted, or belong to the Viet Cong, I was kept pretty busy.
When my tour of duty was up and I returned to the States, I didn’t get to see Uriah Hawthorne. By then he’d left Columbia for private practice in the Mid-West. I got involved with marriage, my own law practice, and then the divorce. We exchanged occasional letters, but that was it. I rooted from the sidelines when he ran for the Senate and sent him a congratulatory telegram after he won. After that I followed his career casually in the papers.
I was surprised when I got the letter asking me to come to see him in Washington. It sounded urgent and very hush-hush. There was also the implication that I owed him a favor-—which was true—-and so I went.
Our meeting took place late at night in a second-rate hotel room with only the two of us present. The Senator got right down to cases. “As you may know, Vance,” he began, “I’m a junior member of the Senate watchdog committee that keeps tabs on the CIA. Right now we’re faced with a very interesting question. We’re trying to find out just how much money the CIA gets every year.”
“I thought Congress appropriated their funds.”
“We do. But even the Congressmen and Senators who vote the appropriations don’t know how much goes to the CIA. It’s hidden in various other allotments, supposedly in the interests of national security.” The Senator scowled. “The CIA claims if it has to account for its funds, its effectiveness will be hampered.”
“What an opportunity for a boondoggle,” I observed.