Straw Dogs

Xu crept out of the bathroom stealthily. He crept up behind the armchair. Just when he was behind the chair, the man in the armchair perceived quite correctly that he was not alone. He turned fast in his chair, but he was not quite fast enough to avoid Xu’s harsh blow to the back of his head. The man was unconscious before he fell back in the chair. Xu walked around the chair. He looked at the man’s face and was just too elated at what he saw. Yes, the American president was lying at his feet, or so he thought.

Now, one thing Xu Zhenxian and most other secret service agencies around the world do not know about is the longest running, most covert CIA operation, one that has been an integral part of the operations of the Central Intelligence Agency since its creation in 1947. This operation has retained the code name “Operation Holotype.” It is an operation with a sole aim – the preservation of the life of the president of the United States of America.

The origins of Operation Holotype could be traced to the Yalta Conference of the Allied nations in 1945. One day after drinking more than his fair share of Vodka during the conference, Josef Stalin, leader of the USSR met with President Franklin Roosevelt. During their conversation, Stalin let slip the fact that he had a body double who stood in for him at risky appearances.

“It is only one of the few ways I can preserve my life from my enemies such as your own country and the countless enemies I have at home. I have to do so. Do you have any idea how many assassination attempts have been made against me? Countless!” the Russian leader had rambled on. “But what do they know? They don’t know Russia can’t do without me! I am Russia!” Stalin said rounding up any discussion of the topic between him and the American president.

The Russian leader’s interpreter had failed to translate that bit, but he also failed to stop his boss from talking too much. The interpreter was perhaps afraid for the safety of his own life – he could have been shipped off to Siberia for daring to caution his head of state before foreigners. The American translator in the room did not miss that bit – President Roosevelt was not one to be outdone by the Communists.

The United States government had already recognized the need to have a centralized intelligence gathering organization. The Organization of Strategic Services (OSS) was set up by General William “Wild Billy” Donovan for this purpose but its functions by the time of the Yalta Conference stopped at intelligence gathering only. After the Yalta conference, Roosevelt impressed it upon the head of the OSS to incorporate the preservation of the life of any serving United States president by any means necessary, with particular focus on the running of an operation that ran and managed body doubles for the president at risky, and if necessary, all times in the nation’s history. The OSS was on this assignment when President Roosevelt died.

When President Harry Truman, Roosevelt’s successor in the White House, disbanded the OSS in 1945, plans for the operation were unsurprisingly jettisoned. When the new president set up the Central Intelligence Agency in 1946 to replace the now defunct OSS which was set up to carry out much wider functions than its predecessor, some of the employees at the OSS were recruited to join the new intelligence agency; they pitched Roosevelt’s plans to Truman. This was done of course under a very heavy shroud of secrecy – very few employees of the CIA, only those at the higher end of the chain were privy to the existence, goals and objectives of Operation Holotype.

The first body double for an American president was “produced” in late 1947 with the aid of plastic surgery, a pioneer technique at the time. Truman was endlessly amused when he first met the man who was his perfect replica, a man who mimicked his mannerisms perfectly. Truman’s body double was used extensively during the presidential campaigns leading up to the presidential elections in that year when there was widespread disaffection directed at him and his administration. The Truman campaign people, unknowingly, especially enjoyed the services of the double when the president had to make campaign appearances which were deemed extremely risky. Most political pundits predicted Truman’s woeful loss at the polls, but he had won eventually. Thus Operation Holotype became a standard covert CIA operation that continued over the decades, not completely smoothly but with stop gaps down the years. The body doubles are recruited by the CIA from agents within its ranks. The agents are paid special grants in addition to their normal wages in the company.

President Eisenhower followed in Truman’s footsteps – he had three body doubles during his two terms in office, the first two having been killed by heart attacks. The first president to break with the tradition of having a double was President John Kennedy. When President Kennedy was briefed about Operation Holotype for the first time by Allen Dulles, then the CIA director and asked to accede to having his own body double made, the Bostonian had laughed in the face of the CIA director.

“Why, so I could get cuckolded by some agent who’s on your payroll? Can’t you see that most men in America would like to take Jackie to bed at any cost?” President Kennedy had asked the director – Jackie was his wife Jacqueline Kennedy. His fears were probably borne out of the fact that he had himself cuckolded a few men in his time and like such men, he was mortally afraid of being cuckolded himself. Three years later, perhaps the man’s life would have been saved in Texas if he had a double, but who knows with these things anyway?

The greatest success story of Operation Holotype to date is the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan in 1981. For weeks, the White House had been receiving anonymous crank letters from John W. Hinckley, his would be “almost-assassin.” This alerted the presidential security people who always had the double around to act as a decoy. Fortunately or unfortunately, Hinckley ended up shooting the decoy. The existence of the programme had to remain a secret; the public was suckered into believing that the president had been shot. President Reagan’s acting skills came in handy here, for they were needed for him to act a man who had just had a close call with death. He, being the master show man that he was, could not resist the urge to make some PR out of it, what with his alleged, well-known “Honey, I forgot to duck” statement his PR people said he made to his wife when he first spoke to her after he had been shot.