A Clean Kill in Tokyo

looked at me for a long time before he responded. “I’ve kept your secrets for a long time. I’ll continue to keep them. Fair enough?”
    I underestimated you,
I thought.
    “Fair enough?” he asked again.
    “Yes,” I said, not having anywhere else to go. “Now, let’s work the problem. Start with Holtzer.”
    “Tell me more about how you know him.”
    “Not right after I’ve eaten.”
    “That bad, huh?”
    I shrugged. “I knew him in Vietnam. He was with the Agency then, attached to SOG, a joint CIA-military Special Operations Group. He’s was tough, I’ll give him credit for that—grew up on the streets of South Boston, and he wasn’t afraid to go into the field, unlike some of the other bean counters I worked with out there. I liked that about him when I first met him. But even then he was nothing but a careerist. The first time we locked horns was after an ARVN—Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the South’s army—operation in Military Region Three. The ARVN had mortared the shit out of a suspected Vietcong base in Tay Ninh, based on intelligence from a source that Holtzer had developed. So we were involved in the body count, as a way of verifying the intelligence.
    “The ARVN had really pounded the place, and it was hard to identify the bodies—there were pieces everywhere. But there were no weapons. I told Holtzer this didn’t look like Vietcong activity to me. He says, ‘What are you talking about? This is Tay Ninh, everyone here is Vietcong.’ I say, ‘Come on, there aren’t any weapons, your source was jerking you off. There was a mistake.’ He says, ‘No mistake, there must be two dozen enemy dead.’ But he’s counting every blown-off limb as a separate body.
    “Back at base, he writes up his report and asks me to verify it. I told him to fuck off. There were a couple officers nearby, out of earshot but close enough to see us. It got heated, and I wound up laying him out. The officers saw it, which is exactly what Holtzer had wanted, though I don’t think he bargained for the rhinoplasty he needed afterward. Ordinarily that kind of thing wouldn’t have aroused much attention, but at the time there was some sensitivity to the way Special Forces and the CIA were cooperating in the field, and Holtzer knew how to work the bureaucracy. He made it sound like I wouldn’t verify his report because I had a personal problem with him. I wonder how many subsequent S&D operations were based on intelligence from his so-called fucking source.”
    I took a swallow of coffee. “He caused a lot of problems for me after that. He’s the kind of guy who knows just which ears to whisper in, and I’ve never been good at that game. When I got back from the war I had some kind of black cloud over me, and I always knew he was the one behind it, even if I couldn’t catch him pulling the strings.”
    “You never told me about what happened in the States after the war,” Harry said after a moment. “Is that why you left?”
    “Part of it.” The terseness of my reply was meant to indicate I didn’t want to go there, and Harry understood.
    “What about Benny?” he asked.
    “All I know is he was connected to the LDP—an errand boy, but trusted with some important errands. And apparently he was also a mole for the CIA.”
    The word “mole” felt unpleasant in my mouth. It is still one of the foulest epithets I know.
    For six years, SOG’s operations in Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam were compromised by a mole. Time and again, a team would be inserted successfully, only to be picked up within minutes by North Vietnamese patrols. Some of these missions had been death traps, with entire SOG platoons wiped out. But others were successful, which meant that the mole had limited access. If an investigator could have compared dates and access, we could have quickly narrowed the list of suspects.
    But MACV—the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam—refused to investigate due to sensitivities about “counterpart relationships.” That is, they were afraid of insulting the South Vietnamese government by suggesting a South Vietnamese national attached to MACV might have been less than reliable. Worse, SOG was ordered to continue to share its data with the ARVN. We tried to get around the command by issuing false insert coordinates to our Vietnamese counterparts, but MACV found out and there was hell to pay.
    In 1972, a traitorous ARVN corporal was uncovered, but this single, low-level