men to whom women are drawn like moths to a candle,” Janice Hall had said.
The day Janice came to the office and met Castillo, she suggested to her husband that they have him to dinner.
“He’s probably lonely living in a hotel,” Janice said, “and would really appreciate a home-cooked meal.”
“I thought you hated men to whom women were drawn like moths to a candle.”
“That’s not his fault, and he’s obviously a nice guy. Ask him.”
Castillo also got along from the start with Joel Isaacson and Tom McGuire. Hall had worried a little about that; Secret Service guys aren’t impressed with most anyone. But Joel and Tom—both excellent judges of character—seemed to sense that Special Forces Major C. G. Castillo wasn’t most anyone. Isaacson had even gone to Hall and suggested that Castillo be given credentials as a Secret Service agent.
“He could get through airport security that way. And carry a gun. I’ll handle the credentials guys at Secret Service, if you like.”
What really moved Castillo from being sort of a male secretary cum interpreter in whose presence it was possible to imbibe intoxicants and relate ribald stories to being a heavy hitter in Hall’s office was a fey notion of the President of the United States.
In May 2005, an old Boeing 727 that had been sitting at the airport at Luanda, Angola, waiting for parts for more than a year, suddenly took off without permission and disappeared. No one really thought it had been stolen by terrorists and was going to be flown into some American landmark in a repeat of 9/11—that had quickly become regarded as a ridiculous notion at the highest levels; for one thing, the aged bird didn’t have the range to fly to the United States—but no agency in what the President described as “our enormous and enormously expensive intelligence community” seemed to be able to learn what had happened to it.
The President was annoyed. At a private dinner— really private, just the President, the first lady, and Secretary and Mrs. Hall—the President said that he had been talking to Natalie Cohen—then his national security advisor, and now the secretary of state—and they had come up with an idea.
Hall understood that “they had come up with an idea” meant it was the President’s idea. If it had been Natalie’s, the President would have said so. What had probably happened was that he had proposed the idea, she had first argued against it, but then had given in to the President’s logic, and the idea had become “their” idea. If she hadn’t given in, and he had decided to go ahead anyhow, he would have claimed the idea as his own.
“You’re the only department without an in-house intelligence operation,” the President had said. “So this will work. Natalie will send everybody in the intelligence community a memo saying that since this stolen airliner poses a potential threat to the homeland, you are to be furnished, immediately, all the intelligence they’ve developed about this missing airplane.
“That will give us who knew what and when they knew it. Then, very quietly, we send somebody—just one man—to go over the scene quietly, very quietly, and see if he can find out why the CIA, for instance, knew something on Tuesday that the DIA didn’t find out until Thursday. Or why the FBI didn’t find out at all. You with me?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. President.”
“The question is: Who can we send to do this without setting off a turf war?”
After meeting Major Carlos G. Castillo, the President decided he was just the man to very quietly, without setting off a turf war, find out which intelligence agencies were running with the ball; or had fumbled the ball; or had just sat on it, waiting for another agency to do the work.
Castillo went to Luanda, Angola, where the whole thing had started, and immediately ignited a turf war that had very nearly cost Secretary Hall his job.
He not only learned that the missing 727 had been stolen by Somalian terrorists, who planned to crash it into the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, but with the help of Aleksandr Pevsner, an infamous Russian arms dealer, located the airplane no one else could find, and then with the help of the ultrasecret Gray Fox unit of Delta Force, stole the missing airplane back from the terrorists. With Castillo flying as copilot, Air Commando Colonel Jake Torine had flown the airplane from Costa Rica to Central Command headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida.
When the President