see to it that it doesn’t go under. And Mr. Clean is happy because he’s still running the business and making money.”
“It doesn’t seem very ethical.”
“This is the intelligence business, JP,” Felter said. “Ethics in intelligence is about as common as honesty in politics.”
Both Lowell and Portet chuckled.
“There are two possibilities,” Felter went on. “The most logical, I think, is that the CIA’s right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. The right hand—in this case, the Asian desk— already has one airline, and they want another. Redundancy is the term. If the right hand has talked to the left—the African desk— the chances are it was only to get confirmation of what they had already learned about Air Simba.”
“How can you be so sure that Gresham Investments is the CIA?” Portet asked.
“The Riggs bank is the CIA bank, for one thing,” Lowell said. “And for another, it sounds like one of their projects.”
“What shape is Air Simba in, Captain Portet?” Felter asked.
“We were in the black. . . .”
"’We’? Who are your investors?”
“Me. Jacques and Hanni are the officers.”
“They’d find that interesting,” Lowell said.
“You were saying, Captain?” Felter said.
“Could I get you to call me JP?”
“Thank you,” Felter said. “My friends call me ‘Sandy.’ ”
“We were in the black before the Simba uprising,” Portet said. “I was actually talking to Credit Lyonaisse about borrowing enough to buy a 707 or a DC-8. The Simba uprising changed all that, of course.”
“I don’t understand that,” Lowell said. “Wasn’t there an increase in demand for air freight? Military and civilian?”
“Air Simba is chartered in the Congo, and is required by law to serve the government first,” Portet said. “And the government has been paying with vouchers that will be redeemed ‘when the emergency is over.’ They give the same vouchers to Mobil Oil for our fuel, and they cash enough of the vouchers to give us money to pay the crews and maintenance personnel, but we get a little deeper in the hole every day.”
“And the CIA in the Congo would know that, wouldn’t they?” Felter said thoughtfully. “My scenario—scenarios, there are several—is that maybe their report on what Kasavubu was doing to his civilian airlines was sent to Langley and passed to the Asian desk, and somebody there said, ‘Hey, this guy is just what we’re looking for. He’s an American citizen, about to go broke, and he knows how to run the kind of operation we want.’”
“Yeah,” Lowell agreed softly. “Or they did a database search for American pilots flying for foreign airlines, came up with JP’s name. Same result. They checked him out with CIA in the Congo, and got the same report.”
“Well, it doesn’t really matter, does it?” Portet said. “I certainly don’t want to get involved with the CIA.”
“Don’t be too hasty about that,” Lowell said. “Let’s think that over.”
“Think what over?”
“You could turn the agency’s interest in you to your advantage, JP”
“I’m not sure I’d want to,” Portet said. “But how could I do that?”
“By letting them finance your airline, which would in effect make it an interest-free loan, and then not letting them get fifty-one percent.”
“How would I do that?”
“Every time they up the ante, you match it,” Lowell said.
“Where would I get the money to do that?”
“Craig, Powell, Kenyon and Dawes is always ready to put money into a business guaranteed not to fail by the U.S. government, ” Lowell said. “And that’s business, not personal.”
“You want to go over that again?” Portet asked.
“That’s a very interesting thought, Craig,” Felter said. “But let’s put it on the back burner for the present. I think it’s time we brought JP up to speed on Operation Earnest.”
He turned to Portet.
“What I am about to tell you, for reasons that will be self-evident, is highly classified. Ordinarily, when it is necessary to give highly classified information to someone outside the system, there is a stock speech threatening all sorts of dire consequences if he reveals that information to someone else. That’s absolute nonsense. You can’t take someone to court for revealing a secret unless you’re willing to reveal in open court what secret, and that’s the last thing you want to do. All I can do is rely on your good sense and patriotism.”
“Thank you,” Captain Portet said.
“We have reliable intelligence indicating that Che Guevara intends to go to the Congo—he’s in Africa now—” Felter began, “to pick up the chaos where the Simba movement left off, and take the country over.”