By Roscoe J. Danton
Washington Times-Post Writers Syndicate
President Joshua Ezekiel Clendennen today chose Ambassador Charles W. Montvale, the director of National Intelligence, to be Vice President less than twenty-four hours after Secretary of State Natalie Cohen revealed that Montvale had been the brains behind the brilliant intelligence coup that saw Russia’s super-secret Tupelov Tu-934A touch down at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington with American intelligence operatives at the controls.
How the aircraft—described, off the record, by senior Air Force officials as “years ahead of anything in the American arsenal”—came into U.S. possession remains a closely guarded secret, but it is known that the Central Intelligence Agency had a standing offer of $125 million for the delivery of one into its hands.
Montvale announced at Andrews that the money would be paid to the two pilots who flew it into Andrews. They were identified only as “retired officers with an intelligence background.”
Secretary of State Natalie Cohen, pointing to Montvale’s long and distinguished career in public service—he has been a deputy secretary of State, secretary of the Treasury, and ambassador to the European Union—said she could think of no one better qualified to be Vice President, and hoped his selection to that office would “put to rest once and for all the scurrilous rumors of bad blood between Montvale and the President.”
President Clendennen immediately nominated Truman C. Ellsworth, who had been Montvale’s deputy, to be director of National Intelligence. That appointment, according to White House insiders, almost certainly was behind the resignation of CIA Director John Powell, although the official version is that Powell “decided it was time for him to return to private life.”
The President announced that he was sending the name of CIA Deputy Director for Operations A. Franklin Lammelle to the Senate for confirmation as CIA Director. Lammelle, who has worked closely with both Montvale and Secretary of State Cohen, is widely believed to have been deeply involved with Montvale in the operation that saw the super-secret Russian Tupelov Tu-934A come into American hands.
Presidential spokesman John David Parker said the President would have nothing further to say about the intelligence coup, stating that it “was, after all, a clandestine operation, and the less said about it, the better.”
The problem was that Roscoe not only knew the backstory, which he had not written about, but had been part of it. He knew, for example, that the President had been known to refer to Montvale as “Ambassador Stupid, director of National Ignorance.” He also knew that President Clendennen, shortly after taking office, had ordered Montvale’s “Red Phone”—which provided instant access to the President and cabinet heads—shut off, and canceled Montvale’s access to the White House fleet of limousines and GMC Yukons, in the hope that this would encourage Montvale to resign, so that he could appoint CIA Director John Powell—who could, in the President’s judgment, find his ass with both hands—to replace him.
He also knew, for example, that President Clendennen had named Ambassador Montvale to be his Vice President not as a reward for the intelligence coup, or because of his admiration for him, but because the alternative had been the virtually certain indictment of the President by the House of Representatives quickly followed by an impeachment trial in the Senate.
Danton knew that the delivery of the Tupelov Tu-934A into the hands of the CIA had almost been a sideshow to what had really happened: Shortly before Clendennen had become President on the sudden death of his predecessor—an aortal aneurysm had ruptured— the United States had launched a preemptive strike on a biological warfare manufactory in the Congo.
The manufactory and everything within at least two square miles around it had been bombed and incinerated with every aerial weapon in the American arsenal except nuclear. It was believed this action had removed all of an incredibly lethal substance known as Congo-X from the planet.
This assessment was proven false when FedEx delivered several liters of Congo-X to the Army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease—the euphemism for Biological Warfare Laboratories—at Fort Detrick, Maryland. This was shortly followed by the discovery of another several liters of the substance by Border Patrol agents just inside the U.S.-Mexico border.
And this was shortly followed by the SVR rezident in Washington, Sergei Murov, inviting A. Franklin Lammelle, then the CIA’s deputy director of operations, for drinks at the Russian embassy’s dacha on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
There he proposed a deal: The Russians would turn over all the Congo-X in their possession in exchange for the former SVR rezident in Berlin, Colonel Dmitri Berezovsky, and his sister, Lieutenant Colonel Svetlana Alekseeva, the former SVR rezident in Copenhagen, who had not only defected with the assistance of Lieutenant Colonel C. G. Castillo but had also spilled the beans to Colonel Castillo about the “Fish Farm” in the Congo. The Russians also wanted Colonel Castillo.
When this proposal was brought to the attention of President Clendennen, he thought the deal made a great deal of sense, and ordered that it be concluded. When informed that Colonel Berezovsky and Lieutenant Colonel Alekseeva were not in the hands of the CIA, but in Argentina, with Colonel Castillo, who flatly refused to turn them over to the CIA, President Clendennen ordered Director of National Intelligence Montvale to send all the alphabet agencies of the intelligence community to find them and see that they were all loaded aboard the next available Aeroflot flight to Moscow.
Frederick P. Palmer, the United States attorney general, later described this action as being of “mind-boggling illegality,” and suggested that if anything beyond President Clendennen’s caving in to the Russians was needed to convince the House of Representatives that articles of impeachment were in order, this would do it.
And the story would have come out. The simultaneous offered resignations of Secretary of State Cohen, Director of National Intelligence Montvale, General Naylor, and even presidential spokesman Porky Parker could not be swept under the rug, even if a sense of duty might keep those resigning from making public why they could no longer serve President Clendennen.
Attorney General Palmer, however, argued that the country could not take another impeachment scandal, and that it was their duty to stay in office, with the caveats that the President appoint Montvale as Vice President, that the President ask for DCI Powell’s resignation, and that he make other changes in the senior leadership that they considered necessary.
The President, having no alternative but impeachment, quickly agreed.
Roscoe Danton, running down the rumor that Lieutenant Colonel Castillo had snatched two Russian defectors from the CIA station chief in Vienna, had first encountered members of the Merry Band of Outlaws in Argentina during the time the alphabet agencies were looking for him.
Without quite knowing how it had happened, he had wound up in Mexico embroiled in Colonel Castillo’s Merry Outlaws’ current operation.
Castillo had learned that the Congo-X the Border Patrol had found just inside the Texas-Mexico border had been flown to Mexico in a Tupelov Tu-934A, and that the aircraft, presumably carrying more Congo-X, was on an air base on Venezuela’s La Orchila Island. He launched an operation to grab both the aircraft and the Congo-X.
Roscoe J. Danton had been aboard one of the Black Hawk helicopters that landed on La Orchila Island. He had not been sure then, and was not sure now, whether he was there as a courageous journalist following a story no matter where it led, or whether he was a craven coward who believed the Merry Outlaws when they made their little joke, “Now that you know that, Roscoe, we’ll have to kill you”—and actually might have done so had he not climbed aboard the Black Hawk.
Danton had managed to convince himself, before he had been so rudely awakened, that he had been more the professional journalist than professional coward. He had come to this conclusion after deciding that President Clendennen was a miserable sonofabitch for trying to swap Dmitri and Sweaty—who had also been on the Black Hawk—and Charley Castillo to the Russians.
“After the island,” when he saw Castillo and Colonel Jake Torine preparing to fly the Tupelov Tu-934A to Andrews Air Force Base, he realized that he had been accepted by the Merry Outlaws as one of their own.
There were advantages to this—for example, he had been given a CaseyBerry, over which the secretary of State had given him the scoop about the murders and kidnapping in Mexico—and he could see a cornucopia of other news that would come hi
s way in the future.
But there were manifold disadvantages to his being a professional journalist that he could see as well.