by Todd Moss
“No.” Sunday turned off his screen. “If you want to help me, you can start by going away.”
“You’re no fun anymore, Sunday. I thought Nigerians were supposed to be party animals.”
“I’m American.”
“Whatever.”
“I grew up in California.”
“Yeah, I know, I know. So that’s why you’re no fun?”
“No time for fun. I’ve got to finish this by COB.”
“The CIA doesn’t have a ‘close of business,’ Sunday. Didn’t they tell you that, like, on the first day?”
“Go away.”
“No, sir,” Glen said with a mock salute. “We are twenty-four/seven! We never close! Not the Central fucking Intelligence Agency. Not even on Christmas.”
Sunday turned his back on Glen.
“Hey, if you’re Muslim, they probably have you working on Christmas, right? Used to call that shift the Jew Crew around here.”
“I’m ignoring you,” Sunday said.
“I guess it’s more Muslims than Jews now, dontcha think?”
“Glen, I’m going to turn my computer back on and finish my work. If I turn around again, I expect to see that you’ve gone away.”
“Okay, okay,” Glen huffed. “Don’t get so damn testy, Sunday. I thought you Nigerians were supposed to be laid-back.”
Sunday waved Glen away over his shoulder. “Shoo.”
“I know you’re supposed to be compartmentalized on this Iran thing, but I’m not going home yet. If I can help, let me know. Maybe run some Google searches or something.” Glen laughed to himself and wandered away.
Google?
Sunday closed the Pentagon database on his classified computer and opened a web browser on his unclassified machine. Into Google he typed 2506. The search results were long lists of addresses. Nothing notable. He was about to close the window when he glanced at the search results at the bottom of the screen. There was something he didn’t expect: an orange-and-blue flag of a silhouetted soldier with a bayonet-tipped gun and a banner reading BRIGADA ASALTO 2506.
A Spanish Assault Brigade 2506? He typed this into a new search field and the result:
Brigada Asalto 2506 was a CIA-sponsored group of Cuban exiles formed in 1960 to attempt the military overthrow of the communist Cuban government.
Ay! He carried on reading.
It carried out the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion landings in Cuba on 17 April 1961.
The Bay of Pigs?
38.
EVERGLADES CITY, FLORIDA
THURSDAY, 10:04 P.M.
Jessica blocked out the bone-deep cold she felt from wearing a damp cocktail dress on a high-speed motorcycle for the past ninety minutes. She had tailed Ricky Green all the way from Port Everglades, onto Highway I-595, down Alligator Alley, and again when he turned south toward Everglades City. The road was so flat and straight, Jessica turned off the Kawasaki’s lights and just followed the red rear lights of the Hummer.
As she passed the WELCOME TO EVERGLADES CITY sign, she thought “City” might be an exaggeration. The town was more like a small island with modest sixties-style clapboard houses, amply spaced on large plots of land. Sure, it was late, but the streets were wholly abandoned.
They passed the turnoff for the Everglades Airport, and just as the town appeared to end in darkness, Ricky veered off the main road and down a dirt driveway.
Jessica waited until the lights of the Hummer had disappeared from view, then she hid the motorcycle in the bushes and followed the dirt path on foot. After about a hundred yards, she came upon the parked Hummer and could see moving lights through the brush in a clearing ahead. She could hear Ricky banging on metal and grunting but couldn’t see what he was doing. Jessica pushed deeper into the brush to try to get a better look.
Suddenly, she heard a motor start up, followed by an incredibly loud hum, like a giant hair dryer. A second later, she was blasted by a gust of warm tropical air. Jessica shielded her eyes and backed away from the bushes. Was he taking off on a seaplane? Or a boat? It sounded like both.
As the noise and wind receded, she returned to the Hummer and ran down the path that Ricky must have taken toward the machine. She arrived at the shoreline just in time to see Ricky strapped high in a chair at the front of a low, flat boat with a massive spinning fan at the back. A fanboat.
Fuck! Where the hell is he going now? Jessica wondered as Ricky evaporated into the infinite darkness of the Florida swamps.
39.
U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT HEADQUARTERS, WASHINGTON, D.C.
THURSDAY, 10:16 P.M.
Judd still hadn’t heard anything from Jessica. He had hit a dead end trying to uncover more on the Americans from The Big Pig.
Judd turned away from his whiteboard, with its photos of the men and the lines of the web that still didn’t make sense. Maybe I’ll never know the truth, he thought. Even if he didn’t know who these guys were or what they were up to, he knew he had to focus on his task: a hostage negotiation strategy for Landon Parker. He still needed a backchannel to Havana. And he needed a plan before the end of the day.
Judd had discovered in the archives that every White House since John F. Kennedy had tried to establish a secret dialogue with the Cuban government. LBJ, Nixon, Carter, Bush, Clinton—they all tried. And they all failed. Even the coldest of the Cold Warriors, Ronald Reagan, had attempted to find common ground with Havana by negotiating to end the presence of Cuban troops in Africa. Reagan had to strike a deal with El Jefe. The result of eight grueling years of talks was the departure of Cuban troops from Angola, a withdrawal of South African forces, and the creation of a newly independent Namibia. It was a complex triple agreement of historic proportions. But that diplomatic success in Africa never led to a broader détente between Washington and Havana. Instead, the Angola negotiations followed the same pattern as other attempts at dialogue: Small steps in confidence building eventually gave way to animus.
Judd had read through the history of failed diplomatic overtures to Cuba. It was a long record of missteps and misunderstandings. Minor advances toward compromise were simply swept away by political expediency. Hard-liners on one side or the other had found it too easy to scuttle any progress. Why should Landon Parker believe I can do better? Why should I think I can?
Judd had scrawled down the basic outlines of a plan on a single sheet of paper.
Good faith
Discreet negotiations
Plausible deniability
Incentives to deliver
Judd was stuck on number one. What kind of new gesture could the United States make that might entice the Cubans but not enrage Capitol Hill? How to thread the needle between the old men in Havana and the old men in Miami? How to find common ground between El Comrade Presidente and Brenda Adelman-Zamora? Judd jotted down a list of the least-controversial options that he could present to Landon Parker:
music, baseball, biotech sugar.
It was a pitiful list. Sugar might even be too contentious. Judd changed it:
biotech sugar tropical agriculture.
Still pathetic. But at least it was something to propose. The topic was beside the point, he reminded himself. It could be anything. He just needed to manufacture a new reason to talk to the Cubans. Any cover for making a deal to recover the Americans.
Were they hostages? Or ploys? Or pawns? The uncertainty burned at him. Judd turned back to his whiteboard, staring at the photos of the four men. What were they really doing in the Florida Straits? Why was Landon Parker so anxious to help them? What was their connection to Ruben Sandoval? And who was Richard Green?
Who the hell were these people?
40.
CIA HEADQUARTERS, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
THURSDAY, 10:42 P.M.
Sunday dug deeper into the CIA archives on the Bay of Pigs. Most of the records on Brigada
Asalto 2506 had been redacted or were so old that they had been boxed up and taken to off-site storage, probably some warehouse in a nondescript office park off a northern Virginia parkway. There was no way he’d get to the original records tonight.
The CIA had increasingly been relying on “open source intelligence,” what government officials called any material that was also available publicly. Crucial nuggets of information could often be found in newspapers or on websites that were just as reliable as clandestine sources. Sometimes open source was even better.
So far, Sunday had confirmed from open sources that Brigada Asalto 2506 had, in fact, been a group of Cuban exiles that formed the core team of a covert paramilitary CIA operation to invade Cuba in 1961. The plan, hatched by the Agency’s Deputy Director of Operations at the time, Randolph Nye, was to have 2506 land at Bahía de Cochinos and establish a beachhead. They would then make contact with a local underground force, inciting a popular counterrevolution and eventually retaking power in Havana. Assassinating the Cuban leader was not a formal objective of the plot, but all members of 2506 knew that wealthy Cuban exiles in Miami had placed a large bounty on the head of El Jefe.
Sunday read in the historical records that President John F. Kennedy had approved the Bay of Pigs operation, but so much had gone wrong that day. The element of surprise was lost after invasion plans leaked. The Bay of Pigs was supposed to be one of America’s most covert operations, but it was spoken about openly in the cafés and bodegas of Little Havana in Miami.
On the fateful day of the operation, Brigada Asalto 2506 attacked a well-armed Cuban force and quickly ran out of ammunition and supplies. The first-wave teams on the beach were trapped and outnumbered. The underground counterrevolutionary cells were also neutralized before they could activate. The promised cash never arrived.
In the end, more than a hundred men from Brigada Asalto 2506 were killed and more than a thousand were captured. The detainees were then publicly paraded back in Havana, a humiliation that was only worsened by a show trial the following year. The leaders of 2506 were executed, while the rest were given lengthy prison sentences. Most of the men were eventually released in a prisoner exchange in late 1962. They returned to Miami, longing for home, seething with hatred for the communists, and burned by the betrayal of the U.S. government.
Sunday found several historians who concluded that Nye’s plan was doomed from the start not by operational mistakes but rather by a flawed premise of popular support. Few academics believed that the Cuban public was ready at that time to support an American-backed invasion.
But among the exiles in Miami, Sunday learned, that one factor rose above all else as the reason for the debacle: Kennedy’s denial of Nye’s request for U.S. air support. The planes never came.
Fascinating, Sunday thought to himself. But what do Randolph Nye and Brigada Asalto 2506 have to do with today? How is this ancient history possibly connected to the Americans captured on The Big Pig?
Sunday kept digging. He learned that after the Bay of Pigs failure, Nye resigned, moved to a ranch in Texas, and quietly disappeared from political life. Sunday unearthed his brief 1991 obituary in the Waco Tribune-Herald, which noted his lifelong service to the United States government but made no mention of the CIA or of Cuba. Sunday also found a photo of Randolph Nye in the 1932 archives of the Yale Daily News, but he was wearing a football helmet so his face was hidden. The only other picture of Nye that Sunday could find was in a long-defunct Spanish-language newspaper of South Florida, La Gloria. The grainy photo from February 1961 showed several men around a table at a restaurant. The caption read Líder local Héctor Cabrera se reúne con Randolph Nye del gobierno federal.
The name Cabrera lit up on the page like a neon sign. Sunday double-checked his notes and, yes, one of the hostages, the owner of the boat, was Alejandro Cabrera. Sunday quickly searched the open source database for Héctor Cabrera and found an obituary in the Miami Herald from 1979:
Héctor Cabrera, a beloved figure in Little Havana . . . Born in Santa Cruz del Norte, Cuba . . . A successful diamond dealer . . . Moved to Miami in 1959 . . . Cuban patriot active in local politics and charitable organizations . . . a champion for democracy and human rights in his homeland . . . Survived by his grandsons, Alejandro Cabrera and Ricardo Cabrera . . . Donations can be made to the Kiwanis Club of Little Havana . . .
Sunday sat back in his chair to absorb what he had just read. The captured American, Alejandro Cabrera, was the grandson of a Cuban exile linked to the architect of the Bay of Pigs. A coincidence? Or did a young Alejandro listen to the war stories of his grandfather and was somehow seeking to redeem his family’s past? Could the seizure of the fishing boat be yet another mistake in a long line of ill-advised covert operations by exiles against the Cuban government? Or by the Central Intelligence Agency? Or, most likely, was Sunday inferring conspiratorial connections that didn’t really exist?
Sunday decided he needed more information on Alejandro before taking any of this back to Jessica. He logged on to the FBI database and found that Alejandro Cabrera had a long list of minor criminal infractions but nothing serious. From what Sunday could tell, Cabrera seemed to be a genuine real estate agent from Maryland, the father of three girls, a second-generation immigrant who was living the suburban American dream. Maybe the historical Bay of Pigs link was a fluke?
Sunday carefully reread Héctor Cabrera’s obituary. What was he missing?
Héctor Cabrera . . . Born in Santa Cruz del Norte . . . A successful diamond dealer . . . Cuban patriot active in local politics . . . Survived by his grandsons, Alejandro Cabrera and Ricardo Cabrera . . .
Ricardo? The FBI files showed that Ricardo Cabrera of Miami had been arrested at age eighteen during a drug bust in Everglades City, Florida, in 1983. After that, the records stopped. No tax filings, no police rap sheet, nothing. Sunday checked for a death certificate but came up blank. Ricardo Cabrera ceased to exist in 1983. It was probably nothing, just a criminal who disappeared underground. Or maybe incomplete records, Sunday told himself.
It was now after eleven o’clock and Sunday knew the Purple Cell team leader was waiting to hear from him. Plus he still had to finish his Iran-Somalia assessment for the Director of National Intelligence. Sunday made a mental notation to follow up on Ricardo Cabrera once he got time rather than chase another ghost tonight.
Sunday started to call the number Jessica had given him as her temporary phone in Florida. But before pressing the final digit, he suddenly knew exactly what she would say. Sunday set the phone back down. He couldn’t miss anything obvious.
Sunday pulled up research on Dennis Dobson. Software engineer, family all clean, nothing of note. He found the same for Crawford Jackson, a former Navy SEAL, now a contractor at Carderock Naval Surface Warfare Center, with the highest level security clearances. His background was scrubbed every year, no blemishes, nothing suspicious.
The last man, Brinkley Barrymore III, was probably the least likely to have something big to hide. Barrymore was ex–Naval Academy, Georgetown Law, a JAG naval lawyer, now a partner at a prestigious D.C. law firm. Open sources reported that his grandfather was the scion of a well-known Annapolis family that claimed lineage back to one of the original settler families at Jamestown, Virginia. The style pages of the Washington press were filled with stories of the Barrymores at Annapolis Yacht Club regattas, at black-tie charity galas, symphonies at the Kennedy Center, and other socialite events of the Washington-Annapolis blue-blooded glitterati.
Brinkley Barrymore III’s wedding to Penelope Anderson of Memphis was covered in a gaudy half-page spread in the Washington Post. In the story, buried among the achievements of the Barrymore family, was a small notation that Brinkley’s maternal grandmother, Henrietta Nye, had also attended the wedding.
Ay! Sunday’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. Nye?
41.
U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT HEADQUARTERS, WASHINGTON, D.
C.
THURSDAY, 11:11 P.M.
The ringing phone startled Judd, shaking him from his intense concentration. Without checking caller ID, he snatched the handset, “Sweets! Is everything all right?”
“Dr. Ryker, it’s me, Sunday.”
“Oh, sorry,” Judd said, deflated. “I was . . . waiting for a call.”
“Is everything okay, sir?”
“Yes, it’s fine. My wife’s away with the kids and . . . It doesn’t matter . . . It’s good to hear from you, Sunday. I . . . I appreciate your work on Zimbabwe last week. You were a huge help.”
“I can’t believe you pulled it off, Dr. Ryker. It’s really something.”
“We pulled it off, Sunday. No way Gugu Mutonga would be president without you,” Judd said. “You sent me just the right information at just the right time. Right when I needed it.”
“I’m just happy to help out,” Sunday said, suddenly wondering if calling Judd Ryker had been the right move.
“You seem to have an eerie intuition, Sunday.” Judd knew he was pressing too far, but couldn’t help it. “A magic touch.”
“I’m, um . . . just an analyst doing my job, sir.”
“Well, we made a pretty good team, didn’t we?”
“Yes, sir, we did.”
Judd weighed his options on whether to ask the question he really wanted to ask, but Sunday quickly changed the subject.
“Sir, I’m actually calling you for a favor.”
“You’re asking me for a favor? I think I owe you quite a few.”
“I’m working on a special project right now—”
“Don’t tell me you’re working on Cuba!”
“Um . . . no, sir,” Sunday said. “I’m not supposed to discuss details of any of my special projects, but . . . it’s not Cuba . . . Is that what you’re working on, Dr. Ryker?”
