Without Honor (18 page)

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Authors: David Hagberg

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“In the midst of all this came Darby Yarnell, the bright young MBA directly out of Harvard. Oh, what a force he was in those days. But how ready we were for him. Let me tell you,” Owens said.
He was recruited in the spring of his senior year right there at the school. It was before the Vietnam era when the mention of an agency recruitment team on a campus was cause for a major riot. In the late fifties there was still a lot of idealism around. The recruiting teams consisted mostly of a grade-one clerk, a regional desk officer, and as often as possible a field man home for debriefings. The clerk covered the entry-level possibilities, the desk jock talked about the advancement, the good pay, and the intellectual challenges of the Company, and of course the field man bespoke the James Bond romance of the job.
“I don't remember who we sent up there that year, but the young Yarnell nearly talked every one of them out of the Company, convincing them that they were wasting their time, that theirs was an immoral task, and furthermore, that someday they'd be remembered by their children as no better than Gestapo thugs, mindless wretches for whom
1984
had already become reality.”
Of course, Yarnell had overwhelmed them with his intelligence, his breeding, and the sheer force of his personality. Who could resist such a combination in those days? Who could resist such a combination in any age? Pharaohs and czars had fallen for less. The man was possessed of that rare combination: charm
and
intelligence.
“Our team came back with their tails between their legs, ready to give up on everything they'd ever learned. We didn't have the Farm down in Williamsburg like we do now. No place really to send them to get their heads back on straight. Yarnell did
it for us. He came traipsing down to Washington, innocent as all get out, ready, willing, and able to give his all for the cause. Gabriel couldn't have done better with his horn.”
Owens chuckled with the memory.
“He must have been the wunderkind,” McGarvey suggested.
“Oh, yes, the wunderkind,” Owens hooted. “Someone's exact words, I'm sure. I was working the Latin American desk in those days, and I saw Yarnell as the perfect catch. He'd not only learned Spanish —and learned it well—in college, he'd spent time in Spain and he actually understood the bastards. Not simply their language, mind you. Any high school kid can master Spanish in a few semesters. I'm talking their souls. Their
esencia
. Yarnell knew what he was talking about, no question about it. He was exactly what we thought we needed at the time.”
Yarnell went through his training at the speed of light, soaking up information sometimes faster than the instructors could feed it to him, which started his prowling days.
“We weren't so compartmentalized then, you know. Should have been though. The
Abwehr
had taught us a big lesson … I mean, Canaris did pay the ultimate price for knowing too much, having too many feelings … . And the NKVD was years ahead of us, too, but then we'd never had a Dzerzhinsky or a Beria. Still …”
Owens was starting to wander, so McGarvey brought him back on track. “Prowling days? I don't understand.”
“He became an alley cat. Any handout was welcome, didn't care which hand fed him. Went from office to office, section to section, finding out what was up. Often as not he'd drop in with a bottle of French brandy or a box of Cuban cigars, and by
the time he'd left they'd all be on a first-name basis and he'd have made three suggestions in seven different directions as to how they could improve their operation.”
Again Owens stopped a moment to think back.
“The damndest thing about him, though—and this part I remember directly—was that no one ever took offense with Yarnell's meddling because, quite simply, it wasn't
meddling.
You always got the feeling in those days that he was genuinely interested in helping you out. He was sincerely concerned that the CIA should become the very best intelligence agency the world had ever seen. He wanted breeding in the service. Knowledge. Sensibilities for the arts. Spying to the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms.”
“So he went to Mexico?” McGarvey asked.
Owens looked up. “After his training, after a stint with me overseeing him on the Latin American desk, we sent him down to our embassy in Mexico City.”
“Mexico was our southern neighbor and in many ways our ally, but the Russians ruled supreme in the diplomatic and intelligence circles in Mexico City. They'd adopted our philosophy there from day one: If you want to run the show, throw a lot of money into it. And they did. Their embassy was bigger and better equipped than ours. They cultivated more people within and outside of the Mexican government than we did. They threw more parties, offered more clandestine aid to almost any cause in the bush, and had consulates in more outback cities than we thought was necessary.
“For forty miles beyond our border along Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California we were king. Beyond that there was—and still is from what I'm told—a definite Russian presence. The proletarian
uprising may not have gained any kind of a foothold in the desert hinterland, but democratic capitalism certainly doesn't hold sway either. In that, rural Mexico is very much like rural Spain; the poor are concerned with their government only in as much as it has the capability of feeding their families.
“Yarnell understood all of this long before any of the rest of us did. Some of it instinctually, some of it intellectually, and the remainder experientially. He was a very fast learner.”
“It was '57 when he went down there?”
“No, more like late ‘58, maybe even the spring of '59. I remember that he hadn't been down there very long before we began gearing up for the Bay of Pigs invasion, and then of course he got married in the midst of the CESTA investigation and the whole ball game with the
Junta de Liberación Latinoamericana
. You know, revolution was coming to Latin America once and for all, and look out Western Hemisphere because the downfall wasn't going to be exactly pretty.”
As Owens went on talking, McGarvey could begin to envision a young, arrogant, well-educated Yarnell first taking over the fledgling CIA and then transferring his efforts and considerable talents to the Russian presence in Mexico City. God, how it must have galled mere mortals like Basulto's case officer, Roger Harris. How much, he wondered, of Harris's pushing was simple paranoia? Harris had wanted to be king, or at least in the top ten. He had to work for it, whereas a man like Yarnell could simply snap his fingers and the service, collectively, would come running. Men like Yarnell became presidents or senators or at least DCIs. Men like Harris had to work for every single scrap that came their way, and they often resented those for whom success seemed to come so naturally. Maybe he was chasing
after a very old vendetta after all, McGarvey thought.
Yarnell took over our embassy in Mexico City just as he had taken over the agency itself back home. The State Department, which even in those days raised objections about the CIA, never said an unkind word about Yarnell, but their universal sentiment was that he was wasted in the agency; he'd fit in so much better at State. He would have become an ambassador. It was a foregone conclusion. He had the feel for the job. He had the look, the flair. But for Yarnell in those days there was nothing but the agency.
 
“Operation Limelight, it was called,” Owens continued telling his story. “From the beginning it was Yarnell's brainchild. In fact, it was he who suggested the program in the first place.”
“Program?” McGarvey asked. It was an odd choice of terminology, he thought.
“It was more than a project. Yarnell figured to put a permanent mechanism in place that would counteract the inroads the CESTA network had made. The Russians certainly would never quit the region so it was up to us to neutralize their effect.” Owens was remembering everything now. “CESTA was more than simply Russians, of course. There were East Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Bulgarians, and naturally the odd lot of Spanish Communists. Their product was said to be the best, though there was a lot of natural animosity between the Mexicans and the true Spaniards. But then a lot of money was being spent down there. Nothing was too good for CESTA. Nothing was too good for the cause; the best equipment, the cream of the crop from NKVD's Intelligence School One outside of Moscow, the old Eastern European hands. And
above all, one of the most sophisticated banking systems anywhere in the world.”
“He must have had the help of the Mexicans themselves,” McGarvey suggested. He could envision Yarnell as a force, but even a superman doesn't work in a vacuum.
“He could have been president of Mexico, for all I know,” Owens said, cross that his story had been interrupted. “He arrived in Mexico and promptly took over the capital. In those days he didn't spend much time at the embassy. Of course it was exactly what we wanted, but no one figured that Yarnell was so dedicated to the cause that he'd actually go out and get married to a native just to ingratiate himself to the country.”
Yarnell had had his detractors in those days, too, Owens stopped a moment to explain. There were a few early voices who thought he was too big for his britches, that he was going too far too fast, and that when the fall came Yarnell, for all his youthful enthusiasm and foolishness, would take a lot of good people with him. When he married this young girl, a member of a good family, his critics claimed he had finally gone too far. The girl was just a baby, still in her teens! What could he be thinking?
“But then none of us really knew Yarnell's measure then, not yet, and none of us had met Evita. If Darby Yarnell was a force to be reckoned with, if he was the sun, then Evita Yarnell was a super nova. All of Mexico City was at their feet.”
CESTA was pals with bureaucrats at every level of the Mexican government. Yarnell's Operation Limelight was the counteraction; our answer to something that had been in place since the forties. Not so easy a task. His first step was to gain the love and respect of the Mexican people, which had been hurried along by his marriage, and then he could
come in with his sweeping gestures to capture the hearts of the men who ran the country.
Owens was a natural storyteller, but he was an old, lonely man who was happy for the company and meant to string out every little detail for as long as he could get away with it. McGarvey had no real objections, for often the kernel of truth you were looking for came in the offhand remarks of some garrulous storyteller. But he wanted the man to at least stay within the main framework of the story—Yarnell's life.
“I still don't get a sense of what Yarnell's program was all about,” McGarvey said. “I understand
what
he was trying to do, and I certainly understand
why,
but I'm not quite sure I see the
how.
”
“Yarnell has always had money. He was raised by his grandparents, as I recall, and they died when he was quite young, leaving him a bundle in trust, which came under his sole control when he turned twenty-five. He hasn't lost money, from what I heard.”
Yarnell bought himself a house on the outskirts of Mexico City … possibly one of the largest, finest palaces in the capital. He staffed it with a lot of his friends—God knows how he got them so quickly, but he was always surrounded by them—and he began to throw parties.
“I saw the house only once,” Owens said, smiling at the memory. “Let me tell you, McGarvey, the place was a palace. He had one of everything there and perhaps two of some things.”
“Who were his targets in those days? I mean, how were they picked out of the crowd?” McGarvey asked.
“He had a governmental directory, of course. He went through it with a red pencil for everyone he figured was committed to CESTA, and a blue pencil
for everyone committed to us. In those days the reds outnumbered the blues two to one.”
“He invited the unmarked … uncommitted ones to his house?”
“To his house, to a hunting lodge he rented, to a little retreat on the ocean. He bought them presents, gave them weekends with beautiful women if need be, but mostly he gave himself; his free, helpful advice on how to solve any problem they might have, from love to engineering, from business to bureaucracy. He became their banker as well as their father confessor. For the entire government.”
“CESTA had more money than Yarnell,” McGarvey said. “Even rich Americans couldn't possibly compete with an entire governmental network … . From what you're telling me CESTA was the entire Warsaw Pact's organization.”
“Of course there was no competition, at least not for money. But CESTA was indiscriminate. They went in for quantity, while Darby Yarnell went for quality. CESTA, for example, might manage to turn five out of the six men running the water utility for Mexico City. But Yarnell would pick the one man on whom the department was most dependent. The one indispensable man. He'd put that man into the limelight so that the entire world could see that he was numero uno, that he loved Mexico above all other nations, that his loyalty could never come into question, and that there would never be another man half as good as he for the job.

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