“Come on in, Howard,” the deputy director said to Howard W. O’Connor, the assistant director for administration of the Central Intelligence Agency. “What have you got?”
The deputy director was a slight man in his early fifties who wore his still-blond hair very short. O’Connor was a stocky, ruddy-faced man with a full mane of white curly hair.
O’Connor waved a long sheet of teletypewriter paper.
“The manifest of the Americans rescued from Stanleyville, being flown via Frankfurt to the States,” he said. “It just came in from Léopoldville.”
“Something, someone, on it is interesting?”
“A woman named Hanni Portet and her daughter, Jeanine,” O’Connor said. “Mrs. Portet is a German national, married to a chap named Jean-Phillipe Portet. He’s an American—he was Belgian, but served in our Army Air Corps in World War II and got his citizenship that way. The little girl—she’s eleven—got her citizenship via the father. There is also a son, Jacques, also an American citizen whom the long arm of the draft caught in Léopoldville, and when last heard of was at Camp Polk, Louisiana, taking basic training.”
“Why are the Portets of interest?”
“We’ve been looking around for someone to bankroll in setting up Air America II,” O’Connor said.
“Don’t call it that, Howard. Air America is a painful subject. No one was supposed to know of our interest in it. We need an airline that doesn’t have parenthesis CIA close parenthesis painted on the tail of its airplanes.”
“There have been several suggestions,” O’Connor said. “The one I like best is ‘Intercontinental Air Cargo.’ We can set it up in Miami; there’s half a hundred one- and two-airplane ‘airlines’ operating out of Miami.”
“What about just ‘Intercontinental Air’?”
“There is already an Intercontinental Air,” O’Connor said. “That was one of the reasons I like ‘Intercontinental Air Cargo.’ We can even hide behind their logo and color scheme.”
“Why don’t we just buy into Intercontinental Air?”
“The people that own it aren’t interested in partners,” O’Con-nor said. “They’re willing to sell, but we need somebody to buy it who can’t be tied to us.”
“This guy Portet?”
“Yeah. Right now he’s chief pilot for Air Congo, but he also has his own two-bit airline, Air Simba, flying mostly World War II Boeing C-46s around Southern Africa.”
“You think he’d be interested?”
“Things are not good in the Congo,” O’Connor said. “And they’re unlikely to get better, whether or not Che Guevara goes over there and starts causing trouble.”
“That’s not funny, Howard,” the deputy director said. “We told the President that’s not going to happen.”
“I think Portet would be very interested,” O’Connor said. “I wanted your permission to approach him.”
“You want to go over there?”
“No. He’s coming here with his family. I want J. Richard Leonard of the Gresham Investment Corporation to approach him.”
“Do it. Do you know when and where he’s going to be in the United States?”
“We’re the CIA, Paul. We can find out.”
“Do it, and let me know what happens,” the deputy director said.
[SIX]
Office of the Commanding General
Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina
1520 1 December 1964
Brigadier General Matthew Hollostone, USAF, the forty-two-year -old general officer commanding Pope AF Base, was at his desk reading with fascination a rather detailed report by the Fort Bragg provost marshal.
On the one hand, it was encouraging to be reassured that the fighting spirit was as present in this generation of junior officers as it had been in his, when he had been a twenty-two-year-old captain. The detailed list the provost marshal furnished of the damage done to a Fayetteville night spot when a local beauty had aroused the mating instinct simultaneously in one of Pope’s pilots and one of Bragg’s parachutists was clear proof of that.
On the other hand, there was no question that the behavior chronicled by the provost marshal was conduct unbecoming officers and gentlemen, and he would have to come to some understanding with the commanding general of Fort Bragg vis-à-vis a suitable punishment for both miscreants.
Sitting on the credenza behind General Hollostone’s desk was a small Air Force blue box containing a speaker. It brought to General Hollostone the radio traffic of the Pope control tower. It was on all the time, but very rarely did anything being said come to General Hollostone’s conscious attention.
He was a command pilot with more than five thousand hours in the air, and over the years had learned to listen subconsciously to radio traffic. In other words, he heard only those things that had an effect on him.