The Cold War ruled. Ghosts of JFK, RFK, MLK, and Lee Harvey Oswald haunted America. Dr. Strangelove and his arsenals of doomsday atomic weapons tick-tocked toward imminent and seemingly inevitable launch. The Soviet Union sprawled as an evil gulag wasteland behind an Iron Curtain, while Communist China coiled like an invisible dragon behind a Bamboo Curtain. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI knew everything about everybody… and might use it against them. Hitler might not be hiding in Paraguay, but former Nazis who escaped after World War II had operatives in Swiss banks and at remote communes. Israeli avengers stalked the globe: they got Eichmann, they could get anybody. Apartheid bedeviled South Africa. South American drug dealers were still “small-time” businessmen, but America’s Mafia had a French connection for heroin. “Terrorists” were often called “revolutionaries,” whether they wore KKK robes, Black Panther berets, the kufiah of the PLO, or the Weather Underground clichéd long hair and love beads from the rainbow daze of the sixties. Cults like the Manson Family were coalescing inside the country’s consciousness. You could feel them out there even if all you heard were whispers. Something enshrouding and protecting our globe called the ozone layer was in jeopardy because of deodorant we sprayed in our armpits. No Superman battling for truth, justice and the American way knew it, but not far from my rented garret, President Richard Nixon’s White House henchmen were formalizing their “dirty tricks” strategies into thuggish crews that would be called “plumbers” created for burglaries and murder. In the jungles and cities of Vietnam, my generation was in that war’s twelfth year of Americans killing and dying.
Only the crazy weren’t paranoid.
You never knew where “they’d” strike, who they’d kill, or, for certain, why.
My what-if fantasy about a covert CIA office on Capitol Hill was not without foundation in reality. In those days, a flat-faced, gray concrete building with an always-lowered garage door and a windowless, locked, unlabeled entrance crouched on Pennsylvania Avenue amidst restaurants, bookstores, and bars just three blocks from the Capitol and the House of Representatives’s office buildings. Hill staffers shared the common knowledge “secret” that the building belonged to the FBI. If you had enough official clout to ask J. Edgar Hoover’s Bureau, you were told that this Capitol Hill office was one of their translation centers.
Sure, but what do they really do? wondered many of us.
Within pistol range of that secretive FBI fortress sat the propaganda-distributing, storefront townhouse headquarters for the Liberty Lobby, a political sect too whacky and extreme to be casually categorized as “right wing,” a group that in coming years would with impunity advertise and sell illegal drugs through the mail — Laetrile, a compound its proponents claim cures cancer, and the core of the drug regimen that the great actor Steve McQueen decamped to Mexico to use in the days before cancer killed him.
Two-plus years after being scarred by the MLK assassination riots, this was the Capitol Hill neighborhood where Condor’s what-if questions were born.
The last lecturer to my 1971 class of Congressional interns was Les Whitten, a novelist, a translator of French poetry, and partner to Jack Anderson, whose syndicated investigative reporting column ran in almost a thousand newspapers delivered to the doorsteps of about twenty million Americans from sea to shining sea. Unbeknownst to them, Jack and Les were under extensive illegal surveillance by the CIA. Les was the epitome of a muckraker — a term of honor. Neither of us imagined that four years later, after Condor, we would be reporting colleagues working together for Anderson’s column. That night in 1971, I was only a college kid.
A kid who was on his way home for spring break after the conclusion of this wondrously lucky three-month Senate internship. I stayed late after class that night to persuade Les to tell me the “great story” about the CIA he’d told the class that he would break the next week when I was back home in Shelby, Montana, where there was no daily newspaper for me to read the column.
Allen Ginsburg is the Beat poet. By 1971, as America rolled toward a narcotics nightmare none of us could imagine, he’d seen the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness, dragging themselves through America’s streets in search of an angry fix. The horrors of heroin screamed too loudly for the man inside the poet to ignore. Cherubic, bald, bearded, homosexual, mantra-chanting Ginsberg, hated by legions of conservative upholders of law and order, did what few of his critics would ever dare to do: Ginsberg declared a personal war on heroin. And he backed his rhetoric with action. His crusade was investigatory as well as proselytory. Les’s upcoming “great story” concerned Ginsberg’s investigations into the CIA’s allies in our Southeast Asian shooting war and their ties to the heroin business.
As Les stood in the nighttime halls of a Congressional office building and whispered his news to me, I felt my world tremble.
But I was just a college kid from Montana, a few weeks shy of my twenty-second birthday, headed home to my frontier tough, “gothic” (my wife’s brilliant characterization) and “noir” (my post-9/11 insight) hometown of Shelby sixty miles east of the Rocky Mountains, thirty miles south of Canada, and a million miles from the kind of “real world” I’d barely glimpsed in my three-month internship in Washington, D.C.
My grandfather had been a cowboy and card shark for saloons, my grandmother was a polio-crippled midwife who’d seen eight of her own children survive, including my mother and her four sisters who all lived in our hometown and who helped raise me like a pack of fun-loving coyotes. My Sicilian uncle had a still-unclear-to-me management role in our local red stucco two-story brothel that was protected by the cops and county health officials, a… confusing civic attitude toward law and morality that also manifested in our frontier doctor/former mayor performing sometimes-botched illegal abortions in his office above Main Street. Judging from the doctor’s steady stream of out-of-town patients, everyone west of the Mississippi River knew that particular secret.
You know the kid I was.
Coke bottle-thick, unfit-for-military-service eyeglasses. Off in the clouds. Mouthy. Nowhere near as smart as I or most of the town thought, surprising everyone when despite my brilliant four-years-older sister, I barely cracked the top third of my high school graduating class of eighty-seven. On the third string of the football team only because there was no fourth string. Obsessed by, unworthy of, and unsuccessful with every teenage girl. An uncool member of Teenage Republicans. The son of good, loving, respectable, middle-class parents who did their best and believed in the post-World War II American Dream. My workaholic father managed movie theaters, which meant I grew up seeing thousands of Grade B movies. My mother was a county librarian, which meant I didn’t need to worry about how long I kept the thousands of crime and adventure novels I devoured. I’d worked since grade schooclass="underline" theater ticket taker, motion-picture projectionist, janitor, hay bale bucker, rock picker, tractor jockey, gravedigger. I lucked out and put myself through my state university shoveling for the city road crew.
When I went to the University of Montana, I was so naïve I thought that the journalism department that gave me a small work-study scholarship included my passion: writing fiction.
I’d started spinning fictional tales literally before I could write, dictating stories to my patient mother (she threw them away). By my high school graduation, I’d written my senior class play and was sending out the first of hundreds of short stories to be rejected by crime, mystery, science fiction, and mainstream magazines. I was seven weeks into my university studies before I realized that the journalism major I’d chosen did not cover fiction. But (eventually) I witnessed Seymour Hersh change our world for the better with his journalistic exposé on the My Lai massacre and the journalism department gave me access to scholarships the fiction writing department couldn’t — though that department did have professors named James Lee Burke, James Crumley, and Richard Hugo, the poet and the only one of that illustrious American literary trio whose classes I took. Yeah, dumb me. One scholarship was the Sears Congressional Internship for investigative reporting that took me to that garret near a phony-looking townhouse in Washington, D.C.