The Seeds of Fiction

by Bernard Diederich

  I pleaded with the stewardess to tell the captain to let me off. I assured her the airport was safe. ‘It’s a long way from the trouble in the city,’ I said.

  But it was no use. We flew on to Guatemala City.

  The following day, Wednesday 23 August, with a whole gang of foreign correspondents from Mexico and Miami, I was able to fly into Managua. It was indeed a major story. Sandinista commandos, numbering only twenty-two, had captured not only thousands of ordinary citizens paying their taxes in the government offices but Somoza’s entire rubber-stamp congress which had been in session at the time. Several of the hostages were relatives of Somoza. It was a guerrilla record, the largest hostage-taking in Central America.

  Ultimately Somoza called off an initial attack to retake the palace, which had not been successful, and agreed to negotiate. Negotiations were under way when we arrived. The Sandinistas were demanding the release of fifty-nine of their comrades being held as political prisoners, $10 million in cash, the repeated broadcast over government radio stations of a two-hour-long Sandinista communiqué and their choice of air transport out of the country. They asked for Mexican, Venezuelan or Panamanian aircraft. Somoza bowed to their demands, although he cut a bargain with the Sandinistas to reduce the ransom money to half a million dollars. (The Sandinistas’ communiqué was read three times a day for the next two days over the radio and on television and also published in the press.) The next day, Thursday, government police and soldiers were ordered to allow the guerrillas and their freed political prisoners open passage to the airport. It was a carnival scene. The police had disappeared. And when the people of Managua heard that the police had been ordered off the streets everyone seemed to converge on the airport highway and terminal to catch a glimpse of the Sandinistas, whom they treated as heroes. Driving a rental car with two photographers, I tailgated the caravan of buses from the palace, on to the tarmac and up to the waiting aircraft, a Venezuelan Air Force C-130 and a COPA Panamanian airliner. The leader of the twenty-two Sandinista commandos, Edén Pastora, stopped before entering the aircraft and posed for photographers, his rifle held high in a gesture of triumph. The picture became a popular Sandinista poster and Edén Pastora an instant hero of the revolution.

  It was only the beginning of the Nicaraguan story. In the wake of the palace seizure a general strike was called by the Broad Opposition Front (FAO), made up mostly of business groups demanding the resignation of President Somoza, the third family member to rule Nicaragua over more than thirty years. Youthful rebels, calling themselves Los Muchachos (the Boys), rose up and seized much of the picturesque town of Matagalpa. Suddenly it was shades of the Spanish Civil War and Guernica as Somoza ordered his air force to bomb his own people. As the guerrilla war spread Matagalpa, Estelí, Jinotega and Masaya as well as Managua became my datelines in the months that followed. For the next eleven months Nicaragua became my second home.

  Back in Panama, Chuchu was so jubilant at the Sandinistas’ hostage-taking coup that he got drunk and deprived Graham of his front-row seat in the Nicaragua drama. ‘Chuchu and I were supposed to go on the plane fetching the hostages and commandos,’ Graham wrote on his return to Antibes, ‘but unfortunately Chuchu misunderstood the General’s instructions [Chuchu later confirmed that he was too drunk to fully comprehend the General’s orders] to spend the night at the airport and the plane left at four in the morning and we only arrived to get it at five! Chuchu received a reprimand from the General. But it wasn’t serious.’

  Chuchu did take Graham to see the newly freed prisoners and members of the audacious commando team who had freed them. They were being held temporarily at a Panamanian army base. Graham, like the General, was impressed with Edén Pastora, who was as handsome as a film star and a symbol of Sandinista defiance.

  Graham wrote from Antibes:

  How good it was to see you for those few days in Panama. I very much liked your piece in Time [which now gave correspondents bylines] about the fighting in Matagalpa and I am glad that you came out alive to write it. I think unless something dramatic happens this is my last visit to Panama. I found the journey rather exhausting. Torrijos sent me and Chuchu up to Belize to see [Prime Minister George] Price and I enjoyed that trip except that there was nothing to eat except shrimps and we were stuck for long periods both ways in Salvador. At first I didn’t care for Price but afterwards I came to the conclusion that he had been shy and we got along very well. An interesting and curious man. Another disappointment, I missed my caviar lunch on the way back to Amsterdam because we over-flew Lisbon and all we had in place of a luxurious meal was a selection of Dutch cheese.

  Gabriel Garcfa Márquez, he added, had come to Panama City, and they had introduced him to Flor’s rum punches at the Señorial.

  On their return to Panama from Belize, Graham related, Chuchu had said he needed to stop over in San José, Costa Rica, to talk with an important Sandinista. While Chuchu met with his Sandinista contact, Graham had the pleasure of chatting with the ‘lovely’ Nicaraguan poet Rosario Murillo who had once been an occupant of Chuchu’s guerrilla safe house in Panama City. Much later Graham learned that Chuchu’s contact, who was with Rosario in San José that night, was Daniel Ortega, the man who was destined to become head of the Sandinista Junta and later President of Nicaragua.

  He wrote on 9 October 1978:

  A hasty line, I’m afraid, to thank you for your most interesting and detailed letter of September 26 as I am just off to Anacapri for about two weeks. You must have had a terrifying time in Nicaragua and you were much in the thoughts of Chuchu and me. It’s a terrible thing that Somoza has been allowed to run riot in this way. To think that he excused paying up for the hostages in the National Palace in order, as he said, to save human life! I should be sorry to see him going into a comfortable retirement and I do trust the Sandinistas will end by bumping him off.

  Alas, I seem to have been wrong about Drake’s burial. It was off an island in Portobelo Bay according to the only book I have here. I think I did write to you when I got back but my memory is very hazy so you will know that Chuchu and I had a very interesting two days in Belize — it was the General’s idea. George Price is well worth a visit. So is the Vice-Premier who looks like a black Edward VII. An interesting point emerged from him that the British contingent of troops is apt to make manoeuvres on the Guatemala side of the frontier without informing the Government. [Guatemala had long asserted claims on Belizean territory, challenging Britain’s influence in its former colony.] There might be a story there. We angered the opposition by giving a radio interview stressing the friendship between Price and Torrijos. The leading opposition paper in an editorial referred to us as ‘the so-called author Green [sic] and agent Martínez of Panama’.

  In a letter dated 8 November Graham wrote:

  I have only just got your letter of September 29 partly because of the French post strikes and partly because I have been away for about two weeks in London and Switzerland. No news yet on When the Bell Chimes [sic].

  Don’t bother to send me any further background on the Sandinistas. I doubt whether I shall see any of them again and your articles in Time have really covered the ground admirably. I must say I rather like the idea of the Wild Pigs (a Panamanian anti-guerrilla unit) going to fight beside the Sandinistas, though I suppose it would be a disaster for the continent.

  At the end of 1978 my editors at Time agreed with my suggestion that we ask Graham to write an article about the Caribbean, including Belize. They also assented to my further proposal that Graham and I wind up a trip in Cuba with an interview with Fidel Castro. Excited, I telephoned Graham in Antibes to discuss the project and was shocked to discover that he was scheduled to undergo an operation in London to remove part of his intestines. Apart from such a dire medical prospect, he was not enthusiastic about the project in any case. In a letter he wrote on 9 January 1979, he said:

  It was very nice hearing your voice on the telephone. I feel more and more doubtful about the Time
magazine project. 4,000 words anyway scares me. I don’t like to be committed to such a large article by accepting payment as if it were in advance for my expenses. [I could hear him again telling the story of his assignment for Life magazine, which involved his going into Malaya at the end of 1950 to report on the Communist guerrilla war, and then moving on to Vietnam. ‘They were very generous,’ he had said, ‘and paid me $5,000 for one article they didn’t even publish and which I later published in Paris Match. It was a lot of money in those days.’] As far as talking to Fidel is concerned you would do it far better than I as a practised interviewer. Let’s leave our plans for the moment as something vaguely in the Caribbean. Do you know Belize? It’s really a very charming place and worth a visit. My love to you and Ginette.

  In a letter dated 19 March 1979 from Antibes, thanking me for a ‘long and interesting letter’ and then leaving the important things to last, Graham wrote, ‘You must forgive a very brief reply as I have been having a rather nasty operation in a hospital in London for two weeks and still feel a bit feeble. I hope I shall be feeling all right when summer comes and we can make plans, but I have been told that I must do no travelling for the next two months.’

  He also commented on a meeting that I had reported on between Pope John Paul II and the bishops of the western hemisphere in Puebla, Mexico.

  I had a different impression reading about the Pope’s speech in Puebla. I took it as an encouragement for the progressives and simply a discouragement for priests actually to take up arms. That should be left to the laymen. This point of view seems to me reasonable. Rogelio, the Panamanian Sandinista, visited me a month or two back and I sent a little money to their bank account in Panama — only enough I am afraid to buy a silver bullet to shoot Somoza with.

  It proved a very difficult year for Graham. Not only did he have his intestinal tract to worry about; he was highly distressed about an interview he had given to the New Yorker magazine — or, more precisely, its rendition of the interview. A month later, on 19 April, he wrote:

  I have just seen a copy of the New Yorker which you may have seen with a so-called Profile by Mrs Gilliatt. I little thought the New Yorker were capable of publishing such inaccuracies or Mrs Gilliatt of writing them. I have written the enclosed letters to the New Yorker but of course they don’t publish letters but it may warn the editor and cause some discomfort to Mrs Gilliatt … I wish there was some way of getting at her through Time magazine!

  One of Graham’s letters to the editor of the New Yorker, dated 18 April and which was enclosed, stated:

  Dear Sir, I was shocked to read in a paper like the New Yorker the Profile made by Mrs Gilliatt on my poor self. If your magazine printed correspondence I would ask you to print the enclosed. Surely there must be some way of drawing attention to her mistakes and misstatements … having counted more than fifty misstatements, misquotations and inaccuracies in Mrs Gilliatt’s Profile, I gave up the job. I advise your readers not to take any sentence on trust as reporting what I thought or said or have done. To take a few large and small inaccuracies: I was never invited to an internment camp in Argentina, if any exists, there are no vultures in Antibes, I never saw Miss Tutin act in Russia, no Communist from the Czech Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs has ever called me on the BBC ‘a liar’, etc. These epithets were published by Dr Duvalier of Haiti. The Czech official, like all but a few lines of Mrs Gilliatt’s article, is the product of her very odd imagination and her very imperfect memory. I advise her in the future to use a tape-recorder and make sure that there is no vulture under her bed.

  Graham could become extremely cross with what he called, ‘the silly things people write about me’. He complained that they were constantly searching for some deeper meaning but became intellectually lost in the process.

  I would like to think the Nicaraguan revolution ended on 18 July 1979, my fifty-third birthday, but the Sandinistas declared the 19th as the official end of hostilities and the day they took over the country. On returning to my base in Mexico City after spending the preceding three months covering the war, I found a letter dated 1 June from Graham in which he wrote:

  I am sorry I simply can’t remember the name of Contreras’s wife. I ought to as I have seen a great deal of her but I’m very bad at remembering names.

  I fear we will have to leave our Caribbean journey until next year. My operation in March and difficulties in Yvonne’s family has meant that I haven’t yet got to my little house in Anacapri and I think we will have to go there in late August. That only leaves me a few possible weeks in early August to arrange anything and I’m not sure yet that I feel fit enough. I have to go to London at the end of June for an examination and of course a good deal depends on that.

  I believe the General and Chuchu are going to be over in Europe this summer. I had a visitor from Panama a week or two back — the political counsellor who was there when we went to have lunch with Torrijos last time — and he was very pessimistic about the situation. Apparently Panama has lost the support of Colombia since the elections, Venezuela are very feeble supporters and they find themselves again alone. They believe that the emendations to the [Panama Canal] Treaty which will be made by the [US] Congress will make it impossible to accept it, and then there is going to be trouble in October. I imagine that’s one of the points of the General’s visit to Europe and also one of the reasons why he has gone back to the army. Anyway let’s keep in touch.

  By the way I gained a very optimistic impression of the Sandinistas from the political adviser. He said the Western press had gone far astray and that the fight in Estelí was a real victory. The Sandinistas only lost a very few men and finally left town with more than a thousand recruits unstopped by the National Guard. He gave Somoza only a few more months to survive. Let’s hope he wasn’t being over-optimistic like the General was last year. It’s a very good idea you should write a book on him [Somoza].

  The political adviser had been correct regarding Estelí, as I and my press colleagues all were. In fact, none of us covering the war had underestimated the results of the climactic battle in Estelí, and we all knew that Somoza’s days were indeed numbered.

  On 7 August Graham wrote:

  I have received an invitation from the President, Royo … for [Panama’s] celebration at the end of September of the symbolic entry into the Canal Zone. I imagine you’ll be there, but I am not absolutely sure that I’ll go this time as I feel lazy after my February operation and I may be in Capri. Anyway do let me know if you will be there as it would help to sway my decision.

  Graham missed a day of great emotion, at least for Panamanians. US President Jimmy Carter, armed with the necessary implementing legislation voted by Congress, had signed the Panama Canal Act three days earlier, and Vice-President Walter Mondale headed a large delegation from Washington. It was a truly festive time. At dawn on 1 October Panama’s new civilian President, Aristides Royo, led a march by members of his government and thousands of Panamanian citizens up Ancon Hill in what was now the former Canal Zone and unfurled a gigantic Panamanian flag. As the flag of Panama reached the top of the flagstaff, Royo declared, ‘A state within a state no longer exists.’

  Meanwhile leftist guerrillas were on the move in El Salvador. Eleven businessmen had already been kidnapped that year for ransom money that would go to the guerrillas’ war chest. Washington, fearful of another Nicaragua, was pressing the government of General Carlos Humberto Romero to institute political reforms, but El Salvador’s powerful oligarchy warned against any concessions to the left. At the same time the United States was secretly talking to progressive elements in the military that Washington hoped might forestall another bloody revolution in Central America. Yet while the big story in the region in the autumn of 1979 was El Salvador, there was yet another story back in Panama: the Shah of Iran.

  A popular uprising had forced Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his wife Farah to flee Iran in January 1979. While bouncing from one refuge to another they descended virtua
lly in my backyard, in the lovely eternal-spring resort of Cuernavaca, just over the mountains from Mexico City. Then shortly before Christmas the royal couple landed on the beach of Contadora Island off Panama. President Carter’s press secretary, Hamilton Jordan, who was on good terms with Omar Torrijos, had arrived to consult with the General. Without hesitation, between puffs of his Cohiba cigar, Omar agreed to take in the Shah as a favour to Panama’s friend President Carter, who was by now in deep political trouble over the seizing of American hostages in Tehran.

  Carter had allowed the Shah to fly to New York for medical reasons, andIslamic fundamentalist rebels in Iran had reacted by seizing the US embassy and holding its staff of fifty as hostages. The rebels demanded the Shah’s return to stand trial in exchange for the hostages’ freedom. For the United States the hostage crisis became the drama of 1980 and was to cost Carter his bid for re-election.

  Mexico, already angered at the Shah for showing a preference for New York’s medical facilities over their own, refused to allow the Shah back into the country, and the Carter administration felt duty-bound to find another haven for the exiled Iranian ruler.

  By the time I arrived on Contadora Island to report on the Shah’s move there, the pretty young aide whom Omar had designated to act as liaison with the Shah and his party was fed up. She pleaded with me to tell Omar she couldn’t stand playing nursemaid to rude royalty. Ideologically, she would have preferred to have been on Via España in Panama City with the scores of students who were demonstrating against the Shah’s presence in Panama. (Torrijos’s National Guardsmen viciously repressed the anti-Shah demonstrators, several of whom required hospitalization.)

  The bungalow belonging to the former Panamanian ambassador to the United States, Gabriel Lewis Galindo, where the Shah and his family were staying. It was hardly big enough for even a petite Peacock Throne, but the Shah and his wife managed. Almost daily they went out to play tennis with some of the chic guests at the new Contadora Hotel, a short drive down the hill from the bungalow. The Shah finally decamped from Panama for Egypt in March 1980.