Free Jake Fonko M.I.A. by B. Hesse Pflingger

Secretary of State Henry Kissinger; national security advisor Brent Scowcroft; Army Chief of Staff General Frederick Weyand; and Graham Martin, our ambassador to South Vietnam. Approximately as I lifted my second cup of coffee to my lips, they decided to pull the plug on Cambodia. American support for Lon Nol and his crew ceased abruptly. Had I known at the time, probably little would have changed, but at least I’d have been better prepared for what was to come. Ignorance is such bliss.
    Ordering breakfast in the coffee shop was simple enough—menu notwithstanding, the kitchen served what it had, and the management charged what it had to. That morning they offered bread or croissants and preserves, fresh local fruit, eggs, rice porridge, some sort of sausage, and tea or coffee. Take it or leave it. I asked about orange juice and was told they’d been out of it for a month. Shortages or no, the Hotel Phnom strove to Do It Right: service was efficient and impeccable. Prices varied, depending on what the smugglers demanded, who you were and what currency you carried. No difference to me, as it went on the tab, but I couldn’t but be awed by the price of an egg in local money—if that was any indication, I might as well substitute the stack of Cambodian riels Sonarr provided for the toilet paper in my bathroom.
    Westerners filled the restaurant, mostly Americans, plus a sampling of European nationalities, except for French, who stuck to their own habitats. A correspondent from London sharing my table explained that the Phnom, always a gathering point for everybody who was anybody in Phnom Penh, enjoyed even more popularity these days, owing to the rocket round that took out the Monorom Hotel doorway two weeks earlier, killing eleven people and palpably compromising the ambiance. He told me heavy fighting encircled the city. The Khmer Rouge controlled the countryside, and were now closing in on the capital. Shelling increased daily, which explained the flashes I’d noticed as we came in last night. He painted a pretty bleak picture of conditions around town. Well, I’d see for myself soon enough.
    After breakfast I went back to my room to vet out my instructions more carefully. I’d packed them along at breakfast for the sake of security, although anyone breaking into my room and rifling it in hope of finding Top Secrets would go away bewildered. “Jack Philco” was a part I could easily get into. He looked like me, came from Los Angeles, matched my size and even shared my birthday—October 23, 1949. We differed mainly in that instead of Army officer, he worked as an agricultural advisor for AID, and instead of college dropout he had a degree in ag economics from U. Cal, Davis. Philco (that is, me) was in Phnom Penh to touch base with the local AID mission, having just spent some time at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines. Well, with any luck no one would ask my opinion on the season’s rice crop.
    His passport showed him to be well-traveled. Then I noticed a funny thing. On my last Army assignment prior to returning to Nam I’d made an extensive inspection tour to interview staff at American military intelligence bases all over the world (and we have more than you’d think!), part of a periodic readiness survey. Shuttling between the various bases and the Pentagon had kept me on the road the better part of a year, though it didn’t show up on my passport, since I used U.S. military transport and when overseas stayed strictly on base. The immigration stamps on Philco’s passport matched my tour perfectly, right down to the dates. When the CIA phonied up an identity, they didn’t miss a trick!
    My second look-through turned up no clues, let alone specific instructions, regarding my mission in Phnom Penh. The pages of boilerplate were bureaucratic gobbledygook to baffle even a lawyer. In six years of Army I’d never seen anything close to half as half-assed as that batch of so-called