by Jose Latour
“Well, gentlemen, I’m very curious to find out why I’m here.”
Hart rearranged himself in his seat and, smiling, shrugged off Steil’s concern.
“It’s our impression that you’ve done nothing wrong, Mr. Steil. You have nothing to fear from us. For some time now, we’ve been on a case about which we presume you know nothing and are only marginally involved. At present, we can’t disclose the nature of this case. It’s classified material.
“A month ago we learned that you were planning a trip to Cuba and we want to request your cooperation concerning—”
“Just a minute,” Steil said, raising his hand and looking at the floor. “No, go on.”
“All we want from you is to report to us—”
“Hold it,” Steil interrupted again. “I’ll ask a question and I want a straight answer. Are you going to ask me to spy on someone or something?”
“No,” Hart said.
“No?”
“No.”
Steil cut a sideways look at Tony, who remained strangely impassive.
Steil cleared his throat. “Listen, Mr. Hart, Mr. McLellan,” he said, returning his gaze to the officials. “I’m indifferent to politics. I don’t give a damn about communism, the embargo, the Cuban American Foundation, or anything of the sort. I don’t know anyone in Cuba remotely connected to the government or the Communist Party. And if your request has nothing to do with spying, I don’t see how I might be of any use to the FBI or the U.S. Treasury.”
Five or ten seconds elapsed. McLellan pursed his lips in disapproval; Hart tilted his head to the side but kept silent. Tony Soto crossed his ankles and, looking at the floor, shook his head in dismay.
“Well?” Elliot said.
“Well what?” Hart asked.
“How could I be of any use to you guys?”
“How can you find out if you don’t let me finish?”
Steil pressed his lips together. The man was right. Suspecting a trap, he had lost his cool. He nodded his agreement. “Sorry. Go ahead.”
“Fine. Would you like a Seven-Up?”
Looking the man in the eye, Steil accepted the offer and Hart marched to the refrigerator, opened it, and returned with the soda. Steil was not thirsty. He nodded out of a realization that they had checked him out right down to trivialities, as this was his favorite soda. And the dickheads wanted him to know it. It gave him the creeps, but he reached for the can, pulled the tab, had a sip. Hart returned to his seat, interlaced his fingers, and started talking.
“We have reason to believe that you’ll be approached by someone in Cuba. Someone you’ve probably never seen before, although he may try to introduce himself through a friend or relative of yours. We think he’ll try to cut a deal with you. Rest assured that this guy won’t harm a hair on your head. On the contrary, he’ll try to win you over. And he’ll ask you to do something for him here in Miami.
“We may be wrong. In that case, your trip will be uneventful and you’ll let us know when you come back. But there’s a strong possibility we’re right and, if a stranger approaches you with a proposition, we ask you to please agree to whatever this man asks you to do in Miami and report it to us.”
Hart crossed his legs, McLellan ran his hand over his scalp, Tony combed his mustache with the fingernails of his hand. Steil could not believe his ears; feeling his mouth parched, he took a second sip.
“Now, please, think about this. We could’ve chosen to keep you in the dark. Then, upon your return, ask you if someone in Cuba had requested you to deliver a message, make a business proposition, or in any other way act on his behalf in this country. In this scenario, suppose that, out of fear, distrust, or another reason, you refuse to cooperate, or deny having conferred with anyone when in fact you did. Even worse: No stranger approached you, neither a friend nor a relative asked you to do anything here, but we may think you are lying. In such a circumstance, you’d become a suspect in our case. We don’t want that to happen. We’ve taken you into our confidence because we think you are to be trusted and can give us a hand.”
“But there’s another reason for asking you to cooperate with the U.S. government,” McLellan said when Hart paused. “By helping us you will help yourself. Your future here is splendid, Mr. Steil. You arrived as an illegal immigrant, inherited an important amount of money, and are a partner in a trading company. Even though you haven’t applied for U.S. citizenship, it’s the American dream come true. However, the dream may turn into a nightmare if you become involved in a serious crime. I ask you to consider that.”
Steil slid himself forward and deposited the can of soda on the coffee table. “I think the best thing I can do is to cancel my trip,” he snapped.
“You may, of course,” Hart retorted. “Then we would have to reconsider our impression that you are not involved in what’s definitely going on.”
Feeling cornered, furious, Steil got to his feet. “You just said I hadn’t done anything.”
“Take it easy, Mr. Steil. Please sit down. I said it was our impression that you had done nothing wrong. Maybe we are mistaken. Maybe you are thinking of canceling your trip to report this meeting to somebody,” Hart said suavely.
“That’s nonsense! I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“Elliot, sit down,” Tony Soto advised.
“Shut the fuck up, Tony!” Elliot advised back, scowling in anger.
“There’s no need to curse,” fumed McLellan.
That stopped Steil cold. He inhaled deeply and expelled a sharp, exasperated breath. “I’m sorry,” he whispered as he sat.
“Don’t lose your cool, Mr. Steil,” McLellan went on. “We need your help. Because of your nationality, your job, your frequent trips to Central America, and your fluency in English, you are the perfect candidate.”
Steil turned his head, rested his elbow on the sofa’s arm, cupped his chin in his hand, and, staring at the nearest desk without seeing it, looked askance at the proposition. His silence was respected. He knew nothing about the so-called case. He had not committed any crime, not in seven years. He refused to get involved in politics, never had. He would not do it. No government agency could force him to do something against his will.
“Gentlemen,” he began, turning to face Hart and McLellan, “I won’t go to Cuba. I cancel my trip. I’m sorry.” Then he stood.
Hart raised his eyebrows and shook his head with compassion, regretting that things had reached this point, then moved his gaze to McLellan.
“Okay. No problem. It’s a free country,” McLellan said with a smile; his brackets bent outward. “You have a lawyer, Mr. Steil?” the man from Treasury asked.
“What?”
“Attorney, counselor, ambulance chaser, abogado in Spanish.”
“Yes.”
“There’s a phone there. Give him a call.”
“Why should I?”
“Because yesterday you drew nine thousand dollars from your savings account with Capital Bank. And I have here,” McLellan extracted a folded paper from his shirt pocket, “an authorization to search you. I suspect you’re carrying a sum of cash that considerably exceeds the maximum amount you can legally take to Cuba, which is exactly thirteen hundred eighty-one dollars, the result of multiplying one hundred eighty-three dollars by seven, the seven days you’ll be there, then adding the hundred you can legally import in merchandise. Perhaps you are not aware that if I find on you just one dollar in excess of thirteen hundred eighty-one, you face a fine that ranges from fifty thousand to ten million and imprisonment ranging from ten to thirty years, for willfully attempting to violate a U.S. law that permanent resident aliens must comply with. So, I think you should call your lawyer and ask him to come here as quickly as possible.”
…
On April 17, 1997, a few minutes past 11:00 A.M., Manuel Pardo got a phone call from the personal assistant of XEMIC’s president. An unscheduled meeting was taking place in the top floor meeting room and his presence had j
ust been requested, the woman said. The instant the retired major entered the luxurious meeting room and scanned the participants, he knew what was on the agenda. Besides XEMIC’s president and his two vice presidents, in attendance were the president of Banco Financiero Internacional, a general—and vice minister—of the Ministry of the Interior, and representatives from the Central Bank of Cuba, the Ministry of Electronics and Communications, and the Ministry of Science and Technology.
The day before, the corporation’s president began as soon as Pardo complied with the request to sit down, persons unknown had siphoned off $1,600,065 U.S. from a Banco Financiero Internacional bank account in the Cayman Islands.
The man paused to let it sink in. Pardo had been anxiously waiting to hear it from the horse’s mouth. He knew that, for Interior, everyone was a possible suspect, including the presidents of the bank and the corporation, but if the corporation’s network administrator were not informed of what had happened, it would have meant he was in boiling-hot water. He had rehearsed his part painstakingly, with Victoria as acting coach, and now, his fear assuaged, he was ready to play it.
“How much?” he asked, his eyes wide with disbelief.
The president repeated the amount.
“But how …? I mean, banks have security systems, all sorts of …”
Pardo feigned hesitation. The inept bureaucrat who had reached the top after many years of seven-day, eighty-hour weeks and considerable boot-licking was shaking his head.
“They did it online,” the man explained. “Two withdrawals, one for …” he glanced at his notepad, “$785,414. The other for $814,651.”
“Oh,” Pardo exclaimed, then let a few seconds slip by before jumping from his seat. “But online they leave a trail!” he said enthusiastically. Another reflective pause. “Unless they used Telnet,” sounding discouraged by the prospect.
“That’s exactly what they did. The trail evaporates at a Canadian Internet service provider. The lessee of an account fed them a false name and listed as place of business a vacant lot in Montreal.”
The other participants watched as Pardo reflected on this. “But to find out our bank’s codes and passwords …” The script said he had to leave it there, and he did.
“Yes, we also suspect it’s an inside job,” the bureaucrat said, “but we need proof. The Ministry of the Interior and the Central Bank preside over the commission formed to investigate this. I want you to collaborate with them. You’ll be joining forces with …”
While nodding gravely to each commission member he was introduced to, Pardo felt slightly sad. He and Victoria had achieved a masterstroke and they could not claim credit for it. It was not fair.
That evening, telling the story to his wife, “… but I nearly peed in my pants with laughter when the general, Silvestre, you know him?”
“No.”
“Well, he drew me aside after the meeting was over and said, ‘Major, you are our man here. If someone can find out who did this, it’s you. This is my direct line,’ he gave me a note with his number. ‘You need something, find out anything, I want to be the first to know.’ Can you imagine? He wants to be the first to know!” Pardo laughed heartily.
Victoria was a little worried over her husband’s gradual transformation. From a sexually unimaginative, lackadaisical mathematician with utopian social notions, Pardo had become a go-for-it realist with superb sexual skills. But he had also turned fearless and overconfident. She believed that a little fear was beneficial; confidence was great, overconfidence dangerous.
“Be careful, macho,” she warned. “Now everybody will be on the lookout. Before this, you could check all the programs and records, enter all the Web sites, nobody was on the alert because nothing remotely similar had happened. Now it’ll be different. There may be someone in Interior, or in Science and Technology, or in Communications, expert enough to track you down.”
“Victoria, trust me on this. Nobody, nowhere, can track me down.”
“Just be careful.”
At the first meeting, the experts from Science and Technology and Communications wholeheartedly agreed with Pardo’s intelligent suggestions. He in turn okayed, without any reservation, their suggestions. The laymen nodded their approval without understanding a single word of cyberspeak. Work began.
Three weeks later General Silvestre called a meeting at 10:00 A.M. in his office. The three experts admitted their failure; they had not been able to detect how the intruders got into the system. Banco Financiero, they explained to the bureaucrats, had top-of-the-line software, no holes in its security, cutting-edge intrusion-detection techniques. Somebody had got in, but they could not say who or how.
The general banged on the table with the palm of his hand, startling the others. “This is unacceptable, cojones,” he yelled. “We got robbed and you tell us that everything is perfect? The security, the software, the hardware? Well, the guy’s got fuckware and right now he may be fucking us blind. Me cago en su madre.”
Pardo had to call forth all of his self-control to not laugh himself silly. “Excuse me, comrade general,” he said instead. “We’ve changed all the authentication and authorization software. It’s impossible for … whoever entered the system to repeat his feat.”
I shouldn’t have said feat, Pardo immediately realized.
“Feat? You call a robbery a feat, comrade?”
“Sorry, comrade … It’s just that …”
“What Comrade Pardo means,” barged in Ariel Camacho, the expert from the Ministry of Science and Technology who had taken a liking to Pardo, “is that from a purely technical standpoint, what was done is a tour de force.”
“I take a crap on the tour de force,” bawled the general. “It must’ve been that traitor,” he added.
Five weeks before Pardo’s swindle, a midlevel, thirty-five-year-old executive of Banco Financiero Internacional stationed in London had applied for refugee status. The man had been admitted to the party at twenty-three, served in Angola, enthusiastically waved little Cuban flags at political rallies, and told anyone willing to listen that the Commander in Chief was the greatest person in world history. Two months after being posted to London with his wife and five-year-old girl, he had defected.
The experts had looked into the possibility that the fleeing executive had pulled off the job or had provided the required information for others to pull it. The unanimous conclusion, reported to commission members during the fourth meeting, was that the man lacked the background knowledge, essential information, and computer expertise to do it. Despite this, the paranoid general, who could not tell a computer from a typewriter and needed to close the case, kept insisting that the “traitor” was the thief.
“Perhaps he’s in cahoots with other undetected traitors hoping to be sent abroad soon, then they apply for political asylum and get their share. ¡Hijos de puta!”
Nobody said a word. The general gulped half a glass of water, returned the glass to the table with a thud, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Now, comrades,” he said, “we have to solve this case. I want you to begin anew, clean the slate, start from zero, double-check everything. Above all, you must take appropriate measures to secure the systems, software, or whatever you call security in your gobbledygook and vouch that this will never happen again. If it does, many people will be sent packing. Not you; guys from S&T, Communications, and the Central Bank. You have nothing to do with what happened, you are just lending a hand; Interior appreciates that. But people from Banco Financiero? From XEMIC? I wouldn’t give a penny for their jobs if this ever happens again.”
Although the culprit was never found, the fact that for the next two years and five months no unauthorized transfer of funds took place made the swindle sink into obscurity. Pardo traveled extensively during this period. On a trip to Canada he electronically paid fifty-eight thousand U.S. dollars from the “E” bank account for a vacant lot in Guelph, Ontario. Through the go-betweens in Brooklyn and Houston, he ma
iled the bill of sale to Mr. Bonis, the Miami gardener. Nine days later, at 10:00 A.M. precisely, from a Montreal pay phone he punched the Miami number he had memorized and got the machine. “Bonis Landscaping. Leave your message and I’ll call you back. If this is Mr. Dopar, Ms. Negri says thanks.” Pardo waited for the beep, then said: “Tell her I appreciate her help.”
In 1998 and 1999 the former major traveled to London, Barcelona, Milan, Frankfurt, and Paris. In each of those cities he opened Internet accounts with local providers. Following his wife’s instructions, in Paris he rented a safe-deposit box at a Credit Lyonnais branch and stored in it one floppy disk that Victoria had asked him to spirit away. She had made him promise that (1) upon his return to Cuba he would hand over the key to her for safekeeping, (2) he would not make a copy of it, and (3) under no circumstance would he try to learn what the disk contained. Feeling sure that it was something very secret and of great importance, he kept his word, believing that in certain matters the less you know the better. Victoria had taken some substantial life insurance policy, he concluded.
When in August 1999 the head of procurement at Tiendas Panamericanas, XEMIC’s nationwide chain of stores, defected in Madrid, Pardo was ready to strike again. On September 14, $1,235,760 vanished from a Tiendas Panamericanas bank account in the Bahamas. The network administrator was ordered back from Paris the day after the fraud took place and he returned immediately, thus convincing the detectives that he had nothing to do with the swindle. Concealed in his shoes and underwear he brought with him $10,000 in hundred-dollar notes.
After the inquiry commission finished its work in December of that same year, Pardo was sacked. Everyone believed that the General Directorate of Counterintelligence had made him a scapegoat after they had failed to detect that a senior executive of Tiendas Panamericanas was getting ready to betray the Revolution and embezzle the people’s money. It was clear as day, General Silvestre said. For over ten years the Judas had traveled hundreds of times abroad, making contacts in many countries. A Barcelona ISP operated the Internet account utilized to make the withdrawal, and the bastard now lived in Spain. Lacking concrete proof, though, no extradition request was presented to the Spanish government.
