Well, all of that isn’t till Monday. Between now and then all I have to think about is the crazy Vietnam situation. One more monk burns himself up, we’re going to have to ship more fuel to that country. Wish Diem would get his act together, which reminds me, I wish McNamara and McCone could get their acts together. McNamara testifies that Castro isn’t exporting Communism to Latin America, McCone testifies that he is, same fucking committee. Maybe the Secretary of Defense could one day talk to the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and coordinate their testimony.
He smiled. Fun idea! He walked over to his desk, flipped up his telephone book, and scratched out two cards, one for his Secretary of Defense, confiding to him the telephone number of the Director of Central Intelligence Agency, the second to the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, giving the telephone number of the Secretary of Defense. He placed them in envelopes and sealed them. He pushed a button at the side of his desk. An aide entered: “Yes sir?”
“Get these delivered, Joe.”
“Yes sir.”
“And watch they don’t shoot the messenger.”
“Sir?”
JFK smiled. “Never mind. Thanks.”
The President walked out of his office toward the family quarters, still smiling.
14
It was after midnight when the Commando L raider zoomed in on the Baku as it was leaving Caibarién with a shipment of Cuban sugar bound for Leningrad; the raider set fire to much of it before powering back toward Florida. It hadn’t been necessary for Armed Forces Chief Raúl Castro to awaken his brother: Fidel was never asleep at midnight. He received the news and told Raúl to come to his house, together with Ramiro Valdés and Osvaldo Dorticós, at ten in the morning.
They were all there, looking grim. Dorticós had already been in communication with the Kremlin and now advised Fidel that both at the United Nations and in Moscow the Soviets would be protesting vigorously. He had taken the liberty, he said, of advising Raúl Roa, the Foreign Minister, to prepare a statement accusing the United States of violating the Neutrality Act, “etc. etc.”
Castro nodded. “All right.”
“But it is time,” he said with some gravity, “to execute our plan for Miami.” He turned to his brother, Raúl. “Have plans been made?”
“Yes, Fidel. We have just been awaiting your word.”
“Well,” Castro said, taking a deep puff from his cigar, “you now have my word. If the Americans want to play, we can show them a trick or two. Eh?”
There was general acquiescence that they could show the United States a thing or two in the dirty tricks department. It was instantly apparent to his three close associates that Fidel’s anger had risen now and had launched him, as it often did—as it increasingly did—onto one of his high-energy plateaus. It was from these that he tended to act most decisively. And it was clear that he took great pleasure in what he considered the special ingenuity of the revenge he would take. He knew it would hurt John F. Kennedy personally, and that, exactly, was what he wished to do: to hurt John F. Kennedy personally.
That night at exactly six, in the bedroom of his little house in southwest Miami, the Cuban they called “Alejandro” was, as always, alone with his shortwave listening set and his tape recorder. He pulled out the notebook, the decoder, from behind the bookcase and sat down to listen. The alert, which always came within the first two minutes of Radio Havana’s news broadcast, was a slip-of-the-tongue mention of the wrong month. “Hoy, el día viente y seis de abril—el día viente y seis de marzo” meant that there would be instructions during the weather broadcast, which generally came between five and seven minutes after the hour began.
The news started off with a declamatory quote from Fidel Castro denouncing American complicity in the illegal raid on the merchant vessel Baku, carrying a Soviet flag and Cuban sugar. A sharp protest would be filed with the United Nations “tomorrow, April 27th—tomorrow, March 27th.”
Alerted, Alejandro connected his tape recorder. When the time came for the weather, the recorder was on and he listened for the activating phrase. It came. “There is the possibility of rain over Oriente Province tonight and tomorrow.” Yes. The possibility of …
He jotted down down the key words and turned the radio off. The announcer had spoken very fast, and so he wound back his tape and listened again, intently. The key words were 1) “Oriente,” 2) “tonight,” and 3) “tomorrow.” He looked into his codebook. “Execute Operation Oakes.”
The basic plan had been made, but there were arrangements that had to be left until the last minute. The airplane ticket, the fake passport, the alert given to Cuban assets in Mexico. And, of course, the timing of the flight, as also of the reception in Mexico, depended on the unwitting cooperation of the target. A log had been kept on his habits and Alejandro was moderately confident the plan would meet with success. The selected executioner was well trained, and his equipment modern.
On March 27 in Miami the sun sets at 6:26.
Fifteen minutes after that time, Blackford got up from his work table to turn on the overhead lights in his living room-study and the floor lamp over the round table on which his papers lay. At his side, also in shirt sleeves, Pano was writing.
There was in hand a communication from LASH. It was the second that had come in directly to Blackford. The first, via Rufus, was a testimonial. “You can trust Pano,” was all it said.
LASH had surveyed all the possibilities. He was ready to make final plans to “execute”—LASH was very fussy about the use of that term, having coldly reproached the first user of the word “assassinate”—Fidel Castro. He was ready, he had said, to “execute” Castro for violating so grossly so many provisions of the Cuban Constitution. The only way to carry out the execution, short of committing suicide (“I would not mind sacrificing my own life, but it would hardly be a successful coup d’état if I were not there to assume or to pass on the leadership. There would hardly be any point in executing Fidel in order to turn Cuba over to Raúl”), was to use a sniper’s rifle, and in Cuba there was none suitable for his purposes that he could lay his hands on. He needed a true sportsman’s rifle, with a telescopic sight. He had exactly the model in mind, a Model 70 Winchester.
At their meeting the day before, when Pano had brought LASH’s message in, Blackford had said: “No. No U.S. equipment.”
There would have to be other ordnance. He would, by the following day, have in hand an inventory of foreign-made equipment as close as possible to the specifications of what LASH was asking for. “Some of this stuff we have up in Langley,” Blackford said, staring at the catalogue listing, “but not all. Let’s see in any case. Come around at five, and I think I’ll have the information.”
Now Pano was taking notes while Blackford, going through the papers, dictated. “There is the Russian Mosin-Nagant or the Dragunov or the German Mauser. The Mosin-Nagant rifle comes with scope sight, 7.62 by 54R caliber.” Blackford looked down at a footnote, which advised that the rifle was being discontinued at the end of 1962. Blackford turned his head sharply to retract his dictated notation. At that moment the bullet whizzed through the window.
Both men dropped to the floor. His heart pounding, Blackford crawled to the window and, with hand stretched up, pulled down the curtain. He crawled to the light switches. First he turned off the wall switch. The standing lamp he disconnected by pulling out its plug at the baseboard. Only then did he stand up and feel his way into the bedroom to the dresser. Opening the top drawer, he found his flashlight. Back in the living room he approached the window cautiously and rotated the brass rod that brought in the louvered shutters, so that no light could penetrate. He turned the lights back on.
“Jee-zus, Pano, have a look.” They talked to each other in soft hisses. Blackford had lowered his head to the level of the bullet hole and was looking back at the table where he had been sitting.
“No, don’t. Sit where I was sitting.” Pano did so. “I’m about four inches taller than you
are. Raise your butt about four inches.” He focused sharply on the line of sight, then stood up.
“Never thought a damned footnote would save my life.”
He sat down in his armchair. The two men stared at each other in silence. After a minute Blackford said, speaking for the first time in a normal tone of voice, “You in any position to find out who did it?”
“It would not have been done without orders from Havana. No posibilidad. Every week a Cuban is rubbed off here, but never an American. Standing orders from Havana. You are the first one. A radical change in policy.” Pano paused. “Why you, Blackforrd?”
“That’s exactly the question. If they know what we are up to, Mongoose is in trouble. If on the other hand—” Blackford reflected for a moment, and he began again. “They know who I am. You may as well know it too, Pano. When I left Cuba in October, I was under sentence of death by the military court. The question is: Why should they choose this moment to—well, catch up—on neglected business?”
“It could be the Baku.”
Blackford reflected. “Yes. Yes. I see your point. The United States makes subversive attempts against Castro, Castro makes subversive attempts against known U.S. agents, in particular this known U.S. agent. Tit for tat. I wonder how many tons of sugar in the Baku were ruined by the fire?” He looked up and smiled. “That would be the free-market price for my life …
“Well, compañero, things are going to have to proceed very differently from now on. Don’t much like the alternative way of life, but I’ve done it before. I’ll need to get an address from Washington. I’ll call you at the usual number tomorrow. We don’t want to lose any time in getting back to LASH. But somehow I’m not in the mood to continue operations tonight.”
“I will stay with you and help you get safely to your new quarters.”
“No,” Blackford said. “The guy who shot at me—he obviously shot from a hotel room across the way—must have had a pretty good look at you through the glasses. And if they’ve been checking on me”—Blackford looked at his watch—“at about seven P.M. every day, they’ve seen you with me more than once. You’d better make your own arrangements.”
“I have made my own arreglos, Blackforrd.”
Blackford was direct. “You use disguise?”
“Yes. A different man steps out of the elevator downstairs. You have never followed me out at any of our six meetings.”
“Good. I’ve had some experience with that sort of thing. But I need a kit. Tell you what. Get a couple of your guys to sweep the front drive between ten and ten-thirty, okay? Then, in your disguise, drive up to the entrance at seven minutes after ten. Tape the headline from the Miami Herald onto your left rear window so I’ll know it’s the right car. I’ll steam right out with a bag and a briefcase into the back seat, and you drive off. By that time I’ll have the address. And, Pano, I don’t know for sure what I’ll look like, but don’t let anything surprise you.”
Pano nodded, went for his own briefcase in the closet, and stepped into the washroom. He was gone not more than a couple of minutes. What emerged was a refugee from a rodeo. Light buckskin coat, Western boots, blue jeans, a long head of hair coming down to his shoulders, a Buffalo Bill mustache, a gold ring on one ear. The briefcase was transformed into a rucksack.
“Goddamn. You’re in practice, Pano.”
“Who’s that Pano, man? Mah name is Jefferson Jackson Coolich.”
“Coo-lijjj, Pano, not Coo-litch. But well done, well done.”
“Thank you, compadre. I will be seeing you, 10:07.”
Pano walked to the door, pronouncing, “Coo-leech,” “Coo-leech,” “Coo-leech.”
Blackford waited five minutes. His hand on the trigger of the Luger in his pocket, he walked out of his suite to the emergency staircase. Up two flights, he turned to Room 1407. The key was ready in his left hand. The empty room had a telephone that did not go through the switchboard.
He reached Rufus.
“It’s Black. Our friends moved against me just now. Rifle shot from across the hotel. Damned near got me. Pano says I’m the only American they’ve ever gone after, so it looks like made-in-Havana.”
“You all right?”
“Yes, sir. And I need a new address. Unless you tell me different, I’m being picked up here in a couple of hours, and I’ll need to go somewhere.”
“Any problem in staying where you are for a few minutes?”
“None.”
Rufus hung up.
Blackford waited. In ten minutes the telephone rang. He lifted the receiver and gave an identifying code number. He listened, and put down the receiver. He had memorized the address of the safe house. His new quarters, until Mongoose was done.
15
When Fidel Castro strode into Havana on January 8, 1959, as conquering hero, he took the first of many occasions to give a speech. He spoke, more or less endlessly, for the next three months. Castro announced the dreams Cuba would realize under his leadership, but warned there was much work to be done—many “administrative” and “regulatory” actions to be taken, and yes, some disciplinary actions too. In January, one of the activities against which the revolutionary regime would wage relentless war was announced: prostitution and pimping.
After the closing of Santos Trafficante’s nightclub, María Raja lived with a succession of lovers in some comfort, in a spacious apartment on Calle Reina. But when word reached her that, the week before, four pimps had been executed (she did not herself use one) and six prostitutes arrested and sent out to a rehabilitation camp, she decided it was time to change not only her profession but her living quarters, and to reclaim her name, María Arguilla. There would be too many former luminaries of the Batista period who would have her telephone number, and perhaps even her address written down in little notebooks that would be perused now with avidity by Fidel’s newly constituted vice squad.
Among other assets, María Raja had a second passport. Her mother, a refugee from Hitler’s Hungary, was above all things fastidious about security arrangements. It was only because she had had the cunning even as a teenager to make contingent arrangements that María so much as existed. As a girl, her mother had become friendly with a patrolman on the Drava River in southwestern Hungary. When the anti-Semitic williwaw of the mid-thirties suddenly threatened to grow to Typhonic force, young Astra, age seventeen, led her widowed mother to meet her river friend, the elderly policeman with a fondness for the children who played along the river’s verdant banks during the summer. He had befriended Astra when, at age seven, she was first taken there to play, and every summer that friendship was renewed.
He quietly—asking no questions—rowed Astra and her mother, with two laundry bags of clothes and toiletries, in the darkness across the border, letting them out in Yugoslavia. It was two years before they landed in Cuba, where Astra had a bachelor uncle who spared no pains to move them, as it were by remote control, what seemed inch by inch, from Yugoslavia and then to Egypt and finally aboard a freighter to Havana, where they arrived in 1941. Astra, a girl of striking beauty, then married a dashing young Cuban in disgrace with his aristocratic family, whose conventions he regularly dishonored, not least, now, by marrying a Jewish refugee from Hungary whose uncle was a jeweler in the commercial district.
But the young couple lived happily during the first two years of the world war, and Astra bore María. It all ended on that gruesome day in which the dashing, stupid young Cuban insisted on responding to a challenge to a duel, and was dead five seconds after his adversary drew his pistol. In return for a very satisfactory settlement, María’s paternal grandparents persuaded the widow to adopt her uncle’s name of Arguilla, and to bring up her little baby without giving her any knowledge of who her father had been, leaving no clues as to how she might trace her grandparents, if ever curiosity seized her.
Astra had been true to her promise, and María did not know her grandparents. But everything else she did know: that her father had been killed in a duel, and th
at arrangements had been made with his parents to guard their anonymity. She learned from her mother the need always to give personal security a high priority.
When Astra died (she was run down by a drunken truck driver) María was only fifteen, and she lived then for two years with her uncle, who died leaving María a jewelry store heavily in debt from years of casual credit practices. Her uncle’s accountant urged María simply to make her own arrangements with whatever money she had left over from her mother’s little bank account, which was less than a thousand pesos. Looking for theatrical opportunities (she had inherited her mother’s beauty), María wandered over to the entertainment district and was not entirely surprised—María, like her mother, was born worldly—to find herself talking with a raffish man, Señor Trafficante, who in his plushly upholstered office looked at her carefully, asked her matter-of-factly to disrobe, examined her again, focused lights on her from various angles, and agreed to employ her.
At first it was a fairly conventional skin show, but as the competition increased and María’s allure won discreet renown, Trafficante found himself going further and further, and always there were rich tourists, predominantly American, willing to patronize his post-midnight, high-dollar act, and the further the act went, the better they liked it. He evolved, finally, the program that was eventually closed down, though not before young Fidel Castro, seeking relaxation only a few nights before he left to attack, on July 26, the Moncada Barracks, had stopped in and marveled at what he saw.
Mongoose, R.I.P. Page 12
