After suffering a stroke on Christmas Day, 1984, Christopher Hughes spent his final days on earth fluctuating between a conscious and semi-conscious state. Small blood vessels in his brain had been weakened by years of seizures, caused by the beating inflicted on him at Saint Sernin, and, in the end, ruptured, leading to a hemorrhagic stroke. His left side became paralyzed, he was unable to speak, and doctors gave him only days to live. Marie and Livy were at his side in his final moments.

Before he died, Marie told him that Pfisterr had committed suicide. Hughes looked hard at his daughter, searching for the truth in her eyes. “He took his own life, Dad,” she whispered.

Hughes clutched a piece of paper and a necklace in his palm. He gave both to his daughter.

His beloved granddaughter, Livy, kissed his forehead and said, “I love you, Poppy,” and he was gone. A tear rolled from his eye as he breathed his last.

The necklace was a St. Christopher medal given to him by Marie Archambeau on his twenty-first birthday, February 4, 1944. The other was a poem he had written in honor of the lover the Nazis had taken from him.

___________________________

Every now and then, in late February or early March, false spring comes to St. Louis and stays only a day or two. The balmy weather brings promise of better days but also taunts the citizenry with the reminder that the worst is not over. It was on one of these days that Don and I met for the final time at the 45.

Trying to grasp the gravity of his Byzantine and unsettling tale, I blurted, “Tell me how it’s possible that none of this, or very little of it, is widely known. The American public is ignorant of these facts.”

“Because they’ve been kept in the dark about the truth of their history by those who don’t want them to know the truth. Because they’ve been deluged with all sorts of trivial crap on TV and technical gadgetry to distract them. Because democracy is just a hollow word to them now. It no longer means freedom to choose their own destiny; it no longer means the power and the right to choose what kind of government we have.

“Hell, in retrospect, it’s never meant that. We were once tricked into believing it meant that by our corrupt leaders, by our fairy-tale textbooks, by our willingness to believe the propagandists who really own this country. But now, all we want are our things. That’s what democracy means now—the freedom to choose what type of DVDs, cell phones, DVRs, computers, video games, i-pods, and whatever other fucking gadgets we can buy and play with, and fritter away our deluded, worthless fucking existences with.

“Democracy is now just another word for the right and power to pursue a self-indulgent, immediate-gratification, possession-obsessed life, blissfully unaware of history, totally perplexed by and oblivious to how we got to this point. I read an article the other day; it said that more people know who Paris Hilton is than know who Abraham Lincoln was. The same poll said 61% of Americans think Al-Qaeda was funded and protected by Saddam Hussein and that he planned 9/11; 48% say global warming is a left-wing conspiracy, but 0% know that KBR Halliburton reaped billions off both the Vietnam War and the Iraq War. It’s a nation of attention-deficit, misinformed, myopic morons.”

I considered what Don had to say but felt compelled to play devil’s advocate. “We still get to select our leaders. It’s still a one-man, one-vote proposition.”

“Yeah, right. Give me a fucking break. When do you suppose the last honest presidential election was in this country? It doesn’t take much…sometimes just one state. The ruling oligarchy stole the 2000 election in Florida; they stole the 2004 election in Ohio. They made sure the hostages in Iran were not released until after Reagan stomped Carter in 1980. They made sure Nixon ran against McGovern in 1972. They made sure Bobby did not make it to November in 1968.”

“Bobby Kennedy?”

“Let me ask you something. In those history textbooks your college uses…who does it say murdered Bobby Kennedy?”

“Sirhan. He was convicted.”

“Ever read the autopsy report? The fatal bullet was a contact shot, entering behind the right ear at an upward angle. There was black residue on the wound, meaning that the gun muzzle was making contact with the back of Bobby’s head when the trigger was pulled. Sirhan was always in front of Bobby, never closer than a few feet. All the witnesses there that night say so.”

“Another conspiracy? The CIA again?”

“I’m glad you brought this up. Here’s another great example of why and how this country has been so fucked up for so long. Remember one of the pictures I showed you of Dealey Plaza when JFK was shot? One of the guys there that day was David Sanchez Morales, CIA head of JM-WAVE in Miami where they trained anti-Castro Cubans before the Bay of Pigs. At one time he worked for Pfisterr. I saw a statement he allegedly made in the HSCA files I found on Pfisterr. Morales said, ‘I was in Dallas when we got the sonofabitch, and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard.’ Well, the BBC, just a couple months ago, ran a story where they investigated the CIA’s role in Bobby’s killing…and they came up with some old videotapes that show Morales was in the Ambassador Hotel that night. I’ve seen the tape of that show, and I’ll be damned if it isn’t Morales.

“Now, what in the fuck do you suppose a CIA chief of covert operations was doing at the kill sites of both Kennedy brothers? More importantly, why isn’t this news in the U.S.? Not a single newspaper, not any wire service, no TV new network…not CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC…no cable, satellite, national, or local news picked up the story. Not even to report what the BBC said, forget the Morales angle. And yet, there’s absolute photographic evidence of the CIA being at both death zones. What could be a more important story? But the American people will never hear about it. They were too busy trying to get a glimpse of Anna Nicole’s tits on her dead body.”

Don’s face turned red; spittle formed at the corner of his mouth. He pulled away from the bar and slumped in his seat. “I don’t know why I get so worked up. I’ve dealt with this shit for twenty-five years now…you’d think I’d be used to it.”

He lit another smoke and stifled his agitation. In a more sedate tone he said, “You know, I’ve come to think it’s not the CIA anyway. They’re just the intermediaries…for the richest most powerful corporations in the world…for Wall Street and the defense contractors who send their profits to Wall Street…for the military-industrial complex that keeps inventing enemies and wars to justify their existence and keep the money rolling in. I think of the CIA as the enforcers for this…conglomeration of power. Who really runs this country? Follow the money.”

The old cop who had solved every murder committed on his watch, including the one that never officially happened, blew a ring of smoke and mused, “Mussolini had a spot-on definition of fascism. Know what he said? ‘Fascism should really be called corporatism, because it’s the perfect merger of the power of corporations and the power of the state.’ When the state is not looking out for its people’s best interests, when, instead, it is looking out for the interests of large corporations, then the well-being of the rich and powerful few always supersedes the well-being of the many…and truth and democracy die. Remember Lincoln’s Gettysburg address? He said, government of the people, by the people, and for the people…”

“…shall not perish from the face of the earth,” I finished.

“I can argue that it already has. Sure, we can go out and vote for someone, but if it’s the wrong candidate, they’ll never let him get elected. It’ll be stolen.”

“Like those two recent elections?”

“Right. Or they’ll kill him…seems like they’ve given up on that…too primitive, too messy. Or they’ll control him somehow. There’s your America, professor…next time  you’re in your classroom, teach that. Tell those kids the truth. How does it go…so history doesn’t keep repeating itself?”

We said our good-byes, and Don walked away a free man, finally unburdened by a quarter century of lies and subterfuge. He strolled casually down the sidewalk of St. Louis’s Central West End, mild breeze at his back, without a care in the world. On that fine false spring evening, his conscience and soul were tormented by not one iota of falsehoods.

_________________________

That was the last time I saw my old friend. He died of a heart attack that spring. His wife and daughters were by his side.

Hundreds attended his funeral. The family chose a few select friends to share anecdotes and reminisce about the old cop. For some reason, I was one of the chosen ones. I attended the mass with Marie, and I chose to read the poem her father had written for her mother years ago. The words befitted the lovers, and Don Hayes, and Father Carney, and Livy, and the Munshall family, and Peter Rushman, and the campesinos of Central America, and the six million Holocaust dead, and all who cherished Jack Kennedy’s vision of America.

The past comes ‘round
as my lover would call,
and whispers softly
before the fall.
Take me this day
to my home across the sea
where I once loved you
and we yearned to be free.
And recall how we dreamed
of your nouveau-riche land,
when days turned to ash,
and our hopes into sand.
We went our bitter ways
in a time that’s long gone,
but not are our memories,
and our child lives on.
Now the enemy is known;
Soon the beast is slain;
In peace I rest with you;
patriots without the pain.

__________________________

After Pfisterr committed “suicide” in 1984; his five signed confessions were sent anonymously to CBS News, the New York Times, the United States Justice Department, the Midlothian Press of Midlothian, Texas, and Richard Dudman of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

The CBS news producer who received the letter checked with the local affiliate in Dallas to see if it had any news on a Daniel E. Pfisterr of 10837 Webb’s Chapel Road. The Dallas affiliate informed CBS that a man with that address had committed suicide just a week prior, but that his name was not Pfisterr; it was Daniels. He was not CIA, and, apparently had been undergoing treatment for a severe metal illness in the months leading up to his suicide. The CBS producer decided the confession was nothing more than the ramblings of a delusional, suicidal nut and threw the letter away.

When the CIA was contacted by a New York Times reporter, it denied any knowledge of a Daniel E. Pfisterr and claimed he had never been employed by the agency in any capacity. Years later, when APT (Americans for Peace and Truth) activists obtained CIA files under the Freedom of Information Act that confirmed that Pfisterr was a CIA agent who had worked in black ops, the agency was forced to admit that, yes, Pfisterr was a “rogue” employee who, because of a mental illness that made him paranoid and delusional, was prone to “fanciful prevarications.” Pfisterr, claimed the agency, while having performed admirably in classified operations in the cause of American interests around the world, was forced to retire early because of his mental illness, and the accusations made in his “suicide note” were baseless.  In short, he was a deranged man who made a pitiful, tragic attempt at reprisal against the agency for its perceived mistreatment of him.

The Justice Department took no official action with regard to the letter. In fact, to date it has not even publicly acknowledged receiving any such letter.

Penn Jones, publisher of the Midlothian Press and a long-time critic of the Warren Commission’s report, never received the letter. The CIA, which had, for years, been monitoring his activities and communications, intercepted the letter and destroyed it before it reached him.

Richard Dudman, who had not worked for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for nearly twenty years, received his copy of Pfisterr’s confession almost by accident. A former editor of his at the newspaper forwarded it to Dudman at his home in Ellsworth, Maine. I became aware of this only after Don Hayes died. It was then that his wife gave me Don’s correspondence with Dudman.

Don had chosen Dudman as one of the five recipients of Pfisterr’s confession because he had admired Dudman’s coverage of the JFK assassination. Don considered it one of the few honest investigations of the murder. Among our many nights at 45 Club was one devoted almost completely to Dudman’s stories as they had appeared in the Post-Dispatch, circa late November and early December, 1963. Don laid out photocopies of microfilm articles he had run off at the public library. Dudman’s reporting had been remarkably precise and ground-breaking. As early as the day after the assassination he had reported, “Physicians who attended the President at Parkland…described the throat wound as an entrance wound and said the…wound in the right side of the back of the head…could have been caused by the exit of a bullet.”

The December 1, 1963, Post-Dispatch contained this Dudman headline, “Uncertainties Remain Despite Police View of Kennedy Death…Position of Wound is Puzzling—Did Assailant Have an Accomplice?” The most salient and devastating part of the story read, “The strangest circumstance of the shooting, in this reporter’s opinion, is the position of the throat wound, thought to have been caused by the first of two shots that struck Mr. Kennedy.

“Surgeons who attended him at Parkland Memorial Hospital described it as an entrance wound…[despite the fact that] at the time of the shooting, the President’s open automobile was moving almost directly away from the window from which the shots are thought to have been fired.

“The question that suggests itself is: How could the President have been shot in the front from the back?”

The story then went on to quote one of the Parkland physicians, one Dr. McClelland, who said, “We are familiar with bullet wounds. We see them everyday—sometimes several a day. [The throat wound] did appear to be an entrance.”

“That’s it in a nutshell, isn’t it?” proposed Don. “Dudman had ’em by the balls, but he let ‘em get away. And I think I know why.” Don’s allegation remained unclarified until after he died.

One of Dudman’s last dispatches from Dallas read, “Secret Service Gets Revision on Kennedy Wound,” subheaded, “After Visit by Agents, Doctors Say Shot Was From Rear.” The article continued, “Two Secret Service agents…obtained a reversal of [Dallas surgeons’] original view…by showing the surgeons [the Bethesda autopsy].”

Don smirked, “The Secret Service was hard at work, weren’t they? Working much harder than they did in Dealey Plaza.”

Don had sent one of the original Pfisterr confessions to Dudman in 1984, care of the Post-Dispatch, and waited several years for Dudman to act on the information contained in Pfisterr’s confession. Don assumed he was still a working journalist somewhere in the world and assumed that Dudman would investigate the facts and write a subsequent story on the verity of the letter’s contents. However, there was no reply and no published story. Maybe Dudman was dead, thought Don.

He let the matter lie until he stumbled across an article written by Dudman that ran in the August 4, 1996, Post-Dispatch. Don called Dudman’s editor, who gave him Dudman’s address in Ellsworth, Maine. Don sent Dudman a photocopy of Pfisterr’s confession and waited. Dudman’s reply was courteous but baffling. He ignored all of Pfisterr’s assertions except for the ones concerning Kennedy’s assassination. Dudman wrote, “In those terrible hours and days after Kennedy was shot, I spun my wheels madly trying to find a plot…I found it unacceptable to believe that such a deed could have been the work of a single deluded person…[however,] I have come to believe the various theories violate a rule of logic called Occam’s Razor, which holds that one should accept the explanation that requires the simplest set of assumptions.”

Don’s reply, which he composed but, for whatever reason, never mailed to Dudman, read, “The problem with your Occam’s Razor ‘solution’ is that the assumption that Oswald acted alone is not the simplest set of assumptions. In fact, given all we know about the circumstances of the assassination, it is the most far-fetched, illogical and contrived set of assumptions. Applying Occam’s Razor to the lone-assassin theory requires one to accept that a single bullet zigged and zagged through two bodies, tearing flesh, shattering bones, and leaving fragments behind…and yet somehow is discovered intact on a stretcher in Parkland. It requires one to dismiss the doctors’ original, unaltered, unpressured assessment of the wounds. It requires one to ignore Dealey Plaza witnesses. It requires one to excuse away the strange behavior of the Secret Service. It requires one to overlook photos of Operation Mongoose operatives at the scene of the crime. It requires one to believe that it was all just a fantastic coincidence—that the ex-Nazi, CIA agent who phoned in the original description of Oswald to the police just happened to work for the guy whose wife was housing Oswald’s wife and children. In short, by the law of Occam’s Razor, there were multiple assassins in Dallas, and a conspiracy is the only logical conclusion. It is the simplest set of assumptions.”

Don’s eloquent, well-reasoned argument would have fallen on deaf ears anyway. When I took a closer look at Dudman’s August 4, 1996, article, I was struck dumb. Its headline read, “My Neighbor, The International Spy.” It was Dudman’s homage to his friend and Washington, DC, neighbor Richard Bissell, Deputy Director of the CIA and “head of the CIA’s clandestine service” under Allen Dulles. Bissell had passed away, and this was Dudman’s glowing, lavish eulogy. He wrote of Bissell as if he had been a god among men, a “super engineering administrator and spymaster.” Dudman praised Bissell for overthrowing Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. Dudman even admitted being there as it happened. He wrote sycophantically of seeing, “Lockheed’s Kelly Johnson and Polaroid’s Edward Land at the Bissell house…planning the spy plane [U-2] that photographed Soviet missile sites.”

Dudman went on beach picnics and yacht cruises in Maine with Bissell, and marveled at how, “this greatest of technocrats disdained radar, fathometers, and radio detection finders, relying on dead reckoning.”

Dudman made no mention in his story of MK-ULTRA, Midnight Climax, Paperclip, Mockingbird, and the other dirty, criminal, and treasonous operations that Bissell and his fellow “patriots” carried out.

So much for Dudman’s objectivity and credibility in reporting on the CIA and how it turned America into a fascist state.

__________________

After Pfisterr met with his just demise, Marie lost her appetite for vengeance and retaliation against those who had tormented her and her family. At age forty, she began a new life—pursuing quiet contentment and stability, and abandoning the turbulence and violence of the past. She took great joy in raising her daughter, Livy, who excelled in school just as her mother had. Livy went on to college, married, raised a family, and lived a blissfully prosaic life in suburban St. Louis.

Marie gave up fighting evil and surrendered the struggle for truth and justice in her lifetime. The last time I saw her, she was gently rocking her baby granddaughter on a porch swing at sunset of a golden summer evening. At sixty-three, she was at peace with the past and what she had done to fight fascism. She smiled at me and spoke the words I have ruminated over many times since. “All that has happened to you—all that you’ve seen and heard…about Don, me, my father, my mother, the CIA—have come together in this moment for you to consider. Why? That is for you to figure out. It’s hard to do the right thing. It takes courage. It’s harder still to decide what is right. That takes wisdom. You’re in a unique position to win over hearts and minds; I believe you have the courage and wisdom to do it. And remember, my friend, the truth is always worth the cost it demands of you. Truth is right.”

_____________________

When the fall semester arrived at SWIU, I was teaching my customary three sections of American History 101. Just after mid-term, we reached the section in the text dealing with the post-World War II era. The book, a garden-variety survey text, was typically whitewashed clean of any unpleasant truths about post-war America. There was no mention of Operations Paperclip, PBSUCCESS, MK-ULTRA, Mongoose, ZR-RIFLE, Executive Action or any other CIA horror. Oswald was the lone assassin, LBJ was the accidental president, and Vietnam was a holy crusade against communism.

The students were in the middle of delivering oral reports on a chapter dealing with WWII and its global aftermath. One of them, a recalcitrant blonde with lip piercings, tattoos, and bad grammar, ended her speech with the bland aphorism, “…and so democracy defeated the fascists for good.”

Reflexively, without aforethought, I nearly shouted, “That’s an out-and-out lie.”

The students, stunned, looked at me with quizzical, frightened expressions. I composed myself, and in a measured but unambiguous tone I told them, “No more lies. Today we learn the truth. Forget what your textbook says. It’s bullshit. Fascism was not defeated. It just moved west… to America. And here’s how it happened….”

“What was your role?” asked Hayes as he swung the hammer menacingly near Pfisterr’s head.

“I set up Oswald. He was already being constructed…”

“Constructed?”

“Being given a portfolio as a political nut case. Defecting to Russia…coming back. Shooting at Walker. He was carrying out assignments, but he didn’t know why. There was always some cover story. When he came back from Russia, we placed him with the white Russians in Dallas—DeMohrenschildt. He handed him off to Marcello and Banister in New Orleans. He was told to infiltrate a plot against the president—Ferrie and Shaw and the Cubans were false sponsors. We brought him back to Dallas and placed him with the Raskes. She was told to get him a job.” He tilted his head. “Here,” he said, indicating the Depository. “She really had nothing to do with it. It was more cover. D. H. Byrd put him here.”

“Who?”

“Friend of Bolt’s and Hutchison’s…the Dallas oil cartel. They owned the city. Someone named Wallace, LBJ’s guy, and David Morales planted the rifle and the shells on the sixth floor. Byrd was having some work done that week. Morales and Wallace got access to the building disguised as some sort of workers. Secret Service got the prints on the gun at the funeral home.”

“How’d you get the Secret Service to go along with it?”

“Just a few key players.”

“What about the home movie, the Zapruder film? Why was that allowed to go public? You know that’s the most incriminating evidence. The president’s head snapped backwards. Last I checked, chief, that means one thing—he was shot from the front.”

“Zapruder was supposed to be there. In that spot. Don’t ask me how; I just know he worked for Dresser Industries. Check into who owns Dresser…who bought Dresser…check into Heynes’ holdings…they’re CIA fronts. They wanted that movie…as a trophy, a remembrance. Bolt bought a copy. It was also supposed to be doctored to show shots from behind. That’s why all the blood and brain and skull matter fly forward. Our guys did that…at the Photographic Interpretation Center.”

“I’ll be damned. Why go to all that trouble?”

“The plan was to have solid evidence of shots from the rear…to frame the patsy…in two key areas—1) the photographs…notice how Zapruder was the only one taking pictures from the north side of Elm Street. His film was the only recorded view from that side. 2) the autopsy photos…were…” Pfisterr almost lost consciousness.

“Don’t pass out on me, Dan. There’s so much more I want to know.” He slapped Pfisterr to keep him conscious. “Was the coffin empty when Air Force One landed in Washington that night?”

“No!” cried Pfisterr.

“Wrong answer, Dan. Actually it was a trick question. Do you know why it was a trick question, Dan?” Hayes raised the hammer over the blubbering spymaster.

“Yes…don’t hit me…yeah, because…there were two coffins. They put the body in an expensive pinkish-gray one in Dallas, but…but…he arrived in a different one altogether at Bethesda—a plain, war-zone shipping casket…zipped in a body bag.”

“Why was that, Dan?”

“For security…for…”

“Bullshit,” bellowed Hayes. He raised the hammer again.

“Okay…okay…the body was…the body was altered…at Walter Reed before the official autopsy at Bethesda. Check into a Dallas mortician named Gutmann. He did the body work. They flew him into Washington and back on a supersonic jet.” Pfisterr’s face was pale, and he nearly passed out from the pain.

Hayes shifted topics. “How’d you get all those Nazis into the country so easily? Tell me about Dornberger. You were there in Toulouse, weren’t you? You saw him beat that kid to death right in front of his mother.”

Pfisterr shot Hayes a look of surprise, as if to say, How did you find out about that?

“I’ve been reading up on you, Dan, or is it Eb today…or Mr. Daniels?”

Hayes realized that Pfisterr was about to pass out, so he stuffed Pfisterr’s mouth with the handkerchief and delivered another jolt of pain to keep him awake. He swung the hammer suddenly and expertly at Pfisterr’s crotch. Pfisterr’s face turned shades of violet and gray as he rolled over on his side.

Hayes waited a few minutes to let the pain subside. He knew Pfisterr was not going to stay conscious much longer, so he had to get the information he had really come for quickly. He removed the handkerchief. “How did you dispose of Dornberger’s body? And why?”

“That was…easy. Coupla assets flew in to Scott Air Force Base on one of our jets. They were going to kill him…they found him dead already. They took the corpse. We flew him back to Germany and buried him. Didn’t…didn’t want any questions. Didn’t know who killed him…didn’t care.”

“Well, I got some shocking news for you, Dan. The daughter of Chris Hughes killed him. You remember Hughes, don’t you? The fellow soldier you set up in Toulouse. Was that your first act of treason? I suppose it was.”

Pfisterr was dumbfounded but still skeptical. “How do you know this?”

“Because I’m the detective who investigated it, you stupid prick. I guess you CIA guys don’t know everything, huh? But that’s not all, Dan. Father Carney was the best friend I had on this earth…and the best man I ever knew.” Hayes’ eyes watered as he tightened his grip on the hammer.

For the first time in his life, Pfisterr was on the wrong end of fate’s cruel irony. His past had finally caught up with him, and Hayes was the avenging angel sent to make him pay for his sins. The church service Pfisterr had attended only an hour before seemed to have happened in another lifetime. The solace provided by the Lord’s assurance of Pfisterr’s righteousness was gone. His world of moral absolutes, in which socialism was depraved, and capitalism was wholesome and pure, was shaken. Before this otherwise innocuous spring Sunday, Pfisterr had thought of himself as a hero in life’s drama, bringing about God’s and America’s vision, which were one and the same–that of an orderly, free-market society, with a ruling class doing what was best for its compliant and uninformed subjects. But his universe had been turned inside-out by this overweight cop from nowhere who had failed to grasp the big picture and who had the manners and language of a common dock worker. Hayes was nothing more than a coarse Irish cop, probably descended from potato-famine immigrants, clinging to some childish grudges.

It occurred, then, to Pfisterr that what he was undergoing was only a test from God. A test of his faith in America and the virtuousness of his career and beliefs. After all, God had made him one of the privileged, one who not only served the ruling class but came to be a part of it. He knew secrets of America that few others did. He was granted power to control events that few others had. He was protected by the cloak of the hidden oligarchy and was invulnerable to the weepy disgruntlement of the lower classes. Certainly, a Catholic commoner like Hayes was not meant to get the best of him. That’s all this was, a test; Pfisterr convinced himself he would prevail as he always had–through cunning and an undying belief that he knew what was best for America. Though he was in severe pain and had temporarily been humbled by Hayes, he was about to turn the tables on his tormentor.

“Give me the papers; I’ll sign,” he told Hayes. What difference did it make? Pfisterr could easily claim that the signature and the document were forged by a crazed ex-cop who delusionally blamed his failures on the CIA. A false dossier could be constructed. Hayes could be given a history of mental illness and painted as a conspiracy whacko by the company’s psychiatric assets. This cop is not going to defeat me, thought Pfisterr. I’ll find a way out.

Hayes was suspicious of Pfisterr’s resignation, but he wanted to finish the business quickly. He uncuffed Pfisterr so that Pfisterr could sign all five letters, and Hayes stuffed them in his satchel. He then ordered Hayes to start climbing the fire escape to the roof of the Depository.

When Hayes gave him this order, Pfisterr immediately recognized it as a sign from God. The one advantage Pfisterr had over the cop was that he had a better knowledge of the Depository. Pfisterr had walked every inch of it in November 1963 and knew all the escape routes. One was another fire escape on the west side of the building that Hayes, thought Pfisterr, either did not know existed or assumed was unusable. Even though he was injured and in excruciating pain, Pfisterr knew he could move faster than this overweight cop and make the necessary leap from the last step of the fire escape, which extended only to the second floor window near the northwest corner of the Depository, to the ground. While the cop was busy trying to find the other escape, climbing down it, and deciding whether to make the leap, Pfisterr would be long gone.

“Go slowly,” commanded Hayes, pointing the gun at Pfisterr. His intent was to get Pfisterr onto the roof of the building and force him to jump off or push him off, so that it appeared to be suicide. The signed suicide notes would then be mailed to various “honest” media outlets or law enforcement agencies in the hopes of exposing Pfisterr’s and the CIA’s operations.

With Hayes just a flight below for the first four stories, Pfisterr climbed the steps as if he could barely endure the agony of the ascent. He was trying to sandbag the cop. As Pfisterr neared the top, he suddenly scrambled up the last flight of steps. He lurched over the edge of the building and landed on his good shoulder. He raced for the west side of the building, intending to scurry down its fire escape and leave the cop behind.

Hayes did not flinch when Pfisterr scrambled up onto the roof. He knew, from weeks of scouting the location, that there was no other way down. A rooftop door leading to the interior of the building was locked from the outside. There was no other fire escape; the one that existed on the west side of the building in 1963 had been removed. Hayes figured that Pfisterr, not realizing the only way back down was the way they had come up, was fleeing for another exit that did not exist. The cop smirked at the thought of outwitting one of “America’s best,” the Skull-and-Bones prick from Yale.

As Hayes reached the top step, he peered across the roof just in time to see Pfisterr swing his leg across the edge of the Depository, desperately feeling for the imaginary iron ladder. Hayes caught one last glimpse of Pfisterr’s smug expression—the expression that had informed all his victims that he could get away with anything and no one could ever touch him—before it turned to momentary horror as he lost his balance and knew, in one fleeting moment before his demise, that fate and retribution had finally caught up with him. He plunged seven stories and landed head-first. His skull was smashed like a watermelon that had been beaten with a sledgehammer. Mere yards from where the CIA had pulled off one of its dirtiest crimes, one of its planners—and one of the men who had lifted the lid on Nazi Germany’s sewer and permitted its fascist rats to infest America, and then protected its progeny and fostered its flagitious form of government—died an appropriately gruesome death.

As Daniel Everly Pfisterr left Sunday services at the First Presbyterian Church in North Dallas, he felt a renewed sense of comfort and peace. Communing with his spiritual side helped him put the nasty business in Honduras behind him. He had spoken with the Lord and had received the response he had always received on Sunday mornings–the Lord was on his side of the moral divide in the world. Men like Father Carney, though dedicated and sincere, were misguided and, thus, dangerous. Communist sympathizers and agitators like him were a threat to the American way of life and had to be “liquidated” for the preservation of the republic. Because many Americans would not understand his methods, Pfisterr had to work in secrecy. He accepted this. He accepted his plight as an anonymous patriot who helped provide the blanket of national security under which all Americans slept safely. But he also felt, in his heart, that there were millions of decent, patriotic Americans who, if informed of what he and his covert brethren were really up to, would overtly approve of his actions, and would enthusiastically fund them with tax dollars and applaud them openly at rallies much like the ones the Nazis used to hold at Nuremberg.

Now that he was semi-retired, Pfisterr could look back on a career spent protecting America from its internal and external enemies, and on this warm spring morning in 1984, he thought, What a wonderful way to enter old age. Well into his sixties, he had reached an advanced level of contentment and fulfillment. Despite some moral misgivings when he’d first entered intelligence work, he had long since rationalized murder, coups, treason, blackmail, libel, drug running, and all manner of mayhem as the price one paid for freedom in America. And since America was the Almighty’s chosen land, overrun by conservative, God-fearing, patriotic Christians, he had no trouble reconciling his professional actions with his Savior.

He had run life’s race well, and his conscience was clear. He had served his country dutifully and had saved many more lives than he had taken. He took pride in the fact that he had helped squash egalitarian, populist, and self-governing movements in third world countries and replaced them with autocratic, oppressive regimes sympathetic to the capitalistic principles of the U.S. Communism, the godless, classless plague, which had once threatened to overtake the world, was in its last throes across the globe. Pfisterr knew that the atheistic, labor-allied Marxists and Bolsheviks would inevitably collapse of their own depravity and God’s will, sooner rather than later.

He also took great satisfaction in knowing that he had made billions of dollars for the CIA’s corporate benefactors and defense contractors. They were the real unsung heroes of the American way of life. Quietly, behind the scenes, they were the catalysts who drove the economy and provided jobs for millions. Sure, they amassed unimaginable wealth, and sometimes they came off as imperious and arrogant, but, without their patriotism and commitment to national security, who knows what kind of fix America would be in? They were giants, thought Pfisterr, particularly the Texas tycoons—the men who ran Halliburton, Brown & Root, Bell Textron, Permindex, all the Bolt corporations, Dresser Industries, Ling-Temco-Vought and all the rest. America worked best when these corporations were making money by helping defend us from the global red threat. Pfisterr, in his forty years in the CIA, in partnership with America’s ruling class, had traveled the world seeking out and destroying that red threat.

Lost in his self-congratulatory trance, he casually strolled down Webb’s Chapel Road and toward his comfortable brick home in an upper-middle-class section of North Dallas. It had become his custom to walk to and from Sunday services when the weather was favorable. His wife, Helen, confined to a wheelchair, had years ago eschewed church attendance. So Pfisterr was alone when a car slowed and abruptly pulled over to the curb near him. The driver opened the passenger door and gave a pleasant greeting. “Mr. Pfisterr, how are you? Can I see you a moment?”

Pfisterr did not recognize the car—a 1979 Mercury Zephyr, popular model of rental car agencies—nor the man, a short, overweight, forty-something dressed causally in a sport shirt and slacks. His garb indicated to Pfisterr that he had not attended services, but he could have been a resident of the neighborhood whom Pfisterr had met briefly and quickly forgotten. Pfisterr’s instincts had deteriorated slightly in retirement, and his Sunday morning reverie had lowered his guard, so by the time he leaned over and looked inside the car it was too late. The man in the car lowered his voice to just above a whisper and said, “The thing for you to do is to smile at me and stay calm. Act like you know me…like we’re having a pleasant conversation. You don’t want to make any sudden movements. Just get in the car, nice and easy…keep smiling.” As Don Hayes spoke these words, he opened the glove compartment, took out his gun, and placed it next to himself on the seat, while maintaining his grip on it.

Pfisterr, jolted from his peaceful Sunday morning daydream, knew he was about to enter a nightmare. Payment for his sins was due, and his kinship and correspondence with his reactionary, flag-waving, free-market, unmerciful God was not going to help him now.

Pfisterr thought of running, but one look at the man in the car told him he would become a dead man if he did. He had spent a lifetime trying to size up foes—formidable or vulnerable—and instantly calculate their reactions when confronting life-and-death duress. His intuition told him this stranger was too resolute and businesslike to be taken lightly. Hayes’ deadpan expression and droopy eyes gave him the look of a stone-cold killer…or maybe a cop, thought Pfisterr. The thought crossed his mind that the stranger was a contract asset on a mission for the agency.

Pfisterr glanced quickly to his left and right as he slid into the passenger’s seat. To his chagrin, he saw no passerby or pedestrian in the vicinity. There was no one in the area to take notice of what was happening. Later, when his wife called the cops and told them he was missing, there would be no eyewitness account of Mr. Pfisterr getting into a stranger’s blue, late-model Mercury with Texas plates. Pfisterr realized immediately his only hope lay with bargaining with the stranger or begging for the kind of mercy he himself had never granted.

“Close the door and turn your back to me,” ordered Hayes. Pfisterr complied, and Hayes swiftly and expertly slapped handcuffs on his wrists.

As they drove slowly down Denton Road toward Love Field, Hayes kept the gun pointed at Pfisterr, and Pfisterr tried to comprehend his circumstances. This stranger was no ordinary criminal. Robbery was not a motive; he would have already asked for the wallet and wristwatch or rings. He knew Pfisterr by name, so, likely, it was a personal matter. He wanted to harm Pfisterr or perhaps even kill him. Who had he pissed off this much? Pfisterr had made a lot of enemies in his day, but few knew his real name, his multitude of misdeeds, or where he resided. Whoever this guy was, he had done his homework. He had spent time researching and preparing for this day. He likely knew that Pfisterr had been with the CIA. Nothing else in Pfisterr’s background could have prompted such retribution.

Hayes steered the car slowly through the light Sunday morning traffic and headed for downtown Dallas. At Main Street he turned west, and within minutes he had arrived at the corner of Houston Street. He stopped at the light and glanced at Pfisterr, who, despite increasing anxiety, maintained his best covert-operative blank expression.

As he turned right onto Houston and headed towards Elm Street, Don said, “You recognize this place, don’t you, Dan?” They had entered Dealey Plaza, and the Texas School Book Depository building was straight ahead.

“Of course,” replied Pfisterr. “This is where Kennedy was killed. I don’t know what you want from me, but I can assure you I had nothing to do with his murder.”

Hayes smirked and let out a slight laugh. “Right.” He drove north past the intersection of Elm and Houston, and pulled around to the back of the Depository near the vacant loading dock.

“Look, you obviously think you know things about me. But have you considered the possibility that what you know is wrong? That what you think you know is not really the truth? If you’re with the company, you’ve probably been told I’ve become a liability, but, I can assure you, I know people who can dissuade you. Whoever’s paying you, I    can pay you more. Whoever gave you the order, I outrank. In fact, with one phone call I can have him liquidated…and you can get the job…for twice what you’re being paid now. I appeal to your sense of patriotism.”

Hayes laughed loudly at that remark. “What the fuck do you know about being a patriot, Danny boy? You know, I would have expected better from an Irishman, too. But you’re Protestant Irish, aren’t you? Your people were from the north…probably sold us out to the British. Treason’s probably in your fucking DNA.”

Pfisterr knew then that he was not dealing with a hired assassin. Hired assassins don’t admonish their victims for their ethical lapses. “Why are you doing this? What is it I’ve done that irks you?” he asked Hayes.

“Irk? Irk?” Hayes said with amusement and derision. “No…it goes beyond ‘irk,’ Dan. Just shut the fuck up and sign these.” Hayes reached for a one-page letter and several duplicates from the console between the seats and handed Pfisterr a pen.

“What is this?”

“Your confession. You sign these, and I’ll let you go,” lied Hayes.

The letter was four paragraphs, typewritten. It read:

“In July 1983, acting as a covert operative for the Central Intelligence Agency in Central America, I murdered Father James Carney without provocation or cause. Father Carney was serving as the chaplain for a small militia of rebels who were justifiably fighting for their national sovereignty and freedom. Like Father Carney, they died as heroes. I regret my actions, and I accept full responsibility for my crimes.

“I can no longer live with the guilt and shame of the crimes I committed in my capacity as a covert agent for the CIA.  Among these are aiding Nazi war criminals to escape punishment and helping to place them in influential intelligence, defense and aerospace positions in the U.S. government; overthrowing duly elected foreign governments, including those in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile; sanctioning drug smuggling and trafficking, and illegally administering dangerous drugs to unsuspecting victims; murdering innocent people, including decent, law-abiding Americans; and conspiring to murder the President of the United States, falsely implicating an innocent man for the crime, and covering up the deed after the fact.

“Though no law enforcement agency has the power to indict me, and no jury will ever try me, I am guilty of treason. So are my compatriots in the CIA—James Lawson, Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, Richard Helms, James Jesus Angleton, Charles Toller, Ed Vackland, and E. Howard Hunt, most prominent among them.

“I have betrayed my country and deserve to die a coward’s death,

Daniel Everly Pfisterr
10837 Webb’s Chapel Road
Dallas, TX ”

It was Pfisterr’s turn to chuckle. “You’re a…what…a conspiracy buff? You’re in search of the truth? Well the truth is this—history is written by the conquerors, and we conquered. It was either us or the Soviets; would you have preferred that they prevailed?”

“I would have preferred the Constitution and democracy prevailed, you smug fuck,” uttered Hayes as a deadly anger stirred in his belly.

“I’m a man of honor, and I took an oath. I’ll never sign that.”

“We’ll see.” Hayes put the papers in a small satchel, which he slung over his shoulder, and told Pfisterr to get out of the car slowly. Hayes nodded toward the deserted loading dock, and he walked up the concrete stairs behind Pfisterr.

“Keep going around the side of the building, where we’re out of sight.” Hayes kept a grip on the gun, as he partially hid it in his pants behind his belt buckle.

Pfisterr wanted to run, but there was nowhere to go except right back at his kidnapper. They came to an enclosed area between the loading dock and the warehouse where they could not be seen from the parking lot or any adjacent buildings. Hayes motioned for Pfisterr to sit on the concrete ledge.

“Do you write with your left or right hand?” Don asked as matter-of-factly as he could.

“Right. Why?” asked Pfisterr warily.

With cat-like quickness, Hayes pulled a hammer out of the satchel and struck Pfisterr on the left shoulder. Pfisterr let out a yelp that sounded like a dog which had just been run over by a car. His clavicle had been broken by the blow.

“The faster you sign, the less you suffer.”

Pfisterr said nothing but whimpered in pain.

Hayes took a handkerchief from his pocket and stuffed it in Pfisterr’s mouth; then he hammered the injured shoulder. Pfisterr’s scream was muffled, but his moans were audible as he leaned over on his good shoulder and wept in pain. Still handcuffed, he lost his balance and nearly fell off the loading dock ledge.

Hayes leaned him upright and taunted him. “Dan, Dan. Come on now. You know how this goes. You’ve done it enough yourself. The guy being tortured at first resists and tries to be heroic, but in the end you know he always shits all over himself and gives up his friends.”

Pfisterr shook his head defiantly. “All right,” sighed Don, “let’s start with something a little easier. Tell me the truth of what happened here in ’63. Tell me the names of the shooters.” He removed the handkerchief from Pfisterr’s mouth.

“I don’t know. That’s the truth.”

“How do I know when you’re lying or telling the truth. Hell, you probably don’t even know.”

“There was another shooter, but it was just some renegade asset. He wasn’t under orders from anyone at the agency.”

Hayes laughed loudly. “You’re lying. An operation like this had to be run by from start to finish by intelligence professionals.”

Pfisterr took that as a compliment, but Hayes did not let him enjoy it. “Put out your left hand on the ledge,” he commanded Pfisterr. Hayes stuffed the hanky in his mouth again, then swung the hammer down and shattered Pfisterr’s left pinky finger.

-222-

In January of 1982, Don Hayes resigned from the Perry County police force and began to regularly converse with Marie Kanermann about the murder of Walter Dornberger and the CIA’s vast array of “indiscretions.” Marie never revealed her sources to Don, but Don soon learned that Marie was a deep and dependable well of knowledge about the CIA.  Marie, though, was slow to reveal what she knew.

Marie, when first questioned by Don in 1980, refused to tell Don anything. She denied knowing Dornberger or having anything to do with his murder. When Don told her the car in her driveway had been spotted at the scene, and that her father had already let slip that he knew of Dornberger, Marie shut down completely. She refused to let him in her house without a warrant, and she did not answer his phone calls. Scared that she’d be indicted for murder, she even thought about hiring a lawyer.

But without a corpse, and with everyone else in Perry County repudiating the crime, Don knew he had no chance of an indictment or an arrest. When Marie stopped talking to him, he realized that he had to win her trust to get her to open up. He had to convince her that she was under no threat of being charged with a crime. And once he learned of Dornberger’s background, he had no qualms about letting Marie off the hook.

Don began following Marie in order to gauge her routines. She dropped off Livy at school in the mornings and returned home by 8:45 every morning. One spring morning in 1981, Don confronted her in her driveway. “I’m not here to arrest you or interrogate you. I’m here to give you some information.”

Marie halted her dash for the door and just looked at him.

“There’s no way you’ll ever be charged with Dornberger’s murder. I have no corpse. Some government agents hijacked the body in the middle of the night. I have no car. I have no murder scene. I have no ballistics.” He was lying about that part. “I have nothing. I’m not even certain that your car is the car that was seen there that night. I have done a little research on Dornberger…bad guy…I figure he deserved what he got.”

Marie eyes softened, and she wondered who this cop really was. He was overweight and dressed sloppily; he walked with a gimp, and his droopy eyelids gave the appearance of an unindustrious flatfoot. But Marie sensed that he had a keen mind and that bad guys had everything to fear when he set his sights on them. Those languid eyes missed nothing, and he oozed fearlessness and danger. The kind of guy one would want for a friend, but would live in mortal terror of if Hayes were ever betrayed. And the kind of guy whose word could be trusted. Marie suspected there were few times in such a man’s life when he would make himself as vulnerable as Don was making himself now. What the hell, she thought; better the devil you know than the one you don’t. She invited him into her house.

Don was in the middle of telling Marie about Operation Paperclip, about the Terror of Toulouse, about Pfisterr, about their CIA connections, when suddenly he stopped. “You know all this already, don’t you?” The cop’s instincts, as always, were dead-on. As Marie sat through Don’s revelations without a reaction, Don realized he was the neophyte instructing the expert. Marie knew more about the CIA than he had ever dreamed.

Don deduced that this might be a means by which to pry loose Marie’s secrets. “I first heard of Dornberger through an acquaintance who just happened be a consul on the HSCA in ’77 and ’78,” Don told her. “You’ve heard of the HSCA?”

Marie nodded.

“Well, the HSCA’s investigation was compromised by the CIA. Counterintelligence agents did background checks on the members of the committee, and the ones who were found to be undesirable were smeared by the CIA’s media assets. What was that operation called…the one where reporters and editors were recruited to propagandize for the CIA?”

Marie hesitated but could not resist the opportunity to inform the cop. “Some say it was so secret that it did not have a name until someone wrote a book about Philip and Katharine Graham, the publishers of the Washington Post. Katharine Graham coined the term. The Grahams were in the original group of recruits of Frank…” Marie stopped for fear that revealing Lawson’s full name would somehow alert the cop as to how Lawson had met his demise, even though logic told her that no one outside AIC had such knowledge. “The Grahams recruited other publishers and news people into the project when it first got started. That’s why the American public never heard of MK-ULTRA, PBSUCCESS, Operation Ajax, Executive Action, and all the other CIA dirty tricks.”

“Tell me about MK-ULTRA. Didn’t that involve mind-control experimentation with what…LSD?”

“Yeah…but it didn’t begin with the CIA; it began with the Nazis at Dach…”
Marie caught herself again.

Don tried to placate her. “Hey,” he said in as soft a voice as he could muster, “I lost an uncle at Normandy. I never got to know him, really; I was too young when he went off to war. But I always felt like I was robbed of something. He was my only uncle. I’ve hated the Nazis ever since. We fought the good fight, though, over there, and my uncle died for a good cause…keeping fascism out of America. Turns out, the CIA brought it here anyway. Now I hate the CIA like I hate the Nazis…same damn thing as far as I’m concerned.”

Don noticed a crack in Marie’s façade. Christ, she must be dying to tell her whole story to someone. It’s just too fantastic and outrageous to keep it bottled up. He attempted to disarm her even more. “I’m not here to bring a Nazi killer to justice. If I’d have run into Dornberger on the street and knew who he was, I might have pulled the trigger myself. I mean you no harm.”

Marie shot back, “Then why are you here?”

“In all the years I’ve been a detective…was a detective…I’ve never had an unsolved murder. But it’s more than that. They made me look like a monkey, a fool, with this Dornberger thing. I guess I was supposed to just roll over and play dead, just like the rest of America, when the CIA pulls out its propaganda guns and its dirty-tricks machine. Well…not me. I want the truth, that’s all. And if the truth is what my gut’s telling me it is, then I’m on your side…not the CIA’s. I have no sympathy for fascists. You’re the patriot, not them.”

Marie nearly let a trickle escape from her moist, salty eyes, but the hard years she’d spent coping with the CIA’s destruction made her hold back. If the cop was making a genuine, no-tricks offer, then he could wait. Wait while she sized him up further. Maybe Julia could make inquiries about his background. Maybe Detective Hayes was CIA himself.

“Why don’t you come back some other time,” she abruptly told him.

_____________________________

Peggy and Julia Munshall had formed a small, informal, underground, counterintelligence unit of their own to keep track of CIA covert operations and operatives. The unit was woefully undermanned—Peggy, Julia, Dolores Zanusz, and Mimsy Reynores were its only members. Zanusz was the wife of an ex-agent who had an axe to grind against the company, and Reynores was the wife of an active ex-Cuban agent who had become disillusioned by years of the company’s perfidy and treasonous acts. Reynores, unbeknownst to her husband,  Jesus, passed along CIA secrets to the other three women who acted on the information when they could. When threat of exposure was limited, they sabotaged agency operations when possible. They thought of themselves as the new French Resistance, fighting fascism in the west four decades after fascism had ostensibly been annihilated.

They no longer dosed their enemies with LSD or ricin, however. Marie’s misadventure in Dallas in 1973 had cured them, at least temporarily, of attempting murder. Instead, they alerted honest, non-Mockingbird media outlets of agency malfeasance. They sent anonymous notes, which divulged agency misdeeds, to liberal, Democratic congressmen who were bent on investigating the CIA. They pressed for CIA secret documents under the Freedom of Information Act. They spied on the spies. Their efforts, though, were small-scale, and the American intelligence monolith barely noticed.

Through Julia, Marie had discovered the CIA’s sabotaging of the HSCA. Julia had been fed the CIA’s behind-the-scenes manipulating of the investigation by Reynores. She was also aware of the agency’s efforts to keep the hostages in Iran until Carter could be defeated by the ultra-conservative Reagan. Once Reagan got elected, Central America became the CIA’s focus. It sided with the neo-fascist military juntas trying to trample populism movement for economic and social justice, propagated by the destitute of Honduras and Nicaragua. Small, disorganized, untrained bands of rebels aligned against the powerful, treacherous CIA. One of these bands had as its chaplain Padre Lupe.
__________________________

As the months passed in the early 1980s, Marie was slow to warm to Don, but each time they conversed, she came to trust him slightly more. Gradually, she came to look forward to their exchanges. She felt like a great burden was being lifted from her; sharing what she knew with someone outside of AIC was scary, yet at the same time liberating. The relationship that developed between them was not so much confessor and priest; it was more like collegial iconoclasts and insurrectionists who were sharing monumental secrets. They found a kinship in knowing they were among the very few in America at the time who had uncovered the true history of their country. And what Marie revealed to Don was not her attempt at a mea culpa, but a deep yearning to finally tell someone in authority, or at least someone who had once been in authority, about the terrible crimes and the private agony she had kept to herself most of her life. For years, Marie’s world had been divided into two groups: AIC, her father, and Livy on the inside; everyone else on the outside. It felt good to, at last, let an outsider, a one-time professional investigator at that, into her inner circle.

For his part, Don grew quite fond of Marie. In the old days, he would have thought of her as his prey, and he would have been circling her for the kill by means of guile and subterfuge. But this was different; Marie was no criminal, and he was no longer a real cop. He was grateful for each piece of information she shared, not in a Machiavellian way, but for its own sake. For the altruistic sake of the truth.

By the summer of 1983, Don felt Marie was on the verge of disclosing the most cataclysmic and excruciating details of her motivation for killing Dornberger. One warm, indolent day, he offered to take Marie and Livy on a picnic to a local park that had a swimming pool. While Livy swam, her mother and the man she came to know as Mr. Hayes ate sandwiches. Don often opened their conversations with a joke; this day was no exception. “You know, I just realized–we’re Donny and Marie. But not quite like the other Donny and Marie, huh? We’re more like the subversive Osmonds, the dissident Osmonds.”

Marie howled, “Yeah…not the singing Osmonds, the seditious traitor Osmonds.”

After lunch, as the languorous afternoon dragged on, Don sensed the time was right. “Listen, there’s something I just don’t understand…and, now, I don’t want to, you know, dredge up painful things. But I just can’t figure out…who was your mother? I know your father was captured and beaten in France in 1944…by Dornberger…and that’s enough reason for you to have wanted the bastard dead. But…you’re how old? Thirty-six or thirty-seven?”

Marie knew what was coming and instinctively stiffened.

“That means you had to be born right around the time your father was being hidden in France by his…girlfriend…and her son. She had to be your mother, too, right? I can’t make it out any other way. But where and when were you born? How’d you get to America? Who raised you? That woman…your father’s lover…she’s your mother, wasn’t she?”

I’ll be damned, thought Marie. I’ve made this unfathomably labyrinthine and bittersweet journey, from Dachau to south St. Louis, just to arrive at this moment? To pour my heart out to this ex-cop, whom I feared and detested just a few months ago? I don’t even broach the topic with my own father. It’s too hard on him. Life’s the damnedest thing, she thought.

“I’m the daughter of Chris Hughes and Marie Archambeau…half-sister to Levecque, for whom my own daughter is named.” She nodded toward the pool.

“Livy,” sighed Don.

“I was born in Dachau, the day before it was liberated. My mother died giving birth to me…on the floor of the camp bordello. I was raised by Hannah, her fellow inmate, who survived Dachau and emigrated to America…Massachusetts. She raised me there.”

“Christ Almighty,” Don uttered in a stunned, hoarse voice. He leaned forward. “There’s something I have to tell you…There was a CIA agent present at Saint Sernin who witnessed the whole thing….”

“Pfisterr.” Marie finished his sentence. “My father knew him as Eb Daniels then. He set the whole thing up.”

Then Marie dropped it on him. The thing Don had waited years to hear. “I wish AIC had killed him when we were in the killing business.” She proceeded to tell Don about AIC and its targets—Lawson, Strughold, Dulles, Toller, and Bolt. Then, hesitantly, Dornberger.

“How did you know Dornberger was in St. Louis?”

“Complete accident. By coincidence, a friend of mine saw him board the plane in DC. Told me what flight he was on. I was at Lambert Airport, waiting for it. I recognized him from old photos my father had shown me. I…followed him. He rented a car. I got in my car and I…drove where he drove. I never…intended for him to get shot. I brought the gun along, just for protection…”

“The Luger, right?” Don, with equal parts expectancy and apprehension, uttered the words as if afraid Marie were going to blow up his theory in his face with a quick denial.

He had never been certain where, how, and why Marie had obtained such an obscure weapon.

“Yeah…my mother, umm, Hannah had given it to me.”

“What was she doing with it?”

“It was a memento, of sorts, form the day Dachau was liberated. She shot and killed a Nazi officer with that same Luger. His name was Klodzensky, and he was trying to escape just as the Allies were entering the camp. She never let the gun out of her possession after that. She used to tell me, ‘Nothing I’ve ever done felt so good, so righteous, or so justified. I wish I’d killed more of them.’ When she died, I could not…dispose of it. It meant so much to her.”

Marie’s eyes locked hard on Don. “You’ve waited a long time to hear me say this, haven’t you?”

Don had the look of an innocent man who had just been released from prison after serving time for a crime he had not committed. Knowing that he’d been right all along, that he had really seen Dornberger’s corpse with a bullet hole in its head, was sweet vindication. He wanted to hear the rest of it. “If you weren’t intending to kill him, why did you go to the airport? Why did you follow him?”

With rising anger that surprised both of them, Marie’s words came like a torrent of hostility that had never abated, “I wanted him to know that I knew what he’d done, even if no one had ever made him accountable for it. Even if he’d escaped Nuremberg. Even if our government refused to prosecute him as a war criminal. I wanted him to know that not all of America was one big sanctuary for fascists. I wanted to hear the truth from his own filthy, goddamn mouth. I wanted him to have to answer, once and for all, for what he’d done. Think about it. If not for him…and Pfisterr…I could have had a normal life. My biological mother and my brother would be alive today. My father would be a well man. I would have had a real family, a happy childhood. My god, France was just days from being liberated when they were captured and beaten. Just a few more goddamn hours…and…they would have gotten out of the war in one piece. They had talked about moving here to St. Louis after the war for months before they were captured. You know how often I’ve dreamed of the life I could have had? I wanted…needed…to see…to confront the man who took that away from me.”

Marie took a deep breath and tried to compose herself. “I wanted to confront him. To tell him I was the sister of the little boy he’d beaten to death at Saint Sernin. That I was the daughter of the French woman and American soldier, who he’d…” Her voice trailed off, and she wiped the corners of her eyes. She composed herself again. “I wasn’t thinking rationally. I didn’t think it through. The airport, of course, was too crowded to confront him and get…whatever satisfaction I thought I was going to get. When I saw him go to the rental lot, I raced for my own car, got in, saw him get on the highway…and…I just followed him. I didn’t know where the sonofabitch was going. He just kept driving. Across the river into Illinois. He went all the way to Pinckneyville before he pulled over in front of this house. He went in; came back with some old lady. They went into town…to some bank…and then returned to the house. Dornberger stayed in there for hours. I don’t know what he was doing in there. He finally came out sometime that evening.”

She gazed at Don with pleading eyes. “I swear I never meant for him to die. I’d had enough of that after Bolt. Lawson’s death and Dulles and the others…they brought me little satisfaction…it only made me feel anxious and empty. I just wanted him to know I knew what he’d done, and that he was going to burn in hell for it.

“When he got in his car, I approached the passenger side. I pulled the gun out and pointed it at him. I told him who I was…and…I started spouting all sorts of gibberish. I was so nervous and angry, I don’t even remember what I said. All of a sudden, he reached for the gun with his left hand and grabbed my wrist with his right hand. For an old man, he still had good reflexes and a strong grip. We struggled, and the gun went off. It hit him above the right ear. I saw a piece of the back of his head come off. I got in my car and took off. I was a wreck after that. Couldn’t sleep. Fidgety and anxious all the time. Looking over my shoulder. Then you came and questioned me, and told me about some witness. I didn’t know there’d been a witness. After that, I could barely function, I was so scared.”

“You fooled me. You seemed as cool as ice.”

“I just told myself, the best thing to do was just shut up. As time went on, I felt safer…calmer…especially when you told me you had no body. At first, I had no idea why there was nothing in the newspapers about it…or on the news. I assumed, then, that the CIA was covering it up…they didn’t want anyone looking into Dornberger’s past. What a laugh…the CIA was my best friend in this case.” Marie looked Don straight in the eye. “What if you still had the body? What if you were still a cop? Would you arrest me?”

“Yes,” Don said softly without hesitation.

Marie thought about it for a moment and said, with only a hint of facetiousness, “I appreciate your honesty.” Then she looked away and sighed, “Well, that’s it. I’ve told you everything. Was it worth chasing me for the past three years?”

“Yeah…but,” Don paused, “…there’s still one guy out there who deserves to die more than any of the rest, and yet you let him off the hook.”

“Pfisterr,” replied Marie, without apparent emotion. “Hey, my days as an assassin are over.”

“What about your friends?”

“AIC has disbanded, whether you believe it or not.”

“I don’t.”

Marie laughed at the cop’s knee-jerk cynicism. “I have to admit…sometimes I daydream about it. My friends have been keeping tabs on him…occasionally they call with the latest news. In fact, Pfisterr is in Central America, still doing the CIA’s dirty work. Still protected by our fascist government. Have you heard about that American priest he killed down there?”

Daniel Everly Pfisterr knew he was getting too old for the job when the simple exertion of striking the prisoner on the kneecap with a club winded him. Pfisterr was approaching his mid-sixties, an age when most men are retired and comfortably looking back on their life’s labor. Still, his lack of stamina took him by surprise. He tried to keep himself in shape; he wasn’t overweight, and he had given up cigarettes years ago. But the strains of middle age and the god-awful jungle work were catching up with him. He had grown to hate Central America—its relentless heat, its uneducated and socialist-inclined peasants, its constant governmental instability, and its gruesome lack of amenities. Simple things like clean water, decent food, and competent health care were always a challenge to find, even with the money the CIA was pouring into the region.

So when he was presented with another Honduran rebel to interrogate at the CIA compound on the Nicaraguan border in the summer of 1983, Pfisterr’s forbearance with the clueless communists had evaporated. He struck the prisoner hard and got the reaction he wanted—a deep, painful moan. Good, he thought, this one will crack easily. And he spoke English, no interpretation was needed.

Pfisterr was told by General Gustavo Alvarez, head of the army, that this one was the rebels’ chaplain—a Catholic priest from America. This information incensed Pfisterr.

“What are you doing down here among these communist peasants? What do you think you are proving? Don’t you know you’re hurting your religion and your country? You’re one of those Christian socialists aren’t you?”

Father James Carney, affectionately called Padre Guadalupe, or Lupe, by his faithful Honduran flock, in a calm voice made a simple reply that almost disarmed Pfisterr. “I am where I am most needed. To love Christ is to live as he did.”

Pfisterr, who considered himself something of an expert on the Bible, shot back, “This isn’t how Christ lived, ministering to a bunch of godless rebels who want to bring about a godless government.”

“My people are God’s people…and they’re starving to death,” responded Padre Guadalupe, “because they can’t grow food on their own land. American corporations have taken it from them. And they’re dying of disease because they have no money for doctors and because the chemicals sprayed on the bananas pollute the air and water. And they’re fighting a just cause to retake their homeland. They’re fighting the good fight just as Jesus did.”

Pfisterr, frustrated by the priest’s gentle demeanor and misguided beliefs, became more forceful. “You completely misunderstand what’s really going on down here, don’t you? We must not let communism take hold in the western hemisphere. These people don’t know what’s best for them. We have to determine that for them. What we’re doing here is in their long-term interests.”

“You mean, having the CIA intervene to overthrow the leaders they elect…and then empower fascist dictators to starve them off their lands.”

Spittle shot from his mouth as Pfisterr furiously sputtered, “People who believe in God should have nothing to do with communist guerillas. When they win, freedom of religion loses. Real Christianity, like it’s practiced in the USA, will become extinct.”

Lupe softly replied, “You mean real Christians support the oppression and starvation of their fellow man? Maybe that form of Christianity is not worth preserving anyway.”

Pfisterr seethed with fury. No one had ever had the temerity to speak to him that way, but he felt compelled to answer this insolent Marxist priest. After all, America had to win not only the shooting war against the reds but also the war of ideas. “America is a generous Christian nation, willing to extend a hand to anyone who accepts the precepts on which the nation was founded.”

“And what are those?”

“That all men are free to pursue their own destiny, in a society unencumbered by a totalitarian regime.”

“That’s what the Honduran people want.”

“What the Honduran people want, or think they want, is to have a communist government parcel out land and goods without concern for who has the means, under a free enterprise system, to pay for those things.”

“So it’s about riches, then. Freedom for you means free enterprise, and nothing more. The American way is to preserve, at all costs, a system where the wealthiest have the right to own all of the country’s resources. And the power to oppress those who want to survive by sharing in a portion of those resources. That’s neither just nor righteous. That’s the real godless system, not socialism.”

Pfisterr got so livid he turned red in the face. “You fucking socialists really hate the wealthy, don’t you? Money is the root of all evil, right father? Let me tell you something. The country you turned your back on is the best country on earth. Where any man, if he works hard enough, can be as rich as he wants.”

Confident that angels were speaking through him, and at peace with his maker, Padre Lupe serenely quoted from Proverbs, “Whoever trusts in his riches will fall. Riches do not profit in the day of wrath, but righteousness delivers from death. When the wicked dies, his hope will perish, and the expectation of wealth perishes too.”

Pfisterr’s last wisp of patience evaporated. “Enough of the fucking debate,” he shouted. He beat Padre Lupe as he had seen Dornberger beat the Archambeaus and Hughes in Saint Sernin forty years prior—to inflict the maximum amount of pain without fatally harming the prisoner. “Give me the names of the rebels. Where are they hiding?” he screamed.

Padre Lupe merely made the sign of the cross, asking that his persecutors be forgiven. Pfisterr, exhausted, turned over the brutal interrogation to a Honduran soldier. Eventually, Pfisterr put a stop to it. “He can endure torture, but is he willing to give up his life for the rebels?” he asked Alvarez. Alvarez had a Honduran pilot start up the helicopter, a Bell helicopter donated to the Honduran army by the CIA. Alvarez and Pfisterr watched while two soldiers loaded the bound and wounded Father Carney on board. Pfisterr said, “I’ll go up there with him.”

While flying over the jungles of the Patucas region, Pfisterr asked Padre Lupe once more to divulge the names and locations of his rebel associates. When Lupe refused, Pfisterr shoved him off the helicopter to a certain death.

Jimmy Carney, friend of Don Hayes in the halcyon summer of 1961; loving pastor to 80,000 campesinos and 96 desperate, destitute, and righteous rebels; and guardian angel to all mankind, was murdered by the scourge of all benevolent, brotherly, and peace-loving peoples who lived in the second half of the twentieth century: the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America.

_________________________

I offered condolences to Don. “I’m sorry about your friend.”

He nodded and lit up another Marlboro.

“Who told you the story of how he died?”

“It’s common knowledge now. They found his remains in the Patucas jungle, right where Florencio Caballero said he’d been dropped from the helicopter.”

“Who?”

“He had been part of Battalion 316, serving under General Alvarez, interrogating and torturing suspected leftist rebels. He was at El Aguacate, a U.S.-controlled base where the CIA supplied and trained the contras, when they brought Jimmy in. He went up in the helicopter with them. He saw the American push him out. Caballero said he knew the American only as ‘Mr. Eb’ or ‘Mr. Daniels.’”

“Holy shit.”

“But Caballero’s account has only surfaced in the last few years in FOIA documents. I knew the whole story shortly after it happened.”

“How?”

“Marie told me in the summer of 1983.”

By late February, St. Louisans have been so beaten down by winter that they have nearly lost hope of spring ever arriving. The cold, gray days eat at their sanity, and the bitter winds attack their will to go on. Many, like Don Hayes, turn to booze and reminisce about better days, rich with meaningful endeavors. In the winter of 2007, 45 Club became the place where Don and I sought shelter from the endless gloom and attempted to make meaning of the past.

Don ordered whiskey and settled in for another night of lecturing the professor. “Okay, let me tell you a little bit about Jimmy Carney.”

“Who?” I asked.

“You know, my best friend from high school. The CIA murdered him.”

“Right…right…you mentioned him a couple weeks ago.”

“The first time I saw Jimmy, he was on his knees in the chapel. When he wasn’t in class or on the football field, he was praying or attending mass. Best kid I ever knew. Good grades, great athlete. Never a whiff of trouble. He loved and respected the Jesuits who taught us. I think he got the calling from them.”

“The calling?” I asked.

“To the priesthood. He wanted to become a Jesuit priest and a missionary. Follow in Christ’s footsteps…not like the phony Christian assholes who parade around today telling us that fags are awful, and we have to vote Republican, and they’re saved and you’re not.

He wasn’t a pious hypocrite. He once told me, ‘Donny, I want to tend to the least among us, just like Jesus. You know who Jesus really was? A destitute revolutionary. He fought the establishment with nothing but faith and courage.’ He meant it literally. He wanted to live among the poor and minister to them spiritually.”

“He was your best friend?”

Don got a good laugh out of that. “He always told me that if he could save me, he could save the world. I drank, smoked, cursed, chased skirt, and skipped mass on Sunday. I gave the Jesuits and my old man fits. They didn’t know what to do with me. Once I got big enough, the old man couldn’t bat me around anymore. The priests at St. Looie tried to jug me, suspend me, anything. How I graduated I don’t know. Fuck…good days. Anyway, Jimmy and I loved football. We had a damn good team when we were seniors. College scouts came around offering Jimmy a scholarship. After football season we would still get pick-up games in Forest Park. I’d walk over from Dogtown; he’d walk over from the West End. We lived only a few miles from each other. We both got jobs at the zoo that spring. After work, we’d walk over to my girlfriend’s house and steal beer from her old man’s refrigerator.”

Don paused and stared off into the cold night beyond 45’s front window. His words, then, were more measured and softer. “Great summer, that summer…1961. Jimmy’s family got him this old, beat-up Nash Rambler. We’d take our girls out to the park, ballgames, the drive-in movies. Got my first piece of ass that summer in the back seat of Jimmy’s Rambler. We were watching Spartacus over at Ronnie’s Drive-In.

“Ahh…anyway…in the fall, Jimmy went off to college, and I scrounged around a while until I finally enrolled in the police academy. I heard from Jimmy off and on; saw him at Christmas sometimes. But we sorta lost touch later.

“He got ordained in 1969. My old buddy, a damn Jesuit priest. I was proud of him; I knew that’s what he wanted. Jimmy had a goodness about him I’ve never known in anyone else. I don’t know what it was…an inner spirit…he’d do anything for you, and always was on the side of those who had no one else to fend for them. The helpless, the indigent, those who couldn’t care for themselves. I knew he was Christ’s emissary on earth. And I also knew no matter what sorta fuckin’ shit I wrought down here, I’d always have Jimmy fightin’ for me up there.

“He wanted to be sent to Honduras…the most god-forsaken, fucking place in the world. Nobody there but peasants, rich cattle ranchers, United Fruit Company, military dictators, and the CIA. And the peasants made up 99% of the people. Jimmy got assigned to the poorest part of the country, Progreso mission. United Fruit and the ranchers owned all the land. The campesinos, the poor farmers, couldn’t make a living. They lived in shacks made of palm leaves and vines held together by mud plaster. They ate only what they could grow—lots of beans. The water was contaminated by the chemicals the American fruit companies used to spray on the bananas. There was no medical care, so tuberculosis, malaria, and yellow fever ran wild. Most kids were anemic; some starved to death.

“Jimmy did what he could. He begged the government to provide more supplies. He wrote to the American embassy and relief organizations back home. It was a drop in the bucket. But Jimmy never quit. He loved those people; he kept many alive who would have been dead otherwise. Along the way, he became a social revolutionary…even wrote a book by that name—To Be A Revolutionary.

“United Fruit and United Brands were getting rich growing their fruit and exporting it to the States, but they were putting nothing back into Honduras. Jimmy and the Jesuits started a new movement in Central America called…you’ll love this… ‘Christian Socialism.’ They tried to unionize the workers, get an export tax placed on the outgoing fruit so the government could redistribute the money to the peasants, and get the American corporations to relinquish some of the land so the campesinos could farm it. Hey, I’m no socialist, but it was the only way to keep those people from starving. We stole their land, grew bananas on it, made millions, and gave them nothing in return.”

“What about the government?” I asked.

“Crooked as a dog’s hind leg. United Brands knew the leaders were for sale. In 1975 the President, Osvaldo Lopez, is bribed with one and a quarter million to cancel the export tax . The Army removes him. Then the minister of economy is given twice as much to see that the taxes are not collected.

“Meanwhile there’s a revolution going on next door in Nicaragua. Somoza was overthrown by the left-wing Sandinistas. You know about that, right?”

I nodded. Thank god, I thought. Spared from Don’s abuse.

“So when the Nicaraguan rebels came along and tried to overthrow the Sandinistas, guess whose side the USA and the CIA came down on.”

“As I recall, Reagan and Congress sent millions to the contras.”

“Not just that. The CIA set up a staging area in Honduras to train the contras. They created a Honduran special forces of sorts called Battalion 316. The CIA sent Pfisterr in to train them in counterintelligence measures—in other words, rooting out the enemy through interrogation and torture.”

“Holy shit,” I interrupted. “Don’t tell me that…”

“There’s more. Pfisterr decides that Battalion 316 needs to learn from the master.”

“Not Dornberger?”

“Yeah…his old pal. Remember, they’d gotten their start together in the business.”

“He would have been in his what…eighties by then, right? Is that what he was doing in the Americas in 1980?”

“He had no intention of teaching torture and interrogation methods to a bunch of Nicaraguans, but he needed the money. He was old and feeble and broke. He demanded that Pfisterr pay him up front. Pfisterr arranged for him to fly to the States on a military transport out of Hamburg. He arrived on June 22, 1980. Pfisterr picked him up in Washington. Dornberger refused to fly to Central America unless he had some jack in his pocket. Pfisterr, seeing the condition the old man was in, knew he would be of no use in the contra operation. He took pity on the old man, though, and gave him the name and address of …”

I finished, “Lydia Stullmeier?!”

“Pfisterr had no idea if Bolt’s old account was still paying off from the Dallas operation. He just wanted to get rid of the old Nazi…send him on a wild goose chase and hope that he’d have a heart attack on the way or something. The account had been dormant for years, but Pfisterr gave him the password and told Dornberger all he had to do was knock on Lydia’s door and hold out his hand. He bought Dornberger a round-trip ticket to St. Louis, and I’ll be damned if Dornberger didn’t find the house. Pfisterr told him she lived right outside St. Louis. The old man must have really been pissed to find out that Pinckneyville was about 75 miles east of St. Louis.”

“He had to drive east on 70, cross the river, find the 64 cut-off, and take that all the way to 127, right?”

“Then it’s about 20 miles south on 127. He arrived in St. Louis on a TWA flight at about 11 o’clock. He rented a car at the airport, got a map from the counterperson, and started driving. It took him about three hours to make the trip; he must have been desperate for the money. He didn’t know his killer was following him the whole way.

“She was a serial murderer,” I said, astonished. “Did she think she was going to single-handedly eradicate anyone associated with the CIA? How many did she wind up killing?”

Don just looked at me and faintly grinned.

“She killed Dornberger didn’t she? How did she know where he would be?”

“Pfisterr realizes he’s made a mistake flying in Dornberger to help train the contras. Dornberger is in his 80s and looks old and feeble. All Dornberger wants is the money. Pfisterr sends him on a wild goose chase to Pinckneyville, via St. Louis, with the idea of tapping into Bolt’s account in his sister’s name. The old man is so broke, Pfisterr has to buy a round-trip ticket for him at the Washington airport. What Pfisterr doesn’t know is that Julia Munshall is working at the TWA counter in the terminal. She recognizes Dornberger, and, when he boards a flight to St. Louis, she calls Marie, who had moved there a couple years before to be with her dad. Marie meets the flight at Lambert Field and follows Dornberger. She intends to shoot him before he leaves the Lambert terminal, but there are too many witnesses. He rents a car, and Marie follows him. He drives across the river into Illinois and just keeps going. Where the fuck is he going, she asks herself. She keeps following him, though. When is she ever going to get an opportunity like this?

“Dornberger finally finds Stullmeier’s place, goes up to her door, and rings the bell. A few minutes later he reappears with her. They drive into town, and he drops Lydia off at the bank. She comes out with a sackful of $100 bills. They drive back to her house, and, instead of just dropping off Lydia and leaving, Dornberger goes inside with her. I don’t know why…maybe he was just tired and wanted to take a nap. Maybe he notices Marie’s car just sitting there on the road across from the house, and he gets suspicious. Anyhow, he waits for darkness to fall, and he hurries out of Stullmeier’s house. He doesn’t notice Marie crouched down on the other side of his car. As soon as Dornberger gets in the car, she blasts him. She’s disguised her appearance; thus, the Reese kid thinks he sees a man walking away after firing a shot into Dornberger. She hits him in the right temple and blows the back of his head off.”

“The slug you recovered…you said it was from a Luger.”

“Yeah…the one Hannah had given her as a keepsake. The one Hannah used to kill the Nazi lieutenant at Dachau.”

“That’s incredible. Thirty-five years apart, mother and daughter gun down Nazis with the same Luger.”

“We process the scene, question Lydia, send the body to the morgue, impound the car…you know the rest.”

“Who kidnapped the body? How did they know Dornberger had been shot, and why did they want the corpse to disappear?”

“Pfisterr, after he got Dornberger on the flight to St. Louis, thinks about it for a couple hours and then decides he should dispose of the old man himself. He had become a liability. Besides, he was capable of torturing or killing Bolt’s sister. Pfisterr did not want to deal with that mess. So he scrambles an Air Force jet out of Andrews with a couple of covert assets on it. They fly to Scott Air Force Base, just west of Pinckneyville. They get to Pinckneyville, and, imagine their surprise, someone else has done the job on old Walter. They force their way into the morgue, take the corpse and the car, fly back to Washington, then on to Weisbaden and Dornberger’s little home town and put him in the ground. They even arrange for an obituary to run in the local papers. The CIA…Pfisterr…threatens and intimidates the Perry County police and medical examiner. Voila…the murder that never was. The only thing they left me was the slug and the photos.”

“How did you find out how they disposed of Dornberger’s body?”

“Pfisterr told me,” deadpanned Don.

I stared at him blankly for a moment. “Why would Pfisterr tell you anything? CIA agents never reveal their secrets.”

“They do when someone hammers their balls.”

I laughed, but Don was serious. “You tortured Pfisterr into confessing? How…where?”

“I’m getting to that, but first you’ve got to understand something about Marie and me…”

“Yeah…you found out that she was a serial killer, but you didn’t arrest her?”

“By the time she told me everything, I was no longer a cop. What could I do? Notify the authorities? What the fuck for? No one would have believed me. Officially, there was no murder. Dornberger had died of natural causes 6,000 miles away. Besides, I sympathized with her. I got…fond of her…and her daughter Livy”

Don was withholding something from me. “Did you sleep with Marie?”

“No.” He appeared genuinely offended.

“How many others did she kill?”

____________________________

Charles Marlin Toller was the kind of cold warrior who saw détente and diplomacy as just another form of cowardice. He knew only one way to deal with the red menace—blast it to smithereens, no matter the cost.

Born in Dallas near the turn of the century, and, along with his brother Boyce, reared in a time and place when any political posture other than right-wing fanaticism was considered blasphemous, Toller naturally gravitated to the military. He attended West Point and was assigned to an artillery regiment in the 1930s. He joined the Army Air Corps in World War II, where he did photographic analysis and intelligence work. Dulles, who heard of his work through his OSS contacts, hired him as an adviser on Paperclip. Toller vetted potential Nazis for their “usefulness” in the fight against communism. The elusive Dornberger was his coveted catch, and Dulles rewarded Toller by appointing him Deputy Director of the CIA in 1953.

Toller assisted with military intelligence in the Guatemala operation and was point man in CIA military strategizing for the Bay of Pigs. As the invasion went bad, he beseeched Kennedy to unleash U.S. airpower to turn the battle against Castro’s forces. Kennedy refused, hundreds of anti-Castro fighters were killed on the beaches or captured and imprisoned, and Toller accused the president of being a traitor. When Kennedy fired Toller in 1962, Toller swore an undying hatred of the Catholic president.

He knew the plotters and understood something was afoot at the Company in mid-1963, but he distanced himself from the operational level in order to maintain deniability. He was asked for assistance only once; Pfisterr requested that Toller speak to his brother Boyce two days after the assassination. Boyce, a Dallas councilman and beholden to C.R. Bolt, distracted Will Fritz, police captain, with a phone call; thus, Fritz was not in position to protect Oswald when Oswald was being moved that Sunday morning in the Dallas jail where Ruby killed him.

No tears were shed in the Toller household in Virginia when word of Kennedy’s death came. Charles and his family went on with their lives. Plausible deniability insulated him from the plotters. Few, except for national security insiders, even knew his brother was a Dallas councilman.

Toller retired a happy man. He got out before Vietnam got ugly. Though he understood the secret rationale for the war and the agency/defense contractor symbiosis, its stench bypassed him. His official record was spotless, and he was accorded one of the CIA’s most enviable compliments by Helms—“Few knew he was with the Company.”

Toller liked to look back on a career defending America from its enemies, without and within its borders. He took pride in helping to preserve, in his own small way, the capitalist society that rewarded him well.

He indulged in the leisure pursuits he had denied himself when on active duty. He played golf at the exclusive Congressional Country Club with retired conservative politicians and businessmen. Often he stayed for drinks afterward in the well-appointed mahogany-and-leather lounge. Many times he was served by an older waitress, a part-time golf-season hire who, though she seemed far past the age of cocktailing for a living, was quite attractive.

Toller started an innocent flirtation with her, and got to know her by name—Peggy. Peggy seemed relatively familiar, but Toller could not quite place her. She was trying hard to look younger, and her layers of make-up and a gaudy hair-dye job sometime gave her a garish appearance. Nevertheless, she was pleasant and seemed to enjoy Toller’s attention.

On a warm, indolent Tuesday afternoon just before Labor Day, 1971, the club lounge was nearly vacant. Toller lingered over a scotch and soda after his golfing buddies had departed. He ordered another and struck up a conversation with Peggy.

Minutes later, Toller was suddenly overcome by a shortness of breath. He coughed and wheezed as if he were having an asthma attack. He lumbered out to the parking lot for fresh air, but he collapsed. Three hours later he was pronounced dead at an Arlington, Virginia, hospital.

________________________

Christian Rackham Bolt, right-wing extremist, bigamist, oil billionaire, and world-class cheapskate had been born into a large, well-off family in Fayette County, Illinois, near Vandalia in the southern part of the state before the turn of the 20th century.

He had been coddled by his mother, who slept with him until he was seven, and chastised often by a distant and unloving father. Bolt’s father, part of an overtly Oedipal triangle, finally put a stop to the unusual sleeping arrangements, and from thereon was wary, and strangely jealous, of his son. Bolt’s father often made a point of telling young Christian, “I’m the man of the family, not you; you’ll do only as you’re told.” Bolt’s sister, who stayed in southern Illinois all her life, said C.R. did not take well to his father’s austere, vindictive ways and struck out on his own at an early age. This began a life-long pattern of Bolt’s stubborn independence and his inclination to answer to no one.

Bolt won a couple thousand dollars in a crap game with roughnecks and bought a cotton farm in Arkansas, but the Mississippi delta flooded in 1919 and washed away the farm. He kicked around the South for several years before striking it rich as an oil wildcatter in East Texas in the 1920s and 30s. He bought up all the leases he could afford, and by the 1940s he was one of the richest men in America.

He finally settled in Dallas, because of its wild west, ultra-right-wing reputation, raising three separate families in the process. He felt no need to divorce one wife before marrying another, because, as he often told those closest to him, “I’m the richest man in the world, and I can damn well do as I please.”

By the 1960s his estimated wealth had grown to $400 million. His holdings included not only his many oil-related companies but vast real-estate holdings, publishing companies, TV and radio stations, and health food stores. He virtually invented right-wing Christian radio by paying for broadcasts that extolled the virtues of the Bible and promoted the values of the John Birch Society. After JFK got elected, he mandated that most broadcasts center around criticism of the president and his pro-communist policies.  He funded the campaigns of many pro-big oil, anti-communist political candidates, including Lyndon Johnson. When Kennedy beat out Johnson as the Democratic nominee in 1960 in Los Angeles, Bolt insisted, despite his hatred of Kennedy and all Catholics, that LBJ accept the Vice-Presidency. “Lyndon will be president someday, and then the South will rise again,” he reasoned.

Bolt loved to gamble for high stakes on poker, gin rummy and football games. Jack Ruby often arranged these gambling opportunities for him. Ruby also provided hookers for Bolt, who had an ardent carnal desire well into his sixties. During these trysts, he would occasionally run into Walter Dornberger ,who shared his sexual appetites and his fanatical politics. Bolt came to trust Dornberger to head his internal security and intelligence network.

Ruby was often seen going in and out of the Bolt Oil offices in Dallas’s Mercantile building. Usually, one of Bolt’s sons—Hanley or Wilson—would be the conduits for paying off gambling debts or providing bribes to police or political officials. Ruby was the bagman. The day before the assassination, Ruby carried a large satchel of $100 bills out of Bolt’s offices for delivery to the conspirators at the Cabana Hotel on the evening of November 21, 1963.

Bolt did not hide his hatred of Kennedy–for “letting Southeast Asia get overrun by the communists, for cutting the oil depletion allowance, for recognizing the UN, for aiding and abetting the worldwide communist conspiracy, and for supporting civil rights”—and paid for his son Hanley to print “Wanted for Treason” posters with Kennedy’s picture on them. The posters were distributed all over Dallas just prior to Kennedy’s visit. When warned by a friend that this could cause Bolt trouble, Bolt responded, “The hell you say; I can get away with anything. I own the police, and my friend Hutchison owns Hoover. Who else is there? The CIA? They’re on our side. I can buy and sell any man in this world with the exception of one, but we can shoot him out of office.”

Not long after the echoes of gunfire had faded in Dealey Plaza, Bolt abruptly left Dallas, surrounded by his bodyguards, Dornberger included, and secreted himself in his Mexican hideaway with some right-wing Texas pals, General Edwin Walker among them. Walker had supposedly been shot at by Oswald in April 1963, but it had been nothing more than a CIA-staged event meant to prove that Oswald was capable of attempted murder with a rifle.

When Bolt returned to Dallas for a New Year’s Eve party at the Adolphus Hotel, rumors were swirling about his involvement in the assassination. Tongues wagged and conjecture flew—Bolt, LBJ, Hutchison, Pfisterr, Toller, and other Kennedy-hating Texans were in on it. But then dead bodies started showing up all over Dallas, and its citizens recognized this as a signal to keep their mouths shout.

Bolt knew he was impervious to prosecution—whether it was murdering a president, practicing bigamy, gambling illegally, or jaywalking. He owned the town, and nothing happened in it unless he approved.

__________________________

Marie left Livy with Julia and her mom in Maryland and made a special trip to Dallas in November 1973 as part of the Assassination Research Project, a group of volunteers who naively thought they could uncover the truth about JFK’s assassination. It was ten years to the month since the murder, and the ARP investigators intended to rattle the bones of the city where it occurred. Marie was under no such illusions. For her, the trip was a chance to exterminate Dornberger’s Dallas sponsors.

November 21, 1973, was Thanksgiving Eve. In the late afternoon sunset, Marie waited for the old man to leave his offices in the Mercantile Building. She recognized  him by the white, balding scalp, the cheap, off-the-rack suit, and the large, muscular bodyguard who accompanied him. It was Bolt, and he was headed for a high-stakes poker game at his mansion outside Dallas.

Marie followed the limo, driven by Bolt’s chauffeur, as it headed out of town. It exited in rural northern Texas and slowed to 30 miles per hour. As Marie steered her car within 50 feet of Bolt’s she suddenly was rammed hard in the rear by a white Buick that emerged from nowhere. Bolt’s limo speeded up and vanished into the night. Meanwhile, Marie was forced off the road and into the ditch by the Buick. She revved the engine and tried to climb out of the ravine, but her wheels were stuck.  A short man with long stringy hair clutched at her passenger-side door. Marie, terrified, thought she spotted the glint of a pistol in his waistband.

The man was John Gutmann, Dallas mortician, murderer, and inveterate gambler. He was doing security work for Bolt, to whom he owed thousands in gambling debts, and he had followed Marie’s car all the way from downtown.

Gutmann slung open the door and was shocked to see a woman, no more than thirty, in the driver’s seat. “What the fuck are you doing following Mr. Bolt?”

Marie, in tears, screamed, “I’m lost. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know a Mr. Bolt.”

“You’re lying.” Gutmann pistol-whipped her across the face. Marie tasted the metallic, bitter flavor of her own blood.

A car in the opposite lane came veering towards them and slowed down as its headlights flashed on Gutmann and Marie. A man rolled down his window and asked Marie if she was okay.

“Can you lead me to a hospital? I’m hurt,” she cried.

The man noticed blood streaming from Marie’s mouth. He got out of his car and started pushing Marie’s car out of the ditch. He insisted that Gutmann help him, but Gutmann calmly got in his Buick and drove away.

Marie’s tooth had been knocked out, and she needed twelve stitches to close the wound above her eye. Her days as a premeditative AIC assassin were over.

AIC covert activities ceased as its members completed their junior years at American University. As the country’s youth turned against the war and became more active and radical, Peter, Julia, and Marie were content to let others carry the torch.

In the summer of 1966, Mark Lane’s groundbreaking expose on the Kennedy assassination was published. Rush To Judgment became a best-seller, and, for the first time since Dallas, public sentiment turned against Dulles, Arland, and the other Warren Commissioners. In radio interviews, Lane claimed that the CIA was to blame for JFK’s murder, and the agency became the target of Jim Garrison’s investigation in New Orleans just a few months later. It seemed to Peter and Julia that payback time had come. Two decades of CIA abominations were finally being exposed and avenged. But Marie knew better. Garrison was vilified and demonized by the Mockingbird press; his investigation was infiltrated by traitors; his witnesses were killed; and the powerful government functionaries he subpoenaed, like Dulles and Toller, simply brushed the summons aside. In the end, Clay Shaw, a lower-level operative who funneled money through cover organizations for the CIA and who helped set up Oswald in New Orleans, was acquitted.

Lane’s work spawned more conspiracy books like Harold Weisberg’s Whitewash and James Hepburn’s Farewell America, and Sylvia Meagher’s Accessories After the Fact, but the executive, legislative, and judicial branches took no action. It was as if an indigent wino had been murdered in Dallas, not the president of the United States. Officialdom wanted nothing to do with the truth, for many of them were culpable in direct and indirect ways.

Furthermore, Marie noticed, nothing was mentioned of other CIA transgressions—Paperclip, Mockingbird, PBSUCCESS, MK-ULTRA, Mongoose, Midnight Climax, and all other secret debasements of democracy. The fix was still in, and the criminals were still free.

Julia was forced to drop out of school before her senior term began. Her mother had run out of money, and Julia was forced to accept a position as a legal secretary in Arlington. Peter and Marie, though, managed to graduate in May 1967. Peter immediately left for New York to seek work as a musician, and Marie returned to St. Louis to spend some time with her father.

Though they kept in touch, the three musketeers were not reunited until the summer of 1968, when they met up in Chicago to protest the Vietnam War at the Democratic convention.

Marie, by then, had a part-time job writing features for a Chicago magazine, and she had lined up an interview with Hubert and Muriel Humphrey who were in Chicago for Hubert’s coronation as the Democratic presidential nominee. Peter took a break from sporadic work as studio musician and lounge singer, and Julia had two weeks vacation coming from her law firm.

Their first night in Chicago was spent in Lincoln Park, where they joined the yippies smoking dope, playing guitar, and making placards. They had a good time catching up and joining in the radical fun until the Chicago cops came. Armed with billyclubs and surly demeanors, they forced the peaceful yippies out of the park, beating many of them in the process.

The next night, the yippies gathered in Lincoln Park again. The mood was more restless then, as many of the kids shouted obscenities at the cops. One in particular, who wore a headband made of the flag and a brown T-shirt that read “DO IT,” went from group to group chanting, “Down with the pigs!” He introduced himself to Marie and her friends as “Billy Donovan” and exhorted them to fight back if cops tried to force them out of the park again. When he moved on to the next group, one of the yippies leaned over and whispered to Marie, “Watch out. We think he’s a narc.”

The cops shoved the yippies, and, led by Donovan and other inciters who had not been there the previous night, the yippies shoved back. Marie saw Donovan take a swing at a cop and then quickly dodge the cop’s retaliatory blow. Donovan went up and down the police line taunting cops, for which he absorbed little or no punishment. Nonetheless, he had accomplished his goal. All hell broke loose, and the National Guard was called in.

The cops flailed away at anyone with long hair. The beatings were random and, for the most part, without provocation, but the cops were seething with the August heat and the pressure from a tyrannical mayor and were itching to unleash their fury.

Chicago became a police state that night, where dissent was met with a mallet. Where free speech earned a billyclub to the mouth. Where a peaceful gathering was pulverized by the nominal peacekeepers.

Yippies hit the pavement head-first. Blood ran in the streets.  Tanks rolled down the avenues bordering Lake Michigan. Kids, barely out of high school, were rendered unconscious with crushed skulls.

Marie, though on the fringes of the violence, caught the blunt end of a cop’s club against her cheek, and her face began to discolor. She fell backward, stunned, and sat on the pavement for a moment, trying to gather her senses. When she got up, two cops pinned her arms back and handcuffed her wrists. She was loaded into a paddy wagon and carted off to jail.

She shared a small, dingy cell with several other beaten and subdued kids. They had one toilet between them and were given no water, food, or medical attention. The cell was not air conditioned, and its concrete walls kept the summer heat from escaping. The prisoners’ sweat mingled with their trickling blood. The conditions were not unlike the Nazi cattle cars and death camps in which human beings were treated like animals. The bitter parallel did not escape Marie.

She knew that twenty-four years prior, almost to the exact date, her biological mother had been imprisoned by a similar legion of thugs. Twenty-four years, and not much has changed, she thought. She crept to a corner of the cell, away from the others, and curled up into a disconsolate ball of self-pity. There seemed to be little point to her protest of the war, of how America was run, of how righteousness was never served. Look where it had landed her. Her writing, her dissidence, her voice counted for little.

In that moment, it seemed to Marie that she was doomed to lead a life no better nor worse than her parents’—one brutalized by war and the agents of fascism, the other crippled in body and spirit—or any other subjects of the American empire. She was sick of an existence in which pain seemed the only willing companion. She was tired of assuming that contentment and fulfillment were beyond her reach. She no longer wanted to feel that she was not entitled to experience joy. Since the day of her birth, in maybe the most wretched abyss ever constructed by man, Marie had known strife and longing…and little of anything else.

In that steamy, decrepit jail, on an unbearable Chicago night, she resolved to find some happiness, some reward, some recompense for all she had suffered. And she made a promise to herself to not let any of her enemies control her life and her emotions again.

She wanted to start anew and take what was hers. She’d had enough of letting others impose their will on her; she was going to impose her will on the world. Others led quiet, comfortable, contented lives; why not her?

Marie even resorted to prayer, something that, long ago, she had deemed inconsequential. She bowed her bruised head and asked God, whose existence she had always questioned, for some benevolence and grace…some inner peace and security. Let others fight the good fight. Let them carry the burden. In the end it did not matter; evil always won out. The powerful oppressed the weak. The rich exploited the poor. The government would always be corrupt, its citizens forever duped.

Marie was throwing in the towel and asking God for what she had never had—a family. An intact, healthy, loving family. Whose arms could embrace her. Whose strength would protect her. Whose words would soothe her. Whose security would heal her. She wanted to fall in love with a kind, understanding, steadfast man. One like her father. One whose shoulder she could lean on and dissolve all her worries into.

Lost in her far-flung fantasy, Marie briefly nodded off. When she awakened, her head hurt, and her senses were re-alerted to her dire surroundings. She showed a press credential to her keepers and demanded to make a phone call to Senator Humphrey.

Marie called the Humphreys’ hotel room and got word to one of the Senator’s aides that she had to cancel the interview. When the aide got word to Humphrey that the young female reporter had been beaten and jailed by Chicago Police, the Senator sent an emissary to free her.

One of the first yippies to be released from jail was Donovan. He was neither bloodied nor scarred, as police politely escorted him out to the precinct’s front desk, where a nondescript, middle-aged man, wearing a crewcut and horn-rimmed glasses was waiting for him. They exchanged no words and quickly walked out of the police station. It was an odd interlude, which perplexed Marie.

Marie was surprised when the cops let her go at the same time they released Donovan. She was even more surprised at who posted bond. “I’m Nick Gavros, Jr.,” said her savior, a slight, short, handsome guy with dark hair, brown eyes, and a deep tan.

“Son of the Nick Gavros?” inquired Marie. Gavros, Sr., was president of GDM Enterprises, a multi-million dollar agricultural products processing and storage company. Senior was widely known in political circles for being Hubert Humphrey’s financial guardian angel. Not widely known was that Junior was as much of a womanizer as his father. Both Nicks had a taste for tall, svelte women with long, sexy legs. Marie was just their type.

That night, Marie met the Humphreys. They were pleasant, unpretentious Minnesotans, who seemed unfazed by their proximity to the White House. Marie tried to ask the Senator a few serious questions, but Muriel would have none of it. “Look at the poor dear, Hubert. She’s injured. Let her relax. We’ll get some ice for that bruise. Why do the police have to be so brutal? It makes Chicago look bad. It makes the Democrats look bad.”

“We sympathize with you young kids. We want to get out of Vietnam as much as you do,” said Hubert, “but we’ve got to do it the right way. Nick, tell this young lady how we feel.”

Nick, Jr., nodded, “He’s a good man, and he’ll be a great president.”

Marie wondered how an apparently decent man had become associated with a monster like Johnson. Didn’t Humphrey have suspicions about how LBJ managed to wrest the White House away from Kennedy? Didn’t he know that LBJ was nothing more than a lying, thieving, murdering warmonger? And if Humphrey was really this naive and decent, did he think the ruling military-intelligence-oil oligarchy was going to let him ascend to the presidency?

These questions were only fleeting. Marie decided to let go of her troubles and enjoy herself at the party. Gavros was handsome, gracious, and charming, and she indulged herself in his attention.

The large hotel suite was a hotbed of commotion. A young, pretty blonde, supposedly a friend of Nick’s from Northwestern, where he was attending summer school, was playing piano. Hangers-on and advisers were drinking and gossiping. Television images interspersed convention flak with rioting in the streets. “God, I don’t know which is worse,” muttered one of Humphrey’s minions.

Mayor Dailey’s thugs were policing the streets and the convention hall. War demonstrators got a club to the head, and reporters who covered it got threatened and berated or worse. Chicago turned into one large melee, pictures of which were transmitted from coast to coast.

Nick, Jr., undisturbed by it all, sidled up next to Marie and asked her about herself. Marie was flattered by the attention and found Nick to be a soft-spoken, affable gentleman. He treated females like princesses, and it was an approach that had served his purposes well. By age twenty-three, he had bedded innumerable co-eds and even some of their mothers. Marie was drawn to his unflappable, demure, and chivalrous nature. He complimented Marie on her intelligence and political views before expressing admiration for her physical features. Nick had learned this was a strategy that worked well on the emerging females of the late 1960s, who were more worldly and liberated than their forebears.

Marie had known few males in her life who were secure enough to be as gentle and thoughtful as Nick. She found the combination of confidence and solicitude irresistible. She tumbled into Nick’s bed the next night, beginning an intermittent, mostly unrequited, and painful affair with him.

Nick gave Marie flowers daily. He picked her up in limousines. He wined and dined her at expensive restaurants. They made love often.

But in time, as was Nick’s pattern, he grew uninterested. One night in September, he cancelled a date with Marie and did not call again for another week. Marie, by happenstance, saw him with the blond piano player from the Humphreys’ apartment. She realized then that Nick was more interested in getting his dick wet than he was in true love. Still, she could not break away completely. She was in love for the first time in her life and did not want to let go.

Nick showed Marie a lifestyle she had never known—one of privilege and indulgence. They attended parties at opulent homes. They sat on the 50-yard line at Bears football games. They took expensive vacations.

In late October, when frigid air blew into the city, Nick invited Marie to fly to Palm Springs for the weekend. The Gavroses owned a sprawling home in the southern California desert, next to a golf course. Their neighbors were movies stars and America’s rulers, and often, when playing golf, these reclusive kings would meet one another.

Marie, who had never even seen a golf course before and who could not distinguish a driver from a putter, was coaxed into accompanying Nick to his country club. What she saw stunned her.

The clubhouse was more like a palace than a hangout for amateur golfers. The main dining room had a crystal chandelier, linen tablecloths, and china settings on the tables. The bar was 50 yards long, with leather railings and chairs. The black servants and caddies were dressed impeccably in white cotton suits.

The course itself was the lushest green acreage Marie had ever seen. The course, lined by tropical palm trees and pinkish-gray mountains, was manicured to perfection. Not a blade was out of place. The tee boxes alone were larger than her apartment.

It dawned on her that she was looking at American aristocracy’s vision of paradise–gorgeous uniformity constructed around a game played only by white, wealthy, mostly Protestant males. For some, this was a birthright; for others, it was the entitlement that came with the hard-won class war. The only thing that separated it from Roman decadence was the young, nubile, buxom, and willing concubines waiting for their conquering warriors in nearby cabanas. Beauty was everywhere, but it was not beauty of the heart. It was surface beauty, won in ugly ways, and surface beauty waiting to be defiled.

Marie drove the cart; Nick played the game. As they approached the first tee, he pointed to another cart pulling away from the 18th hole. “That’s Prescott Heynes. Want to meet him?”

Marie just stared as her jaw fell open. The man whom Julia had described as “dictator of the world” was no more than 5 feet 5 inches tall. He had a slight build and a round face. He was almost completely bald, and he had ears as big as a clown’s. This was the man who made and broke heads of governments? This was the man who did business with Hitler? This was the man who controlled what America saw, read, and thought? This was the man who pulled the strings and made the puppets dance?

His physical appearance was so unformidable that Marie thought Nick had made a mistake. “Are you sure that’s him?”

“Yeah, I’ve met him several times. He and my father used to be partners in some Asian interests.”

Asian interests. Nick uttered the words as if he were bored by them. Marie wondered if “Asian interests” meant smuggling drugs to help fund the CIA’s secret operations. She caught herself, though, and tried to remember why she was here—to relax, to indulge herself, to be with the man she loved. When she looked back towards Heynes, he was gone.

“Does he live here?” Marie asked Nick.

He laughed, “He lives everywhere. Has about six homes. I think he’s in New York most of the time. I’ve been to his penthouse in Manhattan…upper West Side, I think. But he’s also got mansions in Florida, Mexico, Europe. Hey, let’s tee off. Come on, sweetheart.” He leaned over and kissed Marie, who was still thinking about Heynes’s decision to not bomb the Nazi railways in World War II.

She turned to Nick and laid her head on his shoulders. She wanted to leave the torment of the past behind, but here it was following her…even in the farthest reaches of the land, in this desert Eden for the elite.

That night, Marie drank to excess and abandoned her inhibitions. She swam naked in the Gavros pool. She snorted Nick’s cocaine. They made wild love outdoors on the patio furniture.

They awoke the next day in each other’s arms, and Marie, though bleary-eyed and only semi-conscious, felt a worldly contentment that had eluded her until then. She loved Nick and his gentle, unassuming ways. She wanted to make a life with him. She wanted to lose herself, once and for all, in his luxury and security. She wanted to join the oligarchy instead of fighting it.

But back in Chicago, Nick resumed his womanizing. He was incapable of resisting the wiles of other females, and he found no lasting satisfaction with just one woman. Still, Marie could not let go of him.

Marie confronted Nick several times with proof of his cheating, and he never denied it. Instead he chastised himself for his weaknesses and told Marie that, even though he loved her, she would be better off without him. Nick could not resist any pair of lithe, slinky legs, and he openly admitted it. Marie even found this quality appealing; she was attracted to this reticent, self-deprecating man’s own sense of his pathetic shortcomings. She tried to change him, but to no effect.

One bitterly cold Saturday night in mid-November, Marie gave him an ultimatum. They had attended a party, hosted by one of Nick’s rich friends, at a penthouse on Michigan Avenue. Nick had spent the evening flirting with other women and leaving Marie to fend for herself in a roomful of strangers. On the way home, Marie, emotionally wounded and fuming, lost her temper.

“It’s bad enough when you come on to other women in my presence, but do you have to humiliate me in front of your friends?

Nick feigned innocence and claimed he was just being sociable.

“Why can’t you be sociable with me? I don’t appreciate being ignored by you in public, especially when I don’t know anyone else. I sat in a corner all night by myself. I hate being treated that way by you.”

Nick grew silent and stared out the window of the limo; he had played this role many times before, and he knew what was coming.

“I can’t take this anymore. Either treat me right, or…I’ll…I don’t want to go on like this. I love you, but I want things you don’t want,” sighed Marie. “You can’t be faithful, can you?”

Nick said nothing. Rather than trying to dissuade Marie, he was letting her make the painful decision of breaking up. That way, he could avoid the ugly scene and ensuing guilt of doing it himself. He never broke up with women; he did not have the stomach for it. He let them arrive at that inevitable conclusion by behaving poorly. He was too much of a gentleman to just abandon a woman, but he was too much of a heel to love just one for longer than a few months. And he was too much of a coward to accept the responsibility for his frailty. In the end, all his women came to realize that there was no future with Nick, and they simply moved on. He was too much of a playboy. Some, like Marie, were irreparably scarred by the affair.

Marie spent several days alone in her apartment, refusing to work, refusing to eat, and getting little sleep. She was unable to reconcile her heart with her head. She knew, with complete certainty, that Nick was never going to give her the happiness and security she craved, but she could not tear her heart free from him. She even contemplated begging him to take her back, and contenting herself with loving a man who was incapable of fulfilling her needs, but pride and anger kept her from groveling.

For weeks she tormented herself with the kind of grueling self-examination that only the most scrupulous and upright souls can undergo. Why do I desire what I cannot have? Am I meant, by design of higher powers or fate or simple genetics, to live a life of turmoil and instability? Will I forever be a nomad wandering a strange land, deeded by a privileged few?  Are the oppressed responsible for their oppression?

Marie vacillated between two extremes. Sometimes, overwhelmed by melancholy, she felt like an orphan of a godless world, constantly at the mercy of an unseen malevolence, impotent against its power. At other times, seething with acrimony over a surfeit of grievances, she felt like taking up arms against the obdurate world.

The process did not heal her, nor did she derive some profound insight. Instead, she came out the other end with a new paradigm of values—to take no more shit, consequences be damned. If she was going to endure the vagaries and lacerations of life, she would also wield her own axe. She would take what comfort she could from everyday existence, but no longer would she take the pain lying down. She would speak, think and act as she pleased, with little care for how others viewed her. Life was too short to care about what others thought. There was no real succor in pleasing them anyway. One must live with oneself, and, thus, be at peace with oneself, even to the detriment of others.

Most of all, she came to believe that striving to do good was of little or no use in such a nihilistic world. Where evil abides and flourishes, god has no domain. And without god, without redress or consequences for the unspeakable inhumanities visited upon the greater good by the evil few, what constraints are there to chain the aggrieved? They should strike back, for what is the harm? The only absolute is the alternative—do nothing and perish.

By Thanksgiving, when she was forced to spend the holiday alone, Marie had enough. Lonely and despondent, she said good-bye to Chicago and Nick, quit her job, and moved to Baltimore to be closer to Julia. Mrs. Munshall insisted that Marie stay with her.

In the second week of December 1965, semester finals finished, Marie, Julia, and Peter hopped into Julia’s 1961 Ford Fairlane and headed for Dallas. They took turns behind the wheel and stopped only for food and bathroom breaks. The trip took two days, and when they arrived in the city they drove the exact route Kennedy had taken from Love Field on his death motorcade.

As they passed through downtown, heading west on Main Street, they looked up toward the Mercantile Building and the offices of C.R. Bolt. They continued driving slowly west toward Dealey Plaza, the kill zone. It was a Sunday, and traffic was light. Rather than staying on Main, the more direct route to the Stemmons Freeway, they made a drastic, unnecessary right onto Houston, then a quick left onto Elm, right in front of the Texas School Book Depository. It was the route that was chosen by the conspirators, in order to slow Kennedy’s limousine down and force it to pass in front of the patsy’s workplace.

“This place is so much smaller than the photographs make it appear,” said Julia. “No way witnesses could be confused about the direction of the shots.”

A chill came over the three as they drove over the very spot where JFK’s head was blown off. They glanced at the picket fence atop the knoll to their right, the perfect place to obscure an assassin and a position from which an expert marksman could not miss.

“You see why they had to maneuver the car over here instead of taking a straight route to the freeway?”

They doubled back to the parking lot behind the picket fence, stopped the car, and got out and walked the plaza. They looked up to the sixth floor window at the northeast corner of the depository. “No way Oswald makes that shot.”

The weather was chilly, and after a few minutes the three had enough of the cold Texas wind and the mournful surroundings. They headed towards SMU, AU’s sister Methodist school, where they were put up in vacant dorms. The ruse was that Marie and Julia were considering transferring to SMU. They met with the dorm RA, an academic advisor, and the dean of students just to keep up appearances. The allure was the free board while in Dallas.

When they were settled in, Marie got out a local phone book and started looking up names and numbers. There was a Dornberger, Walter, living at 2341 Preston Trails.

“He’s here,” Marie almost shouted. “The sonofabitch is here. I found him.” She pulled out the copy of Dornberger’s book, V-2, her father had given her to read months ago. Hughes had decided his daughter was now old enough to know exactly who had tortured him and her mother. The dust jacket contained a few brief notes about the author. There were a few sentences distancing him from the Third Reich, absolution for the atrocities at Peenemunde, and claims of unawareness of the horrors of the concentration camps. The book contained several pictures of Walter with his Nazi cronies. And to seal his acceptability with American readership, the last sentence read, “Dr. Dornberger is an aeronautics scientist with Textron Bell of Dallas-Fort Worth.”

“Big mistake, Walter. CIA agents should never reveal anything about themselves, especially photos and workplace,” smirked Marie. She showed the book to Peter and Julia who quickly leafed through it.

“Look at this,” exclaimed Peter. “He makes Nazis sound like a bunch of dignified gentlemen having parlor debates. Look at this on page 98…Dornberger having a discussion with Speer. ‘You just have to find some way of getting on together, old chap.’” Peter assumed a faux British accent. “Then Dornberger replies, ‘I shan’t be able to stand him much longer.’ Shan’t…shan’t? What refined manners Walter has.” The agents of AIC had a good laugh over that one.

“Look at this shit, on page 103, Walter claims Hitler came up to him and said, ‘I thank you. Why was it I could not believe in the success of your work? If we had had these rockets in 1939 we should never have had this war.’ See, all the Nazis really wanted was world peace,” howled Peter.

“My,” added Julia, “they speak such perfect English too. Walter sounds a little like Ward Cleaver. ‘You know, Beaver, if only those Jews had listened to reason and hadn’t complained so much about working those long hours, well, we would not have had to mass murder them. Let this be a lesson to you and your brother Wally…always salute the flag and never speak up when America shoves fascism down your throat.’”

“Let’s get high and read this thing,” suggested Peter. “We can interpret what Walter really meant to say.”

Peter and Julia went into convulsions reading V-2, but Marie did not want to reduce Dornberger’s World War II conduct to a joke. Her simmering hatred of Dornberger would not allow it. She wanted revenge.

The next day they found 2341 Preston Trails. It was located in an upscale neighborhood of North Dallas. They parked across the street from an expansive, one-story brick residence for several hours, waiting for Dornberger to make an appearance.

Instead, a young male, 30-ish, about six feet tall, with a full head of dark hair walked out of the front door and down the driveway.

“That’s sure not Walter. Do we have the right house?” asked Marie.

“Yeah, 2341, right?”

Marie bolted from the car and approached the man who was sticking his hand into the mailbox. Peter and Julia tried to stop her, but she had not come all the way to Dallas for nothing. “Excuse me, sir, I think we’re lost. Is this the Dornberger residence?”

“Used to be,” said the man in a soft Texas drawl. “We bought the house from him a couple months ago. He retired and moved back to Germany. I don’t know how you would get a hold of him.”

Disconsolate, Marie returned to the SMU dorm. “Hey,” Peter tried to cheer her up, “look at it this way. Now you can’t be arrested for murder.” He was only half-joking.

Marie was glum until she browsed the Dallas Morning News the next day and could not believe what she saw. A small headline, buried near the back of the local news section, read “Daughters of the American Revolution to present Dr. Strughold with Americanism Medal.”

_______________________

After escaping prosecution at Nuremberg for his war crimes at Dachau, Hubertus Strughold had been evacuated to Fort Bliss with the other Paperclip Nazis for Americanization training and “career placement” preparation. His research in aviation medicine, a euphemism for the brutal torture and murder of unsuspecting inmates, was seen as quite valuable by Dulles and the American oligarchy. The CIA wanted to get their hands on Strughold’s work before the communists did, of course, but, more than this, Strughold was seen as the ideal scientist to staff the Air Force’s new School of Aeromedical Research at Randolph Air Force Base in Texas.

Strughold had dosed unsuspecting prisoners, Hannah among them, with LSD and mescaline. Many had turned psychotic, but most had survived, only to experience emotional and psychological problems later in life. But Strughold’s most egregious sins were his nonsensical experiments which dealt with the effects of cold water on men who were exposed to stand in it for long periods. Nazi pilots often were shot down or forced to ditch in the Atlantic or the North Sea, and Goering commissioned Strughold’s tests to determine how long pilots could survive the frigid conditions. Strughold forced male prisoners to strip naked and stand in the water until they froze to death. Many tried to drown themselves rather than endure the torture.

The experiments were pseudo-scientific and proved little, but Strughold’s knowledge and data were valued by American authorities.

Once he settled in south central Texas, he found America a quite agreeable place. Much like Dornberger did, Strughold envisioned the rise of a new Reich in his adopted land. He saw many similarities to 1930s Germany. The American citizenry was, with the willing compliance of politicians, journalists, and law enforcement, kept in the dark about what was really going on. A secret government, welded together by wealthy, powerful conspirators, operated undisturbed, as duped Americans were distracted by the puppet government they were assured was really in power. And America was amassing a great war machine looking for a fight. Its military budget far exceeded anything Hitler devised.

At age 67, Strughold felt, except for a slight heart condition developed after years of smoking, that he was still in the prime of his life. He was comfortable economically, and he was content with his profession. He was doing important work that made him prosperous, and he was appreciated by his new countrymen. They accorded him honors, and they sang his praises for public consumption. Strughold had never heard of the Daughters of the American Revolution before they called to inform him that he was to receive their Americanism Medal. It was just like life in the Fatherland, he thought.

The banquet was to be held at the Regency Hotel, just blocks from where the 35th president was murdered. How fitting, thought Strughold, that the socialist had been exterminated so close to where a fascist was being honored. Dallas was certainly an enlightened city.

The Daughters secured the hotel’s best suite for Hubertus on his arrival. He checked into the upper floor penthouse early in the day to rest up before the ceremony. He ordered a light meal and then settled in for a nap.

He’d been asleep for close to two hours when he heard a knock at the door. He answered to see a young woman, tall, thin and attractive with a warm smile. She was holding a bottle of wine and a glass on a tray. “Compliments of the house,” she said. “I know you probably don’t have a corkscrew so allow me to open it for you.” She entered the room and pantomimed uncorking the bottle. Strughold did not notice that the bottle had already been opened and the cork was sticking up out of the bottle. The girl had kept a napkin draped over the top of the bottle when entering the room

Strughold thanked her and took the silver tray. America knew how to treat its dignitaries, he thought. It was nearly 5 o’clock, and he decided that a couple of drinks would brace him for his public appearance and acceptance speech. He poured himself one glass of wine and then another. As he sipped the Merlot, he skimmed his prepared notes. All of a sudden, the words seemed to fly off the page at him, and the room’s wallpaper seemed to melt. His heart started racing, and paranoid thoughts rushed through his head. Why was this group of…what were they…Daughters of the Revolution…honoring him? It was a trick. He was being set up to look like a fool. They were going to castigate him at the affair. He envisioned a red swastika painted on the speaker’s podium.

He tried to gather his thoughts. What had just happened? In a rampaging panic, he felt a pain radiate from his shoulders to his fingertips. Were they numb? Who was that woman who had brought the champagne?

Strughold paced the room and rubbed his left arm as his mind raced. He could not concentrate on one thought, and was unable to tell what was real from what was not. He tried to call the desk clerk but could not find the appropriate hole on the rotary phone. His breath was short and labored, and he began to sweat profusely.

Then it hit him. He’d been drugged. Probably LSD. He knew the symptoms from watching his Dachau subjects, but the awareness of what was bedeviling him did not mitigate its effects. Oxygen seemed in short supply; he was unable to catch his breath. He managed to stumble out onto the balcony to breathe in the cool December air.  Dizzy and disoriented, he sat down and tried to force air into his lungs. He told himself to let his natural respiratory system take over. Many times he had witnessed his helpless victims at Dachau lose control of their emotions and natural bodily functions by panicking.

Strughold eventually managed to get word to the Daughters that he was too ill to attend the ceremony. He rode out his thirty-hour trip in his hotel room. When he came down, he was exhausted and angry, but he suffered no lasting effects. He had no way of knowing that he’d been drugged by the daughter of the woman he had mercilessly persecuted at Dachau.

Strughold lived another twenty-two years, dying of natural causes at the age of eighty-nine.

______________________

Marie returned to the SMU dormitory in a glum mood.

“What’s the matter? Couldn’t get near Strughold? Weren’t you able to wire him?” quizzed Julia.

“I don’t know. That’s the problem. I wanted to see him suffer,” Marie bristled, “but I couldn’t wait around the hotel. I didn’t want to be seen by him if something happened. But I don’t even know if he drank the wine.”

“You used wine?”

“Yeah. I went to the hotel bar, told them I wanted to surprise my husband, and got the bartender to sell me a bottle. He let me borrow a corkscrew to open it and a tray and a glass to serve it with. I opened the wine and dosed it before I got to his room. I knocked on the door and told him it was compliments of the house. I pretended to open the wine, and then I left.”

“So…you did it. His brain is probably fried right now. So what’s the problem?”
“It’s not enough. I can’t even see the effects of ‘the dirty trick’ I played on him; I can’t even see him suffer the way he made my mom Hannah suffer…the way he made all those poor souls at Dachau suffer. I don’t even get the satisfaction of knowing he drank the wine for sure. We should just forget about this whole AIC thing. It’s not making me feel any better.”

Before they left Dallas, Marie, Julia, and Peter scoured the local papers for any news of Strughold’s fate. They found nothing, not even a mention that the Daughters of the American Revolution ceremony had been cancelled.

On May 8, 1964, Gary Munshall was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head. The medical examiner ruled it a suicide. “Just a few problems with that,” Julia whispered to Marie and Peter at the visitation. “The wound was behind his left ear, and my dad was right-handed. They found the gun near his left hand. And, oh yeah,” she added with bitter sarcasm, “he didn’t keep a gun in the house.” Peter and Marie held their tongues to avoid making the situation even more painful for Julia, but they could not escape the obvious: The CIA had silenced one of its own.

“Notice how none of them has shown up? They’re distancing themselves from him. They’ll claim that my dad never worked for them…even better, they never knew him. They’re probably burning his 201 file right now…just like they did Oswald’s.”

At the funeral the next day there was no CIA representative present. Munshall was not even given the dignity of a government burial, commonplace for CIA employees. Many covert agents were buried in Arlington, their interments complete with honor guard salutes and glowing eulogies from Langley hierarchy. Munshall’s casket was lowered by a few family members and non-government friends. Peter was a pallbearer.

That night, back at the AU dorms, Julia, Marie, and Peter got drunk on wine and swore eternal hatred of the CIA. Marie and Julia had had family members killed and/or maimed by covert operatives employed by the agency, but there was little they could do about it except to try and avoid the same fate. There was nowhere to turn for help. The police were useless. They were no match for the far-reaching power of the CIA. The FBI and Justice Department would never undertake a serious investigation of another secret government agency. Hoover was too obsessed with the FBI’s own reputation and affairs, and he was under LBJ’s thumb anyway. He did not want to go to war with Langley’s superspies. That left the press, but there was little hope that an American media staffed by thousands of Mockingbird assets would ever dig up the truth and run with it.

To suppress talk of conspiracy and its own involvement, Pfisterr and Helms issued a memo dated April 1 to clandestine operatives and media assets that provided “material countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims.”

Point 1—“We do not recommend discussion of the assassination be initiated where it is not already taking place. When it is taking place, friendly elite contacts (editors and politicians) should point out that the Warren Commission made as thorough an investigation as possible and that further speculation only plays into the hands of the opposition—communist propagandists who want to undermine American capitalism.”

Point 2—“Propaganda assets should attack the character, motives, and personal lives of the Commission critics.”

Point 3—“No new evidence has surfaced, and no plausible conspiracy theory has emerged. A conspiracy on such a grand scale as necessitated by the murder of a U.S. president could never be accomplished without several conspirators coming forward to reveal the plot.”

The sheer audacity of Pfisterr using the construct of the conspiracy as a defense against its own existence was diabolically shameless and arrogant. He even mentioned the Reichstag Fire as a precedent for the baselessness of attaching political contrivance and treachery to momentous historic events. “Though many historians attributed the fire to SS storm troopers, recent evidence lays the blame on a historical non-entity…a loner with a grudge.” He was protecting the Nazis still.

But never mind the police, the FBI, and the press, there weren’t even a sufficient number of civilians who believed the wild stories Marie and Julia had to tell. In 1964 public outrage and a groundswell of support for an investigation of the CIA was still a long way off.  The three musketeers had only one another to confide in and with whom to seek comfort. They vowed allegiance to one another, and they decided to keep their secrets to themselves. Telling others provided no relief and prompted only incredulity and censure from the uninformed.

Spring term ended shortly afterward. Mrs. Munshall sold the family home, and Julia moved with her to a smaller home in Baltimore. Peter went back to New York to look for a musical gig. Marie stayed in Washington to earn some necessary money waitressing.

By the time the three friends returned to AU for the fall term, the Warren Commission had issued its report. Oswald had acted alone. There had been no conspiracy. By its sheer volume alone, the report was an imposing document. That was Dulles’s intent all along. “Americans don’t read,” he’d asserted to Arland, his fellow commissioner. They thought they had duped the American public.

____________________________

In 1964, Dornberger got more freelance work than ever. The CIA and Texas oilmen were willing to pay big dollars to have certain people terminated or silenced in and around Dallas. These victims were people who either witnessed something they should not have, or they were blowing off their big mouths contradicting the official government story of JFK’s murder.

C.R. Bolt set up an account through his son Hanley, who laundered the money with dummy companies or people untraceable to Planet Oil, Tumble Oil, Bolt Oil, or any other Bolt-owned cattle, cotton, real estate, or banking business. After C.R.’s death in 1975, a large deposit was made, under the guise of a family inheritance, to Herb and Lydia Stullmeier’s savings account at First Federal Bank in Pinckneyville, Illinois. But in 1964 the money was drawn by Dornberger through Bolt intermediaries.

Walter’s first victim, though, was a mistake. He meant to kill Domingo Benavides, a witness to the murder of J.D. Tippit, supposedly killed by Oswald. Benavides, however, claimed two men fired at Tippit, and neither of them looked like Oswald. Walter went to the Benavides residence in Dallas one night in February and waited in his car across the street. When someone appearing to be Domingo appeared in the driveway, Walter approached him and fired one quick shot to the head. He had killed Eddie Benavides, Domingo’s lookalike brother, by mistake.

Walter atoned for his gaffe by torturing and then murdering Jim Koethe, a Dallas Morning News reporter who had interviewed Tom Howard, Ruby’s attorney, shortly after Ruby murdered Oswald. Howard told Koethe that Ruby was hired to kill Oswald by “some very rich Dallas oilmen.” Koethe was warned to keep that information to himself. He did until he found corrobative sources and planned on running the story to coincide with the release of the Warren Report. Dornberger ended any possibility of that by gaining access to Koethe’s apartment in Dallas, then surprising Koethe as he came out of the shower. Walter indulged his sadist fetish over two days, killing Koethe slowly.

As 1965 approached, Dornberger was as rich and content as he was in the heady days of the Third Reich. After Kennedy’s murder, America had become a reasonable facsimile of Nazi Germany, he thought. A few powerful men had a stranglehold on the destiny of an entire nation. Dissent was squelched at every turn. A war to advance the agenda of totalitarianism and crush the communist threat had begun in the Far East. Anything but unquestioning, blind allegiance to the government was met with rebuke and, sometimes, violent retribution. It was all a fascist could reasonably hope for in post-war America. The America that Dulles and Lawson, and the other CIA founding fathers, had envisioned had finally come to pass.

________________________

As 1964 turned into 1965, Marie, Julia, and Peter tried to concentrate on their studies and forgo thoughts of bringing down the CIA, the presidency, and the shadow government. They had their futures to worry about, and they had careers they aspired to. Good grades were a necessity to maximize the potential of gainful employment after graduation. No world-shaking would happen if they were not in positions to effect change.

Marie studied journalism; Peter made progress toward a bachelor’s in Music; Julia pursued a degree in political science. They buckled down, partied less, and paid scant attention to the CIA’s unfettered perfidy. But they never forgot the pain of losing their loved ones and their president to the wiles of an evil, out-of-control agency. They just focused their energy and intellects elsewhere…until one otherwise innocuous afternoon in the fall of 1965, when Julia was eating one of the “freeloader” lunches she shared with Marie at Europa Café.

Marie was allowed to take the untouched leftovers, the overcooked entrees, and the grilled excess for herself and her poor roommate. Sometimes she brought the food home; sometimes they ate together in Europa. One day Julia stopped in mid-bite as a short, stocky, balding, well-dressed man, with a pronounced gap in his front teeth, entered the café.

“You know who that is?” she whispered to Marie. “He’s CIA. His name is Lawless or Lawton…something like that. He was one of the guys who recruited Nazis into the country. I think he also had something to do with the LSD experiments. I remember my dad talking about him. He’s one of the big bosses, like Dulles.”

This immediately got Marie’s attention; suddenly she was seized by an acute, visceral anger. She felt it burn her neck, jaw, and forehead. Her cheeks and ears turned crimson, and years of latent loathing surfaced. “I’ve seen him in here before. He has lunch here every Thursday, the smug bastard.”

The tone took Julia by surprise. Marie’s eyes smoldered, and her mouth tensed.

“You look like you wanna kill him.”

Marie didn’t respond. She just stared at the man. He sat at a table in the corner with another fellow.

“Hey, I recognize him, too,” asserted Julia. The other man was taller, younger, more distinguished looking. It was Richard Helms.

Marie turned to Julia and asked, “Do you have classes this afternoon?”

“No,” she said.

“Do me a favor, will you? You still have that orange sunshine?”

“Sure.”

“Run back to the dorm and bring me about six or seven tabs of it, will you? And grind them up into a powder.”

“Now?? What’s the rush? You wanna take it here?”

Marie gave Julia a purposeful look and measured her words carefully. Barely above a whisper, she said, “It’s not for me.”

In a moment, Julia understood. Like she had been awakened by a thundercrack, she quickly left the café.

_____________________

Even in retirement, Lawson liked to keep abreast of agency activities. Occasionally he lunched with Richard Helms, other times with Des Fitzgerald or Ted Sheltons. He always found Helms to be imperious, almost snobbish, and lacking in respect for his forerunners at the CIA. Helms, however, was blunt and frank when discussing agency business and gossip, and his banter amused Lawson.

Lawson had been quite depressed lately. Clinically depressed. The doctors couldn’t help him. The medications made him tired and disoriented. He had stopped taking them, and had actually felt slightly better for a while, and on this particular Thursday he was in relatively good spirits. One of the few pleasures he had left was reminiscing with cohorts about the good old days in covert operations. He liked bragging about his successes: the Nazification of America with Paperclip; overthrowing Mossadegh and Arbenz; smearing and undermining liberal politicians; the subversion of the free press. He also made jokes about dosing unsuspecting guinea pigs, in and out of the agency, with LSD. These topics briefly lifted the black fog that had enveloped him.

His nervous breakdown, the one that had forced his retirement from the agency, was behind him. He had gained better control of his emotions. “If only,” Lawson thought, “I could crawl out of this black hole. Be happy again. Do something useful.” At times, the depression nearly paralyzed him. Instead of being at the mercy of an overstimulated nervous system, the way he was in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he presently suffered from an underactive nervous system. He ate little, slept nearly sixteen hours a day, and found little joy in life. But on the last Thursday in October of 1965 he was looking forward to seeing Helms and then being driven by his chauffeur out to his farm on Maryland’s eastern shore.

Helms made vague allusions to “that Dallas mess,” and Lawson knew instantly what he was referring to. Critics of the Warren Report were filling late-night radio airwaves from Manchester, New Hampshire, to San Diego. Conspiracy books were being written. “It’s those damn eyewitnesses and that autopsy screw-up. We might have to give them someone, limit the damage. The New York Times is making noise about some damn investigation,” complained Helms.

Lawson tried to assure him. “What about Sulzberger? He’ll kill any real story.”

“I dunno…times are changing. We really stuck our necks out in Dallas. A lot of slip is showing underneath the dress.”

“No one on the federal level is going to dare bring an indictment. They’d be destroyed. The locals are a bunch of yahoos who have neither the power nor the will to uncover the truth. Don’t worry.”

Lawson changed the topic to Southeast Asia. “Johnson’s handing Vietnam to the joint chiefs and the Farm on a platter, isn’t he?”

The Farm was an insider term for the CIA. Helms smiled, “What choice does he have? We resurrected his career and put him in the White House. He owes his ass to us and our benefactors.”

Small talk and gossip occupied the two men for the rest of the meal. Helms finished and left quickly. Lawson lingered over several cups of coffee. Caffeine helped keep him from nodding off in the middle of the day. He hardly noticed his tall, thin waitress nervously shake the cup and saucer as she set the coffee in front of him. Lawson had been served by her often, but he never conversed with her beyond the order. She was quiet and efficient, just the way he liked his servers. Lawson got lost in his thoughts of the past and grew melancholy. He knew it was time to leave; he needed fresh air to revive himself.

The limo was waiting for him outside the cafe. Long ago, he had given up driving himself. When medicated, he was a danger on the road. When depressed, he was barely capable of performing the minimal functions needed to drive an automobile.

Lawson climbed in; off they went through the streets of Washington headed for the rural route that would take them to Maryland’s eastern shore. Suddenly, Lawson got paranoid and delusional. He started seeing men with guns on the sidewalks as the car drifted through DC. The guns were pointed at him, and he ducked down in the limo.

His heart beat so hard he thought it was going to burst right through his chest. He tried to slow his breathing, but he could not catch his breath. He looked out the car window to see colors flying by him. The colors of the trees were the most well-defined auburns and coppers he had ever seen, but they were blurred by the speed of the car. Vapor trails of color flew from the trees. Lawson thought they were traveling over 100 miles an hour. He screamed for the driver to slow down.

The driver slowed to a crawl before Lawson calmed down. Someone dosed me, Lawson thought. That sonofabitch Helms. Why did the agency want to dose me? I knew too much; I had become a liability. They were trying to drive me insane. Christ, how much acid did they give me?

Within a matter of hours, Lawson felt like he was having another nervous breakdown. The ride out to his farm in Maryland seemed to last forever. When he finally arrived, he secluded himself in his den and tried to gather his thoughts. It was no use, he was sky-high, panicked and beyond help.

Lawson’s LSD trip lasted nearly a day and a half. Finally, he could stand it no more. After thirty hours without sleep, paranoid and hallucinatory to the point of psychosis, he found one of his son’s hunting shotguns, put the barrel in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. Nearly the entire top and back of his head was blown off. He died instantly.

_________________________

When Marie’s shift was over and she returned to her dorm room, Julia was waiting for her with a gleeful greeting. “Frank is on the wildest ride of his life as we speak,” she chortled.

Marie, though, was shaking. “You did dose him, didn’t you?” asked Julia.

Marie nodded her head. “It scared the hell out of me, though. I almost dropped the damn coffee cup in his lap. But he drank it all down. God, I put five tabs of acid in there.”

Julia squealed with exultation and enmity. “Now he gets a taste of what he’s been dishing out all his life. Let the asshole blow his mind. I hope he’s high for a week and starts acting paranoid and foolish. They’ll fire his ass. This is great, Marie. At least it’s a little bit of revenge.”

Marie sat on her bed and quietly nodded again. Her emotions were almost beyond the grasp of her understanding. It was fun to think of Lawson tripping into headquarters at Langley, but somehow it wasn’t enough. It was like she had indulged herself in a childish game, when what she really wanted was to make Lawson, and all others responsible for mutilating everyone she had ever loved in her life, suffer. Suffer like her loved ones had suffered. She felt foolish for exposing herself. Lawson would have to know it was the Europa waitress who had dosed him. Who else could it have been? When he comes down, there will be hell to pay, she thought. But Marie did not want to dampen Julia’s ecstasy, so she said nothing.

Peter was as blown away by the news as Julia had been. They insisted on taking Marie out to celebrate. Their revelry continued through the weekend until they read of Lawson’s suicide in the Sunday morning Post.

Peter and Julia briefly panicked, but Marie was relieved and gratified. She suddenly felt something akin to subdued elation. It was the same emotion her adoptive mother, Hannah, had felt after killing her tormentor Klodzensky at Dachau when Marie was only a day old. Justice had been served, and Marie was off the hook. She instinctively knew there would be no investigation, no autopsy. The cause of death was indisputable—a shotgun blast to the head. Unless Lawson had told someone else, before blowing his own head off, that he suspected that he had been wired up on acid by a surreptitious doser, the secret died with him.

The Post article stated that Lawson, survived by a wife and son, had been one of the original officers of the CIA. The girls, under the assumption that Lawson was still an active covert agent, were surprised to read that Lawson had retired from the CIA in 1959 after suffering a nervous breakdown. “Can you imagine what that much acid would do to someone who has a history of emotional problems?” said Julia. “We killed him.”

“No, he killed himself,” retorted Marie. “Just like that CIA scientist who jumped out of that hotel room.”

Julia nodded at the sweet justice of the similitude.

Just to make sure it wasn’t all some drug-induced dream, Peter attended the funeral ceremony in the National Cathedral. Marie and Julia stayed away for fear that they would be recognized by Helms who had seen both girls at Europa. Every aisle of The Cathedral was filled. Apparently, Lawson’s death had touched a nerve at Langley. As Lawson’s family filed out, CIA agents sang, “Fling Out the Banner” in parting homage. He was buried in Arlington Cemetery in the uniform of a naval commander, his wartime rank.

“It made me sick,” groused Peter. “It was like he was some sort of heroic martyr. The man was the worst kind of fascist snake that has ever crawled out of the CIA. He deserved what he got.”

Marie could not have agreed more. “Think of how they’ve been secretly torturing and murdering people for twenty years. We just did to one of theirs what they’ve been doing to us all along.”

“You’re right,” chimed in Julia. “Hey, we’re like a counter-counterintelligence agency. The anti-CIA.”

“We’re AIC; the reverse of CIA,” laughed Marie, “uhh…Acid Dosers in Charge. No…wait. That’s got a ‘D’ in it. Acid in Coffee…uh…”

Peter howled. “What about…Assholes in the CIA? Dead assholes.”
-157-

“No…no…Allen in Coffin…Dulles, that is,” Julia squealed.

The thought of a dead Allen Dulles incited Marie’s imagination. “If they can do their dirty tricks in the name of anti-communism and patriotism, why can’t we do ours in the name of anti-fascism. It’s just as patriotic…more patriotic because we have righteousness and truth on our side. We’re fighting real evil…to save democracy. In a way, we’re at war with the fascists here at home just like we were in Europe in World War II. In times of war, deviousness and torture and covert operations are justifiable…hell, necessary.”

Peter stopped giggling and just stared at her. “What are you trying to say?”

“Hey,” Marie got defensive, “you know, like I do, that no one is going to bring these fascist pricks to justice. They’ve gotten away with all sorts of despicable stuff—importing Nazis, overthrowing governments, even our own government. You know what they’ve done.”

“You’re saying fight fire with fire?”

“What can we really do? We’re only three college kids,” said Julia.

“No,” Marie shot back. “We’re covert agents of AIC. As in I ache, and I want a little revenge…for your father and mine.”

Julia played along. “Okay, what’s our next covert operation?”

Marie replied quickly, as if it wasn’t the first time she had considered such a trip. “Dallas. Home of Texas whackos, Kennedy killers, Dornberger, and Bolt, and every evil thing God ever put on earth. The black asshole of the universe. If you want to defeat the fascists, you have to strike fascist headquarters first, right? Hey, we all want to see Dealey Plaza anyhow.”

Julia and Peter just looked at her and wondered if she was serious.

_________________________

“Tell me something,” I prodded Don, “Only Marie and her two college friends knew about Lawson being dosed, right? How did you find out?”

“From the doser herself, Marie Hannah Kanermann,” Don said with a sly grin.

“You questioned her about Dornberger’s murder?”

“Of course.”

“You think she killed Dornberger?”

“Here’s what I thought. Someone who was close to Hughes was involved. So I wanted to interview everyone close to him I could. I found out where she lived and knocked on her door one night. This tall, scrawny, 36-year-old single mother answers the door. She was the last person I would have suspected. She was quiet, but smart. She claimed to know nothing about Dornberger or his death. This was before I knew she was the miracle baby of Dachau and that her mother and stepbrother had been beaten by Dornberger.  She trotted out her own daughter to say hello to me. Clever ploy to reinforce the normal and harmless façade she wanted to erect. She asked me why I thought she would know anything about Dornberger’s death. I told her about the license plate and description of the car that the Pinckneyville kid, Reese, had seen. It’s probably just a coincidence, I told her, but your car sorta matches it. She flinched, just slightly.

“That made my antenna go up. But I didn’t want to press it; I didn’t want her to think I was on to her.”

“So you thought she’d killed Dornberger, maybe as part of this AIC revenge thing?”

“I didn’t know about AIC then, and, honestly, I couldn’t have arrested her anyway…unless she had confessed…because I had no evidence. And no, I couldn’t imagine someone as frail-looking and passive as she appeared could kill anyone. She had a daughter herself, for Chrissakes. And I remember thinking, what in god’s name was she doing chasing down Dornberger in southern Illinois, about 80 miles from her home. How did she know Dornberger was in this country? How did she know where he’d be? The car, though, that made me wonder. Maybe she had a boyfriend who used it. Maybe a brother. I didn’t know, at the time, that she had the motive, but I thought she knew who did. But I was just whistling in the goddamn dark anyway…I had no body, my body had been stolen; I had precious little evidence, the car Dornberger had been driving disappeared…”

“How did the car disappear?”

“I didn’t find out until a couple years later. We impounded it that night; it was gone in the morning. I assumed, at the time, that the same people who took Dornberger took the car. I found out later it had been a rental; Dornberger had rented it at the airport in St. Louis when he flew in from Washington. He was on the flight manifest. But when I checked the rental car company, they had no record of Dornberger renting that car.”

“Didn’t you consider quitting…just giving up?”

“Yeah…but I couldn’t do it. I guess my cop bones wouldn’t let me. I needed to solve it for my own peace of mind. Did you know there were no unsolved murders in Perry County when I worked there? Still aren’t.”

“So you had no body, no car, no trace evidence, no fingerprints. What did you have?”

“The photographs we had taken at the scene. The money he’d gotten from old lady Stullmeier, and the slug. When I found out the slug was from a German Luger, I wondered why in hell someone from St. Louis was wandering around the city with an antique gun that they couldn’t buy in this city. It wasn’t like they were selling Lugers on the street corners or neighborhood gun shops. This was the kind of weapon that, ironically, only someone like Dornberger would have carried around with him. Then I think, did the old Nazi fuck shoot himself and someone came along and stole the antique gun? But why the fuck would he fly to St. Louis, rent a car, and drive himself out to the middle of nowhere to kill himself? After he’d gotten what he came 5,000 miles for, Bolt’s money? Suicide made no sense. That meant murder. That meant Hughes, or his daughter, knew something.

“I started doing my research. And I started to develop an interesting relationship with Marie. I knew in my gut she held the key to this whole thing. But how to get her to open up? I decided I had to give her what I had in the hope that she would open up to me. There was no other way it was going to get solved. Over months…hell, it became years…we began playing a little cat-and-mouse game. I told her that we had no body, no hard evidence except the slug and the photos, and whoever did it was never going to be prosecuted. I tried to gain her trust. It took a long time, and a lot of coaxing, but she finally started to open up to me, especially when I told her I was no longer working for Perry County, no longer officially working on the case. We were just a couple of acquaintances speculating…having an informal conversation about a murder that never really happened. Then she started to corroborate my research and started telling me about her unbelievable life.”

“Why did you resign from the police force?”

“I was getting no cooperation from my superiors, and then the cops who helped process the crime scene turned on me. Hickman, my partner, died suspiciously…come on, a heart attack at age thirty-seven? The coroner died. I was all alone. I started getting anonymous phone calls, veiled threats directed at my wife and daughters. That was it…that pushed me over the edge. I resigned, and took this challenging job.” Don rolled his eyes.

“What did Marie eventually tell you?”

“Most everything, but it took a long time. I think the summer of 1983 was the turning point for me.”

-123-

In 1963 the Vice President of the United States was a troubled man. Lyndon Johnson knew he was about to be dumped from the ’64 ticket by the president. He had become too much of a liability. Some in congress wanted to initiate an investigation of Johnson’s bribery and kickback schemes. His nefarious associations with Billy Sol Estes and Bobby Baker were being scrutinized by the press and by those Republicans who wanted to discredit Kennedy’s administration.

Johnson’s reputation as the most corrupt and venal politician of the 20th century was well-earned. The king of dirty politics in a state known for dirty politics, he stole an infamous run-off election in 1948 in Texas against fellow Democrat Coke Stevenson. Stevenson and Johnson were competing for the U.S. Senate seat. Stevenson was declared the winner in a close race, until some late, fraudulent returns came in from a county in a south Texas controlled by a Johnson political crony. Two hundred three uncounted ballots were discovered in Precinct 13 in Alice, Texas, most of them “cast” by deceased or non-existent Mexican-Americans. Incredibly all but one of the ballots were cast for Johnson. “Landslide Lyndon” won by eighty-seven votes and began his reign of extortion, fraud, back-stabbing, profiteering, conspiracy to murder, and, ultimately, treason.

One of Johnson’s supporters, contributors, and partners in crime was a wealthy Abilene swindler named Billy Sol Estes. One of Estes’s crooked hustles was claiming to have huge stores of cotton—cotton that did not exist—for which the government paid him millions in subsidies and with which he obtained six-figure bank loans. Estes also illegally bought cotton allotments from surrounding farmers in Texas. Johnson, as majority leader in the Senate, rammed through the federal legislation that benefited Estes. Estes, in return, compensated Johnson.  When Henry Marshall, a federal agriculture agent in Robertson County, threatened to expose the scheme, he was shot and killed by Mac Wallace, LBJ’s personal hitman. Johnson strong-armed the county coroner into ruling Marhsall’s death suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning, despite the huge holes in Marshall’s body caused by several shotgun blasts.

Wallace also murdered George Krutilek, Coleman Wade, and Harold Orr, all of whom were business associates of Estes.

Krutilek, a Texas accountant who kept Estes’s books, was questioned by the FBI, at Bobby Kennedy’s insistence, on April 2, 1962. Kennedy was trying to dig up the dirt he needed to dump Johnson. Two days later, Krutilek was found dead with a hose attached to his pickup truck. An El Paso pathologist swore Krutilek did not die from carbon monoxide poisoning. He had been beaten to death.

Wade, owner of a construction company that built Estes’s storage facilities, was killed in a suspicious plane crash in 1963.

Orr, who conspired with Estes to defraud the government, was arrested with Estes and, just before going to prison, was found dead in February 1964.

Testament to Johnson’s worst crimes came from Estes when he turned state’s evidence in 1984. His attorney, one Douglas Caddy, wrote a stunning letter to Stephen Trott, Ronald Reagan’s Assistant Attorney General, on August 9, 1984. It listed several murders that protected and advanced the political career of Johnson in the 1950s and 1960s. One of them was the murder of John F. Kennedy.

____________________________

Cold and dark as always, the 45 Club was especially dreary on the night Don brought his photographs of Dealey Plaza for my perusal and edification. Forty-four years Kennedy had been cold in the ground; still, his assassination remained unresolved in the American consciousness. Mine too, but I could not help but wonder how covert ops had done it without exposing themselves.

“They did expose themselves, in a lot of ways that aren’t obvious except to a cop’s eyes. At least a good cop like me,” he blustered. “First thing you gotta understand is, they couldn’t have done it without Johnson. They knew he’d be in the White House afterward, with all that power, so they had to have him on board. Pfisterr approached him sometime in the spring of 1963.”

“Hard to believe LBJ played a role in murdering JFK,” I said.

“What do you know about Johnson?”

“Passed the Civil Rights bill in ‘64. Got us into Vietnam in a big way….”

“The Vietnam thing…do you think that was just an accident? Johnson made up that crap about the Gulf of Tonkin in August ‘64. Some phantom North Vietnamese patrol boats supposedly fired on one of our destroyers, the Maddox. Never happened, but Johnson used it as the excuse he needed for Congress to give him the power to send hundreds of thousands of troops over there.”

“Didn’t Kennedy already have troops there?”

“Advisers, and he was pulling them out. Kennedy wasn’t stupid enough to get into a massive land war on the Asian continent. Macarthur advised him against that. There was no way to win a guerilla war against the Vietnamese on their own turf. Everyone knew that…but that wasn’t the point of going over there. The point of going over there was to appease anti-communist war hawks and make billions for the defense contractors who put Lyndon in office. The point was not to win the war; the point was to keep the war going. The Battle for Hill 875 in the Central Highlands, November, 1967, is the perfect example. One of the bloodiest battles of the war. Our guys tried to take the hill from the North Vietnamese who were entrenched there. Took almost a week, and the mountain ran red because of it, but we finally take the hill. A couple days later the American high command orders our troops to abandon the hill. What was the fucking point of that bloody battle? That’s how the war went…over and over. We take some meaningless ground; the NV get it back; we win it again; we give it up.

“Anyway, here was the bargain, professor: Lyndon suckers Kennedy to Texas in November 1963, and the CIA, funded by Texas oil money and defense contractors, does the job on Kennedy in Dallas. The money and power of Brown & Root, Halliburton, Textron Bell, C.R. Bolt, and all of Lyndon’s other Texas buddies…and the CIA…hand Lyndon the White House; in return, he hands them the war.”

My baffled expression amused Don. I knew what was coming, so I beat him to the punch. “Be gentle with me, okay? I have only have a Ph.D. in American history. You understand that, to the uninformed, this is hard to believe.”

“Believe it. I’ve investigated it. I got some pretty good sources. Maybe if I tell you about a couple incidents I uncovered, you can grasp it a little better. My HSCA source told me about a guy named George DeMohrenschildt, CIA contract agent, who was descended from Russian czarist royalty. His family got kicked out of Moscow when the communists took over in 1917. He comes to America, learns English, gets a college degree in engineering and geology, becomes an oil geologist. Works for several Texas oil companies, including Bolt’s companies. Through Bolt, he gets introduced to Pfisterr.”

“Daniel Pfisterr? How does he know Bolt?”

“Remember, I told you, Pfisterr was from Dallas. He did security work for Bolt and for other oil companies owned by right-wing fanatics, like Pantipec Oil, owned by William F. Buckley’s family. Their interests converged. They were obsessed with the communist threat. They hated Kennedy, thought he was appeasing Kruschev and Castro.”

“Was every slimy, shady character in this story from Texas…specifically Dallas?”

Don laughed. “Yeah…Dallas was the black hole of the universe. That’s where DeMohrenschildt lived for a while, too. Anyway, when Oswald…you’ve heard of Lee Harvey?”

Another jab. “That wasn’t necessary,” I groaned with mock indignance.

“When Oswald returns from Russia, he’s directed to Dallas by intelligence operatives in the State Department, and DeMohrenschildt is there to greet him and Marina, his Russian wife. DeMohrenschildt speaks Russian and befriends the couple. He introduces the two to Beulah and Marshall Raske. Beulah, conveniently, speaks Russian too.

“Hard to believe that in Dallas, which probably more than any other American city hated communist Russia, there were so many people running around speaking Russian.”

“Seems odd, huh? Well, there were a lot of odd things going on in Dallas then. Anyway Marshall Raske, Beulah’s husband, gets a job at Bell Helicopter, working for… guess who?”

“You gotta be kidding me…Walter Dornberger?!”

“Yup…meanwhile Marina Oswald and the kids move in with Beulah Raske in Dallas, Texas, while Lee moves to a boarding house so he can be closer to his job.”

“In the Book Depository? How did he get that job?”

“Beulah put in a good word for him with the manager of the building, Roy Truly. That’s the story for public consumption. What really happened is, once DeMohrenschildt moved the patsy into place, and passed him off to the Raskes, D.H. Byrd made sure Oswald got set up in the Book Depository.”

“D.H. Byrd?”

“Dallas oil millionaire. Associate of C.R. Bolt and Cliff Hutchison. Benefactor and close friend of Lyndon Johnson. They used to go to the UT football games together. Byrd owned the Texas School Book Depository building. Byrd was connected to a lot of people involved in this. It’s almost as if he and his building were…I don’t know…what’s the word…the nexus for the whole plot.

“Let me walk you through it. Byrd had the right political connections. He gave money to, and received favors from, every powerful Texas politician—Sam Rayburn, John Connally, George Bush, LBJ, and all the rest. He had connections in the oil business—Bolt, Hutchison, Richardson. All these guys were members in clubs and secret societies. Suite 8F Group which owned all of Texas. The Dallas Council on Foreign Relations. The Dallas Petroleum Club—Byrd, Pfisterr, DeMorhrenschildt, Bush, Bolt, Hutchison, Dornberger, all belonged. Byrd also had military connections. He founded the Civil Air Patrol at the behest of Air Force generals like Toller and Curtis LeMay. You know who was in the Civil Air Patrol, right?”

“Oswald?”

“Bingo. Oswald and his CAP trainer, David Ferrie. Ferrie was the freak in New Orleans who suckered Oswald into thinking he was penetrating a real plot against Kennedy. Oswald thought he was doing undercover work for the FBI; in reality, Ferrie and his anti-communist pals in New Orleans were setting him up. Ferrie was connected to Clay Shaw…”

“The guy Jim Garrison tried for conspiracy…”

“Right…he was also Carlos Marcello’s pilot. You know Marcello, the mafia don in New Orleans. When Bobby Kennedy deported Marcello in 1962, Ferrie was the one who picked him up and flew him back into the country. Marcello swore he’d get back at the Kennedys. Anyway, Byrd gets a meritorious service award from the Air Force for his patriotism and blah, blah, blah. Signed and presented to him by Curtis LeMay.”

“The same Curtis LeMay who was Air Force Chief of Staff under Kennedy, and who said the Kennedys are ruining this country, and it would be an act of patriotism if someone would kill them? That LeMay?” I looked to Don for some well-earned praise.

“Very good, professor. You know you might catch on to this history thing after all.”

“I defer to the master,” I shot back.

Don chortled and sucked down a shot of bourbon. “Here’s the most important connection Byrd had—the connection to the money. He owned Temco, an aircraft company. In the early ’60s he merged this company with Ling Electronics and Vought Aircraft, owned by his rich pals. Byrd became director and principal shareholder in LTV. He and his buddies bought hundreds of thousands of shares of LTV…in November 1963. Then he leaves the country for a two-month safari to Africa. When he returns, JFK is dead, his pal Lyndon is in the White House, and LTV is the recipient of a whopping government contract to build fighter jets, courtesy of LBJ, as we gear up for Vietnam. That’s how the whole thing worked. It was about business. It was about making a fortune and ridding America of the one man who stood in the way of the military-industrial complex making a fortune. And, oh, by the way, guess who worked for Temco after he got convicted of murder? Mac Wallace. He got transferred out to the California offices in 1961. I tried to get his employment records for November 1963. They’re classified because LTV was a defense contractor. But one of his co-workers told me he went back to Texas the week before Thanksgiving in 1963.”

I ceased being surprised at anything Don told me but offered up my feeble excuse. “You know, Don, this all happened before I was born. I’m only 41. My generation doesn’t even remember the assassination, and we were kids when Vietnam was being fought.”

I saw the reaction in his eyes. “Never mind,” I muttered, “that’s no excuse, particularly for someone in my field.”

“Anyway, sometime in September or October 1963 it’s arranged for conspirators to get easy access to the Book Depository. A work crew is hired to lay new flooring in the Depository just weeks prior to the assassination. Meanwhile, DeMohrenschildt and Pfisterr are doing their part to get the patsy into the building. DeMohrenschildt even meets with LBJ at his office in Washington in April 1963. LBJ tells him that Kennedy has agreed to the Texas trip sometime in the fall, probably right before Thanksgiving. DeMohrenschildt relays this information to his CIA handlers and then goes back to Texas and tells the operation funders that it’s a ‘go.’ From there, those at the top of the pyramid, like Johnson, are left out of the loop when it comes to specific planning. Covert operatives in the field, like E. Howard Hunt and Pfisterr take over. Johnson, especially, must maintain plausible deniability. He has just one more pre-assassination task to perform. Help enlist the palace guard.”

“Palace guard?”

“Secret Service agents. You’ve seen the photos…no agent was on the running board of JFK’s limo. There is a film of one agent, Henry Rybka, being ordered off the running board at Love Field. In Dealey Plaza, at the critical moment, the limo slows…some say it stopped…which let the grassy knoll shooter make the kill shot. Photographs show the brake lights were on just as Kennedy’s head is blown off. One of the agents tells other agents to freeze as they hear the gunfire in Dealey Plaza. No agent comes anywhere near the president as he’s being shot at. Some of them were hung over from drinking all night at one of Civella’s clubs. Ruby provided a couple of hookers. They were partying until 4 am. They were derelict in their duty, but the Warren Commission gave them a pass. At Parkland Hospital, Agent Emory Roberts shouted at Jackie to lift her arms up so he could see Jack’s head wound. When Roberts saw it was fatal, he immediately went to LBJ’s side and whispered something in his ear. Roberts became LBJ’s trusted protector after that.”

“They covered everything, didn’t they?”

“Yeah…even the doctors and witnesses. Those who said they heard and saw shots from behind the picket fence got harassed or killed. The doctors all said the shots came from the front, at least in the beginning. Dr. Perry and Mac Kilduff arranged a televised press conference that afternoon where they pointed to the throat and temple entrance wounds. LBJ buried that tape in his presidential archives.”

“Okay how does this benefit Bell? What role did Dornberger play?”

“Walter fingered the patsy. He placed a call at 12:45 to the Dallas Police, just 15 minutes after the shots were fired; phone records from that day trace the call to his office at Bell. Walter described Oswald in perfect detail. He knew Oswald…had met him several times in the company of the Raskes. Described him to a ‘T’and told the cops they could find him holed up in the Texas Theatre. Pfisterr arranged for some covert asset to kill Tippett so the cops who arrested Oswald would be trigger happy. That was the original plan: Have the cops murder the patsy just an hour or so after the assassination. Oswald would have been convicted ex-post facto in the press by Mockingbird assets. Lyndon appoints a dummy commission, made up of Allen Dulles, W. Lyle Arland, and other establishment hacks. They submit a whitewashed report. The coup d’etat is complete. LBJ escalates Vietnam. Bell Helicopter gets rich selling Huey helicopters to the government for use in the war. Lyndon makes sure Brown & Root and Halliburton get their share. Everybody’s happy.”

“Halliburton was war-profiteering during Vietnam too?”

“Try World War II. No point getting into that. Let me just tell you a few facts. Halliburton began as Howco, an oil well-cementing company, in the early 20th century. When the Texas oil boom took off and demand for oil grew, Howco got rich. By the time the founder, Erle Halliburton, died in 1957, the company was worth hundreds of millions. They bought out the Brown brothers and Root in 1962. Brown and Root were among LBJ’s biggest financial backers. When LBJ became president, he made sure Brown and Root and Halliburton got the contracts for building bases, airstrips, ports, bridges, piers, helicopter landing pads—after all, Bell had to have some place to land all those Hueys—hospitals, and all sorts of other crap in Vietnam. They made hundreds of millions through cost overruns, waste, and price fixing. You know what LOGCAPs are?”

“No.”

“LOGCAP contracts. Cheney’s doing it now; Johnson did it in Vietnam. A LOGCAP contract means that defense contractors can charge the government whatever they want because there is no set ceiling on contractors’ expenses. Their profits are based on a percentage of the costs; so the higher the costs, the higher the profits. Contractors have every incentive to run up the costs—to invent unnecessary costs and to overcharge the government for everything  There is no real bidding because that would limit the contractors’ costs. That’s why Johnson had to get around the law that requires competitive bidding for government contracts. It’s the same thing Cheney is doing now. None dared call it war profiteering for fear of being unpatriotic. Brown & Root/Halliburton’s profits were over $300 million from ’65 to ’72 in Vietnam.

“But what burns my ass more than Vietnam is the profits they’ve made doing business with terrorist states like Iran and Libya…and our enemies like Iraq. In the mid-’70s they got more than $800 million to build a naval bases in Iran.  Remember when Moammar Qaddafi was the boogeyman in the ‘80s? In the middle of all that, Halliburton got a $25 billion contract from Qaddafi to build an underground pipeline in Libya. Halliburton even did business with Iraq in the late ‘90s. The oil-for-food program enriched Saddam Hussein by billions of dollars. Halliburton merged with Dresser Industries in ’98. Its subsidiaries, Dresser-Rand and Heynes-Dresser Pump Company, signed a $100 million contract with Saddam to provide oil production equipment and services for Iraq. All the while, Cheney running for VP at the time, denies that either Halliburton or its partners and subsidiaries are doing business with Saddam.”

“How does Dornberger fit into all this?”

“Walter was a favorite of this group. They used him for security and intelligence. He could be trusted with a secret. He was there at Hutchison’s ‘Kennedy killing’ party the night before the assassination.”

“Come again.”

“They held a party celebrating the coming coup d’etat the night before it happened. I have a good source who swears that all the important players gathered at Cliff Hutchison’s house in Dallas on November 21, 1963. Hoover, Bolt, Arland, Pfisterr, Walter, and a few others, including A. Prescott Heynes. LBJ arrived late. He snuck out of his hotel room in Fort Worth, used his body double—a lookalike relative—as a decoy so no one could say he’d ever left the hotel. My source said when LBJ entered, all the men went behind closed doors. I doubt if they were discussing the price of bread. LBJ supposedly said that ‘the Kennedys would be sorry that they ever humiliated me.’”

“What about those photographs you brought?”

“Pictures taken in Dallas that day. The pictures reveal what kind of operation it really was…CIA all the way.”

Don pulled out the photographs and pointed to random faces in the background as Kennedy’s limo turns into the kill zone. “Here’s Gerry Patrick Hemming, soldier of fortune, CIA mercenary. Lucien Conein, CIA. Here are some anti-Castro Cubans, veterans of the Bay of Pigs. Here’s Ted Sheltons. He was briefly detained by the police in Dealey Plaza. Here’s Rip Robertson…remember him from Guatemala? Here’s one from Parkland Hospital, just shows a bunch of people hanging around outside waiting for news while the police and military attaches protect the emergency room entrance, right? Look closer. The guy in the corner, with part of his face cropped off, who does he look like?”

Don didn’t wait for my response. “Here’s the uncropped photo. If it’s not Ruby, it’s his twin brother.”

“What was he doing at the hospital?” I asked.

“Maybe planting the pristine bullet…you know, the one that was supposed to have ripped through Kennedy’s back, then suddenly shot upwards along his spine, made a 90-degree turn, exited his throat, turned right, then left, shattered Connally’s ribs and wrist, came to rest in his thigh, and left fragments of metal in Connally’s body, only to wind up on Kennedy’s stretcher, virtually intact. I guess it grew back the metal it had lost, and someone mysteriously wiped the blood and bone trace evidence off it.”

“The conspirators needed that to tie the bullets to Oswald’s rifle, right?”

“Where’s the Moorman photo, the one that shows the shooter?” I asked.

“Here…but the area is too small and dark to see anything without the photo being blown up. Marie Muchmore’s photo, here, tells a better story. See the little specks that appeared on the lens just as the shot was taken? Those are tiny specks of Kennedy’s blood, brain and skull. They show up on the photograph taken by this woman who was standing to the left and slightly behind Kennedy’s limo. That means she was lined up on a perfectly straight line to Kennedy and his killer. That means the shot came from his front-right.”

“All right, so you’re telling me they pulled it off…this invisible government, this military-industrial-intelligence cabal. You’re saying then that America is no better than those banana republics the CIA was overthrowing. There is no real democracy. The people have no more power to pick their leaders and control their government than the Germans did in the 1930s.”

“Maybe that was the whole point. To make America a neo-fascist state where the people were kept in the dark, and the rich and powerful were free to run the state. Getting us into unnecessary wars whenever they felt like it. Turning the national treasury into a cash grab. You know, Dornberger had a sign he hung in his office at Bell. It was a quote by Goering. I wrote it down.”

Don reached in his pocket for a crumpled piece of paper, “Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger.”

_____________________

Marie developed a close friendship with Julia and her boyfriend, Peter Rushman, an aspiring folk singer from Greenwich Village who wanted to major in music and, like Marie, change the world. The three were bound by left-wing politics, love of JFK, and hatred of the CIA. They often talked politics, and often organized or joined campus and community protests. They joined in the march on Washington in late August of 1963. They petitioned the campus administration to relax admission requirements for black students. American U.’s student body was 98% caucasian at the time.

They became the three musketeers. Peter, barely 58 inches tall, with long, stringy hair and a calm demeanor, was closer to Marie in temperament than he was to Julia. Peter and Marie, nearly the same height, were quiet “snipers.” They loved making laconic, snide remarks about the establishment and its foibles. They were cynical, but their cynicism was expressed with humor, not anger. Julia, on the other hand, was hyper. She wanted to lash out immediately against injustice and abuses of power. She was also the first to  impulsively resort to drugs and alcohol to anesthetize herself against the world’s cruelties.

Julia and Peter were lovers only in the sexual sense. They were not in love with each other—at least not in the “bourgeois” sense of the phrase—and both professed satisfaction with the loose, casual arrangement. Peter, when high, occasionally came on to Marie, who was uncomfortable with his advances. Julia told her one night, “Go ahead and fuck him if you want; I don’t care.” The young radicals cared more about politics and current affairs than they did prescribed modes of sexual behavior.

Peter and Julia experimented with LSD, over the protests of Marie. Marie, however, did indulge in the occasional marijuana joint. In many ways, the three were ahead-of-their-time hippies. They believed their generation could change the world to a more peaceful, altruistic place. Hope abounded. They were young and idealistic. Until November 22, 1963.

Marie heard the news as she was returning to her dormitory after English comp class. She sought solace in the company of her two best friends. The three sat transfixed in front of a television as the unfathomable news came from Dallas.

On Sunday they got on line to view the casket in the Capital rotunda, just as the patsy was shot by Ruby, small-time Mafia hood, C.R. Bolt’s football bookie, and Dornberger’s pimp.

On Monday before they left the dorm to witness the funeral procession Julia got a frantic call from her mom. Gary Munshall was missing. Rumors were already flying around Langley that the CIA was mixed up in JFK’s murder, and Gary knew they were true. One of Pfisterr’s covert assets was a regular supplier of information to Munshall. He told Munshall that Pfisterr had just returned exhausted from Dallas and that Pfisterr was making cryptic comments about how an operation had gotten out of control and really made a mess of things in Dallas. There had been collateral damage. Mistakes needed to be covered up in a hasty way. Munshall knew what that meant. He panicked and drove all night to New York to visit a friend on Long Island.

Munshall didn’t let anyone know where he was, not even his wife and daughter, while he figured out what to do. He considered leaving the country. “The bastards have really done it this time,” he told his friend. “They killed Kennedy, and they know that I know. I’m not going to be safe anywhere, nor is my family.”

Julia left to be with her mother in the Virginia suburbs, and she didn’t return until after the Thanksgiving break. Marie and Peter were left to console one another. More than ever, Marie needed someone to comfort her.

Kennedy’s murder had opened up some deep, dark wound inside her. A wound inflicted by fear. A fear of something inevitably tragic happening to her or those she loved. The fear began when she was a child. Witnessing Hannah’s short and tormented life had somehow infected Marie with the “gloom virus”—the feeling that no matter how one strived for happiness and fulfillment, no matter how virtuous a life one lived, in the end, perseverance was pointless…hope always died. Calamity and misfortune were fellow travelers. Disaster was right around the corner. JFK’s death reinforced the futility of it all.

Marie sought solace in a phone call to her father, but Hughes was no help. He, too, was so distraught he was barely able to speak. What he did say was so austere and pessimistic, Marie couldn’t even fathom the malignance of it. “I wonder if the ex-Nazis and the CIA had anything to do with this?”

Marie, naturally reserved for all of her 18 years, poured her heart out to Peter. He listened and consoled her, and she loved him for it. He was not her intellectual equal, but he was kind and gentle in a world run by violent, greedy, misanthropic males. Peter reminded her in some ways of her father. He was incapable of hurting anyone.

Marie, a virgin until then, made love to Peter Thanksgiving night. She knew then that, though they might never be lifetime lovers, or romantically linked in the conventional sense of the phrase, they would always be the best of friends, something that Marie had longed for since her solitary schooldays on the Cape.

When Julia returned she sensed that Peter and Marie had somehow developed a more intimate connection, but she was neither hurt nor jealous. Rather, it made the three of them closer. And they needed each other’s insights, courage and confidence more than ever, for Julia had some shocking news. Her father was convinced that the CIA had murdered JFK, and he feared for his life.

Peter almost pleaded with her. “How’s that possible? We saw on TV that Wade guy, the DA. He said Oswald did it beyond a reasonable doubt.”

“Think, Peter,” Julia retorted. “If the CIA did it, don’t you think they’d have the fall guy already set up and framed? And don’t you think it’s suspicious that Oswald was killed while in the custody of the police? He’s not going to be able to tell us much now.”

“We know they’ve been overthrowing other governments; why is it so unthinkable that they’d overthrow their own government?” Marie added.

As the weeks went by, the three followed newspaper accounts of the assassination investigation in the Washington Post, and Hughes would occasionally call them with stories filed by Richard Dudman of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Dudman, especially, seemed to be on to some suspicious activities. The Dallas doctors were changing their stories about the origins and nature of Kennedy’s bullet wounds. Those in attendance at Parkland on November 22 saw entry wounds in the throat and the right side of the head. Subsequently they became convinced they had been mistaken when the Secret Service showed them the autopsy results. The wounds had mysteriously changed. The back of Kennedy’s head, blasted out in Dallas, was intact at Bethesda except for a small entry wound in the lower rear of the head. Instead the top right portion of the head was massively blasted out as if the shot had come from the rear. The Dallas doctors’ original assessment did not support Oswald as the lone gunman, so the Secret Service, under LBJ’s directives, had to get the Dallas doctors to change their minds. This required some arm-twisting and some career-threatening to accomplish because ER doctors in Dallas, the murder capital of America at the time, regularly saw patients with gunshot wounds and were quite adept at distinguishing entrance from exit wounds.

Then came word that the main autopsy doctor at Bethesda had burned his original report. “The fix was in,” thought Marie, Peter and Julia.

As months passed, more details came from Gary Munshall. Oswald, a lower-level intelligence operative, had been nothing more than a patsy. The CIA had sent him to Russia and back to give him the appearance of a communist defector.  He had been “caught” in New Orleans handing out pro-Castro leaflets. Through Oswald’s handlers in New Orleans, Pfisterr and the conspirators had hoped to link Castro to JFK’s murder and thereby whip up public hysteria for another invasion of Cuba. The real shooters had been professionals. One from the French Corsican mob; one from an Army intelligence unit; one from the American mafia. Each shooter had a spotter and a back-up. One team framed Oswald by planting the rifle and spent cartridges on the sixth floor. Witnesses who saw and heard shots from anywhere other than the Book Depository were killed or intimidated. The ongoing Warren Commission investigation, run by the lords and lackeys of the military-industrial-intelligence complex, was a whitewash, meant to cover up the truth rather than expose it. Sure enough, when it was published, all 26 Orwellian volumes, the conclusion was that Oswald had no accomplices.

Above all, the murder could not have been executed or covered up without the active participation of LBJ. He got Kennedy to come to Dallas; he coerced Earl Warren to attach his name to a sham commission; he appointed Dulles and Arland to make sure none of the other commissioners sought the real truth; he even phoned Oswald’s attending physician at Parkland the day Oswald was shot to try to extract a death-bed confession from the patsy.

Munshall knew that the information he possessed needed to be given to authorities who could do something about it, but which authorities? The FBI was not to be trusted…Hoover and LBJ were thick as thieves; the Dallas police were obviously corrupt, stupid, or both. There were too many CIA Mockingbird assets in the media. Approaching them might be fatal. Besides, the agency was watching every move he made. His phones had been tapped, and he sensed he was being followed. He considered trying to arrange a meeting with Bobby Kennedy, who, regardless of his brother’s death, was still the Attorney General. But if he were spotted by an agency asset, the meeting would be a dead giveaway that he was about to blow the whistle. He decided he could not, for the time being, discuss the whole sordid mess with anyone but those closest to him.

Only reluctantly did Munshall share information about the assassination with his family. He did not want the information to die with him, a distinct possibility given the nature of what he knew. When he talked about the assassination with his wife and daughter it was only when they were in a noisy public place where they could not be overheard. He told Julia and her mother that they were never to talk about the assassination over the phone, nor should they put anything in writing. He gave them a combination to his personal safe where a letter, containing all the facts he knew about JFK’s murder, was to be opened only upon his death. To further protect his loved ones, he refused to divulge the real names of those he suspected were involved. Instead he used pseudonyms, some of which were used by the actual CIA personnel. One was Eb Daniels, the code name used by Pfisterr.

By the spring of 1964, Marie, Peter, and Julia felt they had access to information about the assassination that was available to few Americans. Julia’s father warned Julia not to divulge the information to anyone. It was dangerous. Lives were at stake…maybe their own. But Julia could not resist telling Marie and Peter what her father had told her. When they asked Julia who at the CIA masterminded the plot and pulled the strings in Dallas, Julia could remember only one name—Eb Daniels. Marie knew she had heard the name before but could not remember where or when.

A gloom came over the campus as the 1963 fall semester came to a close and finals week approached. When Christmas break came, the assassination was still on everyone’s mind. Bidding each other melancholy farewells, the three American U. students went home for the holidays. Marie had saved enough money from her waitressing job at Europa café, in the Georgetown section of the city, to buy a bus ticket to St. Louis.

Hughes was ecstatic to see his daughter, and Marie was glad to take a break from her dejected mood. They spent a lot of time at Chris’s sisters’ homes. Pat and Jeanne adored their new niece, and Marie got along well with her cousins.

On New Years’ Eve, as they quietly and thankfully ushered out the old year, Marie told her father some of what she’d learned of the assassination from the Munshalls. When she mentioned the name Eb Daniels, Hughes looked right through her. He thought back to Saint Sernin and the young lieutenant who had betrayed him. He knew for certain now that Daniels was CIA, and, with impunity, he was still committing high treason.

Hughes explained that Daniels was not his real name and told her what role he had played at Saint Sernin. Marie was furious and dumbfounded. The CIA was more powerful than anyone had ever suspected.

When Marie returned to campus, she could hardly contain herself. She wrote a thesis on the atrocities committed by the CIA in her Journalism class and was quickly chastised by her professor for wild speculation.

She tried to anonymously pass the information on to Washington Post reporters, but they laughed her off.

It was not until Mark Lane came along in 1965 that the subversive American U. threesome’s secret knowledge became validated and public discussion of the truth of JFK’s assassination became safer.