His Own Man

by Edgard Telles Ribeiro

  Although involving the peaceful use of nuclear energy, with no evident threat of danger, the issue had serious implications all around. On the German side, it demonstrated a kind of independence Washington found unacceptable since Westinghouse was known to have already won the bid for Brazil’s first nuclear plant and assumed the market was theirs. On the Brazilian side, it represented the first explicit rupture with Washington since the military takeover in 1964. An incomprehensible — and equally unacceptable — show of independence.

  “But what was the difference?” I asked, trying to familiarize myself with the subject, which I’d known little about at the time and couldn’t quite recall. “What distinguished the two countries’ offers? In terms of the equipment?”

  Eric looked at me as though sizing up a small child he didn’t particularly care for. “To make a long story short,” he said after a resigned sigh, “we wanted to sell Brazil what we called turnkey nuclear plants. In other words, facilities fully equipped for immediate use. But without any technology transfer whatsoever. You bought them, installed them, pushed a button, and presto! The plant was up and running. The rest of Latin America would be gnashing its teeth in envy and we’d then sell fifteen more plants just like it to whoever could pay.”

  He winked at me. It was, in fact, an interesting proposition. For the Americans.

  “On the other hand,” Eric continued, “the Germans proposed a whole nuclear program to Brazil, with several plants. Eight in all, which would operate based on a method they were in the process of testing. A method that would allow for the transfer of technical know-how.”

  “What method was that?”

  “Easy, my friend … That part came later. First there was a preamble.”

  It was nice to note that Eric was treating me with the same bonhomie Colonel Vaz had shown in Vienna. Take it easy, my dinner companion had said one night in that same tone.

  “Until the seventies, uranium was enriched by gaseous diffusion,” he continued. “A new, more efficient and less expensive method was being developed, though. Using ultracentrifuge.”

  Ultracentrifuge … what a word, I thought, looking around me and trying to imagine how many more mysteries those boxes might still yield one day.

  “Only three countries in Europe had had access to that technology. And Germany was one of them. They’d formed a partnership with the other two. That was the technology Brazil was after.”

  Step by step, we were approaching the core of the matter.

  “But at the last minute, the State Department pressured one of the partners, and when I say pressured I mean with an arsenal of persuasive arguments …” A glance in my direction, to make sure I was able to appreciate the firepower a country like his could bring to bear. “It pressured one of the two other partners to prevent Germany from transferring the technology to Brazil. And the Germans reneged. They were forced to back out of the deal.”

  The most important, however, was still to come.

  “Here’s where things began to heat up. Instead, and in utter secrecy, the Germans offered the Brazilians what they presented as ‘a promising alternative method’ they’d been developing on their own to separate out the uranium of interest. Because that was the issue: separating the wheat from the chaff. This method experimentally developed by the Germans was called jet nozzle.”

  I must have looked lost, for Eric made a vague gesture that meant, Don’t even try to follow. But that didn’t keep him from giving me a short lesson. “There’s still no equivalent for the term in Portuguese,” he concluded at last. “What matters is what it represented: transfer of technology. In the field of uranium enrichment.”

  “Washington must have loved it,” I joked.

  “Indeed,” he concurred. “The agreement with Germany foresaw the construction of eight nuclear power plants in association with KVD, a subsidiary of Borgward-Stitz. German interest in the project was twofold. Financed largely by you (which was in itself pretty humorous), they were testing a uranium enrichment process that would raise their standing in the international community — if it worked. And they would still be guaranteed participation in the entire cycle of the project in Brazil, which meant they would ultimately be partners of the commercial plants. Beyond the exploitation of uranium and its enrichment process, these would involve construction of heavy equipment at an extremely high cost. Not bad, right?”

  The first world certainly knew how to defend itself.

  Eric picked up his pace. “The Germans weren’t unaware of what the Brazilian military wanted. They quickly realized that they’d pay whatever the price might be. So whether in good faith or bad, they ended up negotiating with your country something they were still testing — and that would never work for their clients’ top secret nuclear purposes.”

  “Why? The Germans aren’t known to be irresponsible peo —”

  “Because, as I said, they were still working on the technology. But since they were confident that they’d eventually get it right, they felt they were acting ethically. Except that we were up to speed. We knew they had no way of getting there. And that, as a result, Brazil couldn’t benefit from the technology, despite all the German nods toward a breakthrough that would never occur.”

  Eric let out another of his sarcastic laughs and said, “A friend of mine who’s an MIT professor asked me, completely incredulous, ‘Do the Brazilians actually believe that? Are they going to buy it?!’ ” Then he added, “The ones who ended up on top in the operation, besides the group employed at that firm you all created at the time to manage these projects …”

  “Nuclebrás.”

  “… that’s the one … were the banks. The banks made a killing on the operation. Mostly American banks, I might add. German ones too, of course. And even British. Not to mention the Brazilian ones that dealt with them. Huge loans were made to Brazil during those years. Don’t forget that back then everyone needed to get rid of their petrodollars.…”

  Eric paused briefly before continuing. “It’s a shame this less visible side, the whole business of bank transactions, can’t always be monitored. And denounced. The side that always has shrewd operators behind the scenes. You wouldn’t believe the role our countries’ major banks played, two of them in particular, in these negotiations. And how much they raked in …”

  He’d spoken as if the investors and their usual sordid games hadn’t been part of a larger scheme — in which he, Eric, had himself been involved.

  “The banks never lose,” he went on. “Neither do we. We, the American government.… In my day, anyway. We never lost.”

  His conclusion was as pitiful as it was unexpected: “Maybe that’s why we stand alone today … isolated as hell … unable to deal with a world that for the most part despises us.”

  52

  I allowed a good long moment to pass, so Eric could deal with his mea culpa and let it go in peace. Then I turned my focus back to Max, coming full circle, as it were. Fatigue was beginning to set in. Gripping as the topic was, I would have preferred to get out of that garage. It was getting late, moreover, and I still had a long stretch of highway ahead of me.

  “That James Bond tactic you mentioned,” I said. “Can you tell me about it?”

  He didn’t hesitate; he even seemed to relish the opportunity. I almost suggested that we return to the living room to hear the story in more comfortable surroundings, but I caught myself in time, sensing that in the mind of a man like Eric, absurd as it might sound, certain subjects belonged in that setting. Brazil and Germany, together once again, only this time as hostages in a La Jolla garage.

  The challenge, as Eric explained to me then, had consisted of finding out the state of negotiations between the two countries, and where the corresponding documents might be located. On four occasions, the CIA had sent teams, disguised as plumbers, construction workers, or meter readers from the electric company, to comb the ambassador’s residence. They knew the documents had to be there, whether in hard copy or microfilm, sinc
e they’d turned the embassy’s office upside down more than once in the dead of night and found nothing.

  As usually happens in urgent and desperate situations, the hoped-for miracle came about by chance. When Max, in one of his conversations with Ray Thurston, mentioned for the second time the existence of a rare edition of Thomas Mann, which the ambassador never failed to carry along when traveling, a light-bulb went off in Eric’s head. That could well be it, he thought.

  At first, not even he had faith in his hunch, it seemed so preposterous. He soon remembered, however, that the ambassador was a man from another era. And that his literary preference for authors like Maurice Leblanc and Conan Doyle, who often favored the obvious in formulating their puzzles, might well have inspired his choice of hiding place. His CIA colleagues had also rejected the tip, deeming it ridiculous. They hadn’t yet entered the age of state-of-the-art technology but could never have believed they were kept in check by such a childish ploy. As such, more than a few had fallen prey to the ambassador’s smokescreen — which would have held up had it not been for Max’s calamitous intervention. And Eric, for lack of a better option, had decided to investigate the possibility. The microfilm had been found tucked in the back cover of Thomas Mann’s masterpiece, on the eve of the ambassador’s departure. “We barely had time to copy it and slip the original back into its hiding place,” Eric concluded with great pride.

  “But not even,” I asked, leaving aside the singular aspects of the operation, “not even after reading the documents were you able to prevent the countries’ negotiations from going through?”

  “I did my part,” Eric answered laconically. “What happened afterward was out of my hands.”

  Here he hesitated a minute, the way Colonel Vaz would every so often in conversation with me in Vienna. The halt wasn’t quite like the lumbering old bear’s, though it was just as solemn and imbued with a touch of sadness. It was, I realized then, the pause of the elephant heading to the graveyard to die — with nothing more to lose. Or hide.

  Indeed, where would Eric go after La Jolla, if not to the cemetery? Following in the footsteps of his far more illustrious neighbors? Yet unlike them, without the generous eulogy of a newspaper obituary? On the contrary, forgotten even by the agency that had turned its back on him?

  “The Brazilian military wanted the atomic bomb,” he said at last. The grande dame was finally taking the stage. “The secret was somewhat of a joke,” he added. “We always knew the bomb was the driving force behind the agreement between Brazil and Germany. We, meaning the CIA. And we also knew that with the Germans, you wouldn’t get very far. With Westinghouse, on the other hand, who knows? A lot of easy money would come into play.… Loopholes might open, certain secrets could end up in the wrong hands.…”

  There was nothing ironic about his tone. Quite the contrary. He hesitated, hoping to recount the facts as faithfully as possible. Who else could he talk to about such matters these days?

  “There was a group within your military that thought of nothing but the bomb. An influential bunch, close to the president. And there were, naturally, those who defended the use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. But those guys represented a majority solely at your Foreign Ministry.”

  His eyes were gleaming again. It was obvious the subject fascinated him.

  “The military’s argument was simple and to some extent made sense. They’d come to the conclusion that they’d done us a favor by overthrowing the Goulart regime. A legally constituted government, as they kept reminding us whenever they could. And that this favor might yet hatch additional plots in other countries in the region. As in fact had been the case in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, and Peru in subsequent years.”

  He looked at me. He would have preferred that I draw my own conclusions and spare him from further embarrassment. Despite understanding his reasons, I decided to let the words come from his mouth.

  “If we wanted further results elsewhere, though,” he continued, eyes fixed on me, “we would have to pay the price. The chain of events had its cost.”

  And he went ahead, while I wondered how far his delirium would take him. Because imagining that a small contingent of Brazilian Fascists had been responsible for the series of coups in a number of South American countries was as unrealistic as denying that these same countries were capable of destroying themselves without outside help. Buying this story served, at best, to feed another fantasy — that the CIA had had a limited role in spawning these disasters.

  Oblivious of my thoughts, Eric kept going. “ ‘Besides the US and the Soviet Union,’ alleged the Brazilian military, ‘didn’t England and France have bombs? Wasn’t India almost there?’ ” Eric paused briefly. “Ultimately, there was zero support for the Brazilian bomb. The matter was never even broached with our president, which infuriated your military, put your ambassador in Washington in a jam, and left Westinghouse high and dry.”

  After a good laugh, he grew serious again and added, “The Brazilians refused to understand our position: the last thing we needed, at that stage, was a nuclear country in our backyard. Not to mention the arms race that would inevitably ensue in the region. The Argentineans, the Mexicans, the Venezuelans, everyone would want their own bomb.”

  Eric leaned toward me, as if someone in La Jolla might hear us in that closed garage, surrounded though we were by shelves and boxes, and said, “Thus the complication Bonn represented. Because things snowballed when that German of yours became president. Ernesto Geisel … And your ambassador in Montevideo presented to the president’s staff the nuclear project he’d been trying to cook up unsuccessfully for years with Bonn.… That’s when things got rough. Because, after our resounding no, Germany came back with a disturbing maybe.”

  53

  Another pause. “Regardless of how strongly we believed the German nuclear technology would prove ineffective, we were worried. First, because we weren’t one hundred percent sure it wouldn’t work. Second … second, because we had no way of pressuring your government. That was when we began to realize the danger in dealing with excessively closed regimes.”

  Ah … now we were getting somewhere.

  “The widely proclaimed Brazilian political thaw began there. But it was born in Washington, long before it surfaced in the minds of Brasilia’s supposed wise men. Because, with the military in power, we had no access to the key decision makers. And for matters of this magnitude, lobbying wasn’t an option. There were no governors, senators, congressmen, investors, journalists, or others we could pressure. We tried to swap out one general for another, during one of those ‘preelection’ phases of yours, and failed. True, the fact that our candidate was a perfect idiot didn’t help much. But we had little choice, considering the available options.…”

  We both laughed at this, him lightly, me with a clenched heart. We’d finally found common ground, Eric and I. Albeit narrow. But it had been worth the wait. Eric began to perk up again.

  “For the first time since we’d become a world power, for the first time since we’d called the shots wherever we wanted, except behind the Iron Curtain, our hands were tied. Leaving out Cuba, which by that stage was just a pebble in our shoe (and had more to do with elections in Florida than with Fidel and his proselytizing), our hands were tied in our own backyard. Tied by our own doing, with our foolproof nylon rope! For having helped put that bunch of incompetent jackasses in power … pardon my language, it’s the bourbon talking.…” He corrected himself: “I mean, the vodka.”

  That was too easy. The producers of the big show had put up their circus ring around us, after which — two decades later — they’d decided to stage their show elsewhere. Without giving so much as a second thought to the revolt that would soon tear down the tattered tent they’d left behind.

  “Eric, don’t you find this all just a bit much?” I asked. “An entire continent transformed into a blank screen, on which you all drew whatever scenes you wanted? Isn’t that a gross oversimplification of a reality �
��”

  “But that’s exactly what happened,” he retorted, laughing. “On a larger scale than we were used to, of course. When we intervened in other countries’ internal affairs. As occurred routinely in Central America, starting with the Panama Canal, Guatemala, et cetera. Putty in our hands, that’s what South America became at one point, whether you like hearing that or not. Putty in our hands … And it couldn’t have been any other way. The Cuban crisis had ceased to exist, Allende had been overthrown, and the threat of subversion was no longer an issue for us. There were other challenges now. And the main one entailed doing away with centralized nationalist governments.”

  The irritation coming over me was reminiscent of the conversation I’d had with Max twenty years earlier in Alto da Boa Vista, about this very subject. Eric must have picked up on something in my facial expression, for he became somewhat conciliatory.

  “It’s not that the student movements against the military, the marches, the protests, the courage of the press, and so forth, didn’t matter. Of course they did. But the decisions were all made in Washington in terms of the big picture. Because the details …”

  “The details were up to us.”

  “Right.”

  “And Max? Where did he fit in all this?” I finally asked.

  Eric smiled sympathetically. “As you’ve probably guessed by now, I never actually liked the son of a bitch.”

  Had he noticed the unease that had taken hold of me? Probably. Because rather than coming across as aggressive, the line had sounded affectionate. As if Eric were turning to Max to draw us together. After all, he knew very well that my ties to Max were more personal (and went back farther) than those that connected me to João Vaz. The colonel had opened Eric’s door to me. But the person who’d opened Eric’s heart, insofar as he could be said to have one, was Max.

  “He intrigued me,” Eric acknowledged. “He didn’t seem to fit in anywhere.”