Hoyle did not expect this vein of conversation to become constructive or even particularly pleasant, and he was soon proved correct.
Arquero tipped his head back again and looked at Smith. “You make an interesting point, Mr. Smith. But I think we are going to need weapons, as well as advice, if we are to mount a successful counterguerrilla operation, one on a broader scale, like your own in Vietnam.”
His thesis declared, Arquero was now happy to annoy elsewhere. “Well, I’ll not trouble you with business any longer. Enjoy your evening. If I may be of assistance, gentlemen, please do not hesitate to call on me personally.”
Arquero bowed and departed. Castañeda again struck together his heels, then scurried along after his boss.
“Where did you think you were going with that one?” Hoyle asked.
“Not very far.” Smith had his hands in his pockets. He looked at the ground for a moment, then seemed to remember something. “What time do your friends get in from Miami?” he asked.
“They’re in. Charlie’s driving them to Vallegrande.”
“They can establish the safe house and comm link. I want you to stick around with me in La Paz for a couple more days,” Smith said.
“You want them to set up the station by themselves?”
“You said they were good.”
Hoyle nodded. “They’re good.”
“Then they can set it up. Call me in the morning.” Smith walked away.
Across the courtyard, Hoyle watched Alameda gesture sharply at Maria Agular. As he looked on, Maria turned and made her way toward the portico. Hoyle watched the expressions of the grand dames as she walked by. Not one looked at her kindly.
Maria moved gracefully, her head held slightly back and her jaw fixed resolutely. As she passed, Hoyle noticed that her eyes were wet.
11
THE CUBANS PREFERRED things to happen quickly. When they made arrangements, there were urgent meetings, and occasionally, operational matters were even discussed on the telephone, a glaring breach of security that Tania had been careful to avoid. Sometimes, dealing with the Cubans, things developed so rapidly, and often so chaotically, it was almost impossible to keep track of who had done what.
It was important that Tania keep a correct record of what happened; she managed this by maintaining a daily log of her assignments—who in Guevara’s organization had tasked her, what she had been assigned to do, and when the job was completed. In a separate set of files, she kept the names of comrades with whom she had been put in contact, their code names, and whatever biographical details she was able to learn about them. Tania updated these dossiers at the end of each month.
After the files were updated, she photographed the pages using a thumb-sized microdot camera. The film was processed in her sink, and she used an X-Acto blade to make innocuous cuts on the edges of postcards into which the microdots could be hidden. These cards were sent to various addresses in Europe, all of them mail drops for Soviet embassies. A month, sometimes six weeks later, Tania would receive a letter from a friend in Paraguay; an underlined signature indicated that the latest batch of microdots had been received.
All of her work was done by post, which was time-consuming, but in the ponderous course of the mails, there was safety. Tania’s reporting was steady, secure, and unremitting. It was also extremely secret. Only a handful of senior officers at Moscow Center knew of Tania’s dispatches or the manner in which she sent them. She was, in KGB parlance, a “deep placement,” and her reporting on Guevara had made more than one career blossom in Moscow. Tania’s efforts had been extremely gratifying for Aleksandr Mikhailovich Sakhovosky, the supervisor of the First Chief Directorate, the KGB’s division responsible for all foreign operations and intelligence-gathering activities.
In what had been considered a fairly routine “honey trap” operation, the East German Ministry for State Security, the Stasi, had placed Tania in Guevara’s entourage during his 1960 visit to Berlin. Guevara was then the Cuban minister of industry. The Stasi ordered Tania to attempt the seduction of Guevara, and routinely informed Moscow when she had succeeded. It was Sakhovosky who first prevailed on the East Germans to turn over control of Tania to the KGB.
Two months later, Tania was made available as an interpreter for the East German national ballet and departed with the company on a tour of Cuba. Her duties were sufficiently carefree to allow her time to renew a relationship with the handsome minister of industry. When the ballet left to continue dancing, Guevara himself arranged for Tania to stay on in Havana. Her reports had flowed to the center ever since.
Tania’s connection to Guevara was much fretted over within the KGB. Next to Castro, Che Guevara was perhaps the most important personality of the Cuban revolution. Tania was seen from the outset as a long-term asset, and her KGB controllers ran her with great care. As she became infatuated with Guevara, her handlers were careful not to allow her to develop a sense of disloyalty. They could not allow her emotions to interfere with her reporting. Her assignment was too important.
She was kept in line by a fine balance of flattery and an appeal to the spirit of socialist sacrifice. Her work within Cuba was highly classified and communicated to Moscow using the ambassador’s personal codes. As her relationship with Guevara continued, Tania was debriefed in an increasingly deferential manner. She was asked what Guevara thought, how she assessed his opinions, and what she felt he might do. She was constantly reminded that her work was important and served the broader goals of international socialism.
Guevara had no idea of her double life; nor would he until it was too late.
By 1964 Tania’s love for Guevara was so apparent that she had become something of an embarrassment. Although many in Havana had amores secretos, the revolution was not without a puritanical streak. Castro quietly advised Guevara to lower Tania’s profile. This he did by sending her two hundred miles away, to the Interior Ministry’s covert operations course in Camegüey. The curriculum was basic, the simple tradecraft skills required of an intelligence officer, and it was bitterly ironic to Tania that the Cubans had no idea she had been spying on them for over three years. When she was informed that Guevara had personally chosen her to go into Latin America on a deep-cover operation, something in her snapped. She did not see this assignment as a sign of her lover’s confidence; she saw it as a dismissal.
Dejected, Tania asked her KGB handlers to allow her to return to East Germany. From this she was gently dissuaded. Again her controllers urged her to continue her association with Guevara, however distant or peripheral. Their leverage now was strictly internationalist, and her service was humbly for the betterment of socialism. She agreed resignedly. It was growing obvious even to Tania that her romantic devotion to Guevara was a one-way thing.
Tania attended the Cuban operations course, and a slow sort of carelessness overtook her. She was a failed romantic and reacted in a predictably irrational manner. She initiated an affair with one of her instructors, a tall, wiry black man who had previously served as the head of the Asia and African section of Cuban intelligence. Tania was his lover eagerly, if unemotionally, until she left for La Paz.
Rusticated to Bolivia, the KGB expected little else from Tania. And then, late in 1965, Guevara summoned her to Prague. At the center, there was much self-congratulation—their window on Guevara had reopened.
For Tania, the matter was still one of the heart. Her love for Guevara had only been cast in amber by her year alone in La Paz, and as she traveled first to Havana and then on to Czechoslovakia, she wanted nothing more in the world than to have Che Guevara as her own.
Her hope was to prove a desperate and dangerous thing.
In Prague, Guevara again took her into his bed, but not fully into his heart. He had just returned from the catastrophe in Africa, his health was broken, and his political fortunes in Cuba were nil. She found him a man much diminished from the august hero of the revolution. The wounds and the calamities he had survived only made him more beloved, and in that spring
she cherished him with a will and a purpose. That Tania could hold him in the night, that she could be assigned with his dreams and trusted to carry out his most confidential missions but not possess his heart—this nearly destroyed her.
She did her best not to show her anguish, and he was insensitive enough or abstracted enough not to notice. At the end of their month together, he calmly summoned her to sit at the small table in the kitchen of the safe house and gave her a list of things he wanted accomplished in La Paz. He sat there pedantically and made her memorize them.
That night he made love to her, and afterward she sobbed like a child.
On a long, numb journey back to Bolivia, Tania sometimes felt simple heartache, sometimes self-loathing, and sometimes a murderous rage. It was, she told herself, her own fault, all of it. When she returned to La Paz, she vowed to end her work and signaled her controllers at the center for an emergency meeting.
A woman twice Tania’s age arrived a week later, posing as an aunt. This was perhaps the center’s most cynical tactic to date. The woman moved in with Tania for a month, listened to her, cooked for her, and bought her clothes. Tania had accomplished much as an agent, and was extremely sophisticated operationally, but she was human. Moscow knew, even if Guevara had forgotten, that Tania was twenty-eight years old, alone, and vulnerable.
The woman sent by the center was a specialist—an experienced intelligence officer with a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. She praised Tania’s efforts in La Paz, flattering her on the social connections she had made and praising her for all she had done to lay the groundwork for Guevara’s expedition. The woman commiserated, cajoled, and convinced Tania to stay in place one more year, until a successor could be groomed, vetted, and sent to Bolivia to take her place.
Then Tania could go back to Germany. Then it would be over.
Tania stayed, and her new friend departed, directly for the Soviet embassy in Mexico City. There it was reported frankly that Tania was burned out and unfit for further service. The center made the decision to leave her in place. In the cold calculus of spycraft, it was determined that Moscow could gain by doing nothing. The work Tania had done in La Paz was on behalf of Cuba, not the Soviet Union. Moscow was not yet certain where Guevara would go. If he did come to Bolivia, Tania would be there to monitor him; if he did not, Tania would remain in La Paz as a useful, if unreliable, agent in place.
And if she self-destructed, it would not be the KGB that suffered.
For a while Tania willed herself on. Guevara’s advance team came and went, and then, finally, she was asked to guide Selizar Galán to the Ñancahuazú camp.
The day she saw Guevara again was like a dream.
Even now she marveled that it had happened, and wondered also at the odd, cold moment of their reunion. When she saw him, a sudden wave of pity had broken over her. He stood as she walked toward him, handsome, unfaltering, radiating confidence and strength. He could not know, as Tania did, that all his plans were exposed and that great powers were arrayed against him. When Tania felt his arms around her, the conflicting emotions within her nearly made her swoon.
When she returned to La Paz from Guevara’s camp, the strain of her betrayal, the anxiety of a secret life, of the lies within lies, the loneliness, all became overwhelming. Tania cried in the night, she cried when she was alone, she cried when she was walking down the street.
But still she reported. When she’d returned from the camp, she communicated to Moscow that Havana had charged her to go to Buenos Aires and contact a friend of Guevara’s. On the evening she sent her last report, she took a dozen Seconal, drank half a bottle of cognac, and sprawled nude on her bed. It was a shock to her when she woke two days later. Piss and shit were dried on the sheets around her, and flies crawled across her face. These were the first things to tell her that she was still alive.
She walked to the bath, cleaned herself, and sobbed. She had failed even to kill herself. She squatted in the small living room of her flat and stared at the floor. There was no one she could even tell.
Two days after her suicide attempt, Tania received a postcard, a glossy beach scene from Rio, signed by a person named Robert. Although the card bore Argentine postage, par avion, Tania was certain it had been placed directly in her mailbox. When she saw the card among her other letters, it was as though she’d been touched by an electric current. The postcard was a prearranged signal, hand-delivered by Tania’s Soviet controllers. The beach scene indicated an emergency matter. Had the card been sent from Belgium or someplace colder, it would have indicated a matter of less importance. Tania tossed aside the other mail and staggered into her bedroom.
At her desk, she read the card. In the short paragraph scribbled on the back, the words “beach,” “dancing,” and “sunburn” were used in innocuous sentences. A curious reader could guess nothing more than Robert was enjoying a seaside holiday.
In a shoe box under Tania’s bed was a sheaf of water-soluble paper, and typed on it was a code key. Tania needed only to look up the nouns written on the card and compare them against a column of about a hundred words grouped alphabetically. She was still stupid from the drugs, and this routine task took her the better part of half an hour. The message at last revealed itself: “Beach” denoted a meeting place, in this case a park bench on the Plaza 14 de Septiembre, two or three kilometers away from her apartment. The word “dance” meant that a meeting should take place today, and “sunburn” indicated that her contact would be there at four-thirty P.M.
It was now a bit past two o’clock. This was just sufficient time for Tania to dress, leave the apartment, and take a meandering, indirect route to the plaza.
She arrived precisely on time and took a seat on the appointed bench. Ten minutes passed—a sufficient interval, she knew, for her contact to observe the plaza and its approaches and make sure that Tania had not been followed. She watched a man and woman circle the square twice. With some relief, she figured out that they were pick-pockets, cruising. After the couple left, a tall, heavyset man walked to the bench and smiled at her.
“Excuse me,” he said in accented Spanish. “Could this have fallen from your purse?”
In his hand was a duplicate of Robert’s postcard.
“I’ve never been to Rio,” Tania said, and he sat down. He was a careworn man in his mid-to late forties. His shoulders were broad, and his belly was heavy. As he put away the postcard, Tania noticed that his hands were small, almost feminine.
“I am Robert.”
Tania only nodded.
“Were you followed?” he asked. This man operated excruciatingly by the book. She shook her head.
“You know the secondary meeting place?”
Tania now noticed that the man had a Slavic accent. She answered curtly that she knew her procedures.
“You’ll forgive me for standing on ceremony,” he said. The man was definitely Russian and of middling rank. She guessed, correctly, that he was a KGB colonel. His real name was Iosif Seergevich Diminov, and he’d traveled to Bolivia in the guise of a Bulgarian diplomat. None of that mattered to Tania; whoever this man was, he was merely a messenger from the intelligence agency she served, and while they were together, in direct contact, she was in some jeopardy.
“Sollen wir Deutsches sprechen?” he asked.
“I prefer to speak Spanish.”
“Just so.” He smiled at her with a mixture of admiration and mundane sexual appetite. “I first want to tell you that the center is very happy with your work.” Diminov seemed to pause, waiting for her to acknowledge this praise, but she was silent.
“We have read your reports on Guevara and are very pleased. The work is thorough and of great benefit.”
“You didn’t contact me to tell me I am doing a good job.”
“No.”
A group of children passed, and he was quiet. When they were gone, he said, “We have some questions about Guevara beyond the facts stated in your report.”
“Yes?”
&n
bsp; “When you saw him, did he seem well?”
“He was thinner.”
“But healthy?”
“I think so.”
Diminov looked out on the square. It was infuriating how casual he was attempting to be. After an interminable pause, he asked, “The man you are to meet in Buenos Aires, Guevara’s friend, is he known to you?”
“Not personally.”
“We want to make sure that he reaches Guevara safely.” As an afterthought, Diminov added, “And that you are safe.”
All at once Tania was anxious. She knew that none of this could have been the purpose for an urgent meeting. She had been brought here, out into the Plaza 14 de Septiembre, in broad daylight, and now she wondered why. A dull paranoia clutched at her. Perhaps they were going to shoot her.
“How did you find the camps? Were they well ordered?” Diminov asked.
“All of this is in my report.”
“Does Guevara sleep apart from the others or close by?”
“Close by.”
“Did he make love to you?”
Tania had not anticipated the question and heard herself answering almost before she could respond to it emotionally. “No. He did not.”
“Why not?”
At this Tania paused, measuring her words. “He does not love me.”
“Is it possible he will rekindle this relationship?”
“I don’t think so,” Tania said.
“You had close contact with Guevara at the camp?”
“Yes.”
“How frequently?”
“Constantly.”
“Do you think on a future meeting you would have an opportunity to place a drug into his food?”
“Drug” meant poison, and Tania felt a physical pang. She reflected rapidly on the act of murdering Guevara with a vial of cyanide. The thought seemed without beginning or end, and without duration—she turned over the act in her mind like a rational person might briefly consider jumping off a bridge. Murder him? She had never thought to do that, never, even when her heart was shattered, not once until this second.
Killing Che Page 10
