Ghosts of Havana

by Todd Moss

  “You know where it is?” Dennis was leaning all the way forward.

  “Sure.”

  “You have a map? You have a treasure map?” Dennis’s eyes widened.

  “No,” Alejandro said, tapping his temple, “it’s all in here.”

  “So, why can’t you just go get it?” Crawford asked.

  “It’s now a fire station. Goddamn commie firefighters walking around every day on top of my family fortune. They have no idea.”

  “Wow. A real-life treasure chest full of jewels. Just sitting there in Cuba,” Dennis said. “I’m impressed.”

  “And you know where it is,” Crawford said, shaking his head.

  “Yep, I know exactly where it is.”

  “Let’s go get it!” Dennis said. “I’m up for a treasure hunt.”

  “Yeah, me too,” said Crawford. “Let’s go.”

  “We can’t get it.” Al shook his head. “Not yet. Maybe one day.”

  “Tomorrow we can wave at your family jewels from a safe distance,” Brinkley offered.

  “Tomorrow?” Crawford and Dennis asked in unison.

  “Yeah, we’re flying down to the Florida Keys tonight after work,” Alejandro said. “Mi asere Ricky’s got The Big Pig moored at Marathon.”

  “What the fuck is asere? Is he your bitch?” Crawford and Dennis clinked their beers.

  “Oye!” Alejandro scowled. “Asere is Cuban for ‘amigo.’ What are you, stupid?”

  “Relax, asere.”

  “Fuck you. Brink and I are going marlin fishing at first light tomorrow. The Big Pig is down in the Keys. Ricky’s got it all ready for us. You two should come.”

  “Tonight?” Crawford shook his head. “I’ve got work.”

  “Me too,” Dennis said.

  “Work?” Alejandro laughed. “Craw, whatever bullshit you are up to at Carderock can wait. Take a few days off and come down with us. It’s marlin, brother!”

  “The Naval Surface Warfare Center might disagree with you, Señor Cabrera.”

  “I thought you’re retired. You’re not even real Navy anymore.” Alejandro threw a pretzel at Crawford’s head. “You’re a goddamn consultant.”

  Crawford ignored the taunting.

  “And I know that Deuce can come,” Alejandro said. “All you techie start-up boys love to play hooky. Sit around on beanbags and drink coffee and shit. You’re in for marlin fishing, Deuce.”

  “I can’t,” Dennis said. “I’ve got a deadline.”

  “You’re telling me that some app you’re writing for kids to watch porn on their iPhones can’t wait until Monday?” Al jeered.

  “It’s not porn. It’s not even an app,” Dennis said. “You don’t know anything about what I do.”

  “I know that tomorrow you’re fishing for marlin, Deuce.” Alejandro held out his hands as wide as he could. “They’re bigger than this! And they fight like hell!”

  “It’s cybersecurity. I’ve told you, like, a hundred times,” Dennis huffed. “I design software for unbreakable scrambled communications.”

  “We don’t care,” Al replied. “You’re going marlin fishing.”

  Crawford and Dennis shook their heads.

  “You really should come,” Brinkley said. “It’s good fun. And you should see Al’s fishing boat.”

  “The Big Pig,” Crawford chuckled. “Is that you or your boat, Al?”

  “I’ve got to go shower for work,” Dennis said, standing up. “Cash me out.”

  “Fuck that, Deuce.” Alejandro laughed to himself. “It’s barely six o’clock. I’m buying back in and it’s your deal.” He pushed the cards toward Dennis. “You don’t need to go home. Play one more hand, then call in sick and go take a nap. You’re going marlin fishing, asere.”

  4.

  U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT HEADQUARTERS, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  TUESDAY, 8:45 A.M.

  Nice work, Ryker.”

  Judd looked up from his desk, which was covered with a mess of intelligence reports and diplomatic cables. “Thank you.” Landon Parker was standing in his doorway. Judd pushed the papers into piles. “I wasn’t expecting you, sir.”

  “Sorry to surprise you, Ryker.”

  “It’s your building.”

  “Yes, it is, Ryker,” Parker said with a satisfied smile. “I came to congratulate you. Good outcome on Zimbabwe. The old man is gone, and I’m hearing positive things about this new Gugu . . . something.”

  “Gugu Mutonga.”

  “Yes, that’s her. I don’t know how you pulled it off, but good work.”

  “Thank you, sir. I had a lot of help. Ambassador—”

  “Don’t be so damn gracious, Ryker. I know Tallyberger had nothing to do with it. You got it done. S/CRU got it done. I’m glad to see my confidence in you is starting to pay off. I think people are finally seeing that S/CRU gets results.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “We still have work to do, Ryker.”

  “You have a new crisis assignment?” Judd raised a sheet of paper scrawled with bubbles and arrows. “I’m still working on breakthrough scenarios for Egypt and Angola—”

  “Whoa, Ryker! Slow down.”

  Judd dropped his diagram.

  “Egypt is being run by the White House. No space for you to get involved there,” Parker said. “Why are you bothering with Angola? That’s not a country on my radar. Is there an opportunity coming?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Judd said, holding up his paper again. “Angola is a closed oil state. Same president in power since 1979. It looks calm, but I think there’s instability under the surface.”

  “Are they approaching”—Parker grinned and leaned forward—“Minute Zero?”

  —

  Minute Zero was what had just happened in Zimbabwe. It was Judd’s concept, his label for the moment of great uncertainty after a shock hits a country. It could be a hurricane or a surprise invasion or the death of the president, anything big and unexpected that causes a seemingly stable political system suddenly to collapse. Minute Zero was when anything could happen next—and so it was the time to act, to shape events the way you wanted them to go.

  In the past few days, Parker had become a big fan of Minute Zero, which thrilled Judd, but he had to admit, “Angola already had their Minute Zero and we blew it.”

  “We blew it?”

  “In ’75. After the Portuguese pulled out, anything could have happened. But we backed the wrong guy. He talked a good game about killing communists and even drove an old Cadillac around the battlefield. But our man was quickly wiped out with the help of the Cubans. And the same Marxist party has been in control ever since.” Judd waved his paper, “I’m trying to figure out our options today. If Minute Zero arrives once again in Angola, how do we avoid losing a second time?”

  Parker grunted. “I don’t want you wasting time on Cold War history, Ryker. It’s a new age. Hell, we’re even making friends with the Cubans.”

  “Yes, I know that, sir.”

  “That’s what I’ve come to talk to you about, Ryker. I’m going to need your help with Cuba.”

  5.

  U.S. CAPITOL BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  TUESDAY, 10:00 A.M.

  This hearing shall come to order,” announced the chair, banging down the gavel to quiet the room.

  The dark wood paneling, the high vaulted ceiling, and the elevated seating for the members of Congress gave the appearance of a royal court. But the audience suggested something far less majestic. The seats were swarming with anxious bureaucrats in dark suits, pock-faced interns in ill-fitting button-downs, tourists in tacky, bright-colored T-shirts, and a small band of exhausted journalists.

  In the middle of the hearing room, the epicenter for the action, was the committee chair’s seat, which was
now occupied by a short woman in her early sixties, well-tanned, dark hair cut in a classic Washington, D.C. bob. Her face was leathery and a little too taut for her age, but the scars were professionally hidden behind her ears. Just behind the nameplate that read MS. ADELMAN-ZAMORA, the chairwoman loudly hammered her gavel again.

  “This is a special open hearing of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. I have called this hearing so the United States Congress and the American people can learn more about intelligence failings that have continued to hamper the global march of freedom and democracy.”

  Brenda Adelman-Zamora scanned the room over the rims of her reading glasses before continuing to read her opening statement. “The Founding Fathers of this great nation wrote in our Declaration of Independence that ‘all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.’”

  She placed her paper down and looked straight into the television cameras. The nine-term congresswoman from Florida’s 22nd District was a political pro. Brenda Adelman had grown up on Long Island on the fringes of the powerful political machine of Rockland County. Witnessing the mass migration of her elderly Jewish relatives from New York to the Southern states, she, too, moved with her political ambitions—and built an impressive congressional career on the magic formula of the South Florida triple defense: Social Security, sugar subsidies, and Israel.

  Brenda had been less successful in romance, however. She’d hastily married an ophthalmologist of Cuban descent. They quietly divorced after only a few months and the episode appeared to have had little impact on her life. The political benefit of a hyphenated last name was, however, substantial. Becoming a champion of democracy in the Caribbean bolstered her hawkish foreign policy credentials—and turbocharged her fund-raising capabilities across South Florida.

  “Consent of the governed,” Adelman-Zamora lectured. “Those words have meaning. We as a nation believe in democracy and freedom. We defend these values at home and we promote these values abroad. This means we must fight against dictatorship and repression, wherever it may rear its ugly head. That is the destiny of the United States. Freedom and democracy are interwoven into our values and ultimately into our national security. And that brings us to our topic of this hearing this morning.

  “A principal task of our intelligence services is to monitor and analyze the political forces of tyranny. We cannot defeat an enemy that we do not understand. We rely on the capabilities of the great men and women who serve our country in the intelligence services to look underneath every rock, to listen in the dark corners, to unearth the secrets of our enemies so that the march of freedom can resume. However, too often we have failed to foresee change coming.”

  The chairwoman returned to her written text and continued, “We did not predict the Iranian revolution coming in 1979 and we continue to fly blind on political change in Tehran. We did not foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union and we have been unable to foresee new Russian aggression. We have repeatedly missed the signs of new threats to the state of Israel, our most important democratic ally in the Middle East.”

  Chairwoman Adelman-Zamora removed her reading glasses and sighed deeply for the cameras. “And most obvious of all, our neighbor to the south has been imprisoned by tyranny since 1959. That once-proud nation should be a close American ally. It should be an engine for prosperity in our hemisphere. Instead, our long history of failure to bring liberty to a country just ninety miles from our own shores is an affront to free people everywhere. Our missteps are a lingering embarrassment for these great United States. Today, we are continuing to fail freedom-loving people around the world by the misguided policy of our own administration. Despite the ill-advised steps by the State Department to embrace dictatorship and apologize for oppression, our neighbors remain locked in chains. I have called this special hearing today to ask a simple but vital question: How are we still losing Cuba?”

  6.

  CIA HEADQUARTERS, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  TUESDAY, 11:15 A.M.

  The red file taunted the Deputy Director. He snatched the folder labeled OPERATION RAINMAKER and threw it across the room. It flew like a Frisbee for a second before the papers scattered everywhere and floated down around his office like snowflakes.

  “Dammit,” he swore to himself. He grimaced at the tall pile of files on his desk, a catalog of every covert operation by the Central Intelligence Agency against Cuba since the revolution in 1959. OPERATION TASMANIAN DEVIL, OPERATION PANDORA, OPERATION DEMON BARBER, OPERATION PIT BOSS, OPERATION BANANA SUNRISE. This mountain is a pathetic collection of history, he thought. A graveyard of bad ideas.

  On the very bottom was a file much fatter than the others. He extracted OPERATION ZAPATA, tipping over the rest of the folders into a fan on his desk. As he opened the thick ZAPATA file, he winced as his chest tightened. The first document was a memo summarizing the Agency’s most embarrassing fiasco, the April 17, 1961, botched invasion by CIA-supported Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs. The memo to the CIA Director had been by Randolph Nye, the Deputy Director of Operations during the height of the Cold War. Nye was the man who had occupied this precise office, this seat. His seat.

  Nye had accomplished many things that the world would never know about, but he had died a year ago, unredeemed. Quiet victories in Egypt, in the Congo, in Mexico, and in the Philippines. But the world would always remember the black eye of the Bay of Pigs. The air cover wasn’t approved. The ammunition ran out. The weather turned. The cash never arrived. Everything had gone wrong on that day.

  Randolph Nye was now gone, but his ghost lived on in these walls, thought the Deputy Director. He wouldn’t allow that to happen to him. He wouldn’t allow that to happen again.

  —

  The intelligence game had changed so much. After the failings of 9/11, the United States’ multiple intelligence services had been reorganized. Instead of the clarity of a CIA Director leading America’s secret information-gathering and covert operations, a new super Director for National Intelligence was created to advise the President on all intelligence matters and to oversee all sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA. The DNI was suddenly above the CIA Director, a new player in town and a new layer between the CIA and the White House. To compensate for this slight, the boxes were shuffled and renamed in Langley, too. The Deputy Director of Operations, the person responsible for global covert operations, was renamed the Director of the National Clandestine Service.

  In a classic Washington move, the elevation in title was actually a demotion. He believed this was political theater and textbook ass-covering, the kind of bureaucratic crap that he had grown to despise about Washington, D.C. Just like the incessant meddling from Congress, the politics of management was a growing distraction from the real work of fighting America’s enemies. And a further erosion of the CIA’s preeminence.

  So when he was eventually promoted to run covert operations, he insisted that they call him by the old name, the Deputy Director of Operations. That was the great Cold Warrior Allen Dulles’s title, too, before he became CIA Director. A lesser title on paper, but a symbolic nod to better times and older ways of doing things. And he had made a bargain with himself to make it all worthwhile.

  —

  The Deputy Director closed the Operation Zapata file and randomly opened another. This outlined an aborted attempt in the 1960s to poison El Jefe’s cigars. The next file detailed a bungled attempt to add an undetectable toxin to the Cuban leader’s aftershave. Another plot had planned to induce paranoia and psychosis by lacing his coffee with LSD via a tainted sugar cube. A fourth scheme made covert payments to bribe his security guards into turning their guns on their leader. They had accepted the cash but never pulled the trigger. />
  None of these operations had worked. His predecessor Randolph Nye had let America down. And let down the brave Cuban people.

  The Deputy Director sighed to himself, knowing that, decades later, he was still letting them down. All nineteen successors between Nye and the current occupier of this office had let them down, he thought. The Deputy Director knew he now had access to more money and more technology than anything Nye could have ever imagined. Yet the same old men, the same ragtag rebels who had seized Havana in 1959, still ran Cuba. The island was in a prison and part of the blame lay squarely on him.

  It wasn’t for lack of trying. The Deputy Director had green-lit operations to spark street riots by creating false bread shortages, to disrupt the banking system by implanting a virus in the central bank’s computers, and to plant misinformation in the local newspapers about luxury homes in the Spanish Costa del Sol owned by top Cuban politicians. He had provided seed capital to Cuban exiles in Costa Rica to create a SMS text network about the Miami Marlins baseball team that was a cover for organizing social protests on the island.

  His boldest PsyOps gamble was to launch AeroLibre, a high-altitude plane to beam television broadcasts into Cuban homes. The Deputy Director had even signed off on a Top Secret plan to create BesoPeso, a new electronic currency that could be used to evade the control of the Cuban authorities and, if necessary, pay off potential friends in Havana without drawing the notice of the U.S. Treasury.

  None of these plots had had the desired effect. None had even made a dent in the Cuban armor. Cuban intelligence had countermoved each scheme. They jammed AeroLibre’s signal. They uncovered and blocked his phantom BesoPeso. Oswaldo Guerrero had found a way to choke his every move. The Devil of Santiago had to be the luckiest bastard on earth, he thought. Or, perhaps, the man known as O was actually the smartest.

  The Deputy Director collected the files again into a neat pile and carefully aligned the corners. He plucked every page from OPERATION RAINMAKER off the floor and returned it to the top of the pile. Then he sat back in his chair to clear his head. The long list of Agency failures was an embarrassment. He didn’t want to end up like Randolph Nye. He didn’t want the next man sitting in this chair to muse over his failings.