They ate heartily, drank moderately, and departed promptly. A few minutes after they were gone, Castro’s telephone rang. It was the lieutenant at the gate of INRA. “Comandante, I have here Captain Ingenio Tamayo, who says you have requested his visit.”
“Yes,” Castro said. “I neglected to advise you to expect him. Escort him to my quarters.”
Castro was sitting at his desk when Tamayo came in. He did not stand up, acknowledging Tamayo’s greeting only with a nod of his head and a gesture beckoning him to sit down on a chair opposite.
He opened the folder on his desk. Saying nothing, he reread the sections he had marked up that morning, after a few hours’ sleep recovering from his nonstop trip, Murmansk-Havana, in Aeroflot’s TU-114 turboprop.
“Ah, Ingenio, I have been catching up on American anti-Castro activity during my absence. A fat portfolio, you can imagine.”
Tamayo laughed, as he was expected to do.
Castro puffed on his cigar. “Yes, they do not let a week go by, do they?
“But this item is of unusual interest,” he said. “And for reasons that will be obvious, I intend that the matter should be entirely confidential. That is why I called you.”
Tamayo accepted his cue. He said, “I will never betray your confidence, Comandante. You can bank your life on that.”
“I will bank my life on nothing, my dear Tamayo, not even on my mother’s word. But I trust you, and you have undertaken delicate missions for me in the past.”
“I am always at your orders, Comandante.”
“You are aware of Senator Kenneth Keating, the imperialist senator from New York State?”
“Yes, Comandante. I am aware of his anti-Cuban record.”
“I have noted here,” Castro looked down at his folder, “that Senator Keating has raised the question—no. Not raised the question. He has flatly alleged that the Soviet Union did not in fact withdraw all their missiles last October. He said, in a speech to the U.S. Senate, that there was evidence that there was a missile left. He did not, of course, give out the name of his informant. But we must bear in mind that he has informants of demonstrated reliability. It was this Keating, this warmonger, who, a month before their official discovery last October by the American U-2’s, insisted that the Soviet Union had planted several batteries of missiles in Cuba. He was of course correct, but we never discovered who his informants were.
“Now, one month ago, I learn from this material, a certain Ramón Luminante, a Cuban traitor who fled to Miami, alleged at a counterrevolutionary rally in Miami that he had personally seen a medium-range ballistic missile. The question of this Cuban’s allegation was apparently raised at a hearing of a U.S. Senate subcommittee, and Secretary McNamara has said that the allegation was completely unwarranted, and evidently his word was accepted because, so far as I can see,” Castro’s eyes wandered once again over the material in his folder, “there has been no follow-up to that charge. The Senate subcommittee was evidently satisfied that they were merely looking at one more of the hysterical charges of the Cuban traitors against our regime.
“But now, one,” Castro put on his glasses and checked the date on two of the papers on his desk, “one whole month later, along comes Senator Keating making his speech, reiterating that charge. You will have guessed, I can safely assume, Ingenio, what it is that I have called on you to look into?”
“Yes, Comandante. You wish a search for a hypothetical Soviet missile to be discreetly conducted. Are there any clues? Did the traitor in the first instance detail where he said he saw such a missile?”
“No. But between this morning and tonight, I ordered our Intelligence—and I did this without consulting Valdés; I wish to maintain total confidentiality in this affair—to inform me on where the traitor Luminante was stationed during the period when he was in the Army. He was trained at Campamento Militar de Columbia, he then had a tour of duty at San Cristóbal. He then was transferred to Bahía Honda. Now neither Campamento Columbia nor Bahía Honda was ever a site for the Soviet missiles. On the other hand, San Cristóbal was.”
“You wish me to conduct an inspection at San Cristóbal?”
“Yes, I do. But I regret your using that word. You must bear in mind that we have in Cuba right now twenty thousand Soviet military technicians. They are indispensable to our defense. They are engaged in receiving Soviet matériel, assembling it, conveying it to various locations, some of them secret, some of them not secret, and training our personnel in the use of it. In the hidden locations—for instance within certain caves, and there is a very large cave at San Cristóbal—they maintain our MIG fighters, our tanks, our anti-aircraft missiles. They are indispensable to the national effort. For that reason, you cannot simply go to San Cristóbal and announce that you are there on my orders to conduct, so to speak, a body search of the military base to establish whether there is, hidden underground, a remaining missile or missiles, which, I should add, I very much doubt that there is, because the Americans conducted a very strict aerial surveillance of the Soviet retreat, and because it is inconceivable that Khrushchev should have authorized any such subterfuge without—well, without my authorization.”
Tamayo permitted himself a laugh. “I remember, Comandante, when President Kennedy said in his speech that he would demand a personal inspection of the missile sites to satisfy himself that they had been removed, you delivered that glorious riposte.”
Castro smiled, puffing on his cigar. “Yes,” he said, “the only satisfaction I had during that unpleasant week was saying no American would be permitted within the boundaries of Cuba to inspect the empty missile sites, ‘except Mrs. Kennedy, who is always welcome.’”
Tamayo laughed heartily. “That was a fine moment, Comandante.”
“Well, it worked. The inspection point was never pressed. The Americans relied on their U-2 planes to count, one by one, the repatriation of forty-two missiles. And the question, of course, is: Did they miscount? Did the Soviets withdraw not forty-two, but perhaps forty-one missiles? Or forty? Or thirty-nine? Or: Did they in fact plant within Cuba more than the forty-two missiles they spoke to me about? And if so, where are those that remain in Cuba? Needless to say, this was not a question I asked Khrushchev during our recent … amenities.”
“But San Cristóbal is your principal suspicion, Comandante?”
“I have no ‘principal suspicion,’ Ingenio. At this moment I do not personally believe that there are any missiles left in Cuba. But I would be derelict if I did not inquire into the charge made by this Keating who—no disputing this—has very effective informants. His charge, combined with that of the traitor Luminante, suggests that San Cristóbal is the place to begin looking. If you find nothing there, you must go also to Guanajay, Sagua la Grande, and Remedios. Now, when you arrive at San Cristóbal, be aware that there are several hundred Soviet technicians there, doing very useful work. There were two kinds of missiles planned for us in October, the SANDAL, whose range is a mere eleven hundred miles, and the SKEAN, whose range is twenty-two hundred miles. Both missiles,” Castro handed Tamayo a separate folder, “are for all intents and purposes the same size. The SKEAN is,” Castro peeked at the memo, “to be sure, 2.5 meters in diameter, compared to 1.6 meters for the SANDAL. But a hidden SANDAL would present pretty much the same problems as would confront a hidden SKEAN.” Castro laughed. He pointed to his cigar. “If this cigar were twenty-one meters long, and if it needed, in order to be activated, a transfusion of energy in the form of liquid oxygen and whatever else is needed to launch it, then it too would require a commodious underground berth. It is alleged, in effect, that there are one or more Soviet missiles lodged beneath the storage level of the missiles we became familiar with last year. If there is a hidden missile, it must sit underneath the level at which the other missiles were berthed. In order to be effective, such a missile would need to lie in a cradle that would be elevated to a surface firing posture. That means,” Castro said, using his cigar as an academic pointer and lookin
g up as though to a blackboard, “that the accompanying features of a missile ready or near-ready to function would need to be nearby.”
“The accompanying features?” Tamayo asked.
“Both the SANDAL and the SKEAN, before they could fire, would need an ingestion of LOX. This is not on the order of injecting them with a hypodermic needle. We are talking about tons of liquid oxygen energy, which is a highly volatile substance, and also tons of special kerosene. At least four technicians would be involved in such an operation alone. My immediate point is that not only the underground hidden missile is involved, but also accompaniments: the staff, and the men to fuel, service, arm, and aim it. What, exactly, they look like, I do not know, but you may need to make it your business to find out. This is not by any means an easy job. There is so much ordnance at each one of our great cave sites, sheltering planes, tanks, artillery, that one truck containing the liquid oxygen would not by any means stand out, especially if it were camouflaged so as to make it apparently useful to serve other purposes. If indeed the senator, Keating, and the traitor Luminante are correct, we must assume that all the auxiliary apparatus is well concealed, which makes your investigation more difficult.”
Castro put down his cigar and fixed his eyes now directly on Tamayo’s. “Here, Ingenio, is where you must use extra care. On no account can you raise any suspicion whatever as to the purpose of your visit to San Cristóbal. If it turns out by any chance that there is such a missile, Fidel Castro desires two things: one, to know where it is; and two, that the Soviet Union and the United States not know that I know that it exists. If it—they—exist, then I will make my plans. But until then, nothing—nothing—is to reach Soviet ears, especially anything that suggests any Cuban curiosity on the subject.
“You will go to San Cristóbal as a military officer whose mission it is to coordinate with other military centers the timetable for the assembly of the airplanes, tanks, and anti-aircraft pieces. You will proceed not with direct orders from me—that would lay the grounds for suspicion. You will have routine orders from Comandante Raúl Castro. But those orders will give you the run of the base. I do not desire to inform my brother about your mission, and accordingly I shall arrange for appropriate papers to be issued tomorrow of a kind that might routinely go out without his knowing about them. Major Rolando Cubela, well known to you, who attends to much of my confidential work, will see to it that those papers exist by Wednesday morning. Your job is to don your old uniform, promote yourself to major, pick up the papers from Major Cubela, who knows about our collaboration but not its purpose, and be off.”
Major Tamayo professed his most effusive thanks for his promotion, so casually tendered.
Castro reached into his desk. “There will be incidental expenses, and perhaps some special expenses: the Russian military are not by any means insensible to the uses of cash money.”
Fidel opened the bottom drawer and came up with two bundles of money. “Here are one thousand Cuban pesos, and one thousand American dollars. They may prove useful. Here”—Castro scratched out a number on a sheet of paper—“is a telephone number through which you can reach me. Do not use it except as an emergency. You know how to reach me for purposes of making an appointment. Vaya con Dios.”
Fidel Castro had never succeeded in expunging from his own or others’ use the traditional Cuban valedictory that one should go forward with God.
18
Larry Fillmore would never say about Wild Bill Hicock that his failures owing to a Technicolored imagination were traceable to carelessness in respect of detail. Larry was himself Mr. Discretion professionally, but early on in his dealings with the Agency he had decided that he would permit himself—that he must permit himself—that single exception to The Rules, rules which he fervently believed in and devoutly practiced. The rule in question was, simply put, that in covert action, no one who did not need to know could be permitted to know.
But when Larry Fillmore was recruited for service in the Agency at age twenty-four he was freshly married, and Ruth—to use his own words, uttered during their honeymoon—continued to be “my wife, my mistress, and my confidante.”
She was a tall, redheaded, sun-kissed, energetic wife, mother, lover, and administrator. Ruth had been a student at the Wharton Business School when they first met. She often made fun of the protocols of corporate detail and organization, in which she was instructed and in which courses she distinguished herself; she was, however lightheartedly, amused by what she called the “mystique of capitalist organization.” Nevertheless she understood the discipline and the reasons for it. When Larry proposed marriage, she found herself, Wharton-style, writing down the affirmatives and the negatives of marriage to Larry Fillmore. Although she knew that, whatever the table’s bottom line recommended as the prudent option, she was going to marry Larry Fillmore and that she would do so with the passionate conviction that that was what she wanted to do, she would still write out the table, like a dutiful soldier of organizational fortune.
The affirmatives were pretty routine. Yes, she wanted to marry. Yes, she wished to have a family. Yes, Larry Fillmore had all the qualifications of the man she desired to marry: He was attractive romantically (he was alluring and handsome) and professionally (he was in the Foreign Service, was obviously upwardly mobile); he spoke French and German, he was bright and studious, he was lively and imaginative, he was by nature a monogamous type. Sure, Larry had “known” other women, as the biblical idiom so chastely put it. But she knew that when, of all places on the subway in New York, bound for Fifty-seventh Street to hear Rosalyn Tureck play the Goldberg Variations at Carnegie Hall, he stuttered out his proposal of marriage, he had not made such a proposal before to any other woman. She pressed his free hand with hers while they stood, each with one hand on the aluminum stanchions they relied on to maintain their balance. She knew instantly what her answer would be. Even so, at her little apartment, shared with a fellow graduate of Wharton, that night she would write out the table of Advantages/Disadvantages and force herself to reflect on them. The following morning, interviewed by General Electric for a junior executive position to which she aspired, she found herself answering, in reply to the question, Was she prepared to think of General Electric as her true vocation in life? “Well, sir, that in fact depends. Because if I get married, I will need to decide whether the plans General Electric has formed are compatible with those my husband has in mind.” She might as well have said to her interviewer that her loyalty to General Electric would depend on Westinghouse’s convenience. The official looked at her with bewilderment and disapproval deep-frozen in his face. He paused, and concluded the interview by telling her that she would hear in due course whether she was “quite what General Electric has in mind” for the job.
She entered that datum in her Negative/Affirmative table that night, and when she was done, the Negatives quite overwhelmed the Positives. She laughed, tore the table up, called Larry on the telephone, and said, Yes, she would marry him.
When Larry Fillmore told his superior in the Agency that he had become engaged, he was told that on no account could he reveal to his fiancée what his actual affiliation was, that he must continue to affect to be a Foreign Service trainee. The instructions he was receiving in safe houses in New York, to be followed by instructions in Washington, were to be held strictly confidential.
“How long before I can tell my fiancée what my work actually is?”
“The answer to that is simple: Never. You will be permitted to tell her that you are associated with the Agency, but only after we have done a clearance on her.”
When, Larry had asked, might that be?
The bureaucratic burden of the work that needed to be done (was the answer) would take a good while, because there was a considerable backlog, and there would need to be an FBI check of some detail on his wife. “And since you are a deep-cover agent, the questions that need to be asked are necessarily more difficult to pose. I mean, we can’t very well go to her
college roommate and say, ‘Is Ruth Williams a loyal American?’ We need to go about these matters in an … oblique way.”
“Well, how long will it take?”
“About a year.”
That night, 364 days in advance of her projected clearance, Larry told Ruth that he was a deep-cover agent of the Central Intelligence Agency. Did that, he asked, make a critical difference in her decision to marry him?
No, she had answered promptly. “But it would make a deep difference to me if, in our married life, I am not permitted to know what you are doing, what your problems are, and what is concerning you.”
Larry found himself replying without any misgivings: “You will always know—everything.”
He had entered only the single unspoken qualification: Anything except that which, by your knowing it, would put you in danger. She sensed that he had made a mental reservation. And she added, “What might endanger me is what I would especially insist on knowing.”
Only then had there been obvious hesitation. But he yielded, maintaining within himself the single qualification that he would not unnecessarily expose her to danger. They were married the following month.
Ruth Williams, as far as her family and friends were concerned, was marrying a Foreign Service trainee, at this point in his career, leaving New York for Washington.
Eight years later, Larry was discussing with Ruth the pains Wild Bill was taking to ensure the security of arrangements involving the return of María Arguilla to Havana. More particularly, to her precise destination—the bed of Fidel Castro. Wild Bill had spent the better part of the week canvassing every contingency. Sitting at the kitchen table as Ruth served the TV dinner, together with fresh fruit and an ingeniously selected inexpensive wine, Larry outlined the details to Ruth.
Mongoose, R.I.P. Page 15
