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TRAIL OF THE OCTOPUS -- FROM BEIRUT TO LOCKERBIE -- INSIDE THE DIA

Chapter 6:

Coleman's first assignment for the United States government was in 1982, when the CIA sent him to the Bahamas to interfere in the islands' elections.

By then, his love affair with broadcast journalism had reached the point of separation and divorce, but not without some purple patches along the way. Among the most memorable was his final year with the Boy Scouts of America, before he left it for the first time in 1974. Though increasingly disturbed by its paramilitary functions, he had no reservations about accompanying Norman Rockwell, Mr. America himself, on tour from sea to shining sea with his Boy Scout paintings, featuring Mom, Dad, apple pie and Old Glory.

Coleman's job was to act as a buffer between the grand old illustrator and his adoring female public and to arrange radio-TV coverage for the explosion of patriotic sentiment touched off by this travelling exhibition of Boy's Life magazine covers in cities across the nation. But he was still on the wrong side of the fence, and, as Walter Cronkite kept saying, 'If you want to be a network correspondent, you've got to get some experience first at a local TV station, pay your dues and move on up the ladder. You just can't start off at the top in New York.'

Taking the advice to heart, Coleman replied to all the likely want ads in Broadcasting magazine, tapped all the friends he had made in the media, and bombarded the industry with copies of his resume, finally reaping the reward for perseverance with the offer of a job as late night news anchor back home in Birmingham, Alabama, with WAPI-TV.

He lasted six months. It was not that he objected to being a one-man show, writing, editing and delivering the news, sport and weather; it was just that he grew tired of being stopped on the street and criticized for the necktie he had worn the night before. In radio, you didn't even have to wear a necktie. At the invitation of WSGN programme director Jan Jeffries, he moved on to become news director of Alabama's top radio station, with studios in the penthouse of the City Federal Savings & Loan Building, 'The Big Six Ten', where he lasted three years.

'There I was, free to cover stories I felt would have an impact [he says]. And a lot of them came through Aaron Kohn, director of the New Orleans Metropolitan Crime Commission, who really got my juices going as an investigative reporter. Following through on leads I got from him, we aired reports linking the state attorney-general to New Orleans crime figures, and ran a whole series of in-depth probes into corruption and serious social issues. There were some unserious ones, too -- like the piece we ran on the wire-tap that Cornelia Wallace put on Governor George Wallace's bedroom phone. After I aired the story, he exiled her to Elba, Alabama, and called me up to say I was a nitwit shit, no bigger than a pinhead.'

Others held a higher opinion. Coleman was making a name for himself in investigative journalism. During his tenure, the station won the International Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio Television News Directors Association; the National Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service, and the National Headliner Award. But they earned him no laurels from management, despite Jeffries's enthusiasm. WSGN was one of six stations owned by Southern Broadcasting, a deeply conservative company that seemed sometimes to regard the weather forecast as a threat to the status quo. An invitation to join the Special Investigations Unit of WBZ-TV, Boston, in December 1978, probably arrived in the nick of time.

The move from 65th-market radio to 4th-market television was not only a significant leap upwards in his career but Coleman had been head-hunted on the strength of his growing national reputation to do what he liked to do most: non-deadline exposes of graft and corruption. He rented an expensive apartment in Concord, Massachusetts, just down the road from Walden Pond, and moved a somewhat reluctant Jocelyn up from Alabama with their two children -- Karen, now ten, and Guy, aged three.

But there are exposes and exposes. WBZ TV was part of the Westinghouse Broadcasting Network, and run with the same corporate zeal as Westinghouse displayed, wearing its defence contractor hat, in charging the Pentagon $9096 for Allen wrenches that cost 12 cents each in Handy Dan's. Coleman embarked on a six-month investigation of design faults and cost overruns in the supply of Boston's new mass-transit trolley cars by Boeing Vertol, a defence contractor, like Westinghouse, and better known as builders of military helicopters.

Coleman recalls:

'Any city that agreed to buy Boeing's product got an automatic grant from Nixon's Urban Mass Transit Administration. Didn't matter that the trolleys didn't work. Didn't matter they were dangerous, that their plane plastic interiors gave off toxic smoke if they caught fire -- any city that bought them still got its grant. So after digging around for six months, we went on air with a 35-minute report, lead story on the six o'clock 'Eyewitness News', exposing the whole thing. Big sensation. Media spin-off all around the country. The city of Boston sued Boeing and the federal government, and Westinghouse folded its Special Investigations Unit. I'd breached the Eleventh Commandment. Thou shalt not expose defence contractors.

Coleman won a New England Emmy for the programme, but it was time to move on -- to Washington now for a stripped-to-the-bone security vetting before joining the White House press corps as correspondent for the RKO Radio Network. On the face of it, Coleman was now within reach of everything he had ever dreamed of in broadcast journalism, but in fact running around after Jimmy Carter for two years turned out to be the most boring episode of his professional career.

'Reporters assigned to cover the President are not reporters at all [he insists]. They're hand-out takers -- told what to report, how to report it and when to report it. Break the rules and goodbye press pass. There's no room for enterprise at all. The whole White House press operation is geared to feeding the television networks, making sure that the evening newscasts have the proper 'spin'. The rest -- and there were 150 of us when I was there -- were more or less along for the ride.'

'Never mind what the Constitution says, the role of the American media is to inform the electorate of what the Administration wants it to hear in the way the White House wants it done. The press office manages the media the way you manage a spaniel, by leaking tid-bits to TV correspondents as a reward for stories that flatter the President and punishing them for stories that make the President look bad by shutting them out of the house. You get some rebels but they don't last. They can't, if they're shut out of background briefings. So most of the White House press corps just scamper around like puppies in pin-stripe suits, caught up in the ego trip of trotting along at the heels of the leader of the free world. Ask any honest reporter who's covered that beat -- it's a grueling, back-breaking bore.'

The nomadic life of a newsman had already cost Coleman his marriage. Jocelyn was tired of packing and unpacking and starting again somewhere else every two years. She wanted to settle down and raise her family, and he could not fault her for that.

'They say there are three things you can't keep if you want the job of White House correspondent -- and I wanted it: plants, pets and wives. Everybody I knew there was divorced. But it went deeper than that. Jocelyn and I had married too young and we'd grown apart, that was the truth of it. We woke up one morning and found we weren't the people we had been before. We both tried to keep things going, but it didn't work out. And that was mostly my fault. I still have deep scars and regrets about the way I conducted myself. It was the worst time of my life.'

Resigning after the 1980 election, Coleman went off to Connecticut to win another New England Emmy with WFSB TV, Hartford, and to write a book about the Mafia.

The Ethel Donaghue case made him an instant celebrity. Coleman's story of how a crooked probate judge had conspired with corporation counsel to bilk an old lady of $83 million by having her declared incompetent plucked at Connecticut's heartstrings, bringing him not only an Emmy but more criticism of his taste in neckties at supermarket check-outs and the friendship of FBI Agent Danny Mahan.

'Boy, have I got a subject for you,' Mahan said, when Coleman told him one night in their favourite bar that he wanted to write a book.

The subject's name was Richie Pedemonti, who had spent the last three of his 20 years in organized crime as an FBI informant. Refusing to go into the Federal witness protection programme after his cover was blown, Richie had fallen on hard times, made all the harder when his wife divorced him, unable to face life without a pink Cadillac and regular trips to Las Vegas. Although the FBI agents he had worked with had done their best to get him on his feet again, they were running out of ideas when Mahan took Pedemonti to meet Coleman at the Arch Street Tavern, behind the Bureau's Hartford office.

Fascinated by Richie's inside view of the mob scene, Coleman rented a small studio on Asylum Street and set to work on Squeal, a book anatomizing the mob's business interests in New England -- his collaborator, as often as not, sleeping on the studio floor. Even with a grant from the Fund for Investigative Reporting in Washington to match a small advance from the publishers, Spoonwood Press, their standard of living was austere, and Coleman was obliged to do some additional, part-time reporting for WCVB TV, Boston in order to keep the project afloat.

When his WFSB-TV source of income ran dry at the end of 1981 -- Coleman had gone after a businessman implicated in a Federal housing scam, not knowing that he was the station manager's neighbour, the collaboration seemed headed for the rocks, but then the CIA came to the rescue. In mid-December, Richie was summoned to a meeting on Long Island to discuss the Pizza Connection case, and, as he was unwilling to go alone, Coleman agreed to tag along.

Two weeks later, Coleman took a call at his studio from a government agent who declined to identify himself but proposed a chat and a drink at the airport Ramada Inn. Coleman recognized him at once by the drip-dry suit, white shirt and wing-tip shoes.

'Understand you guys could use a little cash,' the agent said affably, after they had settled in a quiet corner of the bar.

'Yeah, well, without it, I'd say posterity is going to be deprived of a literary masterpiece. What do I have to do?'

'How about a few days in the Bahamas?'

Coleman put down his drink. 'You're going to pay me to go down to the Bahamas? In January? Who do I have to kill?'

The agent chuckled politely. 'Guy we know down there just lost his wife from cancer. Nice lady. Name of Rose. Helped us for years. She was a real asset -- you know what I mean?'

'Okay.' That was when Coleman realized he was talking to the CIA. 'Sure. I know what you mean.'

'Fine. Well, she left a ton of papers and documents we need. And some people we know think you might be just the guy to help us out.'

'Yeah? How?'

'Soon as her husband gets the stuff together, we'd like for you to stop by their place and bring it out for us, that's all.'

'Well, I think I can handle that,' said Coleman cautiously. It seemed like a complicated way of dealing with a simple problem but he was broke and tired and not disposed to quarrel with the idea of a few days in the sun at the government's expense. 'Do I take Richie with me?'

'Hell, no. Not on your life. He's not to know anything about this.'

Rose's husband, now widower, turned out to be an American expatriate of about 30 years' standing, with business interests in the islands and a lovely old house across the street from the governor's mansion in Nassau. When Coleman stopped by, expecting to pick up a huge box of documents, he was handed a couple of rolls of film.

'Is that it?'

'That's it,' he said. 'That's what you came for. Have a nice trip.'

After ten days in Nassau, Coleman felt guilty about accepting the paper bag that the CIA agent offered him in exchange for the film when he arrived back in Hartford -- until he looked inside.

'What the hell's this?'

'That's two thousand dollars,' the agent said. 'In Italian lira.'

'What am I supposed to do with Italian lira?'

'You're supposed to take a run over to JFK and change 'em into dollars.'

'Oh. Okay. Tell me, you know a guy named Danny Graham? General Danny Graham?'

'Yeah,' the agent said cheerfully. 'I heard of General Graham.'

A few days later, he called to fix another date at the Ramada Inn.

'How'd you like to go down to Nassau again?' he said. 'There's something else we'd sure like you to do for us down there, if you got the time. And I guess you could still use the money.'

'That's a pretty good guess,' agreed Coleman, who somehow had to tide himself over for another month or two until he could finish the book. 'What do you want me to bring back this time? Robert Vesco's head?'

'Ha ha,' said the agent. 'No, this time, you'll take some stuff down for us. Including your typewriter. You can stay in the cottage behind Rose's house and work there.'

'Sounds good to me.' He was still broke, and more tired than ever 'What is it this stuff you want me to take?'

The agent smiled benevolently. 'You got a public relations background, right? Used to work for the Boy Scouts, I hear.'

'That's right. That was before I got to be a legitimate journalist.'

'Well, you're not a journalist now, are you?' He seemed worried suddenly. 'I mean, you're writing a book, but that's not the same, is it?'

'No, I guess not.' Coleman was unaware at the time that the American intelligence community was under orders not to use the media as a cover for its agents. 'It's kind of a longer range project.'

'Well, that's good. Because here's a situation where we think you can really help us, with your media experience. And I think you'll enjoy it.'

As he certainly enjoyed the Bahamas, and as his first mission had been harmless enough, Coleman agreed to go without even asking what was expected of him. The widower would fill him in when he got there, the agent said.

'And we're going to give you some alternative identification to use instead of your passport,' he added. 'You'll be in and out a couple of times, so we'll get you a birth certificate in another name. That's all you need for the Bahamas -- a birth certificate. So I want you to fill out one of these applications.'

He produced forms from three different states, and after some discussion they settled on one for Connecticut, as Coleman was more familiar with that state than with the other two.

'Should I use my own date of birth?' he asked.

'No, better not. This has got to be a whole new identity.'

'Well, I'm not too good with dates. If I can't remember my own birthday, that could be embarrassing.'

'Well, put down July the Fourth,' said the agent. 'You're not going to forget that one.'

He went away with the completed application form and came back in a couple of hours with a Connecticut birth certificate in the name of Thomas Leavy, born on the Fourth of July, 1948.

A few days later, Coleman set off on his first covert operation for the octopus, which was to discipline the prime minister and government of the Bahamas and remind them of their dependence on America's good will.

Lyndon O. Pindling had been framed in Washington's sights since offering sanctuary to the runaway financier Robert Vesco, and even before that had incurred American displeasure by consorting brazenly with money launderers and senior members of the Colombian cocaine cartels.

As the widower explained to Coleman on arrival, the CIA would feed them information on these associations and it was their job to use the dirt where it would do the most damage. He would see that it reached the ears of Pindling's political opponents, and in particular the Free National Movement, which could be counted on to make hay with it during the election campaign. Coleman's role was to use his public relations experience to get the maximum possible mileage from it in the Bahamian and mainland media.

Not having bargained on helping to run a dirty tricks campaign in somebody else's elections, and in any case feeling he had been suckered into it, Coleman hesitated for a day or two before finally persuading himself that Pindling was a rotten egg anyway and deserved all he had coming. Though scarcely aware of it at the time, he had crossed the line. It was easier, after Thomas Leavy's mission to Nassau, to accept that in the real world it was sometimes necessary to do good by stealth, and that it was all right for the United States to interfere in the domestic affairs of other countries because everybody knew it was constitutionally committed to the greater good of the greatest number.

Upon his return to Hartford, Coleman changed another bagful of Italian lira at JFK airport, finished Squeal, and in 1983, after the book appeared in the stores, took a job as field producer with 'The Jack Anderson Show'.

As a legitimate journalist again, this put him out of reach of his new friends at the CIA, who were now calling periodically to see if he was ready to change his mind and work for the Company full-time. And there were moments when he wavered. The trivialization of broadcast news by the networks had made him uneasy about the future; the world was too complicated to deal with in picture opportunities and soundbites. Reporting in depth was what he wanted to do, and what he felt he was good at. The rest was just showbiz. Already he was looking back on his time at WBZ TV, Boston, as the good old days.

For a while, 'The Jack Anderson Show' gave him the scope he needed. Indeed, one story he worked on, in which he managed to get cameras inside a camp run by the Ku Klux Klan for training kids to be Klansmen, came close to his ideal of what investigative journalism was all about, but a few months later the show folded, yet another casualty in the trend towards news as entertainment. Faced with a choice between unemployment, WMAR TV -- a Baltimore station owned by the same company -- and the CIA, Coleman chose Baltimore.

It was a mistake. Determined not to repeat its experience with 'The Jack Anderson Show', management had made up its collective mind to spare viewers the agony of thought by censoring any provocative, or even serious, material from local newscasts. The station wanted a 50-second expose every night, and Coleman was free to do anything he liked in that spot, provided it had to do with sex, drugs or rock 'n' roll.

With a family to support (he and Jocelyn were separated but not yet divorced), Coleman tried his best and even met management half-way with an off-beat story about a local attorney, James B. McCloskey, who ran a quickie divorce business from his home at 301 Timonium Road, Timonium, Maryland.

Working with a partner, Fernando Cornielle, in Santo Domingo, McCloskey claimed he could get a divorce for anybody, even for those who didn't want to tell their spouses. It was not necessary to leave the country, and no court appearances were required. All petitioners had to do was sign a few papers, pay McCloskey his fee and bingo! Within a week, the decree would arrive by airmail, and, under the laws of the Dominican Republic, they were free to do it again.

His own best advertisement for the service, McCloskey had been married five times and would probably have gone on but for the fact that he was well past sixty and his last wife, an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agent, was busting his ass through the courts. Tough, gruff, feisty and profane, he was almost the last person anyone would have suspected of being a spy-catcher, recruiting officer and consultant to the US Defense Intelligence Agency. Coleman certainly didn't when he aired his story about McCloskey's mail-order divorces or for some time after they became friends. None of it showed behind McCloskey's amiable facade, and even if it had, Coleman, like most other Americans to this day, had never even heard of the DIA.

Often at a loose end at weekends, he took to stopping by McCloskey's place on Saturdays to pick him up for lunch at a local Mexican cafe. Over tacos and Dos Equis, Coleman would complain about the assholes who ran WMAR, McCloskey would listen sympathetically, although convinced Coleman was wasting his time anyway 'with all this bullshit news business', and divert him with stories about his ancestors.

One of these Coleman wrote up for the Baltimore magazine. According to McCloskey, his forebears had once owned the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia's Independence Hall and he was planning to sue the city to get his bell back. Before long, he had taken Coleman under his wing in much the same way as Tom Geohagen had appointed himself the younger man's mentor in the Boy Scouts.

'If you ever wanna do something meaningful with your life,' he said one day, after Coleman confided that his running battle with WMAR's management was likely to get him fired, 'all I gotta do is pick up that phone. I know a lotta people in D.C. who'd snap you up in a minute.

'Like who?'

'Never mind. When you're ready to give up this bullshit, just say the word.'

A week later, Coleman was declared surplus to WMAR's requirements, but he was still not ready to say the word. For one thing, to have abandoned journalism at that point would have left him feeling defenceless against the CIA, which for months had been pressing him to the point of harassment. He had even complained about it to Laurie Bernard, a TV producer in Washington whom he was dating at the time.

It was getting close to blackmail. 'Well, now, you know, you worked for us a couple of times, and you're a journalist and all -- I mean, how's that going to look if it gets out?' was the usual line. 'The media's not going to like that. On the other hand, you could have a secure future with us, with a pension at the end of it. And that's something you ought to consider very seriously. People in TV news don't get pensions. They get fired.'

In his late thirties, with a broken marriage and his career fizzling out, Coleman felt trapped in the wreckage. After several days of putting resumes together in McCloskey's office, of calling around the industry on McCloskey's telephone, and badgering his agent, David Crane, in San Francisco, for a network news opening overseas where he could do some serious work, Coleman touched bottom, one night in a waterfront bar and showed up next morning at McCloskey's place ready to throw in his hand.

Among his telephone messages was one from Crane, who had got him a freelance assignment with Cable News Network (CNN) in New York.

For six weeks, Coleman worked out of the new CNN bureau across from Penn station, running around town with a camera crew doing one or two pieces a day, covering the UN and interviewing notables, from Mayor Ed Koch to visiting Israeli Premier Shimon Peres -- and then lightning struck. Crane called to say that CBS had seen his work for CNN and had asked for a tape and his resume. Its foreign desk was thinking of adding another producer.

'This is it,' Coleman told McCloskey, exultant.

It wasn't.

He was kept dangling for several months while CBS News reorganized itself around Dan Rather and News Vice President Howard Stringer. Then at last, on 19 August 1984, Don DeCesare, the assistant foreign editor, called to ask Coleman if he was free to go to Saudi Arabia as an assistant producer with senior correspondent Tom Fenton to cover the Hadj, Islam's annual pilgrimage to Mecca. The contract would run for six weeks, and he would work on the story with Rome Bureau Chief Peter Schweitzer out of the Jeddah Hyatt hotel.

'Take it,' said David Crane. 'They want to see what you can do.'

Coleman needed little urging, although he already knew that one of the things he would have to do was to keep the Jewish chief of the Rome Bureau well away from Saudi officialdom. Then, as now, the country was a tightly run police state, a true kingdom, where the house of Saud literally owned the country and its citizens, and where arbitrary arrest was an automatic response to breaches of political or religious protocol.

'They gave me a CBS News ID [Coleman remembers] and the next evening I took an Air France flight to Paris, connecting four hours later with a flight to Jeddah. After nearly twenty years away from the Middle East, it felt like I was coming home at last. Then culture shock. On clearing customs and immigration, I stepped out of the terminal into the glaring heat to grab a cab, and there, strung over the four-lane highway, was a banner in Arabic which said, 'Please refrain from auto-racing'. Kids in Porsche 911s and Mercedes 350SLs, rich and bored, amused themselves by weaving in and out of the traffic at 100 miles an hour plus.'

'Otherwise, it could just as easily have been Tucson, Arizona. Riding over to the Hyatt, and talking to the driver to free off my rusty Arabic, we passed big American-style shopping malls, Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants -- even Taco Bell joints. The women, especially the young girls, were the only visible difference. With nothing to do but shop, they were in and out of the stores, cloaked from head to toe, soda straws sticking out from their veils as they sucked on their Slurpies, giggling, gossiping, buying designer jeans and Walkman stereos. I mean, what have we done to those people?'

Schweitzer was not particularly pleased to see him and let it be known up front that he was running the show. Although he had declared himself 'an agnostic' to the Saudi authorities, his evident unfamiliarity with the Arab world made Coleman even more nervous for he had realized within hours of his arrival that all foreigners were under close surveillance. With Islamic fervour at its height, he knew there would be hell to pay for the whole crew -- jail or worse -- if the Saudis were given even the slightest room to suppose that Schweitzer was an Israeli spy.

The security police were everywhere [says Coleman]. All interviews and shoots had to be cleared in advance -- there was no going out on our own, shooting pictures in the streets. Anybody caught doing that was put on the next plane out and had his cameras and gear confiscated.'

'My job was to go around to the Ministry of Communications every day with a box of tapes, sit down for hours on end and negotiate each shot. Every foot of video we wanted to up-link by satellite had to be previewed by Saudi censors. If they didn't like a shot of a Hadji shaving or pilgrims passing out in the heat, out it had to go. Anything sensitive, anything I knew we couldn't get by, we had to smuggle out in videotape machines, hoping Customs wouldn't look inside.

Due in large measure to his knowledge of Arab ways, the assignment passed off without incident and Coleman returned to New York confident that he had shown CBS what he could do and that a full-time contract offer would now be forthcoming. But, if anything, morale on West 57th Street was lower than when he had left. Don't hold your breath, was the best Don DeCesare could offer. 'Who knows?' he said. 'I may be selling aluminum siding in Bridgeport myself next month.'

Coleman went down to Baltimore to see McCloskey.

'Okay,' he said. 'Who are these people you're always talking about?'

Ironically, he heard some weeks later that he was under consideration for a producer's slot with the CBS correspondent in Amman, but by then Coleman had been visited by two young men wearing double-knit sports jackets and highly polished black shoes who asked a thousand questions and took notes and had him fill in the permission forms they produced from their identical grey briefcases so that the US Army could proceed with a full security vetting.

At thirty-nine, he had finally committed himself to joining the octopus as a secret agent of the armed forces of the United States -- and taken the first step on the road to exile.
 

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