CHAPTER 34
Maggie Taylor finished her rum and asked Brodie to make her another.
Brodie rarely refused a drink request from a young lady, but whatever Maggie Taylor was offering while sober needed to be given the same way. “Later.”
She nodded. “Okay… Well, Flagstaff. It’s the name of a CIA program in Afghanistan. Once you know that, you know that the code name is obviously a sort of in-joke takeoff on the Phoenix Program.”
He nodded. But there was nothing funny about the notorious Phoenix Program—the CIA Black Ops initiative in Vietnam that had been tasked with wiping out the Viet Cong infrastructure through infiltration, kidnappings, torture, and of course assassination. Literally thousands of Viet Cong—or suspected Viet Cong—had been executed without due process and often without much evidence. As Brodie understood it, CIA officers, in partnership with Army intelligence, did the Intel work and also a little of the wet stuff, but most of the dirty work was done by the South Vietnamese National Police, and even by U.S. Army Special Forces personnel who’d been recruited by the Agency. The program was always controversial because ICs—innocent civilians—had been killed by mistake, and it had been shut down after a congressional investigation. But history showed that Phoenix was very effective in accomplishing its mission. Therefore it would not surprise Brodie if, like the mythical phoenix that rose to life from its own ashes, the spooks at Langley thought that Phoenix—reborn as Flagstaff—would work well in Afghanistan.
He looked at Maggie Taylor, who he assumed had some knowledge of this from her CIA boyfriend. “Go on.”
She nodded. “When I was deployed to Afghanistan, I stayed in touch with Trent.” She glanced at Brodie and continued, “He told me he was working on something very important. With Special Ops units in Afghanistan.”
And Special Ops often became Black Ops when the CIA got involved—as happened in Vietnam. Some things never change—except for the name. Brodie said, “And this was the Flagstaff program.”
“Trent didn’t give me a name for this program, but later he slipped up and used the name. He hinted that people in Civil Affairs… people I knew… were also helping the Agency with this program, and maybe I’d like to help.” She stared off into space, then continued, “That should have set off alarm bells, but… I was naïve, stupid, and eager to assist in the war effort.”
Brodie had heard enough confessions to know not to interrupt when the suspect was crossing the threshold, and to ask questions only when the person began to dissemble or contradicted an earlier statement. Or when they started to justify what they’d done. He wasn’t so sure Maggie Taylor was that stupid and naïve not to understand that her old boyfriend was recruiting her, but he let it pass. He was tempted, however, to point out that she showed poor judgment in that relationship. Brodie had been there himself, so he could be sympathetic, but he had never let the personal cross over into the professional. Apparently she had. Getting involved with the spooks was messy, and it didn’t easily wash off.
Taylor continued, “I was working mostly in Helmand Province, west of Kandahar. Taliban country and opium country. The peasants were making good money from the opium, but so was the Taliban. So the Afghan government, at the urging of the Americans, was ordering the peasants to burn the poppy fields, and Civil Affairs was working with an NGO that was helping to convert the fields and the farmers to raising food.” She forced a smile. “Doing God’s work.”
Actually, thought Brodie, it was an exercise in futility, courtesy of the policy geniuses in the Pentagon. Last he heard, Afghanistan was now producing more opium than it had before the war. Veggies are good for you, but opium pays better. His father should have been growing marijuana instead of smoking it.
Taylor continued, “Trent called me on my sat phone about once a week while I was deployed. He seemed interested in what I was doing, and asked a lot of questions about the villagers and the Afghan officials that I dealt with.” She paused, then admitted, “I understood that Trent was gatheringIntel, but I didn’t have any classified information, and even if I did… I didn’t think there was any law against sharing information with someone who had a high security clearance.”
Especially if you’d slept with him. Brodie said, “There are actually rules and procedures relating to sharing information with other government agencies.”
She nodded. “I understand that now.”
“You understood it then. Instinctively, if nothing else.”
Again she nodded, but insisted, “I had no classified information.”
“Everything you see and hear in a war zone is classified.”
“I know that. Army Intel also asked us a lot of questions about what we saw and heard. Everyone wanted to exploit the Civil Affairs teams. We were supposed to be helping the Afghans, and winning their trust—hearts and minds—but we wound up being the eyes and ears for Army intelligence, and we were under orders to cooperate with them.”
“Right. But not with the CIA.”
She stared at him for a few seconds. “You’re not making this easy.”
“The truth,” said Brodie, quoting the CIA motto, “shall make you free.”
She thought for a moment. “The truth is I let a personal relationship cloud my judgment, and I was partly aware of that, and I knew it was wrong. But another part of me figured I was helping anyway, and that was more important. We’re all on the same side, right?”
Well, the CIA was on its own side, and played well with others only when it suited the Agency’s interests. If Taylor didn’t know that then, she certainly understood it now through some hard experience.
She sat back on the couch and looked out the glass doors to the balcony. A tropical storm was on the way, and heat lightning flashed across the dark sky, followed by the sharp clap of thunder, which reminded both of them of artillery. She said, as if to herself, “The job sucked. We accomplished almost nothing. The Afghans were duplicitous. The only reason we were able to operate in Taliban territory is because the Taliban took half of what we gave the peasants. But now and then, the Taliban would decide to engage a Civil Affairs team—just to show us who ran the show and whose country it was—and the Afghans, who we were trying to help, would set us up for an ambush. On top of all this, Army Intel would debrief us, asking thesame kinds of questions that Trent asked me. And whenever a villager in a place where we’d been working got arrested by the Afghan National Police or picked up by an American Army unit, the locals assumed it was because Civil Affairs had fingered them, which didn’t do much for our mission of establishing trust—which actually didn’t matter because there was no trust on either side.” She took a deep breath. “So I got the Silver Star, a Purple Heart, and a bad case of the blues.”
And, thought Brodie, you got out of there on a medevac chopper, leaving behind a little blood and a lot of innocence. War will do that. It did something to Kyle Mercer, the patriotic kid from San Diego. It did something to Scott Brodie.
She poured herself some cola and continued, “Trent told me they were trying to gather Intel on peasants who would slip out of their villages after the spring planting to go fight with the Taliban.”
Brodie nodded.Where have all the young men gone? Gone to soldiers, every one.Afghanistan had been at war so long that they actually had a “fighting season” that came every spring and lasted until the part-time jihadists returned to their villages to harvest the wheat and/or the poppies. There were a lot of downsides to perpetual war, but it did drive a year-round economy.
Taylor went on, “So after a month of me answering Trent’s questions came the big ask.” She paused, then continued, “He wanted me to start documenting my info more closely… like who these young guys were, their names, and how many there were, the names and the layouts of the villages, did I ever see any guys who had apparently been wounded, did I see anyone who didn’t seem to belong in the village, did I have any suspicions about the village elders… that kind of thing.”
Brodie wondered when Taylor had realized that the guys she was reporting on were being marked for death. Or at least arrest, torture, and—if they were lucky—imprisonment. Sounded a lot like Phoenix reborn.
