It was his third tour as a sniper in which he snatched up Comrade Dragunov. At a forlorn fire base somewhere in the jungle, he and his spotter worked a ruse, with an Agency team and the marines in full co-op mode, that resulted in our acquisition of the first Dragunov in Western hands. That rifle today is at the Agency museum on the first floor of the main building in Langley. Before it was put on display, I had a good hands-on experience with it at the Langley technical directorate’s shop. The very same one!
His twenty years after Vietnam were the most banal of hells. It seems sad that a man of such gifts should suffer so basely, but what are you going to do? Men of such dark fury and skill frequently turn it on themselves, as Pilgrim Swagger did, and the record is beyond melancholy and well into squalor. Alcoholism, business failure, brushes with the law, car wrecks, a failed marriage, a whole litany of messages to God requesting annihilation, since reality was too painful. God must have been busy that day, or perhaps he was saving Swagger to punish a real sinner, such as moi; somehow the sniper retreated to the woods, acquired a trailer, and rebuilt himself. Despite his many feats of arms, this was probably his greatest, bravest accomplishment. He became a reader, curious as to what had caused Vietnam and, beyond that, what had caused so much pain, from his traumatic wound and from the losses he suffered, his first Vietnamese wife and then his spotter. Swagger, I tried to save you from all that. I knew as early as ’63 that it would come to no good end and your story would be written in blood and pain a million times. Kill me if you can, goddamn you, Swagger, but I committed the crime of the century to save you. You should love me as you press the trigger, if that’s what is in store.
Alone in Arkansas except for a dog and a brace of rifles, he gave himself over to the history of the Vietnam War and then the history of war itself, which after all is paradoxically the history of civilization. He educated himself in the ways of a world he served but never knew. His mind refined itself, shed itself of childish notions like pride and bravado and domination, and became wise. He stopped talking, he started listening. He shot and shot and shot and turned his grade-A talent into something almost beyond knowing. He retrained himself for a mission, and at last one came along. I should know. It was my mission.
In ’93, I was sixty-three years old. I was a hoary old eminence grise, beloved by the younger men, known for steady advice, unquenchable rationality – I had never abandoned the New Criticism – and superb technical skills, especially at planning and funding black ops. I was Mr. Black in Agency lore. I was in high demand. Though I spent much of my time on Russia – it was I who put together the money train that enabled Yeltsin to take over after Gorbachev, and I don’t think he or anybody else ever knew I was an American, much less an American agent – I oversaw or advised on projects in other spheres as well.
That was how El Salvador came into my life. God-awful place, never want to go back. It reminded me of Vietnam, though the food was all mealy and saucy, nowhere near the level of the Mexican that Alek had introduced me to.
This need not be a long tale, and I will spare you details and dramatization. I begin with a personal note, although my memoir is by design professional, not personal. But the personal intrudes on the professional. In 1992 Peggy died of breast cancer after a six-week ordeal. It was a terrible thing to see, a woman so vital, so intelligent, so beautiful, so loyal, so terrific, the best of all her peers and the source of whatever strength I had, as well as an extraordinary mother to the boys, eaten alive by the crab. The boys and I were at her side when she passed, and she lived long enough to see them through college and through their own well-established careers and families. It was a devastation for me, one that hurt and hurt and hurt. I am not making excuses; I am merely explaining why I was not at my best in what followed. I made bad judgments, mistakes, my concentration slipped; it was far from my proudest hour. I was lucky to escape alive, even if I didn’t.
Let’s speed this up. Time may not be on our side, thanks to Mr. Swagger. It became necessary to eliminate a man, and it occurred to me to replicate Operation LIBERTY VALANCE. Same method: a patsy sniper, a real sniper, a ballistic deceit, the patsy caught during the op and eliminated, the home team getting away clean. The details are forever sealed in Langley’s files, but again I cast Lon as the real shooter; it turned out he was hungry for the adventure, having become bored stiff by his self-decreed “retirement.” I cast Swagger as Oswald.
Bad career move, as they say.
Swagger, unlike poor, stupid Alek, escaped, and it became a race and a chase. We had to get to Swagger before the FBI did. This was Shreck, my main operative’s, task, and Swagger outsmarted, outfought, and outshot him at every turn. My first mistake: not realizing he would have made a better shooter than patsy. Neither Shreck nor I saw until too late that the plot we had engineered for him generated not his death but his rebirth. He reentered the world he had abandoned stronger, smarter, more guileful, more cunning, and braver. All along, we weren’t hunting him, he was hunting us.
A final ambush was painstakingly set. I urged Lon to be the shooter, and I do think he enjoyed the whole thing. It was better than rotting away in a wheelchair in a secluded estate in the North Carolina countryside. For his heroism, his effort, his high morale, he was awarded a bullet in the head. I should regret this more than I do, but after all, given his tragedy, Lon enjoyed an interesting life because of my importuning. Better he passed that way than via decay. Shreck, for his part, was unhappy to discover that a shotgun slug could penetrate a bulletproof vest. He wasn’t as unhappy as his number two, a stumpy little ex-NCO of extremely violent tendencies named Jack Payne, who made the same discovery, but not until Swagger had blown off his arm with the same shotgun. Swagger: the best man I ever heard of in a gunfight, bar none.
Even then he had surprises. He was captured, and our deeper trap seemed to still be in place, by which he would swing for murder.
Oops, I say! He’d outthought even the great Hugh Meachum. He’d subtly disabled his rifle before the whole thing happened, so it was impossible for it to have fired the fatal shot. As far as I know, they’re still looking for the person who did, but it was at this point that Hugh Meachum decided to die.
Again I pull the screen of discretion between the reader and the details. Let me say that it should be beyond the ken of no professional intelligence operative – and I was one of the world’s best – to arrange a convincing fiction for his own death. I was, after all, a superb planner, a manipulator of documents and secret funding, and had long since made the necessary preparations for such a contingency. It helped that I lived alone and there was no spousal difficulty to contend with. It helped also that I was still under discipline, and I knew that once I made the break, I made it permanently: there could be no going back, no farewells, not a minute crack in the facade.