Over time there evolved a distinct culture of secrecy, a society within a society in which the mores were defined by security classifications, compartmentation, and an unspoken taboo on asking too many questions.
For the families living on or around Marana it was anything but a hardship post. When the household chores were done, Val Merriman and the other wives passed the afternoons playing cards beside the Olympic-sized swimming pool or looked forward to bowling leagues, bingo nights, and turkey shoots. Even the teenagers became a part of the enterprise. Some worked as lifeguards or in the carpentry shop or on the watering crew. Others painted numbers and lines on the runways. The men would gather after hours at the base's watering hole for drinks and the chatter of good old boys reveling in doing what they loved best. In the evenings the base featured not a crude canteen, but a polished dining hall offering fine cuisine with ice sculptures and a chef who had worked on a cruise ship.
Periodically the men, especially the riggers, would disappear for weeks and months at a time. No one asked where they had gone. Most already knew. Those who didn't had no business knowing.
When the Merrimans arrived at Marana in early 1963, the Agency was still licking its wounds from the Bay of Pigs fiasco of two years earlier. By then, several of the Agency's most vaunted figures had been publicly discredited and quietly departed, men like Director Allen Dulles and Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell. But the Bay of Pigs had not put a damper on covert operations. Far from it. Between 1960 and 1965 the CIA expanded its operations in the Western Hemisphere Division by 40 percent, reflecting a perceived increase in Soviet activity in Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, and elsewhere.
Decolonization in Africa led to expansions in CIA activity on that continent as well. Again the aim was to stymie Soviet and Chinese efforts to extend their spheres of influence. Until such perceived threats, Africa had commanded little interest at the Agency. Indeed, African operations, before 1960, had been folded into the divisions overseeing Europe and the Mideast. Between 1959 and 1960 CIA stations in Africa increased by 55 percent. Asia, too, was demanding greater covert resources, particularly in Laos and Vietnam. Those theaters of operations would provide an entire new generation of CIA leaders and station chiefs who would take the place of the graying OSS veterans still at the helm in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Overseeing much of this expansion, after Bissell's departure, was his replacement in 1962 as deputy director of plans, Richard Helms, as experienced and hard-core an operative as any the Agency had. The clandestine service would continue to extend its reach and resources until the late 1960s when public suspicion, budgetary constraints, and concerns about exposure reduced the frenzied pace of covert operations.
The core of senior CIA officers who had overseen the Bay of Pigs operation had escaped their superior's fate and had been reconstituted as if nothing untoward had happened. Indeed, they would help usher in the new era of covert paramilitary operations.
Perhaps it was because they were below the screen of public criticism, perhaps because they possessed skills or experience too valuable to lose. Whatever the reason, the men most closely involved with the Bay of Pigs simply packed up from their ill-named “Happy Valley” operations base in Nicaragua and ended up at Marana, where they played pivotal roles in an ensuing decade of CIA adventures and misadventures. For them the Bay of Pigs was not a career-ending disaster, but merely a stepping-stone to the next assignment.
Chief among these was Gar Thorsrude, Marana's commander and undisputed top dog. It was Gar who had overseen base operations at the Bay of Pigs and briefed men like Alabama pilots Pete Ray and Leo Baker. A company man through and through, he accepted long odds and operational failures as part of the landscape. He was nothing if not a survivor. A commanding figure, he stood well over six feet, had a stony, often sullen face, a mouth full of gold teeth, a crew cut, and a volcanic temper. A former smoke jumper himself, he knew his stuff and knew it well. For this he was widely respected, but not universally beloved.
The less kindly disposed used words like “prickly” to describe him. He had played an integral role in the covert war against China by training Tibetans and providing them with weapons and provisions. He had overseen operations from which more than a few men had not returned. It was said of him by one Agency wife that when he died it would be hard to round up enough people to serve as pallbearers, to which another Agency wife added that she would volunteerâif for no other reason than to make sure he was indeed dead. No one, not even the brassiest of the flyboys, had the
cojones
to ask Thorsrude about the Bay of Pigs. As head of Marana, he was Merriman's ultimate boss.
Others at Marana were veterans of the Bay of Pigs too, among them the base's chief pilot, Connie Seigrest, the smoke-jumping brothers Miles and Shep Johnson, and the head “kicker,” Jack Wall. Many had known each other for more than a decade, dating back to the early 1950s when they had been with the CIA front company called Western Enterprises based in Taiwan. There the mission had been to relentlessly heckle the Chinese. Even Gar had once been a kicker for Western Enterprises.
From Asia to the Bay of Pigs to Arizona, and from there to points around the world. Technically, few if any of them were CIA employees but merely contract workers. But they would have taken strong offense at any suggestion that they were mercenaries. They saw themselves as soldiers out of uniform, not soldiers of fortune, part of an elite cadre forged by more than a decade of covert combat. The men of Marana were the leading edge of any CIA air operation, the go-to guys of Langley. While the State Department boys politely parsed policy in the salons of Georgetown, their stubble-cheeked alter-egos at Marana were flying above treetops through blackest night rehearsing supply drops.
And as John Merriman was soon to find out, even the Cuban exile pilots themselves, those who had survived Castro's murderous fire, would find steady work for the CIA. They would provide a perfect ready-made forceâalready trained in flying, experienced in aerial combat, only too eager to take on the Communists, and just distant enough from the professional ranks of Langley for Washington to once again deny any knowledge of them. It was some of these very pilots that John Merriman was expected to polish and prepare for covert combat missions overseas.
One of these pilots was Gus Ponzoa, the senior Cuban pilot in the Bay of Pigs operation. It was up to Merriman to test Ponzoa and to certify that he was ready to take a T-28 into combat. The first time up together, Merriman had Ponzoa do a series of acrobatic rolls. Ponzoa had trouble controlling the aircraft, the g-force got out of hand, and Ponzoa vomited in the cockpit. Within a day Merriman had him in full control.
Even among the crack fliers of Marana, Merriman was a standout. “He was one of the best pilots I ever flew with,” remembers Don Gearke. “He was a Hollywood-type pilot. I've never seen anybody so calm in my life. He'd always go to the end of the runway. When he was cleared for takeoff, he'd sit back in his seat, pull his gloves on one at a time, and like Smilin' Jack, light a cigarette and say âLet's go.' That was pretty cool.”
Sometimes Merriman's playfulness got out of hand. On one occasion he was teaching less experienced pilots how to pursue and attack a plane in flight. He noticed a small private aircraft overhead and decided to incorporate it into his gunnery lesson by dive-bombing it and hectoring it midair with his more nimble T-28. Again and again he dove on the plane. Unbeknownst to Merriman, the pilot was an air force general on his way to David Mothan Air Force Base. When the officer landed, he immediately filed a formal complaint against Merriman with the Federal Aviation Administration.
Such friskiness was a part of Marana's culture. The timid, they said, need not apply. Even the stern Gar Thorsrude was not above the occasional hotdogging. From time to time he would fly the gauntlet below the Grand Canyon's rim. One time, after a prolonged overseas assignment, he took the canyon route. He was flying below the rim and above the Colorado River, a twisting course, when suddenly, as he rounded a bend, there loomed in front of him, filling his windshield, a solid wallâ the Glen Canyon Dam. “Oh shit!” yelled Don Gearke, a passenger in the backseat. In the time that Thorsrude had been overseas the dam had risen to its full 710-foot height. Thorsrude pulled back on the stick and barely cleared it.
On May 29, 1964, Merriman offered to fly Cuban pilot Gus Ponzoa from Marana to Las Vegas, where Ponzoa was to catch a plane back to Miami. It was a cloudless day, not even a hint of a breeze. As a send-off gift for his newfound friend, Merriman took the canyon route, flying below the rim, artfully zigzagging between the canyon walls at 170 knots. It was Ponzoa's most memorable flight and a celebration of his having checked out in the T-28.
In a month, Ponzoa would leave for a top secret mission to the Congo. There he was to head up a cadre of fifteen Cuban pilots, all of them Bay of Pigs veterans. Recruited by the CIA, they were to pose as mercenaries working for the Congo Air Force under orders from General Joseph Mobuto. Merriman's parting words to Ponzoa: “I would give anything to be going with you.”
One month later Merriman got his wish. He was to ready himself for the Congo, where he would oversee air operations. His was to be a supervisory role. The last thing the United States needed was to expose its hand in that faraway conflict. But nothing could have prepared Merriman for the quagmire that was the Congo.
The CIA had had a secret role in the Congo that dated back to 1960 when Belgium granted its former colony independence, one of a series of colonies that won their independence in the early sixties. Against the backdrop of the Cold War and superpower struggles, each of these young nations became yet another target of opportunity caught in the tug-of-war between East and West. The United States and its handmaiden, the CIA, were intent upon preventing the Soviets or Chinese from gaining a new foothold anywhere in the world, especially in a land as rich in minerals and as strategically located as was the Congo. Just how far the CIA was willing to go was made plain in the fall of 1960.
It was September 19, 1960, that the CIA sent a message to Lawrence Devlin, its station chief in Léopoldville (today called Kinshasa), the Congolese capital. The message, classified “Eyes Only,” was cryptic even by CIA standards. It alerted Devlin that he would soon be receiving a visit from “Joe from Paris” and that he was to take his instructions from him. Not long after, as Devlin was walking to his car near the Café de la Presse, he saw a familiar faceâDr. Sidney Gottlieb, a senior scientist on the technical side of the Agency.
Gottlieb was an odd figure by any measure. Born with a clubfoot and stricken with a severe stutter, he had been a socialist in his youth and a Buddhist as an adult. A chemist by training, he put his formidable talent in the lab to exotic use, making poison darts and handkerchiefs, and overseeing a program with LSD that tested theories of mind control. His subjects were not always privy to the fact they had been dosed. A genius by many accounts, he would have been a perfect model for Dr. Strangelove. In Léopoldville he arrived with a plan for Devlin to carry out.
Devlin took Gottlieb to a safe house, where the two men huddled over a radio whose volume was cranked up high enough to obscure their voices from any eavesdroppers or listening devices. Gottlieb said it was the CIA's directive that Gottlieb assassinate former Congolese premier Patrice Lumumba. A charismatic leftist trained in the Soviet Union, Lumumba was viewed as a threat to U.S. objectives in the region. “Jesus Christ! Isn't this unusual?” asked Devlin, demanding to know upon whose authority such an order had been given. In-house the plan had been approved by none other than Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell. CIA head Allen Dulles had branded Lumumba “a Castro, or worse.” But the scheme also, Devlin said, had the blessings of an even higher authorityâ President Eisenhower.
From his bag, Gottlieb produced a small kit containing a well-known brand of toothpaste. Inside was a deadly poison. The kit also contained rubber gloves, gauze, masks, and even a syringe in the event that the toothpaste could not be slipped into Lumumba's possessions. Devlin had no intention of carrying out the directive, but in the interest of preserving his career, he decided to quietly stall for time. He slipped the kit into a drawer in the embassy safe.
Three months later Devlin's and the Agency's dilemma was resolved. On January 17, 1961, Lumumba was brutally murdered by a rival Congolese faction. Whether that killing was purely fortuitous or given an assist by the Agency has been a subject of debate. One week later, under cover of darkness, a much-relieved Devlin drove to the edge of town and tossed the poison into the rapids of the Congo River.
But neither Lumumba's death nor the intervening four years had done anything to stabilize the Congo. Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson had all secretly deployed the CIA in a desperate effort to shore up the Congolese government as the nation teetered on the brink of anarchy.
So it was when Merriman arrived in Léopoldville on July 17, 1964. A two-month-old revolt in the eastern province of Katanga once again threatened the country. But Merriman's spirits were high, the weather cooler than he expected, and the Congolese ivory and wood carvings caught his eye. “Looks as if I will be able to bring you some pretty presents from here,” he wrote his wife. “Love boys for me and remember that you are the one I love most in the world.”
The letter was necessarily brief. There was much to do. His assignment was to oversee the Cuban pilots, to help prevent a breakup of the Congo, and to suppress the revolt in Katanga. Merriman spent less than two weeks in Léopoldville before taking command of the CIA's air operations and the Cuban pilots who worked under cover of the Congo Air Force.