The Myanmar Agreement, Part I

THE MYANMAR ARGEEMENT -- PART I

The assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, the only U.S. government-sponsored murder of an allied head of state in American history, took place on November 2, 1963. Just days later, the young American President was dead. Over the years, conspiracy theorists have attempted to connect these events, usually casting blame on various members of Diem’s extended family, always in error.

* *

Three men, already positioned to make a huge profit from the high crime of a political man and refusing to serve as the designated victims of the ensuing cover-up, bent world events to their own purposes in 1963. Their leader was Marc Raphael. That was then. Several decades later, things changed.
Bill Tyne was the prime catalyst for the change, when he met Raphael for the second time in his life—the first had been in war-torn Cholon, Saigon’s Chinatown; this time the site was Myanmar. Tyne, to be sure, was forced into making serious trade-offs, but, on the whole, he bested Raphael, being able to attain his goal solely because he appreciated the downside to his leverage, that he had to be willing to risk his own future to close the deal.
The immediate business done, Tyne headed home to New York and unburdened himself to his grown son, Jason, saying that he expected to be indicted shortly for a crime that had never been committed, but that he had agreed not to offer a real defense.
As Bill Tyne explained, Raphael had implicated the prosecutorial forces of the American government in an elaborate scheme to compromise him before the results of an investigation Tyne had conducted could be released. The move was brilliant; Tyne had circumstantial evidence, not proof, and, with any taint on his credibility, he had nothing.
And in all probability, controlling the scheme was now beyond even Raphael’s acknowledged abilities, hence the expected indictment. But Tyne had seen his downfall coming and had responded, running his own scam, bolstering the “evidence” from his investigation with bogus documentation, all based on the real facts and good enough for the short run. In the end, Raphael and his partners had decided to accept what seemed to be an acceptable resolution, just to live out their remaining years in relative peace.
Jason knew the outline of Marc Raphael’s long career; his father had given him the background. Born in 1925 to French parents on a teak plantation in Laos, Raphael matured quickly, fighting the Japanese in the valley of the Mekong in World War II. Disgusted by the casual ineptitude of his French superiors, he bolted with his native troops and offered his services to the Americans. By war’s end, as an accomplished jungle fighter, he was granted U.S. citizenship and joined the OSS, soon to become the CIA. He ran a series of covert operations for the CIA in Laos before being assigned to Station Saigon in the late fifties.
Backed on the ground in the CIA by Blake Ward, a veteran of the American effort to make Guatemala more useful to the United Fruit Company, and by the urbane and well-connected Thomas Andrews, he emerged as the most successful American operative in South Vietnam.
Raphael was an admirer of President Diem and always believed that America had sealed its fate in Vietnam by killing the one man who had the stature with the people to compete with Ho Chi Minh. None of that stopped him from doing his job--or from making his profit.
Later, in the early-seventies, with Ward and Andrews as his partners, Raphael formed Rawaan Ltd. in Singapore and increased their considerable fortunes, trading commodities between Asia and the U.S. Old colleagues in the CIA marveled at the success of Rawaan, but many kept their distance, at least in the beginning, believing that the hefty seed money to start the business had to be tainted, hearing the rumors that a secret fund President Diem controlled to finance a government-in-exile had disappeared.
By the millennium, the Raphael group had all retired from active business, leaving Rawaan to a new generation of managers. Marc Raphael went back to his roots, living in colonial splendor among the Shan people in the wilds of northern Myanmar. Blake Ward left Singapore and settled in Los Angeles, fighting the cancer that was eating his body, always regretting the cost of his success. Thomas Andrews had directed Rawaan’s U.S. operations out of New York—he had even served a stint as the American Ambassador to Singapore--and opted to spend his declining years at his Manhattan townhouse.
As an Army captain in the late-sixties, Bill Tyne had seen combat, none more horrific than the high-casualty escort mission he commanded during the Tet offensive in 1968--when he met Marc Raphael for the first time.
Tyne had survived to come home—not a hero, just alive--attending law school, becoming an attorney in New York, gaining a solid reputation as a deal maker, leading a clean life, as a husband, a father and, after twenty-five years of marriage, as a widower.
Lee Deng, a Hong Kong businessman, had approached Tyne—making clear that he was only an agent, always declining to reveal the identity of his principal. Deng wanted Tyne to investigate the old combat mission at Tet 1968.
“Back then,” Deng said, “you were part of something much greater than yourself, something reaching back to the early days of the American involvement in Vietnam. I tell you this--you and your men were used. You helped to transfer sixty million U.S. dollars out of South Vietnam, money stolen by Marc Raphael and his people. I ask you to find out for yourself what other events you were involved in.”
Tyne, mourning his wife and looking for a new purpose to his life, accepted the assignment. Deng provided his extensive network of contacts and a security detail. What Tyne learned over the course of eighteen hard months might, or might not, be believed in the long run, but all of that was very problematic to Raphael, and he found himself obliged to accommodate Tyne.
Thereafter, Tyne’s immediate problem was with the criminal justice system. Under Raphael’s original counterpoint, Tyne had allegedly supervised a botched break-in at Rawaan’s New York offices, economic sabotage being the motive. The pretense was that Thomas Andrews had wanted to handle the matter privately, but that there had been a leak and Rawaan had reluctantly brought in the D.A.’s office. The NYPD case officer, Detective Ed Fagan, never understood why a man with Tyne’s unsullied background would get himself involved in such a plan. When he learned of the old link between Rawaan’s owners and the CIA, and then about Tyne and Raphael at Tet 1968, his mind conjured up all sorts of exotic scenarios, all to no result.
But after the deal in Myanmar was made, Raphael instructed Thomas Andrews to appeal to the highest levels of government he could reach to prevent Tyne’s indictment. There could be no admission of any falsification of the evidence and the argument was necessarily limited to a claim of adverse publicity to the business. Andrews was listened to respectfully, but his efforts had no effect.
Fagan met with Tyne to give him a last chance to explain the evidence against him, all that Raphael had originally structured. He had no success.
Tyne was indicted; he made bail. None of the media coverage was unfavorable to Rawaan.
The Myanmar Agreement provided that the substantial truth would first be released in a fictional context. Professor Gene Meyers, a Deng contact and a rising-star historian at a major American university, was writing the full-length novelization--the working title was The Incident at Cholon.
The young professor was charged with changing just enough of the identities and factual structure to keep from exposing the actual participants. Full disclosure was only for the distant future.
Bill Tyne had physical possession of the taped statements of Marc Raphael, Blake Ward and Thomas Andrews that had been secured in Myanmar. The agreement provided that the Meyers’ effort would be held by Tyne and not be published until the three conspirators were dead or the year 2010, whichever was later. There was only one modest exception permitted. Proper safeguards were in place in case anything happened to Tyne. The selection of the release date for the novel had been the toughest point on which to reach an accord. The issue was resolved when Raphael, at seventy-six years of age, announced that he would extend the date by himself, by living. It was agreed that the hard evidence, the tapes, would be put into the public domain ten years after the novel was first published.
As far as Tyne could tell, Raphael and his partners had put the truth on the tapes, fully believing that Tyne would keep his part of the arrangement.
Raphael himself seemed to be without any suggestion of remorse when he explained on the tape why he held the American President personally responsible for the Diem assassination.

Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge came to South Vietnam in August 1963 with a clear mission—to get rid of President Diem. America wanted to run the war without taking the risk that Diem might actually do his job, maybe arrange a separate peace with Ho Chi Minh. But Lodge had no idea what he was doing; he knew nothing about Vietnam. I once told him that Diem was from Thua Thien Hue and had a lot of support up there. He’d never heard of the place--he tried to fake it, but he didn't know if it was a city or a province or what. But I reluctantly followed his orders to set up a coup. The original plan was that Diem was to be permitted to go into exile. In mid-October, Lodge told me that Diem wasn't going to survive the takeover. I balked, told him he didn't have the authority. For ten days I did nothing and the plans were falling apart. Then he called me to the Embassy--to meet Congressman Torbert Macdonald. I knew of Macdonald. Tom Andrews always kept us briefed on the VIPs who came to Saigon. The Congressman was close to the President. They had been at Harvard together and¼socialized a lot. He was known to be Kennedy's personal emissary on sensitive missions, political and personal. Macdonald told me that Lodge had the authority he claimed, that the President was the driving force and that Lodge was only fronting the effort. With those assurances, I went back to work. Later, when Lodge told me--actually told me--that I had exceeded orders and that the President was calling for an investigation, my first thought was that Lodge was the only senior American official I'd ever met who flaunted his stupidity...then I had the other thought."

Raphael had his facts right. Americans are still asked to believe that the U.S. had no responsibility for President Diem’s death. The American people, Tyne knew, had been lied to since 1963. Substantial confirmation of President Kennedy’s culpability in Diem’s murder is available, but history-lite as truth is always preferred.
Gene Meyers evaluated the Raphael tape against the backdrop of the extant 1963 cable traffic between Washington and the American Embassy in South Vietnam--particularly the articulated calls for plausible denial, to shield the American President from the consequences of his own acts. Meyers could envision Lodge telling Torbert Macdonald or another of the Kennedy insiders about the recalcitrant CIA agent, Marc Raphael--how this one man was letting the coup plans fall apart. Raphael could be put on track by the use of a simple expedient, the truth, and then after the Diem assassination he and his subordinates, Ward and Andrews, would be available to be unmasked as running their own operation. The word of a man who was essentially a mercenary, only an American by reason of his skill at killing, would be no match for Ambassador Lodge and that of the American President. But for the events in Dallas on November 22, 1963 that ended the very modest American interest in the responsibility for the Diem assassination and terminated the need to protect the American President’s image, Raphael would have had no chance when Kennedy’s men came to South Vietnam to investigate Diem’s death.

There was one point on which Tyne and Meyers had a disagreement over the methodology for portraying the substantial truth. Meyers felt he had to describe as accurately as possible how the unwilling scapegoats made the connection to the shooter. Tyne knew the route—from Tom Andrews to his old associate at Langley, Morgan Pape, to Anatoliy Golitsyn, the notorious Russian “defector” who, by reason of a collective mental breakdown within the CIA, was given unrestricted access to American intelligence files. Tyne thought that any reference to Pape, whom he was told had acted as Golitsyn’s minder, was too direct.
When Meyers persisted, Tyne isolated on what had been said about Morgan Pape on the tapes. A closet homosexual from a prominent New York family, compromised long before by Andrews, Pape was never an independent person in his relationship with the Raphael group.
Tyne then made the effort to go over the tapes with Meyers, to see if the problem could be solved. Sitting in the young professor's office, he listened again to Blake Ward's description of his trip back to the U.S. in November 1963.

Raphael arranged for me to report to the Agency and I arrived at Langley on Thursday, November seventh. I met with Bill Colby that day, gave him the whole story about Lodge ordering Diem’s death and the President’s involvement. He wasn't interested, didn't even take a statement or make notes. I never saw DCI McCone. I knew where I stood.
When did you hook up with Pape? Tyne asked, serving as the interrogator.
Right away, he was our man and I operated out of his place....By late the next Monday, that would be November eleventh, it was obvious that the Agency was finished with me and I went on leave, giving Pape's home phone number to the contact desk. I had four weeks for myself, nobody at Langley was going to bother me, but later, when I left the D.C. area, I checked in with Pape every night.
Tell me about your dealings with Morgan Pape.

* *

"I'm giving you everyone I can," Pape said, "not the first team by a long shot."
I was studying the files, sitting in the den in Pape's Georgetown apartment, carefully reading the data.
"I've got four cities in Texas to consider," I noted, "and most of your possibles are in the Dallas area. Why?"
"Dallas...the hate capital of Dixie," Pape responded simply.
"Yeah, but the majority of these people are Hispanics, not the most dependable in my experience, nobody I had in Guatemala could shoot straight....Why so many of them?"
"Dallas attracts a lot of revolutionary debris out of Central and South American and even the pro-Castro crazies, the one's who'd get hurt in Miami.... I’m giving you what's available. Maybe you should do the job yourself."
But Raphael had been emphatic--we needed a bag holder—and I continued to review the files.
"Who's this Oswald?" I asked finally.
According to Pape, Golitsyn found the ex-Marine interesting—as an agent-in-waiting for a variety of prospective employers, a natural anarchist who spent most of his adult life fruitlessly trying to fit himself into a structured environment. I read the file materials again—first I’d ever heard of a book depository.
When I’d learned all I could about Oswald, I asked Pape about money. We didn’t have access to Diem’s fund yet—we didn’t have actual control over it until just before we brought it out at Tet 1968--and we’d only been able to scrape up $15,000.
"I have about twenty thousand in cash for you," he replied, "best I could do on short notice."
I took his money, believing that it would be returned intact. I was hunting for a sick mind. There was no time to buy real talent.
We continued on, discussing detail. Pape confirmed that security would be no problem. I had two weapons--a .38 and a scoped M-1 carbine--souvenirs of my days in Guatemala, made untraceable before delivery to our contract rebels down there. I could take any domestic flight with the weapons in a carry-on bag.
I was working with two sets of fake ID that I’d brought from Station Saigon, but the situation in Dallas caused me to ask for additional documentation. The paperwork would be crude, low quality, but Pape had no choice but to oblige me. He came through. I was in Dallas by the fifteenth.

* *
That's him, I thought as I isolated on the scrawny, thin-haired young man exiting the Book Depository with a group of low-end clerical-types, in the group but acting alone. Pape couldn’t get me a home address for Oswald. He was believed to be living away from his family at an unknown location.
Without a word, Oswald parted from his co-workers at the first corner. I followed him, using a car rented under one of the IDs I’d brought from Vietnam, J. Scott Conrad, a nonexistent bureaucrat from an obscure federal agency. But to Oswald, I would be someone else entirely.
He went south out of the city center on foot, going far enough that I sensed he was walking to his destination. I waited until he was clear of the downtown area, approaching him when he reached a residential street about a half-mile from the Depository.

"Mr. Lee Harvey Oswald," I called through the open front window on the passenger side, "you and I should talk."
He stopped and moved toward the car, bending to lean into the window. "You government," he said simply, hostility not suppressed.
"Yes, I am" I said, "but not the one that's been visiting your wife and kids out in Irving. Get in...please."
He hesitated. I sat at the wheel, doing nothing until he entered the car.
Then I handed him a folder of documents—Pape’s contribution--on the stationery of the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City, asking him to inspect the contents carefully as I started to move the car farther out of the city.
"I don't read Spanish so good," Oswald said.
"No problema, Senor," I responded, aware that his brainpower was an issue and pleased that he could at least recognize the language. "My name is Augusto Viceros. I serve as the director of the Mexican-Cuban Institute of Cultural Affairs. My actual duties are of a confidential nature--my office is at the Consulate in Mexico City. We almost met back in September."
"I mighta been at the Consulate," he replied slowly.
"You were, on the twenty-seventh and the twenty-eighth. I was there as well. You couldn’t know that the American CIA has blanket surveillance on the Consulate. That is why we couldn't consider your request to join our cause, why we were forced to be abrupt with you. Now, my friend, we can speak freely."
I noticed a supermarket, standing alone and with a half-full parking lot, and pulled in, finding a spot far away from the main entrance between two cars that looked to be there for the day. Satisfied that we would not be interrupted, I tried to get a sense of the man.
"Mr. Oswald, we have a saying in my country, Usted so es muy inteligente, pero puede ser la solucion. Freely translated, that means that we may be of use to each other. Do you still want to go to Cuba?"
Oswald launched into an inane diatribe against the American and Russian political systems, all missing my question entirely, causing me to doubt his stability. When he finally sputtered out, I started to feed him stories about the beauty of the Cuban countryside and the progressive nature of the Fidelistas, letting him cool down.
"Okay," Oswald finally broke in, responding at last, "I gotta be in a place like Cuba, where the worker is the boss. I made that clear in Mexico City."
"So you did, Mr. Oswald, but you haven't shown what you can do for Cuba. Your record in Russia was not so good. Your work with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans was admirable and duly noted, but not successful at all. You’ll have to prove your worth to the cause."
"What can I do?"
“We’ll see,” I answered, and then offered to drive him home.

On the way to his rooming house in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas, I asked Oswald to tell me about his life. He was not guarded, almost relaxed, and everything he said was consistent with the information I had—that he was a borderline moron. But I made an appointment to meet with him on the following day, Saturday, November sixteenth. Then I called Pape.

* *

Whatever was to happen with Oswald, I would still be short on help and I knew it. Raphael couldn’t operate stateside—he would attract attention—and Andrews wasn’t a true field agent. I told Pape that he should find me some backup, hopefully an upgrade on the people he’d already run by me.
"Maybe I can steer you to some people,” he replied, “but not if they know what you're doing."
"Tell me."
Pape asked for time and I gave him an hour. He called back in two and went through a series of names, basically a bunch of losers--some terminated Agency personnel and a few ex-military types--all based in Texas, drunks mostly. I listened without enthusiasm.
"Is that all?" I asked when he seemed finished.
Pape hesitated before continuing. "Well, here's a long shot...a Jewish guy I met in New York in the early forties, before the war. He wasn't really in my circle, but we had a mutual friend--Ginny Belasco, the granddaughter of the playwright, David Belasco. He was a salesman back then, out of Chicago, but working the New York market. He was very rough ‘round the edges and quick with his fists, liked to bust up Bund meetings, talked a patriotic game even though he tried to duck the service when the war broke out. I hadn't seen him in over twenty years until he spotted me on the street up in New York last summer. He was there on some union-type problem, wanted to tell me all about it, I didn't have time—he’s based in Dallas now."
"Is he--"
"Queer, maybe, maybe not, I'm not sure, but he won't connect to me."
"Why do you think he can help me?"
"Well, you know the Company, I run into an old acquaintance and maybe it's not a coincidence, so I checked him out when I got back to D.C. He owns a couple of nightclubs in Dallas. The FBI has him down as a sometimes informant. The way they tell it, he knows everyone in town, including the mob types. My sense is that he gives the Bureau ice-in-winter. That figures…from what I remember, he'd be at the fringes, but street-savvy. His file says he has major problems with the IRS."
I knew the risk, that my makeshift duo would come straight out of the same Intel files.
"What's his name?" I asked.
"He was Sparky Rubenstein in the old days," Pape replied, "calls himself Jack Ruby now."
The U.S. Intel files were only common thread between them, it turned out—not that anyone ever focused on that


* *

The next morning, Oswald took a bus to the Motor Vehicle Office--his idea, not mine--my possible was learning how to drive--and when he started to walk back to his place, I picked him up in my car. There was no tail on him.

“I’ve been thinkin' about this big time," Oswald began after submitting to a frisk. "I gotta get outta here. The FBI will have me fired soon--they do it all the time. I got mouths to feed."
I didn't respond. Factually, I knew that Oswald himself was the prime mover in the Lee Harvey constant-discharge cycle. And more to the point, you can't talk to a man about a kill unless you see the reaction, measure the response. I made for the Dallas Zoo and parked the car in an isolated spot.
"Have you ever taken anyone out, Lee?" I asked as we sat in the car shaded by a high tree on a beautiful fall day.
"Got close once," Oswald said and then told me about his attempt on General Edwin Walker, the right-wing fanatic who Kennedy had removed from a NATO command for his racist theorizing. Inauspiciously, Oswald had muffed a clear shot through a window, but I knew the story and didn’t disagree when he claimed he’d merely been unlucky. The round had nicked a thin, invisible-to-him cross-slat in the window and had been deflected
“But I still shoudda got him,” Oswald maintained, “bein' I'm a marksman and all."
"What weapon did you use?" I asked.
"An I-tal military rifle, a Carcano with a four-power scope, beautiful piece of gear.”
We talked for hours and as the time passed, I felt that I might not do better than this boy-man of loyalties so confused he didn't have any.
I finally told him what the Cuban government wanted of him, forcing him to look me in the eyes before letting him speak.
"I can do it, sir," was Oswald's response, delivered with feeling, but quick, automatically, like I had asked him his chances on some marine training course. Oswald was all certainty, no depth. President Kennedy would destroy my life to cover his butt and never spend a second worrying about it, but I took no pride in sicking this perpetual reject on him.
We talked more, about his family--they would join him in Cuba after he was settled, but I didn't get the sense that I was negotiating a deal-breaker--and about a job for him in Cuba.
Oswald, unable to drive an automobile, wanted to be an engineer. I agreed that he would receive appropriate training and that he could become an engineer in Cuba if he could pass muster. He argued the point, even getting hot with me, but eventually he gave way. Something must have penetrated into his dimness, telling him that even Castro requires his engineers to have basic skills.
We agreed to meet again on the following Wednesday, after he came off shift.

* *

"Hi, I'm Jack Ruby. I own this joint."
The lighting at the Carousel Club was only a faint glow at the bar, not much better where the tables were placed, bright on the triple runway, brighter still when the strippers worked. I had a table on the back wall, well away from the runway and the smallish but noisy, Saturday night crowd. I had come in at the end of a show. Another was promised shortly.
"Join me for a minute, Sparky," I responded.
Ruby smiled and sat, like he was pleased to have a distinguished-looking customer who used his youth name. At the Carousel, a distinguished look was easy to achieve.
"I haven't been called Sparky for years," he offered, "not since Joe Bonds went away. He was my partner until the local law hit him with the book. What's your name, fellah."
"Call me Gideon," I said, using my last identity, Gideon Travis, a nonexistent journalist from a Canadian newsmagazine. Raphael had picked the Gideon name--for the Biblical warrior who was forced to go into battle without most of his troops. God told Gideon that only the totally outnumbered understand the source of their power, but he had been left with a tenth part of his army plus some blowing horns, loud enough to rattle the enemy. All I had were two partners on idle back in Vietnam, plus a pervert in D.C. and a local wacko, but then, I wasn’t doing God’s work.
"I was told you're a player in Dallas," I continued, "that I should look you up."
"By who?"
"Let’s say I'm not at liberty to answer that, but I'm not with the IRS or the FBI or any of those. I know all about your tax problems and the fact that you're jerking Hoover's people off doesn't faze me a bit….I'm working alone and I may have a situation where I need a local who’s on the ball, someone who knows the scene."
Ruby called for a waitress, he called her a champagne girl. He asked for coffee and offered me whatever. I declined.
"Smart," I said, after the girl departed. I couldn’t expect to be invisible, but I wasn’t particularly worried. I was using a washable gray dye in my hair, the effect was to add several years to my appearance.
Ruby smiled again, the fox operating in his den.
"I know facts about you, Jack, just bare facts" I continued. "Tell me the rest, tell me what Jack Ruby is all about."
I listened for most of an hour, getting the feel of the man. We were interrupted only occasionally by groans from the emcee's feeble attempts at humor and by the slightly better response to the club's main purpose.
He was full of contradictions--a man of intense pride in his heritage (Jews got guts, that's why Jews get top billing throughout history), but a man who changed his name to avoid any fallout from his own ethnicity; a civic booster and Kennedy admirer (Jack Kennedy is some class act--his coming to Dallas next week will be a great shot in the arm for business here), yet a man who never bothered to vote and wasn't planning on watching the presidential motorcade; a product of the Chicago ghetto who thought he'd moved up (In lieu of the situation, I got the classiest place in town--this is where all the fuckin' lawyers come)--no style, all schlock.
But Ruby impressed me as likeable, a decent guy, even if slightly under-civilized--and the ethnic angle stuck with me.
"If I need help," I said just before leaving, "I coming to see you."
He didn’t respond.

* * See PART II