Omerta - Mario Puzo [39]
Inzio Tulippa had a nickname all over the world. He was known as “the Vaccinator.” Foreign industrialists and investors with enormous holdings in South America—whether oil fields, car manufacturing plants, or crops, necessarily had to send top executives there. There were many from the United States. Their biggest problem was the kidnapping of their executives on foreign soil, for which they had to pay ransoms in the millions of dollars.
Inzio Tulippa headed a company that insured these executives against kidnapping, and every year he visited the United States to negotiate contracts with these corporations. He did this not only for money but because he needed some of the industrial and scientific resources of these companies. In short, he performed a vaccinating service. This was important to him.
But he had a more dangerous eccentricity. He viewed the international persecution of the illegal drug industry as a holy war against himself, and he was determined to protect his empire. So he had ridiculous ambitions. He wanted to possess nuclear capabilities as a lever in case disaster ever struck. Not that he would use it except as a last resort, but it would be an effective bargaining weapon. It was a desire that would seem ridiculous to everyone except the New York FBI agent in charge, Kurt Cilke.
. . .
At one point in his career, Kurt Cilke had been sent to an FBI antiterrorist school. His selection for the six-month course had been a mark of his high standing with the director. During that time he had access (complete or not, he didn’t know) to the most highly classified memoranda and case scenarios on the possible use of nuclear weapons by terrorists from small countries. The files detailed which countries had weapons. To public knowledge there was Russia, France, and England, possibly India and Pakistan. It was assumed that Israel had nuclear capability. Kurt read with fascination scenarios detailing how Israel would use nuclear weapons if an Arab bloc were at the point of overwhelming it.
For the United States there were two solutions to the problem. The first was that if Israel were so attacked, the United States would side with Israel before it had to use nuclear weapons. Or, at the crucial point, if Israel could not be saved, the United States would have to wipe out Israel’s nuclear capability.
England and France were not seen as problems; they could never risk nuclear war. India had no ambitions, and Pakistan could be wiped out immediately. China would not dare; it did not have the industrial capacity short-term.
The most immediate danger was from small countries like Iraq, Iran, and Libya, where leaders were reckless, or so the scenarios claimed. The solution here was almost unanimous. Those countries would be bombed to extinction with nuclear weapons.
The greatest short-term danger was that terrorist organizations secretly financed and supported by a foreign power would smuggle a nuclear weapon into the United States and explode it in a large city. Probably Washington, D.C., or New York. This was inevitable. The proposed solution was the formation of task forces to use counterintelligence and then the utmost punitive measures against these terrorists and whoever backed them. It would require special laws that would abridge the rights of American citizens. The scenarios acknowledged the impossibility of these laws until somebody finally succeeded at blowing up a good portion of an American metropolis. Then the laws would pass easily. But until then, as one scenario airily remarked, “It was the luck of the draw.”
There were only a few scenarios depicting criminal use of nuclear devices. This was almost absolutely discounted on the grounds that the