Mobutu looked at Dannelly again, almost as if asking permission. Dannelly just visibly nodded his head, and Mobutu took Lunsford’s hand.
Jack waited until Mobutu’s paratroopers had followed Mobutu and Dannelly into the house before asking, “You think you can get away with me going back to Air Simba?”
“If I asked for permission, I would probably be told I’m out of my mind, so I just won’t ask for permission. Consider yourself placed on further TDY, Lieutenant, in a classified covert mission which will require your assumption of cover role. Hell, the CIA does it all the time, why not Detachment Seventeen?”
Jack shook his head.
Smythe, Thomas, and Peters appeared on the verandah and, moving at Peters’s on-crutches pace, came back to the swimming pool.
“There has been a change in officer assignments,” Lunsford said. “Captain Smythe, you are herewith appointed Rations and Quarters Officer of Detachment 17. Lieutenant Portet is relieved. ”
“What’s going on?” Thomas asked.
“You tell them, Captain Portet, while I seek the gentlemen’s rest facility,” Lunsford said. “My back teeth, as they say, are floating.”
He walked quickly across the lawn toward the house.
[ FOUR ]
The Oval Office
The White House
Washington, D.C.
1615 25 February 1965
The President of the United States was behind his desk, talking on the telephone, his voice cajoling, when a Secret Service agent opened the door. Colonel Sanford T. Felter was standing behind him.
It took a moment to catch the President’s attention. Then Lyndon Johnson signaled with a pointed finger for Felter to enter, and for him to join the other two men in the room.
The other two men were the Secretary of State and the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. They both nodded somewhat coldly at Felter, but didn’t speak. Felter sat down on one of the two couches on either side of a coffee table.
Then all three waited for the President to finish his telephone call.
He finally put the telephone in its cradle and walked to them, where he slumped into a wing-back chair.
“Well, Felter, what do you think?” Johnson asked.
“Think about what, sir?” Felter asked.
“For Christ’s sake,” Johnson flared, “give it to him!”
The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency handed Felter a radioteletype message. Felter began to read it.
“If you’d have given him that when I was on the phone,” Johnson said rather nastily, “the three of us wouldn’t be here staring at the goddamn table.”
There was no response.
When he had finished reading the message, Felter looked at the President.
“Well, Felter?”
“It’s surprising, sir,” Felter said.
“Declarations of war are usually surprising, aren’t they?” Johnson asked sarcastically, “and that’s what that is, isn’t it? A declaration of war?”
He snatched the message from Felter’s hand and read from it.
“ ‘If one Vietnam is bad for the American imperialists, I say, give them three Vietnams,’ ” he read. “That’s what the sonofabitch said, and he said it in front of the five hundred people at the . . . What the hell was it?”
“The Second Economic Seminar of Afro-Asian Solidarity, Mr. President,” the Secretary of State furnished.
“And you didn’t think he was going to cause trouble in Africa,” the President said, and turned to the Director of the CIA, “and you told me it was your ‘best assessment’ that he wasn’t.”
“I can only repeat, Mr. President,” the Director said, “that I think that speech was hyperbole, nothing more.”
“That’s what I find surprising, sir,” Felter said. “There should no longer be any question that Guevara’s going to act in Africa, but that he would go public with an announcement like that is surprising. The Soviets have announced they and their allies have no interest whatever in starting revolutionary activity anywhere in Africa.”
“So you would say you think it’s an announcement of a change in Soviet policy?”
“I think we have to move on that presumption,” the Secretary of State said.
“I asked Felter,” the President said. “That’s why I sent for him, to hear what he thinks.”
“Yes, sir,” the Secretary said.
“My gut reaction is that his mouth ran away with him,” Felter said.
“I can’t go along with that,” the Secretary said.
“I’m still listening to Felter,” the President said.
“He’s been running around Africa, Mr. President,” Felter said, “with the red carpet rolled out for him everywhere. I think it’s entirely possible, and I don’t mean to be flippant, that he’s started to believe his own press releases.”
“You want to explain that?” Johnson said.
“Mr. President, I’ve been thinking of who he really is . . . ,” Felter said.
“The last I heard, he was the number-two man in Cuba, a wholly owned