Read See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism for Free Online Page B

couldn’t believe they hadn’t put it all together.
    ‘Yes, at least for three years,’ Scott said.
    I took a quick look around my shabby apartment. I thought about how far behind I was in Mandarin. I thought about another night standing at my teller’s window. And then I thought about a ski run I’d made when I was fifteen. There were six of us on our last trip down when we ran into two ski patrolmen we knew, probably the wildest pair in Aspen. They invited us to come look at a new jump they’d built. We followed them off the main run to an old, abandoned mining camp. In a clearing sat three houses in a line on a steep incline. Their roofs were collapsed. Right above the highest house was a six-foot-high jump. The idea was to pick up enough speed to clear all three houses. If you took it too slowly, you risked landing short - in the middle of a house. When one of the ski patrolmen pushed off, I followed without a second thought. As I sighted the jump between my ski tips, the line of houses began to look like a high-rise, but I felt a sense of inevitability. It was totally irrational. At any moment I could have turned off and avoided the jump. But I didn’t. I just kept going.
    I now felt the same way about the CIA. ‘Sure, Jim. I can be there in two weeks. I could even be there next week.’
    After I hung up the phone, I thought, What the hell. I’d finagle an assignment to Switzerland, meet from time to time with one of those shady agents Scott had talked about, gather up a few pieces of information that would save the world, and spend the rest of my time on the ski slopes. A tour in Switzerland and then out. How much trouble could I get in?
----

AUGUST 1977.
SOMEWHERE IN VIRGINIA’S TIDEWATER.
    Crouching in the door of the C-46, I couldn’t see anything. It was like looking into a bottomless well. When I leaned forward a little to look directly below the plane, the engines’ backwash hit me like a fifty-pound sack of cement, almost yanking me out the door.
    We’d spent more than three hours on the tarmac, waiting for God knows what, cinched up in our parachute harnesses and sizzling on the plane’s hot metal floor. The swamp mosquitoes were drilling right through my Korean War-vintage fatigues. At that point I would have happily jumped onto the North Pole. Anything to get out of that Damn place.
    Come on, Red, tap me out.
    ‘Red’ Winstead, the jumpmaster, had his head out the door, russet hair pasted against the side of his face. He was looking intently at the ground. The rest of the stick, my team of jumpers that night, had already gone and was probably close to touching down by now. Red was spreading us out intentionally. ‘You don’t drop everyone in a tight cluster in a combat jump,’ he’d drummed into our heads in ground school. ‘It’s bad operational security.’ Still, it seemed like an eternity since the last jumper had gone out the door. There would be no second chance if we overshot the jump zone. I’d be going back with the plane, the only one who hadn’t jumped.
    A big, tough Minnesota Swede, Red was a veteran of almost every CIA covert war. No one anywhere knew more about combat jumps behind enemy lines. Legend had it that Red came up with a technique to drop Tibetans into the Himalayas. At altitudes of twenty-five to thirty thousand feet, the crosswinds made it a treacherous ride down, so Red took the Tibetans out to Camp Hale, Colorado, and taught them to wait until the very last second to pull their rip cords. Dropping like a rock into a Himalayan valley was the only way to beat the winds.
    Red had started us out in jump training with parachute-landing falls into a sawdust pit. The idea was to first touch down on the balls of your feet and then roll onto your calf, thigh, hip, and back, all in smooth succession, distributing the impact as evenly as you could. Red made certain we understood.
    ‘You goddamn well didn’t hit all five points,’ he’d yell, leaning over me as I