Charles Travis Lemon is an agent with Tango Section.
His designation inside that small, tight-knit group is Tango 5.
The time frame for the activities we follow Tango 5 involved in is the end of the 70s. Carter is in the White House and under his direction and that of Congress under the control of Senator Church , much of the intelligence community landscape has been changed. Agencies like the CIA were gutted by budget cuts of its boots-on-the-ground teams of operatives, replaced by a dedication to "very high tech electronic intelligence capabilities". But not all. "In that merciless, and sometimes asinine, process an obscure section of one of these bureaus had survived in part because it was so small by federal standards it was almost invisible."
"In the government hierarchy there were bureaus and agencies under secretary level oversight and control. These were then divided into offices, and directorates, and departments, and eventually down to sections. The people in Tango Section at the time had a little inside joke about the name. The military uses the designation 'tango' in their phonetic alphabet to designate 'target'. So the insiders referred to their organization as 'Tango Section' in part because it had survived the targeted cuts to intelligence operations. It also seemed to always be involved in those situations that required a low-level hands-on approach with deniability at the upper levels of the National Security apparatus. They ran the 'target section' now known as Tango Section." Tango Section had always been a secretive, little known and intentionally obscure organization; and they liked it that way! It was an agency that took on the dirty work of the really tough, sticky problems.
We learn that Lemon, 'Trav' to his friends, had served for a fair number of years as the ground controller in the Air Force, responsible for directing the activities of fighter jets involved in operations all over the world. He had served in Vietnam, the Middle East, the Balkans, and Central America. He "had gotten tired of the increasingly impersonal video game atmosphere of high tech warfare in a digital and electronic world" and wanted something "up close and personal". His current employer, Tango Section, gave him just that and very few knew of his work, not even his wife, Julie. "For her and for everyone else outside his agency he was just an ex-pat businessman who had a little import and export business" in Alicante on the southeastern coast of Spain.
Spain where both he and Julie had lived when they met. It served as an excellent location from which to stage his occasional missions. While Julie was involved in the commercial airliner business and was often gone for a couple days here and there, Lemon was largely at home, except for an occasional week or so due to his trading company. In truth, he would receive at short notice a call to head to some trouble spot where he would be told to "fix" a problem however it needed to be handled.
Good Lines:
- Said by Lemon to an enemy, "I've been cleaning up messes like yours for more years than you have been sipping tea and eating dates".