Libra

"What's controversial about it?"

"It's called Talkin' John Birch Society Blues.' "

"Is he white or Negro? Because white boys shouldn't mess with the blues."

"But imagine forbidding him airtime."

"I'll try to get worked up about it. Give me ten minutes."

"I know the signs, old boy."

"What signs?"

"When you sweep through the house guzzling gin. I know exactly what it means. Nostalgic for Guatemala."

Some people thought Beryl had money. It was one of the false impressions that collected around her. What she actually had was a small picture-framing shop on Wisconsin Avenue, strictly a marginal income-lithographs, photographs, framing. Other people thought she was creative. One of the softer arts, quilt-making, water colors. She had a look and ma

It was seen as a mark of the Parmenters' sophistication that she raked the Agency in mixed company while Larry looked on gri

Not that she didn't mean what she said.

"No. I am not making fun. I admire what you did in Guatemala. If not politically, then in other ways. It was practically bloodless. I certainly admire that."

"It was a textbook operation."

"Of course there would have been no need for an operation if the Guatemalans hadn't taken back all that land belonging to United Fruit."

"Is that what happened? Oh."

"I love the way you say textbook operation."

Yes. It was also the peak experience of Larry's career, centering on a radio station supposedly run by rebels from a jungle outpost in Guatemala. The broadcasts actually originated in a barn in Honduras and the messages were designed to put pressure on the leftist government and arouse anxiety in the people. Rumors, false battle reports, meaningless codes, inflammatory speeches, orders to nonexistent rebels. It was like a class project in the structure of reality. Parmenter wrote some of the broadcasts himself, going for vivid imagery, fields of rotting bodies, fighter pilots defecting with their planes. A real pilot tossed dynamite sticks out the window of his Cessna. A real bomb fell on a parade ground, sending up smoke in an ominous column. The government fell nine days after an invasion force of five thousand troops was said to be advancing on the capital. The force materialized then, several trucks and a crowded station wagon, about a hundred and fifty ragged recruits.

That was nine years ago. Larry became involved in proprietaries for a time, legally incorporated businesses actually financed and controlled by CIA. When the Agency wanted to do something interesting in Kurdistan or Yemen, it filed for incorporation in Delaware. It was during this period that he came into contact with a number of Agency assets who had important holdings in sensitive parts of the hemisphere. A man from United Fruit, a man from the Cuban-Venezuelan Oil Trust (it was George de Mohrenschildt as a matter of fact). Merchant banks, sugar companies, arms dealers.

A curious convergence of motives and holdings. Hotel interests here, gambling interests there. Men with vivid histories, sometimes including prison. He saw there was a natural kinship between business and intelligence work. And he realized that the companies he was helping set up as cover for Agency operations held potential for legitimate profits-and beyond that, for enormous personal gain.

Contact with wealthy and influential men was a bracing experience for someone who'd been brought up to believe in the American genius for making leaps to new levels of privilege. Being rich, he saw, was something you grew into. The Agency had huge collections of intelligence on banana republics and their leaders. Larry traded secrets for pieces of promising action. He spent time in Cuba, setting up transactions between the Batista government and interests in the U.S. He helped arrange mineral surveys, land-development deals, drilling contracts, casino franchises. He traveled to Oriente Province to learn the extent of the rebel threat to cane fields controlled by U.S. firms. The extent was considerable. When the American executives left their palm-shaded streets and large white houses, when the cooks and gardeners looked for new situations, when the company guards fled, when the local army post was overrun, Laurence Parmenter's fortune was still in the ground of the unexplored oil properties of Cuba.

"I admire that robe, Larry. You look like Orson Welles in deep focus."

He stood in the doorway smiling absently at the familiar flatness in her voice, not quite hearing what she said.

"On second thought I'll tell you what you look like. You look like one of those corrupt barons in Ivan the Terrible, got up deli-ciously in animal skins. Make me a drink so I can keep you company. We ought to keep each other company."

After the revolution came the plan to invade. He helped set up the Double-Chek Corporation, a front for the recruitment of pilot instructors. Gibraltar Steamship came next, a company whose nominal head was a former State Department officer and ex-president of United Fruit. Parmenter himself could not always tell where the Agency left off and the corporations began. There were men related by blood and by marriage; there were company directors who were former high-ranking intelligence officers; there were government advisers who were once company directors. It was a society he recognized as a better-working version of the larger world, where things have an almost dreamy sense of co

Gibraltar Steamship provided cover for propaganda operations against Cuba. The device was Radio Swan, a transmitter stored in an oversized trailer on a remote island in the western Caribbean. Great Swan Island was the product of hundreds of years of bird droppings. There were three coconut palms, twenty-eight people. Lovely numbers, everyone agreed, pointing toward barre

When the messages were broadcast, Larry was in Washington at the Agency's invasion headquarters, a tempo building near the Lincoln Memorial. He was eating a soggy meal off a paper plate when news hit the control room that JFK would not approve air cover for the landings. The men did not accept it at first. Too unbelievably stupid and cruel. A colonel in golf togs walked through. The men shouted at superiors, damn near grew violent. Someone vomited lazily in a wastebasket, leaning over with his hands on his knees. Win Everett arrived from Miami, wrote out a letter of resignation, tore it up, flew back to Miami to be with exile leaders who were confined in a barracks at Opa-Locka so they would not leak word of the landings. It was the first major death watch in South Florida that week.