Offshore Islands

by John Francis Kinsella

Pat Kennedy had been impressed by the huge old southern style house where Ortega lived, it lay between the La Gorce Golf Course and Indian Creek, just a couple or so miles north of Miami Beach. Its colonnade facade was hidden from the outside by a heavily wooded park.

  Stout iron railings and high brick walls kept out the unwanted. Automatic gates with a TV surveillance system controlled the coming and going of all visitors.

  It was built in real stone, a solid structure designed to last, not one of those wood-framed types with clapboard finishes, which looked like the genuine thing but were destined for obsolescence within thirty years, if not swept away in the meantime by a Caribbean hurricane. The trees were real, a couple of hundred years old.

  Expensive cars were visible in the driveway, where black gardeners cared for the lawns and shrubs whilst armed security guards patrolled overseeing all activities. At the private quay were moored several boats. They included a high-powered motor cruiser that was locally known as a cigarette boat, a pointed craft capable of speeds of up to 80mph.

  Pat Kennedy had first met Carlos Ortega at a Saint Patrick’s Day party held at the International Chamber of Commerce in Dublin. It was a traditional bash for foreign business people, both expatriates and travellers passing through Dublin. It was part of Irish folklore and the myth was accepted in the spirit of St Patrick’s Day, which was celebrated all over the world by serious drinkers, Irish and foreigners alike.

  Kennedy was however a teetotaller, he had taken the pledge, certainly the only one at the party. However he did not frown on drinking, as he knew it facilitated contacts, loosening tongues, which in other circumstances would have remained still, on rare occasions away from the emerald isle he even partook of a wee drink himself.

  In Dublin for a couple of days on business, he was certainly not going to miss a Saint Patrick’s Day party, with the possibility of meeting overseas visitors and making new acquaintances, who never failed to be stimulating and could even lead to business opportunities.

  Ortega had discovered Ireland many years previously. The Irish Republic happened to be neutral by its constitution and as a consequence was technically a bystander in the Cold War. As a result Shannon airport was a convenient refuelling point for Soviet and Cuban commercial aircraft flying between Havana and Moscow.

  Shannon airport was of a dimension, which some kindly described as oversize, others said it had been conceived by megalomaniacs; in any case those who had conceived it were long gone. They had been local politicians who had dreamed of Shannon becoming a major international airport, strategically placed between the capitals of Europe and North America. Unfortunately, with the arrival of modern transatlantic jet travel, the dream had evaporated like the vapour trails of the 707’s then 747’s that bypassed it at ten thousand metres.

  The consequence was that the Shannon Airport Authority was desperately short of business, seizing almost any opportunity to collect landing fees from airlines that needed to make a re-fuelling stop, not forgetting the duty free sales the could be generated from transit passengers in the ‘Biggest Duty Free Shop in the World’. When Aeroflot arrived it was manna from heaven.

  The Moscow-Havana-Moscow run proved to be a boon, with the arrival in the transit area of Russians and Cubans starved of consumer goods. That was of course before the airport authorities realised that the Russians could be even more fighting drunk than the Irish. It became a regular spectacle to see Red Army soldiers, who travelled in civvies, in fighting form as the result of consuming great quantities Vodka during their long flight. They disembarked in the Shannon transit lounges causing some memorable battles.

  The Airport Authority could turn a blind eye to that, but when Red Army soldiers decided that they neither wanted to go to Cuba or return back to Mother Russia, doing the bunk into the Irish countryside, it was too much.

  During the Cold War period, Ortega used neutral Ireland as a convenient base for his furtive activities on frequent occasions. He could meet people in Dublin that would pose a problem in England or France, not to mind Germany, which was creeping with spies and agents of all kinds.

  Kennedy was excited when he was introduced to Ortega and their discussion almost immediately turned to Cuba. He could not resist showing off his knowledge of Cuba by dropping the name Cayo Saetia, which intrigued Ortega.

  Cayo Saetia in Oriente Province was Castro country. He had been born in a small village called Biran and had married the daughter of the mayor of Banes. She had links to the family of the former President of Cuba, Fulgencio Batista, who himself was born in Banes.

  One of the largest land owning families in the province were the Castro’s, they had owned a large plantation that employed three hundred people.

  Cayo Saetia itself, had once been favoured by top members of the Communist Party, and was an exclusive resort for game hunting. There were antelope, zebra and even ostriches, all of which had been imported for the exclusive sport of the high level party cadres and important foreign visitors.

  So, why was Kennedy so interested in that area, the ex-army general and close friend of the defunct KGB asked himself.

  It did not take long for Ortega to worm more details out of Kennedy, who once he got going, could hardly retain himself from talking of Ciscap, he was excited by his new acquaintance, a Cuban insider, whom neither Castlemain nor Arrowsmith knew.

  The instant that Kennedy indiscreetly unveiled the details of the business, Ortega immediately took the decision to cultivate contacts with the loquacious Irishman, whom he recognised as a naive but valuable information source in Ireland, and also a potential associate partner whom he could control using as a front to one of his many international operations.

  When Kennedy invited Ortega for the ‘Shannon tour’ he accepted at once and two days later he was received royally in Kennedy’s office.

  Ortega together with his man, Campo, arrived at the office of Arrowsmith at 42, Avenue Franklin Roosevelt, in the eighth district of Paris. Arrowsmith had heard the bell ring and made his way up a narrow flight of stairs to the fifth floor. A new door had been installed, a typical Parisian anti-burglar proof door that the owners had deemed necessary after a couple of ‘night visits’. Nothing had been stolen and one of his suspicious secretaries had suggested industrial espionage. It was a possibility, but nevertheless a remote one thought Arrowsmith, flattering himself with the idea that there was something worth stealing in the office.

  Carlos Ortega was a Chilean, a tallish, thickset man in his late fifties, dark skinned with greying hair, he smoked heavily and anxiously. When in France he used a luxurious apartment nearby the Quai d’Orsay in Paris, and during the summer months he frequently stayed in Antibes in an opulent villa.

  He had been a high ranking military commander, an army general, close to Salvador Allende, at which time he had close relations with the Soviet sponsors of the Allende regime. With the dramatic death of Allende and the collapse of his regime, Ortega fled to Canada. He later set up a second residence in Cuba where the authorities, as sympathisers of the defunct Allende, helped him to enter into business relations with Cuban state owned business organisations.

  Ortega embarked on a new career as a specialist in Latin American affairs, working closely with the Cubans and the KGB in the heyday of Russo-Cuban relations. He had a vast scope of activities ranging from Angola and Mozambique to El Salvador, Nicaragua and Chile.

  An abrupt transformation occurred with Mikael Gorbachev’s dissolution of the Soviet Union that set off the process of privatisation of industry in the newly independent republics. For three years or more, Ortega was forced to live off the fortune he had accumulated in his lucrative trading arrangements within Comecom and its partners, whilst Moscow revised the rulebook and changed the players.

  In 1993, things started to fall into place in the new Russia, everything was up for grabs and Ortega seized the opportunity as he saw his old KGB and GRU cronies find their place amongst the entrepreneurs and nouveau riche. Vast s
ums of money disappeared; six hundred billion dollars vanished into overseas accounts. It was used amongst other things to finance lucrative operations in the export of Russian products from the ‘combinats’, and the import of luxury goods and foodstuffs for the emerging consumers and the impoverished masses fed by government subsidies. Exactly where the wealth of Russia had disappeared nobody knew, but as time passed the question became purely academic.

  Ortega had been close to the inner circle of Fidel Castro, though after the fall of the Soviet Empire and its economic system, his influence waned as Russia and its friends fell into disgrace and were execrated as traitors to socialism. He was constrained by the events to adapt his strategy to the capitalist future, which was taking form on the horizon, by using his influence to bring capital into Cuba from Latin America.

  Having been a semi-permanent resident in Cuba for twenty years, he had a perfect understanding of how the country’s system functioned. As a Chilean he was naturally a Spanish speaker. He knew whom to pay when, how and where. He had not overlooked establishing close contacts with the Miami Cubans, certain of whom had kept a foot in both camps ready for the inevitable changes that were to come.

  His business in the new Russia had grown rapidly, but with the collapse that followed the stock market crash in Moscow in August 1998, he experienced another setback, losing a very considerable sum of money, the rouble lost 70% of its value against the dollar almost overnight.

  However, the flight of capital following the stock market crash was transformed into a golden opportunity for Ortega, who turned his attention to directing the flood of dollars that were pouring out of Russia in the direction of the offshore banking havens of the Caribbean.

  He was no longer a young man and needed stable investments to realise his ambitions. He knew that the ‘after Castro’ was already taking form as he observed the rapid development of the Cuban tourist industry and realised there was an opportunity to be grasped.

  The question was to find a suitable vehicle that would enable Ortega to take a firm foothold in the key business sectors, building on solid investments. One of the existing sociedades anonimas he controlled with his Cuban associates, such as Caribtrade, could develop a controlling interest in such investments and Kennedy was the fortuitous person who could open the door to a participation in the Ciscap development. Caribtrade was registered in Panama, and with the aid of Cuban laws conceived to assist foreign investors and operators, it was perfectly suited to his plans.

  It was natural that his friends in Latin America had in the early days tended to be socialists, not to say revolutionaries. With the departure of Pinochet as the Chilean leader and national reconciliation, leftist parties were again making an appearance on the political scene.

  Ortega had long been suspected as having close contacts with the rebels in Colombia and Peru. He came and went as he pleased in Colombia, where politics, drugs and money were inextricably entwined. He was strongly suspected by the CIA of being involved in laundering drug money. In fact Ortega was a key link in the laundering of the profits from the Colombian drug trade.

  Coca was transformed into cocaine in the jungles of northern Peru and southern Colombia and then smuggled into the USA by a multitude of routes, road, sea and air via the countries of Central America and the islands of the Caribbean.

  The huge sums of money earned from narco-traffic was laundered in the USA and transferred to banking havens in the Caribbean. The quantities of money were so great that laundering became a vast industry implicated in every imaginable kind of criminal activity.

  Ortega kept his hands clean through arms length operations, only handling money in its ultimate ‘clean’ form. He was the front for the investments that rendered the money respectable. He avoided whenever possible direct contact with money, but from time to time the inevitable happened. In which case, it was treated as funds collected from the Cuban immigrants in Florida and for local American-Cuban politicians or Cuban lobbies. There were numerous collections of cash in schools, churches, supermarkets, shopping malls and businesses. The 600,000 Cubans gave generously as did US sympathisers and other Latin Americans.

  In Florida he maintained a strictly respectable facade. He owned, indirectly through one of his many offshore companies, an impressive home on one of the Bay Harbour islands and operated as an international business consultant, a ‘fixer’, through a Panamanian front company, set up for commodity trading which was fronted by an expatriate Cuban.

  Their business was mostly in Russian fertilisers and oil exported to Central America and the Caribbean. Business with the ex-Soviet Union was normal, though serious doubts lingered in the minds of the US authorities as a result of the many unsavoury aspects of its nature, such as offshore accounts and suspected money-laundering.

  Ortega had initially fled to Canada from Chile and obtained Canadian nationality in 1975. His Canadian passport enabled him to move freely in North and Central America. Canada had always had a very flexible policy towards political refugees such as those Cubans opposing the Castro regime, or, in earlier times supporters of Allende who had fled the Pinochet regime.

  With his Canadian passport he came and went as he pleased, travelling overseas and to the USA, where he had also acquired a green card resident permit, thanks to an influential congressman who supported his application, in return for which Ortega made a considerable contribution to the congressman’s re-election campaign fund.

  That day in Paris, Ortega was accompanied by one of his close financial advisors, a Frenchman, a rather strange character, Arrowsmith had thought. He was tall, well built in his late forties, wearing an off-white jacket and an exotic open necked Caribbean style flowered shirt. Maurice Campo’s father was Spanish, a communist who had taken refuge in France after the defeat of the Popular Front by Franco in the Spanish Civil War. He had then immigrated to South America, where Campo had been born in 1947. Maurice Campo returned to France in the mid-sixties.

  Campo gave the impression of being rather effeminate in spite of his size; he had thick wavy hair, full lips and slightly lisped.

  Ortega was dressed in a pale grey double breasted designer suit, his tie loose, under his arm was an expensive leather document case which he placed on the table of the meeting room.

  As Arrowsmith smiled to Ortega and offered him a coffee he realised he was in a quandary. Why was Ortega there? Was he an emissary from an influential member of the Cuban government? What should he do with Ortega? Should he join him the following week in Moscow? He wondered why he had accepted Kennedy’s introduction to the out of the ordinary personality, who had presented himself as an important businessman with privileged links to key members of the Cuban government.

  If he joined Ortega in Moscow he could be compromised, and if he declined to join him he could be missing a tentative contact with unknown persons, who could be disappointed by his refusal. Why should important persons try to contact him in this way, he was not sure. If it was important there would certainly be other occasions for contacts.

  He would have to stall Ortega and wait for news from Mika Koskinen who was at that moment in Finland. The previous evening he had faxed the Ortega papers to Helsinki and Moscow, the time difference meant that he would receive replies that morning when he arrived in the office.

  Unfortunately all the documents that Ortega had given him were in Russian, though he could decipher the names of the ministries and the oil companies that was as far as his Russian went. Moscow would translate and Finland would comment.

  His secretary discreetly called him from the meeting room; he had a call from Mika Koskinen in Helsinki.

  “Crooks!” was his reply to the dismay of Arrowsmith. “Crooks!”

  He put down the phone and pondered how he could politely get rid of the cumbersome presence of Ortega in the adjoining room.

  Chapter 47

  Bad Money