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If Whitehall was having problems from the tidal wave of telephone calls and press inquiries, the pressure on the White House was trebled. The first statement on the affair out of London had been issued at 7:00 P.M. London time and the White House had been warned an hour before that it would have to come. But that was only 2:00 P.M. Washington time, and the American media reaction had been frenzied.
Craig Lipton; the White House press secretary, had spent an hour in the Cabinet Room with the committee, being briefed on what to say. The trouble was, there was so little. The fact of the abduction could be confirmed, along with the death of two accompanying Secret Service men. Plus the fact that the President’s son was a fine athlete, specializing in cross-country running, and had been on a training run at the time.
It would not help, of course. There is no hindsight as brilliantly perceptive as that of an outraged journalist. Creighton Burbank, while agreeing he would not actually criticize the President nor blame Simon himself, made plain he was not having his Secret Service crucified for falling down on protection when he had specifically asked for more men. A compromise was worked out that would fool no one.
Jim Donaldson pointed out that, as Secretary of State, he still had to maintain relations with London and in any case angry friction between the two capitals would not help and might do real harm; he insisted Lipton stress that a British police sergeant had been murdered as well. This was agreed, though the White House press corps eventually took little notice.
Lipton faced a baying press just after 4:00 P.M. and made his statement. He was on live TV and radio. The moment he finished, the uproar started. He pleaded he could answer no further questions. A victim in the Roman Coliseum might as well have told the lions he was really only a very thin Christian. The uproar increased. Many questions were drowned out but some came through to 100 million Americans, sowing the seeds. Did the White House blame the British? Er, well, no ... Why not? Were they not in charge of security over there? Well, yes, but ... Did the White House blame the Secret Service then? Not exactly ... Why were there only two men guarding the son of the President? What was he doing running almost alone in an isolated area? Was it true Creighton Burbank had offered his resignation? Had the kidnappers communicated yet? To that one he could gratefully answer no, but he was already being goaded into exceeding his brief. That was the point. Reporters can smell a spokesman-on-the-run like a Limburger cheese.
Lipton finally retreated behind the scene, bathed in sweat and determined to go back to Grand Rapids. The glamour of work in the White House was wearing off fast. The newscasters and editorial writers would say what they wanted, regardless of his answers to questions. By nightfall the press tone was becoming markedly hostile to Britain.
Up at the British embassy on Massachusetts Avenue the press attaché, who had also heard of CYA, made a statement. While expressing his country’s dismay and shock at what had happened, he slipped in two points. That the Thames Valley Police had taken a very low-profile role specifically at American request, and that Sergeant Dunn was the only one who had got off two shots at the abductors, giving his life in doing so. It was not what was wanted, but it made a paragraph. It also made a watching Creighton Burbank snarl with anger. Both men knew that the low-profile request, indeed insistence, had come from Simon Cormack via his father, but could not say so.
The Crisis Management Group, the professionals, met through the day in the basement Situation Room, monitoring the information flow out of COBRA in London and reporting upstairs as and when necessary. The National Security Agency had stepped up its monitoring of all telephone communications into and out of Britain in case the kidnappers made a call via satellite. The
FBI’s behavioral scientists at Quantico had come up with a list of psycho-portraits of previous kidnappers and a menu of things the Cormack kidnappers might or might not do, along with lists of do’s and don’ts for the Anglo-American authorities. Quantico firmly expected to be called in and flown to London en masse, and were perplexed at the delay, although none of them had ever operated in Europe.
In the Cabinet Room the committee was living on nerves, coffee, and antacid tablets. This was the first major crisis of the incumbency and the middle-aged politicians were learning the hard way the first rule of crisis management: It is going to cost a lot of sleep, so get what you can while you can. Having risen at 4:00 A.M., the Cabinet members were still awake at midnight.
At that hour the VC20A was over the Atlantic, well west of the Azores, three and a half hours short of landfall and four hours short of touchdown. In the spacious rear compartment the two veterans, Weintraub and Quinn, were catching some sleep. Also sleeping, farther back, was the three-man crew who had flown the jet to Spain; the “slip” crew brought her home.
The men in the Cabinet Room browsed over the dossier on the man called Quinn, gouged out of the files at Langley, with additions from the Pentagon. Born on a farm in Delaware, it said; lost his mother at age ten; now aged forty-six. Joined the infantry at age eighteen in 1963, transferred two years later to the Special Forces and went to Vietnam four months after. Spent five years there.
“He never seems to use his first name,” complained Hubert Reed. “Says here even his intimates call him Quinn. Just Quinn. Odd.”
“He is odd,” observed Bill Walters, who had read further along. “It also says here he hates violence.”
“Nothing odd about that,” replied Jim Donaldson. “I hate violence.”
Unlike his predecessor at State, George Shultz, who had occasionally been known to give vent to a four-letter word, Jim Donaldson was a man of unrelieved primness, a characteristic that had often made him the unappreciative butt of Michael Odell’s leg-pulling jokes.
Thin and angular, even taller than John Cormack, he resembled a flamingo en route to a funeral, and was never seen without his three-piece charcoal-gray suit, gold-fob watch chain, and stiff white collar. Odell deliberately made mention of bodily functions whenever he wished to twit the astringent New Hampshire lawyer, and at each mention Donaldson’s narrow nose would wrinkle in distaste. His attitude to violence was similar to his distaste for crudeness.
“Yes,” rejoined Walters, “but you haven’t read page eighteen.”
Donaldson did so, as did Michael Odell. The Vice President whistled.
“He did that?” he queried. “They should have given the guy the Congressional Medal.”
“You need witnesses for the Congressional Medal,” Walters pointed out. “As you see, only two men survived that encounter on the Mekong, and Quinn brought the other one forty miles on his back. Then the man died of wounds at Danang USMC Military Hospital.”
“Still,” said Hubert Reed cheerfully, “he managed a Silver Star, two Bronze, and five Purple Hearts.” As if getting wounded was fun if they gave you more ribbons.
“With the campaign medals, that guy must have four rows,” mused Odell. “It doesn’t say how he and Weintraub met.”
It didn’t. Weintraub was now fifty-four, eight years older than Quinn. He had joined the CIA at age twenty-four, just out of college in 1961, gone through his training at the Farm—the nickname for Camp Peary on the York River in Virginia—and gone to Vietnam as a GS-12 provincial officer in 1965, about the time the young Green Beret called Quinn arrived from Fort Bragg.
Through 1961 and 1962 ten A-teams of the U.S. Special Forces had been deployed in Darlac Province, building strategic and fortified villages with the peasants, using the “oil-spot” theory developed by the British in beating the Communist guerrillas in Malaya: to deny the terrorists local support, supplies, food, safe-houses, information, and money. The Americans called it the hearts-and-minds policy. Under the Special Forces guidance, it was working.
In 1963, Lyndon Johnson came to power. The Army argued that Special Forces should be returned from CIA control to theirs. They won. It marked the end of hearts-and-minds, though it took another two years to collapse. Weintraub and Quinn met in those two years. The CIA man was concerned with gathering information on the Viet Cong, which he did by skill and cunning, abhorring the methods of men like Irving Moss (whom he did not encounter, since they were in different parts of Vietnam), even though he knew such methods were sometimes used in the Phoenix program, of which he was a part.
The Special Forces were increasingly taken away from their village program to be sent on search-and-destroy missions in the deepest jungle. The two men met in a bar over a beer; Quinn was twenty-one and had been out there a year; Weintraub was twenty-nine and also had a year in ’Nam behind him. They found common cause in a shared belief that the Army High Command was not going to win that kind of war just by throwing ordnance at it. Weintraub found he very much liked the fearless young soldier. Self-educated he might be; he had a first-rate brain and had taught himself fluent Vietnamese, a rarity among the military. They stayed in touch. The last time Weintraub had seen Quinn was during the run up to Son Tay.
“Says here the guy was at Son Tay,” said Michael Odell. “Son of a gun.”
“With a record like that, I wonder why he never made officer,” said Morton Stannard. “The Pentagon has some people with the same kind of decorations out of ’Nam, but they got themselves commissioned at the first opportunity.”
David Weintraub could have told them, but he was still sixty minutes short of touchdown. After taking back control of the Special Forces, the orthodox military—who hated S.F. because they could not understand it—slowly ran down the S.F. role over the six years to 1970, handing over more and more of the hearts-and-minds program, as well as the search-and-destroy missions, to the South Vietnamese ARVN—with dire results.
