Forger, bank robber, CIA operative and… assassin?

You never finish a book. You only stop working and then try and live with the choices that an earlier you made. If I had the Golden Thread to write again, I would have made more of one particular character, who just fascinated me. 

He was a CIA agent codenamed WIROGUE. (In CIA terminology, people employed by the agency are operatives, but those who are contracted and paid for specific, usually deniable, tasks are agents.) 

He was in Congo in the run-up to Hammarskjöld’s death, and he pops up in very odd places in the  story. This is how I described him in the book: 

“He was code-named WIROGUE and was an “essentially stateless soldier of fortune,” a former citizen of the Soviet republic of Georgia named either David Tzitzichivili or David de Panasket who was also a forger and former bank robber.

In September 1960, unnamed members of the CIA’s Africa Division had met with him to discuss an operational assignment. He was then provided with plastic surgery and a wig so that traveling Europeans would not recognize him, and plastic explosive for an unspecified purpose, and dispatched to Africa.

CIA headquarters messaged Leopoldville before he arrived to describe the agent. “He is indeed aware of the precepts of right and wrong, but if he is given an assignment that might be morally wrong in the eyes of the world, but necessary because his case officer ordered him to carry it out, then it is right, and he will dutifully undertake appropriate action for its execution without pangs of conscience. In a word, he can rationalize all actions.”

At first I resisted his having anything to do with anything, because it’s so rare that conspiracies are elaborate and dramatic, rather than chaotic and nonsensical and improvised and dumb. But the fact that he had asked for flying lessons, and was an expert in sabotage and demolitions, was certainly notable. 

And then, late last year, the US National Archives released a trove of documents loosely connected with the Kennedy assassination. WIROGUE is one example of the kind of deniable CIA agent that some people believe might have been connected with Kennedy’s death. I have no opinion on that matter, but it does mean that a fresh document about him was released. And how I wish I had had it before I started writing.