Bill Granger
Schism
For Mal Bellairs, who gave space and time and, unexpectedly, friendship
EPIGRAPH
And the nations were angry, and Thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead that they should be judged; and that Thou should give reward to Thy servants.… And should destroy them which destroy the earth.
My object all sublime
I shall achieve in time
To let the punishment fit the crime.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In 1975–76, congressional investigations revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency had made use of missionaries, medical personnel, and news reporters abroad, recruiting them, for pay or patriotism, into espionage networks. In 1976, under new guidelines accepted by the CIA Director, it was stated that the Agency “has no secret paid or contractual relationship with any American clergyman or missionary. This practice will be continued as a matter of policy.” However, by 1980, the Director admitted in Senate testimony that he had waived the guideline three times and argued that there can be “unique circumstances” in which clergymen and others are the only means available to operate as agents “in a situation of the highest urgency and national importance.”
The late medical doctor Thomas Dooley was posthumously recognized as an intelligence operative in Laos. He was awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Eisenhower in 1959, shortly before the doctor’s death from cancer, but the Agency did not acknowledge his status with them until the late 1970s.
When it was chartered in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency resolved never to spy upon American citizens and never to operate espionage missions on American soil. The Agency has since admitted that it has frequently broken its charter resolutions.
The intelligence community of the United States consists not only of the Central Intelligence Agency but also of various other intelligence groups, including the Defense Intelligence Agency. The National Security Agency generally acts as the “hardware and software” supplier for the intelligence services.
The Tridentine form of the Mass, largely constructed during the Middle Ages and known popularly as the “old” Mass or the Latin Rite Mass, was radically altered in liturgy following reforms dictated by the Second Vatican Council in 1961–64, held at Rome. Though not expressly forbidden in all its forms, at all times, in all parishes of the Roman Church, the “old” Mass has generally been suppressed by the Church hierarchy.
The Vatican State, the temporal presence of the Roman Church, has long operated intelligence-gathering functions through its worldwide network of embassies and special emissaries.
The Vatican State has followed a consistent policy of accommodation with the Communist-controlled governments of the Eastern European bloc countries, especially since 1975.
These statements are all true.
PART ONE
The Return
1
On the day it began, the Ambassador to Thailand was not even in the capital.
For the second time in six months, the Ambassador had flown back to Washington for consultations with the President on the “declining state of civilization” along the border separating Thailand and Cambodia. He had described it thus in his last message because understatement seemed the only weapon left to him.
Each day there had been new reports of armed skirmishes along the border and, as always, the dreadful daily reports on the stinking masses of refugees in the sprawling camps at the border, whose lives were spent huddling against the unspeakable terror coming from the jungles they had fled. There were no dogs in the region and had not been for a long time; nor birds or monkeys, nor any creature small enough and weak enough to be trapped and killed by those with sufficient strength of body and will among the largely lethargic starving refugees. The people were dying each day like leaves in autumn, slowly and surely tumbling to death as the season moved on. The bellies of the children were taut, bloated by starvation, and the bones of their little arms protruded grossly beneath the dull sheen of their yellow skin. All day, they lay in the shade with their immense eyes staring at nothing, the flies fastening themselves to their lips and nostrils like so many small, living black bumps on the flesh.
And all the while, the black market thrived, in the midst of the wretched camps, with the connivance and consent of the Thai soldiers stationed along the border. Winston cigarettes were for sale next to Bic lighters, the products displayed in rows on blankets thrown down in the sand. There were radios and batteries, too, and, most mysteriously, cases upon cases of Aunt Jemima pancake mix that those refugees strong enough to steal, to kill, those who found something still to barter, would buy and mix with cold water and eat without cooking.
“Intolerable,” the Ambassador had fumed when he was sent to Thailand. He had not expected this at all when he agreed to take the post in exchange for his key support in the President’s last primary campaign. He had expected the posting to be a reward, and so it could have been: Bangkok was still a strange and beautiful city, and the embassy could offer nearly every luxury. There was a glittering life to Bangkok separate from the stench of the refugee camps on the border; there were parties that went from embassy to embassy, night after night.
And yet, because the Ambassador was a man of rare passion, he could not keep himself away from the camps, he could not stop himself from experiencing over and over the pall of hopelessness and death that hung over the camps like fine red dust. He had wired the President from the beginning; he had telephoned the White House too often; he had lobbied privately with his wealthy and powerful friends still in America; he had boldly invited the television networks to come and see what he saw, giving them every courtesy. He enraged the diplomats at the State Department with his unorthodox concern and reportedly made an enemy of the National Security Adviser with his actions; and at every turn, he implored the government in Bangkok to save the children at the very least, to move them away from the camps to the interior of the country, to feed them.
The response to this last line of appeal had puzzled him most and troubled him the greatest because he had come up against the bar of color and caste and national hatred that pervaded the East as surely as it did the West. He was not without skill and would have understood in his own country the subtle nuances of racial animosity yet affinity in rural Mississippi between the redneck and the black, but he could not understand the basic contempt of the Thais toward the Cambodians and their absolute hatred of the Vietnamese who had driven the refugees into the arms of an unwilling host.
“Intolerable.” He had said it again and again, and everyone in the embassy agreed with him, everyone in Washington agreed with him, all his old friends agreed with him, the press agreed with him. At every turn, he met a yielding wall of pity for the refugees, for the starving ones, for the children with their bloated bellies and sad, unseeing eyes. No one wanted them to starve — of course not; no one wanted that.
And beyond the border itself was Cambodia, wasted and dead, Carthage of the East salted by war and self-destruction and genocide so that nothing should live there again. The jungles were silent and brooding, returning inexorably day by day to the primeval. Everywhere there was a feeling of death; everywhere the stinking, rotting death, the horror.