Helga and the Whiffenpoof

About the Book

HELGA LINDSTROM was the daughter of a Swedish industrialist father and a mother who was a member of the Krupp family of Germany, one of the wealthiest families in the world. Helga had been a member of the West German Olympic gymnastics team at Mexico City in 1968. At age twenty, she had come with her mother to the tranquility of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands to complete work on her doctoral dissertation. She had entered Heidelberg University at age sixteen and now was about to get her PhD.

JIM SALINGER was sixteen years older than Helga. His true reason for being on St. Thomas was that he was the Caribbean area commander of the White House Special Intelligence Detail, the SID, an invisible intelligence organization created by President Truman when he was displeased with what Congress had created and forced on him, an agency known as the CIA. His cover was a job as corporate attorney and comptroller for an international construction company that operated through the Caribbean and provided him with a reason to be here and to travel extensively through the region.

Salinger’s personal life was still in something of a shambles. He had only a few months before received the final order of divorce from his mentally ill wife. Their fourteen year marriage had been a failure from the beginning, but he had stuck with it because he had adopted her son from her first marriage and they had had another son together. Finally, when her illness became severe, she had tried three times to kill Salinger and twice to kill the children. The violence had to end, so he took the kids and got a divorce.

During the final four years of the marriage, Salinger had been placed on inactive status with the SID. He thought his career in Intel (The intelligence community, not the computer chip maker) was finished. But on that day in February when he got the final order of divorce, his boss, General George K. Buckingham (“Buck” to him in private) was waiting for him in the lobby of the court house.

Now he was back in the saddle, professionally, and he was getting his “legs” again. The work was going well, and this helped him feel better about himself. But when Helga met him and right away started indicating that she had more than casual interest in him, it shook his confidence to the core.

The choice of Whiffenpoof for his code name was not frivolous. It describes a characteristic about him that was an invaluable tool in his arcane work. The definition of whiffenpoof is a person or thing so insignificant as to be easily forgotten. Salinger fit that description perfectly. He was overweight, about five-feet-nine, and with facial features that were not offensive but also not what a Hollywood casting director would look for in an action-adventure hero. He had that common quality that permitted him to go almost anywhere and look like he belonged there. With a conservative suit and attache case walking down the corridors of a court house, he was just another lawyer. In a lab coat at a hospital, just another doctor. In a tweed jacket on campus, just another professor. In soiled khakis and scuffed shoes, just another street bum. And two hours later, no one would remember having seen him.

Helga told Salinger later that her mother had picked up some secondary cues from him when some of his associates had stopped to speak to him momentarily. She had an interesting background of her own that made her more perceptive than the average person. They were at the turtle races at the swimming pool of the VI Hilton Hotel the night they met. Helga and her mother were seated on the chaise next to his. Her mother initiated their contact. It led to an interesting evening, then an interesting week and then to an interesting life.

Because this novel is about ninety-five percent autobiographical, Salinger’s intro to the intelligence community started the same way the author’s did, with his being

About the Author

Now in full retirement, Jim Sauls lives in a mountain community in Western North Carolina and writes about his intelligence career on six continents. He has four children and four grandchildren. He also maintains contact with the family mining business he started in California in 1993 and vacations at his lodge above Lake Tahoe.