"I did," the Director said.

O'Connor turned.

"I didn't see you, sorry," he said. "Good morning, sir."

"Have you seen this?" the Director asked, and handed him a long, curling sheet of radioteletype paper.

TOP SECRET.

1920 GREENWICH 16 MARCH 1965FROM STATION CHIEF, BUENOS AIRES.

TO DIRECTOR, CIA, LANGLEY.

COPIES TO SOUTH AMERICAN DESK.

MR SANFORD T FELTER, COUNSELOR TO.

THE PRESIDENT.

THE EXECUTIVE OFFICE BUILDING.

WASHINGTON1. THE UNDERSIGNED HAS BEEN APPROACHED BY AN OFFICER RECENTLY ASSIGNED TO THE OFFICE OF THE DEFENSE ATTACHe HERE WHOM THE UNDERSIGNED HAS REASON TO BELIEVE IS IN A COVERT ASSIGNMENT IN CONNECTION WITH OPERATION EARNEST WHICH THE UNDERSIGNED HAS FURTHER REASON TO BELIEVE IS CONTROLLED BY MR. FELTER AT THE DIRECTION OF THE PRESIDENT.2. THE OFFICER HAS PROPOSED THAT HE WILL MAKE AVAILABLE INTELLIGENCE INFORMATION TO ME UNDER THE FOLLOWING CONDITIONS: HIS NAME WILL NOT BE USED OR FURNISHED TO THE AGENCY. ANY INFORMATION HE FURNISHES WILL BE TRANSMITTED OVER CIA FACILITIES WITH A COPY TO BE FURNISHED MR. FELTER BY OFFICER COURIER IMMEDIATELY UPON RECEIPT IN LANGLEY. THE INFORMATION WILL NOT BE PASSED, UNDER ANY CONDITIONS, TO ANYONE WITHOUT THE EXPRESS PRIOR PERMISSION OF MR. FELTER.3. THE UNDERSIGNED IS FULLY AWARE THAT ARRANGEMENTS SUCH AS DESCRIBED CONTRAVENE AGENCY POLICY, BUT FEELS AN EXCEPTION TO POLICY IS JUSTIFIED IN THIS CASE BECAUSE THE INTELLIGENCE OFFERED IS UNAVAILABLE FROM ANY OTHER SOURCE.4. IT IS RECOMMENDED THE INTELLIGENCE FOLLOWING BE REGARDED AS THE EQUIVALENT OF CIA RELIABILITY SCALE FIVE.ERNESTO GUEVARA ARRIVED AT JOSE MARTIN AIRFIELD, HAVANA, CUBA AT 1605 GREENWICH 14 MARCH 1965 ABOARD AIR FRANCE FLIGHT 6005 WHICH ORIGINATED IN ALGIERS, ALGERIA. GUEVERA' S ARRIVAL WAS NOT PREVIOUSLY ANNOUNCED TO THE PUBLIC, THE PRESS WAS EXCLUDED FROM THE DEBARKATION AREA, AND THERE WERE NO OFFICIAL WELCOMING CEREMONIES.ALEIDA MARCH DE GUEVARA, HIS WIFE; HILDITA GUEVARA, HIS DAUGHTER FROM HIS PREVIOUS MARRIAGE; FIDEL CASTRO; CUBAN PRESIDENT OSVALDO DORTICoS; CARLOS RAFAEL RODRiGUEZ; EMILIO ARAGONeS; ORLANDO BOR-REGO; AND THREE UNIDENTIFIED MINISTRY OF INDUSTRY FUNCTIONARIES WERE THE ONLY PEOPLE GIVEN ACCESS TO THE DEBARKATION AREA.AFTER A SHORT MEETING OF THE ABOVE WITH GUEVARA, GUEVARA AND CASTRO (ONLY) LEFT THE AIRFIELD TOGETHER, AND WERE DRIVEN TO A MANSION AT CALLE BOLIVAR 117 WHICH IS SET ASIDE FOR CASTRO'S UNOFFICIAL AND PRIVATE USE. IT IS OF INTEREST TO NOTE THAT THE FEMALES WHO CUSTOMARILY RESIDE IN THE MANSION WERE REMOVED EARLY IN THE DAY AND HAVE NOT RETURNED.THERE IS A CREDIBLE RUMOR CIRCULATING THAT AS A RESULT OF THE 'THREE VIETNAMS' SPEECH GUEVARA GAVE TO THE SECOND ECONOMIC SEMINAR OF AFRO-ASIAN SOLIDARITY GUEVARA IS IN DISFAVOR WITH CASTRO BECAUSE CASTRO WAS STRONGLY REBUKED BY THE SOVIET AMBASSADOR FOR THE SPEECH AND/OR CASTRO ALSO DISAPPROVES OF THE BELLIGERENT TONE OF THE SPEECH. THERE IS A FURTHER, LESS CREDIBLE, RUMOR THAT GUEVARA WILL, AT THE SUGGESTION/ REQUEST/DEMAND OF THE SOVIET AMBASSADOR, BE STRIPPED OF HIS POST AS MINISTER OF INDUSTRY SO THAT THE CUBAN GOVERNMENT CAN DENY THAT HE WAS SPEAKING/SPEAKS FOR THE CUBAN GOVERNMENT.IT IS CONSIDERED UNLIKELY, HOWEVER, THAT ANY OF THE ABOVE WILL AFFECT THE CUBAN OPERATION IN AFRICA, ALTHOUGH GUEVARA'S ROLE IN THAT OPERATION MAY BE LIMITED.5. IN THE ABSENCE OF SPECIFIC INSTRUCTIONS TO THE CONTRARY, THE UNDERSIGNED INTENDS TO GO AHEAD WITH THE RELATIONSHIP DESCRIBED ABOVE.

J.P. STEPHENS.

STATION CHIEF BUENOS AIRESTOP SECRET.

"I had not seen it, no, sir," O'Connor said when he had finished reading it.

"The only thing we had on this was a Reliability Three that Guevara was in Havana," the Director said.

"Yes, sir," O'Connor said, largely because he could think of no safe comment to make.

"I just told Paul that I wouldn't be at all surprised if Felter already has this information, and is sitting in the Executive Office Building waiting to see how long it takes for us to send it to him."

"How would he do that, sir?"

"The same way he found somebody who knows the address of the house where Castro gets his revolutionary ashes hauled," the Director said. "Clean that up, just the intel stuff, nothing about the deal Stephens has struck with Felter's man down there, and get it over to Felter by officer courier."

"Yes, sir."

"And you, Paul, you tell the South American desk that I am going to be very interested indeed-perhaps 'morbidly fascinated' would be a better choice of words-to see how much sooner Felter sends me stuff like this than our people do."

"My God, Castro shoots anybody and everybody he thinks might might be turned," the Deputy Director protested. be turned," the Deputy Director protested.

"Well, I'd say he hasn't shot enough people, then, wouldn't you? Felter's source has got somebody in there, and at the top."

[SEVEN].

The Hotel du Lac Costermansville, Kivu Province Republic of the Congo 0950 19 March 1965 The seven-story Hotel du Lac was the tallest building in Costermansville.

After some rather convoluted business dealings, the sixth and seventh floors had been requisitioned, in the name of the Republic of the Congo, by Colonel Jean-Baptiste Supo, Military Commandant of Kivu Province, for use in military operations.

The requisition did not state that the military operation Colonel Supo had in mind was to provide space-and living accommodations-for Special Forces Detachment 17.

The King Leopold Suite of the Hotel du Lac-two bedrooms, an office, a sitting room, and a reception room, all of whose windows overlooked Lake Albert-had become Detachment 17's headquarters.

The smaller bedroom was now Major George Washington's Lunsford's office. The Detachment's executive officer, Lieutenant Geoffrey Craig, and the aviation officer, Major Darrell J. Smythe, shared what had once been some dignitary's private secretary's office, and the larger bedroom was now the commo center. Cables ran out of one of its windows up the side of the building to the antennae on the roof.

Lunsford, Smythe, Craig, Thomas, Peters, and Mr. Portet of Air Simba all had two-room suites on the seventh floor, which just about filled it up, and the enlisted men were housed on the sixth floor, most of them with rooms of their own.

The management of the hotel was pleased with the arrangement, and not at all upset that some people might think the payment arrangements were questionable, perhaps even illegal. This was, after all, the Congo, and things were different in the Congo.

Colonel Supo had issued vouchers for the services provided, and it was even possible that at some time in the future they would be honored by the Congolese government. The management was going to provide an essentially identical bill to the commanding officer, SFDET-17 in the field, with the understanding that it would be paid in U.S. dollars immediately.

The SFDET-17 bill differed from the bill rendered to Colonel Supo's headquarters in that, in the SFDET-17 bill, the cost of beer, wine, and spirits served would be incorporated into the cost of the meals served, and the words "beer," "wine," and "spirits" would not appear thereon.

There were already some radio antennae on the roof of the Hotel du Lac when Spec7 Peters/Captain Weewili went up the first time to see where he could install his antennae, and he was fascinated with what he found, much as when a car aficionado discovers a Model T Ford in daily use.

His antennae, including two dishes, were state of the art, so much so that he was a little uneasy when Lieutenant/Mr. Portet asked for an explanation of how everything worked. Just about all of the equipment he'd brought with him was classified, and you were supposed to have a need-to-know. He finally decided that, in these circumstances, Portet had the need-to-know anything and everything.

"Most of the aviation stuff is pretty standard," Peters explained. "But the commo is nonstandard, state of the art, and classified."

"How does it work?"

"We don't talk about it much," Peters explained, "but we're tied into the datalinks of the surveillance satellites. They have a reception capability-to turn the cameras on and off, you know, stuff like that-and we use that for our commo.

"First, we go through the usual encryption process, break it down into five character blocks. . . . You know how that works, I guess?"

Jack had nodded, although he really didn't have a clue how that worked.

"After we get the encrypted message on tape, then we condense it," Peters said.

"How does that work?"

"You put the encrypted tape on one machine, and a blank tape on a second machine. The first machine is running, say, 480 times as fast as the second machine. If, for example, you had 960 seconds of data, eight minutes' worth, it gets copied onto two seconds' worth of tape on the second machine. And most messages are a lot shorter than eight minutes, more like two, before condensation. When you condense a two-minute tape at 480-and we can go as high as 960 and even 1920, but sometimes the tape won't take it that short-when you condense a two-minute tape at 480, you get a half-second uplink tape. You bury that in garbage-"

"What?"

"You send a long uplink tape . . . sometimes, depending on how long the satellite will be over you, an hour, and hour and a half. They call it garbage because the five-character blocks, which look like crypto, aren't; they're meaningless, randomly selected. I brought about twenty hours' worth with me. So what you do is re-record say forty-five minutes of that, that, and you slip the half-second-sometimes shorter-crypto message in between a couple of characters in the garbage blocks. Still with me?" and you slip the half-second-sometimes shorter-crypto message in between a couple of characters in the garbage blocks. Still with me?"

"I don't know," Jack confessed.

"So we'll send that up to the satellite," Peters said. "The satellite records it, and then, when the satellite gets over Washington-actually, we have antennae farms at Vint Hill Farms Station in Virginia, and at Fort Meade, over in Maryland-the satellite downlinks it. Okay?"

"I'm beginning to be sorry I asked," Jack confessed.

"Then they run the tape fast through one of their machines, until they hit the trigger-"

"What trigger?"

"The crypto message has an impulse-like a 300-cycle tone, you know? The exact frequency is in a Signal Operations Instruction, so maybe one day it's 299 cps, and the next 1,202, and so on. Anyway, when the fast machine hits a trigger, it stops, backs up to the trigger, and then starts running at slow speed. That's fed to a crypto machine, and that's it. Out of the crypto machine comes the decrypted message."

Jack thought it over for a long moment.

"So what the bad guys have to do is play the whole tape-the garbage tape-looking for the trigger. . . ."

"Right."

"Which is hidden somewhere in a half-second encrypted message in tape maybe forty-five minutes long. . . ."

"Right."

"And if they get lucky, then all they have to do is break the encryption code?"

"Right. It's supposed to be foolproof, which probably means they're reading it in the Kremlin, or in Peking, before the courier can get it into Washington from Vint Hill Farms or Fort Meade."

"How often can you send, or receive, something?"

"We get a satellite about every four hours for half an hour, maybe forty-five minutes-it depends on the trajectory."

"Around the clock?"

"Sure.

"I find it hard to believe that the bad guys have somebody here listening for us to send a message to a satellite."

"Anything is possible," Peters said.

"But if there is, aren't we telling him here's a message the minute we start transmitting?"

"We transmit garbage twenty-four hours a day. Every five minutes, there's a two-second pause, long enough to shut off the garbage tape and turn on the crypto tape," Peters explained. "And then, when the crypto's finished, we wait for a two-second pause, and shut it down, and turn on the garbage again,"

"I am awed," Jack said. "And I will be very surprised if it works."

Two hours later, when Geoff Craig handed him a printout from the cryptographic machine, there was proof that it worked:

SECRET.

EARN0005 WASH DC 1405 ZULU 19 MARCH 1965.

VIA WHITE HOUSE SIGNAL AGENCY.

FROM: EARNEST SIX.

TO: HELPER SIX1-IMMEDIATELY ON RECEIPT ADVISE LOCATION, CONDITION, VISA STATUS AND ETA USA MRS. MARJORIE PORTET.2-ETA LeOPOLDVILLE LIEUTENANT JAMES C. MOORE AND CWO3 FRANCIS CLAURE FROM RUCKER VIA BRUSSELS ABOARD UTA 5621 1635 ZULU 22 MARCH.FINTON FOR EARNEST SIXSECRET.

And three hours after that, at 3:15 P.M. local time, Colonel Sanford T. Felter (Earnest Six) also had proof that the burst transmission network to Costermansville was functioning well when he received the following from Major George Washington Lunsford (Helper Six).

SECRET.

HELP0003 1605 ZULU 19 MARCH 1965.

VIA WHITE HOUSE SIGNAL AGENCY.

FROM: HELPER SIX.

TO: EARNEST SIX1-REF PARA 1 YOUR 0005: MRS. MARJORIE PORTET, LAST SEEN IN SPLENDID CONDITION IN SWIMMING POOL THIS LOCATION 1555 ZULU 19 MARCH 1965 DECLINES TO DISCUSS HER TRAVEL PLANS TO USA BEYOND STATING QUOTE NOT ANY TIME SOON ENDQUOTE. SHE STATES SHE HAS NON-EXPIRING, MULTI ENTRY/EXIT VISA AND SENDS HER LOVE.2-REF PARA 2 YOUR 0005: TRAVELERS WILL BE MET AT LeOPOLDVILLE BY AUNT JEMIMA WHO HAS APPROPRIATE MACHINERY READY FOR THEM TO OPERATE.HELPER SIXSECRET.

[ EIGHT ].

The Hotel du Lac Costermansville, Kivu Province Republic of the Congo 0950 23 March 1965 The reception room of the King Leopold Suite had been converted into the Detachment's conference room by moving the elegant furniture with which it had been furnished and replacing it with folding banquet tables and folding chairs from the hotel's basement storerooms.

Map boards had been locally fabricated from two-by-fours and sheets of plywood, and there was even a glossy mahogany speaker's lectern with a built-in public address system. It carried a beautifully carved insignia reading, "Rotary International, Costermansville, Belgian Congo."

With the exception of a few members of the Detachment-aircraft mechanics, a tower operator, and two Green Berets charged with their security-who were in Stanleyville, the entire Detachment had been assembled in the conference room. They were sitting around the banquet tables, which had been arranged in a U.

They were all now wearing the uniforms of Congolese paratroops, with the collar rank insignia of senior noncommissioned officers or junior officers. Lunsford had decided, Solomon-like, that E-7s would be captains, E-6s lieutenants, and everybody else who spoke Swahili senior sergeants. The seven E-5s who didn't speak Swahili were wearing sergeant's insignia.

Everyone was wearing U.S. Army parachutist's jump boots, rather than Congolese boots, as the result of another Solomon-like decision of Major Lunsford. The "old" Green Berets had put on Congolese boots when they had drawn their Congolese uniforms; many of the "new" Green Berets had not.

"What the hell, Geoff," Lunsford had announced when informed of the problem. "If it makes them feel good, why not?"

With the exception of their pistols-everyone had a Colt Model 1911A1 .45 ACP caliber semiautomatic pistol-their weapons were a mixture of Belgian and American. There were Fabrique National 7-mm automatic rifles from Colonel Supo's ordnance stocks, and U.S. Army M-16 .223 rifles, including the short carbine version of that weapon, the Car-16.

Major Lunsford, Lieutenant Craig, and Sergeant Thomas were armed with cut-down Remington Model 1100 12-gauge shotguns. They had carried such weapons in Vietnam, having found they were both very effective close-range people killers, and easy to carry in aircraft. All three weapons and a case of 00-buckshot ammunition for them had been carried to Africa in a locked case, as Lunsford strongly suspected that if their weapons preference became known, everyone would want a shotgun, and he wanted most everybody to be armed with a rifle of one kind or another.

The weapons littered the banquet tables in the conference room, as everybody watched the door to see what the hell was up.

The door opened, and Lieutenant Craig walked in, stood to one side, and called, "Ah-ten-hut!"

Everyone in the room popped to attention.

Colonel Jean-Baptiste Supo, Military Commandant of Oriental, Equatorial, and Kivu Provinces, walked into the room, followed by two Congolese officers and finally Major Lunsford, who was wearing the uniform of a Congolese lieutenant colonel of paratroops.