April 19th, 1980
Arlington, Virginia
Fred Poole passed the Marine Corps Memorial as he cruised north on the George Washington Parkway. Seeing the giant statue of the Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima reminded him of his recent time in Iran and got him thinking about the Sergeant he’d left behind there. He wondered what Carlos was doing these days, and hoped that he would take him up on his offer, and call him.
This was Poole’s favorite stretch of road in the city. It was hardly ever congested (especially on a Saturday like today) and his little Fiat Spider could zip along the curves as it followed the Potomac River. Off to his right was the exit for the Teddy Roosevelt bridge. He was happy to not be heading into the City today, so he continued north on the GWP. The Top was down, and the air was crisp. It was the perfect day for a drive up the Parkway. It was days like today when he wondered why he’d ever leave this place. Then he’d remember the Summer. And the Winters. Oh, and all the self-important jackasses that called this swamp home.
He continued along the river past Teddy Roosevelt Island off to the right. Then past Fort Marcy on the left. Finally he came up to the left-hand turn he was looking for. As he turned off of the Parkway, he turned onto the access road to the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency. He’d returned to the Mother ship where he was hoping to wrap up his current assignment and start working on the next.
He liked to come into the office on Saturdays for the same reasons he liked the mid-watch at Sinop. He could get access to anything he needed, but wouldn’t have to interact with too many people uninvolved with his assignment. This meant he wouldn’t be able to gain any political points for climbing the leadership ladder, but he was okay with that. He was a simple man of simple tastes, and he loved his job.
In a place with twenty-four-hour coverage like Langley, there were always people around. Fortunately for Poole, none of them were interested in bothering him as he made his way to the cubicle he called home on the rare occasions he was in town. He sat down at his desk and retrieved the courier package that was waiting for him. The package contained his notes and selected photographs from his assignment in Sinop.
He sat at his beige IBM Selectric typewriter and began plinking out his report. All in all it was an unsatisfactory report. Having followed up on the tip from his asset, he could conclude that yes, JP4 was being diverted from Baku to Kaspiysk. He could quell his superior’s fears that the fuel was being diverted to Afghanistan. Yet he could not satisfactorily explain exactly what the Soviets were doing with all of that jet fuel.
As he slogged through the report he considered omitting anything about the Sea Monster. He’d made some calls around and though a few of his contacts had heard about it, nobody had a genuine lead on what it was, or whether it could be part of the solution. As best he could figure out it was a one-off experiment that had gone nowhere. He included a brief reference along with the satellite imagery of the Monster and requested some SIGINT tasking of the base to see if anything came of it. If Keller’s hunch was right, he might as well drop it in there. If she was wrong, nobody would think twice about the reference and everyone would move on.
As soon as he completed his report on Kaspiysk, Poole headed to the break room for a cup of coffee before moving onto his next assignment. His friend Carl Miller over in the Latin American office had brought him into a project based on mutual contacts. Dispatches coming out of Havana and Managua referenced a Soviet Spetsnaz general whom Poole had profiled. Carl wanted Fred on the team as the Soviet expert to balance out his team of Latin American experts.
The entire episode arose from the CIA’s uncovering of a Battalion sized force of Soviet Army personnel in Cuba almost a year ago. In the Summer of 1979 The CIA had performed an intelligence audit on Soviet military units in Cuba. During that audit they had uncovered numerous Soviet tank and infantry units. When word leaked about the discovery, there was a diplomatic dustup between the US and USSR over the matter. The Soviets contended that the unit had been there for years and it was not a provocation. The Americans contended that it represented a direct threat to the United States and a gross violation of the agreements between the two nations in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Since that point, the CIA had been trying to untangle the authentic story behind the unit’s purpose and the implications it may have on Communist movements in Latin America. Miller was an expert on Nicaraguan Politics. He had long been resisting pressure in his office to connect direct Soviet involvement to the rise of the Sandinista government, who had taken power in July 1979. That pressure had redoubled since the appointment and confirmation of Dr. Kirkpatrick as the Secretary of State.
Miller still didn’t buy the idea that the Soviets had given direct aid to the Sandinistas during their rise. From Miller’s point of view, you didn’t need the Soviets at all. All you needed was to remove American support for the Somoza regime and collapse was all but guaranteed. It was fairly cut-and-dried. However, even a skeptic like Miller had to admit that there was something going on in the past few months.
Diplomatic traffic between Cuba and Nicaragua was nothing new. The CIA knew that the Sandinista leader, Daniel Ortega, saw Castro’s Cuba as a model for what he hoped to accomplish in Nicaragua. What had changed, or at least what was now being noticed, were similarities in specific dispatches between Moscow, Havana and Managua. The number crunchers at the NSA originally noticed repeating sequences within encoded communications. As the picture unfolded, they linked some of those sequences back to General Stanislav Smotrov. It was all very vague, and Miller needed to put some meat on the bones of that intelligence.
That’s where Poole came in. Fred had profiled Smotrov back in 1968. At the time he was a Colonel leading a tank regiment during the crushing of the Prague Spring. During that brutal campaign, Smotrov’s aggressive tactics and disregard for civilian casualties had earned him the nickname “Stanislaughter” among the English speakers and “Smertrov” among the Russian speakers. After the Prague Spring, Smotrov transferred from the Army to the GRU, the Main Intelligence Unit of the Soviet military machine. From there he took a staff position specializing in the suppression of political uprisings and insurrections. Miller needed Poole to see if he could verify the General’s presence in Nicaragua, and to get as much information as possible on what activities the General was undertaking there.
The situation in the Middle East was still getting all the headlines. This was especially true with a potential conflict between Iraq and Iran simmering. But Secretary Kirkpatrick had made it abundantly clear that the communist regimes in Latin America were a special focus of the administration now. She was an open critic of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and feared there would be a spillover effect on the surrounding countries. Guatemala and El Salvador had continuing political violence destabilizing their governments. The government in Honduras was in its infancy, while Costa Rica was the only nation to offer political stability.
Cuba had been a communist thorn in America’s side since 1959. Kirkpatrick painted a bleak picture of a world where there was a Cuban problem that spanned from Mexico to Venezuela. For the first time in history she argued, the United States would be threatened with invasion. It sounded like so much hyperbole. But Kirkpatrick was an academic, not a politician. She didn’t deal in hyperbole, and she didn’t care what you thought. The weight of that focus of purpose was being felt in every part of the United States’ Military, Intelligence, and Diplomatic organizations.
After his coffee, Poole headed back to his desk to crack open the file that Miller had left him. As he did, his thoughts drifted back to Carlos Rodriguez. When he’d mentioned that he might have something for Carlos nearly two months ago, this project wasn’t nearly as hot as it was today. Especially given that Poole would be working outside of his normal area of operations, he really thought he could use someone he could trust with the ability to move around, speak the language, and someone who would kill a bad-guy or two. It’s been a while since I’ve had a real protege, he thought.