“Who were those people?” Brenda Madden asked. “The program was called CORDS. Civilian Operations Revolutionary Development Staff. They were part of what was being called the Hamlet Pacification Program to identify Viet Cong infiltrators at the village level.” “And mark them for assassination?” “No. The VC were being offered amnesty. If they didn’t want to switch allegiance to the south, they were treated as POWs for the duration.” “None of them were killed?” “Some of them were killed, yes, Senator.” “Then the real reason that you joined the CIA and went back to Vietnam was exactly as I suggested yesterday.
Because you wanted to involve yourself in the action by rescuing fellow assassins.” “By saving the lives of men and women who gave loyal service to the United States,” McGarvey countered. “If we could move along now,” Senator Hammond prompted. “We have a lot of material to get through ”
“Were your rescue efforts effective, Mr. McGarvey?”
Brenda Madden pressed. “Not very.” She glanced at her fellow committee members. “Don’t be modest. How many of the CORDS people, as you call them, did you actually rescue? I mean get across Laos to freedom in Thailand and then here to the United States. One hundred?
Two dozen? Five or ten?” “No.” “One?” Brenda Madden demanded.
“Isn’t it true that not a single one of those people was brought here?”
“There were some, I think,” McGarvey said. “But not by me.”
“Why?” All the frustration came back to him. He shook his head.
“They were not issued visas for one reason or another.” “You have no idea why not?” “It was political. The war was unpopular, and it was over. We lost. Nobody wanted to deal with it anymore.” “Which made you angry,” Brenda Madden said. She didn’t wait for his answer. “That was simply the first step in Mr. McGarvey’s disillusionment with his country, with the CIA, with power in general. With following orders.”
She glanced at the other senators while gesturing toward McGarvey. “It was the same in Berlin and Hong Kong and France. Every assignment ended up a disaster for one reason or another. But always it was Kirk McGarvey in the middle of it. Not following orders. Working outside of his charter. Taking matters into his own hands. Charging in, guns blazing.” McGarvey sat back in his chair to let her rant. She was right in more than one way. The CORDS rescue operation had been a total disaster. Not as a field exercise, but in the political arena at home. And she wasn’t far off the mark when she accused that the aftermath of the Vietnam War had started him on the path of disillusionment. But then she hadn’t brought up the sorry episode of James Jesus Angleton, who looked so hard for moles inside the CIA that he all but brought the Agency down. And she wasn’t aware of John Lyman Trotter, Jr.” McGarvey’s friend since the CORDS days, who turned out to be the mole that Angleton had sought. But that was much later, after McGarvey had been fired. Brenda Madden stopped to take a breath, and McGarvey stepped into the breach. “Was there a question in there, Senator?” Even Hammond seemed to be fascinated by the California senator’s hatred for McGarvey. But he was content for the moment to allow her to continue. His agenda in the hearings was a purely political one. He wanted to be president, and he wanted to cut President Haynes down to size at every possible opportunity. But Madden, who’d moved to San Francisco as a young woman, had shaped her political career as an activist. She was anti-nuclear power plants, anti-free world trade, and virulently anti-Republican and the party’s fiscal conservatism. In her estimation the only reason the social welfare programs of the last half century had failed was because not enough money had been spent on them. Instead of squandering our taxes on the B-2 bomber and stealth fighters, or nuclear submarines and fabulously expensive aircraft car tiers, the money could have been much better spent on educating young, black, single mothers. President Haynes and the Central Intelligence Agency were prime examples of the people and Beltway “old boys” clubs that she most despised. And McGarvey, who’d once inadvertently wondered out loud at a Washington cocktail party why Madden had never married, epitomized both. He was a friend of Haynes, and he was running the CIA. “Let’s cut to the chase,” she said. “Actually you weren’t in the CIA for very long. At least not as a card-carrying employee with a desk, a regular paycheck and benefits. Saigon, Berlin, Hong Kong, and Paris with stints at Langley, and then you were fired. Everything that you did afterward for the CIA was freelance. Isn’t that so?” “That’s correct, Senator.”
“Good. Let’s talk about Santiago, Chile. Operation Title Card.” She smiled. “You people at Langley come up with the most interesting code names.” “A machine picks them,” McGarvey said. “Yes, I know,” she said. “It’s too bad that the entire Agency couldn’t be run with such imagination.” Tide Card was not on Paterson’s list. It was a Track III ops, but tame by comparison with some of the other operations McGarvey had been involved with. But she would milk it for all it was worth.
Sensationalizing a dismal mission that had satisfied no one. Hopefully she was so blinded by her own agenda that she would miss the connection between Santiago and two other operations that sprung out of it. One involved a director of the CIA and a former U.S. senator. The other involved a president of the United States. “What would you like to know?” McGarvey asked. “Tell us about the operation, in your own words,” Brenda Madden said. “I was sent to assassinate Army general August Pifiar, who had been indicted by a U.S. court for ordering the deaths of more than two thousand civilians, most of them dissident students, some of them the wives and mothers of the opposition party, and several of them Americans.” No one stirred. This was the first time in history that such a high-ranking officer of the CIA had made such an open admission. “Actually I didn’t catch up with him until three days after I got to Santiago and checked in with the chief of station. The general suspected that he was being targeted by us and barricaded himself with his wife and three children in their compound in San Antonio, about sixty miles outside the capital on the coast. “I had seen the documentation, the pictures of the bodies lined up inside the Estadio Chile, audio recordings of torture sessions, and three film clips of three groups of women and some children lined up on their knees in front of a long trench. Officers walked down the line firing their pistols into the backs of the prisoners’ heads. The bodies fell or were pushed into mass graves. Some of them were still alive, raising their arms for mercy. “General Pifiar was in all three of the film clips. He personally shot at least a dozen women, and when it was over he refused to order his soldiers to fire the coups de grace into those still alive. Instead he ordered the bulldozers to bury them alive.” The picture had been so vivid in McGarvey’s mind that when he arrived in Santiago he was sure that he could smell the stench of the rotting corpses. He shuddered. All eyes were on him. Even Brenda Madden had nothing to say for the moment. Paterson looked at him with an expression of sorrow mixed with a horrified fascination. “I am what I am,” Mac had once admitted to Larry Danielle. “An assassin.” The acting DCI had been an old man then, with his own memories starting as a senior member of the OSS during the war, and participating in the formation of the CIA. The motto in the early days at the Agency had been Bigger than State by ‘48. They’d gotten their wish and then some.
“What you are is a product of this business, dear boy,” Danielle told him in his fatherly way. “Get out while you still can.” Turn away now and run, run, run. Don’t look back. Get out while there’s still time to save Katy and Liz and the baby. Hide. Jump out of the light, and pull the shadows back in around you. “I got to him by subduing one of his guards, dressing in the man’s uniform and entering the compound. He was in bed asleep with his wife. I shot him once in the head with a silenced pistol, and then got out of there, back to Santiago. The next morning I flew home.” “Did you harm his wife or children?” Senator Clawson asked. “No.” Brenda Madden roused herself. But for the moment even she was subdued. “His wife had to have been damaged psychologically.” “I’m sure that she was,” McGarvey admitted. What he hadn’t told the committee, or anyone else for that matter, was that the general was not asleep. He and his wife had been in the act of lovemaking. His wife spotted Me Garvey and was about to cry out, alerting the guards just outside, so McGarvey had killed her. “Who issued the orders?” Clawson asked. “Mr. Danielle. He was acting DCI at the time.” “That’s very convenient. He is now deceased,” Brenda Madden said. “But your orders were changed. A Senate intelligence oversight committee voted to reject the assassination, and you were ordered not to go through with it. Yet you ignored those orders and went ahead on your own. Isn’t that so?” “I wasn’t informed of the new orders until after I had returned to Washington.” “According to you.”