The Mockingbird Drive Read online

  "Train."

  The glasses on the nearby tables were rattling slightly, as well. The women at the table let out a simultaneous shriek. Then a bell rang near the kitchen, louder even than the shriek, which was still echoing in the room. A woman leaned out of the kitchen and shouted. "Dollar shot for the next thirty seconds."

  Quinn tugged on my sleeve, trying to get my attention. She was pointing at a sign on the wall, next to an old Highway 34 sign.

  All shots a dollar while the train passes. If the building isn't shaking, you're paying full price.

  The men and women by the windows all had their hands up and Quinn thrust hers up as well. The rattling slowed, then ended, and the old man poured refills for everyone at the tables, then stopped at ours. "Brown or clear?" he asked Quinn.

  "Definitely brown," Quinn said.

  A minute later, she was staring at a chipped shot glass of what I assumed was whiskey of some kind. "Don't do it," I said. "Or, if you must, have some of the free peanuts first."

  She pondered this for a moment, ate a few salted peanuts from the bowl the old man had brought, then began studying the binder.

  The news was back on, leading with new developments in the shooting at The Gazette. An LVMPD spokesman named David Matterson had given a press conference that day at a small wooden podium with the seal of the department taped crookedly to the front. Behind him, a half dozen officers and supervisors stood, looking concerned. It was the same setup they'd had the morning after the shooting, when I'd seen coverage in the airport.

  The only difference was that Captain Shonda Payton wasn't standing to the left of Matterson as she had the previous day. On that first morning, when a question came up about the crime scene, Matterson had deferred to Captain Payton, who then approached the podium and said a version of, "That detail is part of the ongoing investigation and we won't be able to comment."

  But Captain Payton was nowhere to be found. Instead, to Matterson's left stood Captain Diego Vasquez, who was stepping in occasionally to offer the same refusal to comment that Captain Payton had.

  "Weird," I said to Quinn, whose nose was buried in the binder. "The police officer who's been there every day isn't there. There's a new guy."

  "Same suit and lie, different face."

  When I covered the courts back in New York City, I had multiple sources inside the police department and often had to stop by different precincts. I realized quickly that all the same office politics and competition that happen in other organizations also happen within police departments, so I couldn't help but wonder why Captain Payton had disappeared from the podium. She spoke well, was personable and photogenic. She was a good look for the department and, having been first on the scene, added credibility to everything said on the podium. Plus, she added diversity, which police departments are usually sensitive to. So there's no way they would've replaced her unless there'd been some conflict.

  I explained all of this to Quinn, who dismissed it. "Maybe she's out sick. Maybe she just doesn't want to be part of the charade."

  "But that implies that she knows it's a charade."

  Quinn finally looked up from the binder, staring at me like I'd just said the stupidest thing she'd ever heard. She held up the shot glass, said "To sheep everywhere," and threw back the whiskey. "Of course she knows," she continued, setting down the glass. "First on the scene. You think she didn't notice any details that don't fit into their perfect little story?"

  "Are you saying you think she knows what happened, because—"

  "Not at all. Not even I'm that paranoid. It's more likely that she noticed a few inconvenient facts that got swept under the rug because they couldn't be explained by the Baxter theory."

  "Maybe so," I said.

  I flipped off the TV and looked for the old man. I needed to order some food, but he was chatting with the table of men. Then the walls started rattling again and Quinn's hand shot up.

  An hour later, we'd eaten burgers and fries, Quinn had downed her second and third shots, and I was studying a section of pages that were, according to Quinn, the only other interesting portion of the binder.

  "It's a table," she said, her voice a little loose.

  "What did you mean, 'a table'?"

  She explained that on old hard drives—or "disc packs" as she preferred to call them—data was often stored in tables, just like the ones we use today in word processors like Microsoft Word. They're basically just columns and rows of information set off by thin lines or spaces. "And what happens when you make a table that's too wide for the margins of your page?"

  "I call Bird," I said. "He knows how to fix that sort of thing."

  "It splits it up to another page. The whole thing turns into a mess."

  I put my hand on the binder. "A mess like this?"

  "Exactly." She stacked our plates, then slid the binder to her side of the table and pulled out four pages, lining them up left to right.

  I moved to her side of the booth and leaned in. She said, "It looks like a table of names that got split between pages, probably because of unreadable data in some of the columns. But look, there's a pattern on these four pages." She dragged her finger across the four pages, starting on the top left of the first page, connecting what appeared to be parts of words across the pages, while skipping over the blank spaces and gibberish in the middle and right side of each page. "Ba. Ker. Gold. Stein." Four sounds. Four pages. "Ba-ker. Gold-Stein. Baker Goldstein. In the original, this would have just been two columns with Baker in one column and Goldstein in the other."

  "It's not a name I recognize."

  "But they have to be names, right? Look at the next one down."

  Again, she started on the top left of the first page and drew her finger across. "The. Odo. Rep. Etrov.

  I stared at her. "That doesn't sound like a name."

  "Put it together." She held a finger over the last letter on the third page and all the letters on the fourth page.

  "Theodore?"

  "Right," she said.

  Next, she covered everything except the last six letters.

  "Petrov?"

  "Right!" She looked at me expectantly.

  "I'm supposed to know who that is?"

  "Theodore Petrov? The Brighton Beach Six?"

  I had no idea what she was talking about. "He was a CIA asset during the Cold War. And no, not just in my head. The Brighton Beach Six were a gang of men—all of whom had parents that fled Russia during World War Two—who spied on Soviet nuclear programs from the late-forties to the sixties."

  "And you learned about this—"

  "It's fact. Public record. Even the CIA-mouthpiece newspapers you read acknowledge it."

  "Okay, then who's Baker Goldstein?"

  "I don't know, but I plan to find out."

  The bar started shaking again and Quinn's hand shot up, but I gently pulled it down before the old man noticed. It was almost seven, and the bar was starting to fill up with a pretty rowdy crowd. The last thing I needed was a plastered Quinn Rivers, so I tried flattery. "Skip this round, okay? I need you to explain this to me."

  She frowned, but said, "This is what they don't want us to know. I'll bet you anything that every name on this list is a CIA asset connected in some way to Operation Mockingbird. And I'll bet you anything that some of them have already been outed, like our friend Petrov, but some of them haven't."

  "And that's what they're protecting?"

  "Exactly." I gave her a raised-eyebrow look as she shoveled a handful of peanuts into her mouth. At this point, skepticism was my default with Quinn.

  As the bar grew louder and louder around us, we went through the names, one by one, pausing after each name to research it on Quinn's laptop. We even looked up the people Quinn thought she'd heard of, which she agreed to despite being offended that I didn't trust her. But it did give her the opportunity to gloat when she was right.

  And she was right. Every time.

  Benjamin Daudet was a low-level minister in the F
rench Government in the 1950s who'd been outed as a CIA asset and effectively exiled. There was no clear connection between him and Operation Mockingbird, but Quinn noted that he'd studied at Harvard in the early 1940s, which would put him in the same time and place as others who we already knew to be connected.

  Chandler Willingham was the owner of Central Paper, a pulp producer and paper supplier that had cornered the market back in the late 1800s. He wasn't mentioned in Bernstein's article, but he supplied paper to half the newspapers in the country in the mid-1900s. When Quinn proclaimed that the CIA had used his paper supplies as leverage over any newspapers that wouldn't cooperate, I asked her to stick to the facts.

  Elisa Gunderson was a student at Harvard's Russian Studies Institute when the CIA began recruiting her. She died in an airplane crash in 1979, and her connection to Operation Mockingbird had been reported in one obscure book published in the late 1990s.

  Then we hit a few names I knew right away, including Barry Bingham, Sr., a Harvard grad and former Navy officer who'd controlled much of the media in Kentucky, especially Louisville, in the forties, fifties, and sixties. His newspapers had won a half dozen Pulitzers under his watch. He was also listed in the Bernstein piece as a CIA cooperator, though the extent of his involvement was unclear.

  Near the end of the list, we hit a name that surprised us both. He was someone we both knew of, and, of all the people on the list, he was the only one who still held a position of significant influence in the world. And he hadn't been mentioned in the Bernstein piece.

  Dewey Gunstott.

  Chapter 21

  I knew Gunstott as the ninety-year-old CEO of International Family Media Holdings, one of the largest media-entertainment conglomerates on Earth. IFMH is a little like Disney, but focused on acquiring and selling media assets, rather than producing and branding their own. They're the most-powerful media organization you've never heard of.

  Gunstott had been interviewed frequently and profiled at least a dozen times in the major business magazines. Though he hadn't been mentioned in the Bernstein piece, a few searches allowed us to make tangential connections between him and Operation Mockingbird.

  He'd grown up just outside of Louisville, Kentucky, then attended an elite Connecticut boarding school and Harvard. He'd flown Douglas A-26 Invaders in the Pacific and, in 1947, had returned home to work at the Louisville Courier-Journal, one of the papers owned by Barry Bingham Sr. We couldn't find any records of Gunstott's reporting work, and in all the interviews we found, he never mentioned his time there. In fact, it wasn't clear that he'd written a single word for the Courier-Journal.

  Three years after returning from the war, he was back on the east coast, moving from job to job at CBS, first in marketing and communications, later in programming. He ascended rapidly for about ten years before jumping ship to become the first CEO of IFMH who wasn't born into the company. He'd been CEO for over forty years and had grown the company into a behemoth.

  IFMH had its fingers in everything. They owned three movie studios, a comic book company, a special effects studio, and music companies that controlled about one-fifth of the music ever commercially published. And that was just their content divisions. Their distribution included newspapers, cable companies, radio stations, theme parks, movie theaters, and more. Then there were the archives. They'd seen the streaming revolution coming and, according to reports in various business magazines, had toyed with the idea of starting a Netflix rival themselves. Instead, they'd started buying up archives, anticipating that old content would find new life on streaming digital services. So they'd bought up old movies and shows spanning the globe, specializing in Asian content for the Asian market. Specifically, China.

  For the last thirty years, China had been Gunstott's obsession. Over the years, he'd made dozens of attempts to crack the Chinese market, most of which had failed. Since all media in China is government-controlled, it's not an easy task. But as the Chinese middle-class grew and Disney gained a foothold, China became an essential market, not a luxury, for IFMH.

  In 2017, China became the largest movie market in the world, a title the United States had held since the medium was created. Selling TV, movies, and other content to China's growing middle class was the goal of every media company in the world. It was the largest market for potential growth left on Earth.

  Of course, Gunstott's biggest competition was Disney, which had its own difficult history of trying to break into the Chinese market. But lately, things had been getting better. In 2016, they'd released three of the top films in China, including Jungle Book and Captain America: Civil War. Not to mention the $5.5 billion Disneyland Shanghai that opened that year. Disney had improved at navigating the financial and legal issues, but there were cultural conflicts as well, and Disney had made multiple missteps along the way. They'd released the film Kundun in 1998, for example, then apologized for its sympathetic portrayal of Tibet. Many other movies had been banned or limited:

  Back to the Future: banned for "disrespectful portrayal of history."

  Avatar: the 2D version was banned because of fears it would intrude on the market and because it "May lead audiences to think about forced removal, and may possibly incite violence," according to Hong Kong's Apple Daily. The 3D version was allowed a limited run.

  Noah: banned for religious themes in the secular country.

  The Da Vinci Code: banned for religious themes after a limited release.

  A quick scan of the current business news results for IFMH revealed that Gunstott was on the brink of closing a massive deal with China, a deal that might finally open up the market to his movie, music, and television products.

  On its face, the deal was boring. The kind of thing you wouldn't even notice or care about. But you should. Deals like this re-shape the world while you're sleeping. The basics of the deal were that China would let a lot more of IFMH's content behind their Great Firewall in exchange for greater control over that content globally through a partnership with Shanghai Pictures, a movie and TV studio that had flirted with Disney for a few years before backing out of the deal.

  Gunstott's deal, which would be his crowning achievement, was set to come before the Senate Subcommittee on International Trade and Finance sometime in the next month. If it passed, IFMH profits could exceed a trillion dollars over the next ten years.

  "That's it," Quinn said, knocking back her fourth shot. "The deal with China is big enough that it could have caused Gunstott and his people to go through records, to make sure he was as clean as can be."

  "The deal is huge, sure, but that's the craziest thing you've ever said."

  "Don't you see? They're polishing Gunstott's past?"

  "He's one of the most powerful businessmen in the country. Don't you think his past has been polished?"

  "Do you know anything about China?"

  I didn't know much, which I was ashamed of, but I didn't admit it to Quinn. I just gave a noncommittal grunt. Right out of her playbook.

  "China and the CIA go WAY back. In the states, news that Gunstott is a CIA asset—"

  "Was a CIA asset. We don't know if he still is."

  "Fine. Whatever. But if people in the U.S. found out, it wouldn't even make page one of the business press because half of the higher-ups are also friendly with the CIA. Same reason the Mockingbird revelations didn't get any play outside of the alternative press, which Rolling Stone used to be."

  "But in China?"

  "In China, a revelation like this about Gunstott might be enough to derail their approval of the IFMH deal. It's the kind of affront that could sway them."

  It was possible, but not plausible, and I wanted to get out of there before another train passed. "Let's get a hotel, okay?'

  "I'm not leaving until we're on the same page about this. I know that massive global conspiracies are inconvenient. But you've gotten a lot smarter since I met you. You've got to see my point."

  I waved at the old man behind the bar, who quickly brought us our c
heck. "So, lemme get this straight. You think that Gunstott was tracking down any records that could have outed him as a part of Operation Mockingbird, he found out about the drive, somehow learned it was stolen by Tudayapi, then tracked it to Baxter, then—"

  "Yes, and we already know what happened at The Gazette. At least part of it. My bet is that the shooters got to Baxter's, made him admit to giving the drive to James, then tracked James to The Gazette, and brought Baxter with them."

  "Why not wait until James was alone to kill him?"

  "Well, two obvious reasons. First, James was going to a newspaper. They probably thought he was going to leak the contents of the drive. The ultimate disaster. Second, a mass shooting is the perfect cover. From their perspective, taking out six people as opposed to one or two is just collateral damage."

  Even when sober, Quinn's mind was like a drunk driver—full of confidence and bravado, but likely to fly off a cliff and crash on the rocks below. And, after four shots, she was moving way too fast for me. My mind wanted to sober up, slow down, and go step-by-step.

  "Okay," I said. "If I grant that. Here's a question: if the CIA somehow found out that a drive marked for destruction hadn't been destroyed, that would lead them to ARDS, then to Tudayapi, right? But she'd already traded it to Baxter. So how could the CIA have found Baxter, how could they have learned he had the drive, without contacting Tudayapi? She would have told us if they'd—"

  "How stupid are you?"

  "Fairly stupid, apparently."

  "Tudayapi would have posted about it on message boards, collector sites."

  "So the CIA just happened to be looking around on the message boards she happened to be posting on?"

  "They have search tools, bots. And they have hackers as good as James and Innerva working for them, combing the Dark Web and doing jobs for them as needed. This one would have been easy. 'Hey, Jimbo, we need to track down a 1968 IBM 2314 that was supposed to have been destroyed but wasn't."

  "And it just so happened that Tudayapi was posting about it, or selling it, at the same time? Okay, I buy it." I didn't buy it, but I wanted to hear the rest of her theory. "But how would the CIA have been alerted to the fact that it wasn't destroyed in the first place?"