Operation Solo by John Barron Page A

Downing, observed that some of his young civilian analysts and clerks voluntarily were staying after hours or coming in on weekends to do work they thought must be done. Their zeal impressed him all the more because they claimed neither overtime pay nor credit. “Walter, we ought to find some way to reward this extra effort,” he said. “You’re here all the time. I’d like you to start keeping a record of who’s here in off hours so I can note it on their fitness reports.” Someone found out about the informal log and filed a complaint that Boyle was attempting to coerce employees into working unpaid overtime.
    Then there was the issue of the pretty girl, or “slut,” as the inspector chose to call her. While her husband was away taking
corporate training, the attractive clerk entertained a male FBI employee overnight at her home. Somehow the FBI learned about the tryst and at 4 P.M. on a Friday fired her for moral turpitude. The woman, who was twenty-three or twenty-four, reacted hysterically. She and her husband had just purchased a house, and they needed two incomes to meet mortgage payments. She did not know what to tell him and feared that dismissal from the FBI would so stigmatize her that she could not obtain another job.
    Boyle telephoned his wife at their home in suburban Springfield, Virginia, and told her what had happened. “Friday afternoon is the worst possible time to fire anyone. She will brood all weekend, and she’s suicidal. Could we invite her to dinner on Sunday night so she’ll have something to look forward to?” A girlfriend dropped her off at Boyle’s house; he consoled her by advising that in job hunting she could cite him as a reference, and after a pleasant dinner he drove her to her home in Maryland. Evidently the girlfriend told people in the office of the dinner; in any case, the inspector learned of it.
    Leaning across a desk, he kept shaking his finger at Boyle while lecturing him about consorting with immoral former employees. “You stick that finger in my face one more time and I’ll break it off,” Boyle shouted. For that insubordination, the FBI demoted him from supervisor to street agent and banished him to Chicago through a “disciplinary” transfer.
    A garbled account of the incident preceded him to Chicago, and he arrived there in early 1961 with the reputation of a piranha. No one asked him to lunch, for a beer after work, or to join a carpool, and no supervisor would accept him on his squad—until Freyman spoke up. “I’ll take him. Let’s give the man a chance and judge him by what he does.” That was typical of Freyman. But he also had gone to the trouble of examining Boyle’s background, which in ways paralleled his own.
    Boyle was born April 6, 1929, in Jersey City, New Jersey, into an extended family that included three brothers, a sister, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. His father was a professional barefist boxer, then a stevedore, a dock foreman, and a salesman, and his mother had worked as a secretary in New York. Both parents read
widely, quoted literature at the dinner table, and on Saturday afternoons gathered the children around the radio to listen to broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera. Under a pseudonym, his mother, a member of the Third Order of Saint Frances, wrote book reviews for the Carmelite magazine published for priests.
    Like Freyman, Boyle benefited from remarkable parochial schoolteachers who disciplined, stretched, and excited young minds. Sister Catherine Pierre was scarcely taller than her first-grade pupils at Saint Cecilia’s Grammar School in Englewood, New Jersey, yet she did not hesitate to give their faces a sharp slap or an encouraging pat. She taught Boyle to read and to love reading. “It is a magic key that opens the door to the world.” She so thoroughly ingrained in him the multiplication tables that by age seven he could multiply,