The Teeth of the Tiger - Tom Clancy [88]
"Like when they tried to whack Castro," Hendley observed. He'd read into the classified files on that mad, failed adventure. Bobby Kennedy had ram-rodded Operation MONGOOSE. They'd probably decided over drinks, or maybe after some touch football, to play that game. After all, Eisenhower had used CIA for similar purposes during his presidency, so why shouldn't they? Except that a former lieutenant in the Navy who'd lost his command to ramming, and a lawyer who'd never practiced law, did not instinctively know all the things that a career soldier who'd gone to five stars fully understood from the very beginning. And besides, they'd had the power. The Constitution itself had made Jack Kennedy Commander in Chief, and with that sort of power invariably came the urge to make use of it, and so reshape the world into something more amenable to his personal outlook. And so, CIA had been ordered to make Castro go away. But CIA had never had an assassination department, and had never trained people to perform such missions. And so, the Agency had gone to the Mafia, whose commission members had little reason to admire Fidel Castro-who had shut down what had been about to become their most profitable venture ever. It'd been so sure a thing that some of the organized-crime big shots had invested their own, personal, money in the Havana casinos, only to have them closed down by the communist dictator.
And did not the Mafia know how to kill people?
Well, in fact, no, they had never been very efficient at it-especially at killing people able to fight back-Hollywood movies to the contrary. And even so, the government of the United States of America had tried to use them as contractors for the assassination of a foreign chief of state-because CIA didn't know how to make such a thing happen. It was, in retrospect, somewhat ludicrous. Somewhat? Gerry Hendley asked himself. It had come within an inch of exposure as a government-engineered train wreck. Enough to force President Gerry Ford into drafting his executive order that made such action illegal, and that order had lasted until President Ryan had decided to take out the religious dictator of Iran with two smart bombs. Remarkably, the time and circumstances had disabled the news media from commenting on the killing. It had been done, after all, by the United States Air Force, with properly marked-albeit stealthy-bomber aircraft in a time of an undeclared but very real war in which weapons of mass destruction had been used against American citizens. Those factors had combined to make the entire operation not only legitimate but laudable, as ratified by the American people at the following election. Only George Washington had garnered a larger plurality at the polls, a fact which still made the senior Jack Ryan uneasy. But Jack had known the import of the killing of Mahmoud Haji Daryaei, and so, before leaving office, had talked Gerry into establishing The Campus.
But Jack didn't tell me how hard this would be, Hendley reminded himself. That was how Jack Ryan had always operated: Pick good people, give them a mission and the tools to accomplish it, then let them do it with minimal guidance from on high. It was what had made him a good boss, and a pretty good president, Gerry thought. But it didn't make life much easier on his subordinates. Why the hell had he taken the assignment? Hendley asked himself. But then came a smile. How would Jack react when he found out his own son was part of The Campus? Would he see the humor of it?
Probably not.
"So, Pete says just to play it out?"
"What else can he say?" Davis asked in reply.
"Tom, ever wish you were back on your dad's farm in Nebraska?"
"It's awful hard work, and kind of dull out there." And there was no way you were going to keep Davis down on