Metal shelves ran from one end of the garage to the other, divided into rows and crammed with boxes with numbered labels.
Waving his ice cream spoon in the air like a conductor’s baton, Eric explained, “I devoted years to putting my papers, photos, negatives, and microfilms in order. And I managed to get it done. My wife was a great help. I never would have been able to organize this archive without her. Today, I’m a shadow of what I once was. After she passed away two years ago, I didn’t set foot in here for months. But I ended up coming back. The prodigal son returns home.”
He paused ever so slightly and indulged in another spoonful. Was it possible that he harbored no doubts whatsoever about his decades of active service? Or was he trying to keep his ice cream from melting?
He soon proceeded. “A small part of the archive could in theory be accessible to the general public. Newspaper clippings, photos, copies of innocuous reports. There’s a confidential part, which is gradually being declassified by the government. The rest, more than half, and don’t ask me which because I couldn’t even tell you at this point, is secret. All mixed together, intentionally. Maybe out of spite. The wheat and the chaff are scrambled together amid the dozens of boxes in this garage, which will one day go back to Langley, as specified in my will.”
After a bitter laugh, he concluded, “It’s going to be one helluva job to sort through all this material. This cursed legacy will be my revenge, for having been sent home before my time, after so many years serving my country. Let them sift through the paperwork for months, if not years! And may they be frightened by what they find!”
Now I was the one who was frightened. I’d accompanied him, slowly munching on my seedless grapes, thereby giving the impression that nothing out of the ordinary was going on, as if we were strolling along the Champs-Elysées on a spring afternoon, not surrounded by the tragic spoils of bloody battles. The labels went parading by my eyes without my daring to linger over them: Allende, 1968–1969; Allende, 1970–1971. After 1972, the boxes were classified by month (Allende, January–April 1972; Allende, May 1973). The labels on the last — the smallest of all — hit me the hardest amid that grim collection of memories: Allende, August/September 1973. At the end of the same shelf devoted to Chile, names of familiar martyrs (Miguel Enríquez, Tucapel Jiménez, José Carrasco among them) and others, unknown, appeared. There were labels designating paramilitary groups, torture centers (Arenal Base, Casa José Domingo Cañas), regions and islands (Dawson Island, Puchuncaví, Chacabuco).… Still others referred to informants or individuals who, according to Eric, needed to be watched (“You have no idea how many people we had to keep an eye on”). Many bore enigmatic titles.
An entire shelf was devoted to the Chilean secret police and the infamous names of those who had served in the dreaded organization: Contreras, Krassnoff Martchenko, Fernández
Larios, Osvaldo Romo Mena, Mario Jahn Barrera.… Some had only numbers, all in blue ink circled in black, or code names (Zulu, Orpheus, Zapata, and — the most curious of all — Onassis). I counted three boxes with the label MIR, undated, and another three for Letelier, Bernardo Leighton, and Prats. Cuba and Fidel were relegated to secondary spots on the next shelf. I remember one box in particular: Cuba — OSPAAAL, 1966. “The Cuban stuff wouldn’t fit in three garages this size,” joked Eric. “But, fortunately, the island wasn’t my problem.”
I went past at least four boxes devoted to General Pinochet and one to his family. Five shelves, from one end of the garage to the other, had to do with the Uruguayans, most with the Tupamaros (namely, Raúl Sendic) and the dictators and torturers of the time (Bordaberry, Gregorio Alvarez, Manuel Cordero). The Argentinean Montoneros also figured prominently.
Eric kept talking all the while. His words reached my ears in counterpoint to our steps, receding only when he took another spoonful of ice cream. He’d finish it eventually, though, and his speech would soon be deprived of its pauses.
We’d reached the Guevaras. They took up an entire set of shelves in one of the rows. His “African phase” was there, from his passages through Mali, Guinea-Conakry, Ghana, Dahomey, and Tanzania to the guerrilla warfare he’d been a part of in the Congo.
“Copies of field reports,” Eric explained when he saw me slow my pace. “From colleagues stationed at African posts. Not everything that’s here has to do with me, of course. But in Montevideo, we received copies of reports from countries that were in some way connected to us.”
Having finished my grapes, I wondered what to do with the bowl. “Set it over there.” Eric pointed to an empty shelf near the door.
We traveled up and down the aisles of his doleful bazaar, reaching the far end of the garage, then moved up the next row back toward the door. I estimated that we would finish the whole trip in nine or ten more rounds.
“You have no idea what it’s like to be born trapped in a system,” Eric said at one point. His tone had changed. It was no longer assertive but had veered off on a more evocative path, which required attention on my part. Eric had finished his ice cream and set his empty bowl next to mine. He licked his fingers before wiping them on his Bermuda shorts. “I don’t say that as an apology. I don’t owe anyone an apology.”
Had the man who’d held his hands up to the TV screen when he saw the World Trade Center towers collapse finally stepped onstage?
“To be born trapped in a system,” he repeated. “For a man like you, a man who was young at the time, the world was a chessboard where pieces could be freely moved based on faith or idealism. But we …” Another pause.
Frustration prevented him from keeping up the appearances he’d relied on during lunch. He seemed to need air. “We were at war,” he said at last.
He vented with the conviction of someone who had experienced day-to-day life in the trenches. He knew what he was talking about. The war, for him, was no abstract phenomenon. I’d seen plenty of awards for acts of bravery hanging on the walls of a hallway on my trip to the bathroom. He’d killed Vietcong, lost friends, even been wounded. In sum, he’d seen death up close. It hardly mattered if it came wrapped in an ideology or not, or whether the ideology was right or wrong. When the time came, the horror would always be apolitical. Two adversaries suddenly confronting one another, wielding weapons in the middle of the jungle, couldn’t both be right. Or both be wrong. In a split second like that, what difference did it make where the truth lay? What mattered was to be the first to fire. And hit the mark.
“The cold war was hanging over our heads,” Eric said quietly. “Today, if you look back, with a minimum of goodwill and forgiveness, you’ll see what we escaped from. Because, no matter how crazy you may be” — another glance at me, which I returned with a cordial smile — “you can’t simply go on admiring our comrade Stalin as before, right? Or condoning Mao’s cruelty, which caused millions to die from starvation. Historically proven facts, which explain what’s transpiring in certain parts of the world nowadays. Or can you?”
Put that way, I couldn’t. So I agreed without feeling I’d surrendered any space on my chessboard. “No,” I replied, “I can’t.”
He exhaled deeply, as if he’d won the first round.
I then felt obliged to add, “The problem with this kind of reasoning, as often happens to be the case, is the broader context in which such matters are analyzed.”
I had to bite my tongue, given the crap my highfalutin words were hiding. But there was no other way. And I had to take it to the end, increasingly aware of the ditch I was digging between us. “Its dynamics, and the necessarily shifting perspective of those … those watching.”
Eric stopped in the middle of one of the aisles, in front of two boxes, on the labels of which I could read Jorge Videla, miscellaneous and Alejandro Lanusse, correspondence with Galtieri. He set his clenched fists on his waist, which was rather comical since he was in Bermudas and Docksiders and looked more like a tourist indignant over a canceled reservation than a war hero offended by the rhetoric of an academic.
“A
nd what exactly do you mean by that?” he asked angrily.
I faced the same options as usual, in analogous situations. Grab the bull by the horns? Or negotiate a strategic retreat? Better negotiate.
“Eric, I don’t think this is the time, or the place, for us to get into this kind of argument. I was merely trying to say —”
“Bullshit!” he burst out furiously. Immediately, however, he apologized. And I, in turn, raised my hand as if to say, Forget it.
“Did abuses take place in South America?” my host asked, throwing his arms open wide. The indignation was directed at his boxes, not at me. Facing the general silence, he himself took charge of answering. “Of course! You bet they did! Why? Because we couldn’t always choose our partners down there. And, often, these turned out to be the worst sort of people. Do you think we were mad about Pinochet? Or Contreras? The corrupt military we had to deal with in some of these godforsaken countries, including yours?”
A bit more and I’d feel sorry for Eric and his companions. But the moment didn’t lend itself to irony.
“War,” Eric said heavily. “We were at war. And there was no time to lose.”
He’d returned to the start of his verbal digression. I waited to see if he’d end there — or head off in another direction.
“There was no time to lose,” he repeated, as if gathering strength before climbing a hill. “Either we snuffed out the fledgling Communist movement in South America or we would have to contend with two guerrilla wars on opposite sides of the planet. And we didn’t even know if we could win the one we’d been involved in for years. But if the Orientals knew how to play dominoes, so did we. And we decided to set up our own game in your neck of the woods.”
Here I recalled Merce Cunningham’s choreography, brought up by Max twenty years earlier. But Eric went on: “The right-wing dominoes, we joked. We went in through Brazil in sixty-four and from there all the countries toppled one after the other, just like a house of cards: Argentina in sixty-six; Uruguay and Chile in seventy-three (a good year for us); Peru at some point, I no longer recall just when; then Argentina again in 1976 (after the brief and pitiful Perón hiatus); and so on. A beautiful domino effect … just perfect. We worked the guerrilla warfare in our backyard with gusto. Without firing a shot or losing a single man.”
Given my silence, he continued down the slope.
“We were used to conventional wars. We’d won two at once, against the Germans and the Japanese. But a guerrilla war was a whole other ball game. Two, in fact … and on a continental scale. No way would we have managed!”
I couldn’t help but put in my two cents. “And both quagmires,” I suggested, “just like today in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
He seemed taken aback by my interruption, so caught up was he in his past. He closed his eyes for a moment, having been confronted with words that cut across time and projected him without warning into the challenges of the present — like a miner who can’t handle the blinding light after days of despair in a dark shaft.
“Maybe so,” he finally conceded, lowering his head. “Maybe so. Today’s world … today’s CIA …”
He fell silent. And cast a tired look over the contents of his garage. A look devoid of pride — and, who knows, perhaps even bewildered. A bit as though, as a result of our tour, he’d reappraised a legacy that had brought him only joy until then.
Suddenly I stopped short. I had just passed a box on which I’d hastily read Nuclear Agreement, Brazil-Germany. I was so nervous that I worked up the courage to excuse myself to use the washroom, promising I’d be right back.
“Don’t worry,” I heard Eric say behind me. “I’m not going anywhere.”
50
“Is that the 1975 agreement?” I asked as casually as possible when I got back.
“In a way, yes. Better known among us as ‘Everything you always wanted to know about Westinghouse’s feelings toward the CIA but were afraid to ask.’ ”
Impossible not to laugh. But I soon added more seriously, “Right. You guys lost a boatload of money when the Germans signed the agreement with Brazil.”
“Billions and billions of dollars,” Eric confirmed. “And for years they accused us of having screwed up. Even though” — he pointed to the box in front of which we’d stopped — “even though this box contains not the final agreement from 1975, as you assumed a moment ago, but drafts of the original document we managed to copy in Montevideo years before the agreement was signed. And even though we sent everything to Langley.”
“And then what?” I asked in surprise.
“Then nothing. The CIA did nothing. Not a thing. They simply sat on the information. Maybe Westinghouse, which had already won the bid for the nuclear plant …”
“Angra 1.”
“Yes, the Angra 1 nuclear plant. Maybe Westinghouse was convinced that with this first victory, the rest of the deal was in the bag. It was in the bag, all right. But in the Germans’ bag. And it was your friend Max, our very own Sam Beckett, who put us on the trail.”
“A double triumph. Or a single blunder?”
“I don’t even know anymore. It was a complex operation, involving smoke and mirrors, the unwitting participation of your former ambassador in Montevideo and his partner Carlos Câmara, not to mention the role played by the British agent who was working with us. Each had a part in the equation, which would earn me a medal of honor and a handshake from Richard Nixon a year later.”
“Despite Westinghouse’s failure?”
“Yes …,” he replied, “and no.”
Then he spilled the beans. “I ended up getting embroiled in the whole Brazil-Germany nuclear issue by mere chance. Courtesy of an indiscretion by your ambassador. The only one he committed in almost six years in Montevideo, poor guy. As I was listening to the recordings we routinely made, a comment of his on the phone caught my attention. I started to concentrate more on everything he said. And put together lines here and there. Until gradually discovering, to our utter bewilderment, that he was the bridge between Brazil and Germany on the nuclear subject. Who would have believed …”
“Really, it doesn’t make sense.”
“Except for one detail, which eluded our people at Langley, given how low Brazilian priorities are, and were, for us. The ambassador had served in Bonn before being transferred to Montevideo.”
“Yes. But … that in itself doesn’t …”
“Exactly. Yet this kind of detail would never have gone undetected if we’d been dealing with a Russian diplomat, for instance. Or an Eastern European. But since he was Brazilian, no one saw …”
Being a part of the third world had its advantages, I couldn’t help but think.…
Meanwhile, Eric pressed onward. “How could we have imagined that the German-Brazilian nuclear connection would go through Uruguay …?” he asked.
To be honest, the possibility would never have occurred to me either. And I doubted that even today anyone would have connected such seemingly unrelated and disjointed facts.
“Once red flags had been raised, I went into the field. And quickly saw that the ambassador operated of his own accord. At least initially. I’m not saying he disobeyed ministry orders but that he acted without its knowledge. He counted solely on the support of a group of military officers, close to the president, with whom he exchanged messages we eventually decoded. And on Carlos Câmara. Even though we were friends, Carlos had never broached this subject with me in Rio. Nor did he in Montevideo. Unlike Max, he was a professional. And a true patriot.”
He took a deep breath, like someone paying tribute to a fallen comrade. He allowed himself to linger a bit longer on this digression. “The ambassador too. Only, he was a loose cannon. Vaz later told me some unbelievable stories about him.”
His eyes, laden with suggestions and malice, sought mine. Would I by any chance be interested in taking a break for a few spicy details? No? Too bad …
“The old man had studied in Germany, before World War II,” he went on
. “He’d made friends, some of whom had survived the conflict, even come out quite well. Several found themselves at the head of their old industries. Washington asked my opinion: what should be done? It was my idea to bring the British secret service into the game. So we wouldn’t be exposed, should suspicions arise. The Brits owed us a few favors.”
Favors for what? I wondered. Something relating to the future Falklands/Malvinas problem? Too late; Eric had already moved on.
“It was Max, then, who connected the dots for us,” he said, his eyes shining jubilantly. “Not even realizing it! That was the beauty of the whole thing.”
To my surprise, he grabbed my arm, as if celebrating a victory. A strange show of intimacy for a man like him.
“Max served us up the crucial information we needed to find the drafts of the agreement. We knew the ambassador had them, because we’d tried everything on the Bonn end, to no avail. The ambassador’s copies were our only hope. But no one could figure out just where that maniac had stashed the papers, or the microfilm. We put Ray on Max’s tail.”
“Ray?”
“Raymond Thurston. An agent from the British secret service. We partnered on a few projects. Nice guy. And an excellent agent. He ended up becoming friends with Max. Which would later cost him his job.”
Here Eric drummed his fingers on the box, as if to rekindle my interest in it. “It was a move worthy of James Bond,” he said affectionately.
So it was then, three hours and six sausages after having crossed the threshold of his home, by which time we’d already downed countless vodkas and beers, that I managed to return to the tragic Brazil of the 1970s. Not by way of familiar topics, as I’d envisioned. But by having been hurled behind the scenes of the nuclear negotiations between Germany and Brazil. In a certain sense, just as had happened to Eric forty years earlier.
51
Eric moved right into the topic, as though in a rush. The State Department and the Pentagon were alarmed, he told me, as if I could dispense with preliminaries in such a complex matter.
His Own Man Page 26
