Southern Hemisphere
1988–1990
In the months after we first bugged the safe house, our intel provided our host allies some excellent opportunities to wrap up more revolutionaries. They didn’t squander those chances by scooping up the little fish. Instead, they learned to be patient and wait for opportunities. Eventually, the five revolutionaries we’d been listening to were arrested by our host nation’s security forces. They were all picked up individually at vulnerable moments in the midst of their daily routines by teams that moved swiftly.
There was no bloodshed as a result. Our local allies interrogated and imprisoned them, which in this corner of the world was a very harsh fate.
Prison could be exceptionally hard on the revolutionaries. A few years before, the professor announced that the prisons were legitimate fronts in the peasant war against the government. There were numerous jailbreaks, riots, and attacks on the prisons as a result. Then, during a week in which an international conference was held in the capital, simultaneous uprisings by incarcerated revolutionaries took place in three prisons. The country’s president ordered the army in to deal with the crisis. They showed no mercy.
Thirty prisoners died in a hail of gunfire as the army stormed the prison. The soldiers summarily executed 130 more in the aftermath.
One day a few months after those first five went down, one of my friendly contacts inside the local security forces tipped me off on an opportunity. They had been surveilling another cell for several weeks. They’d learned their routines, contacts, and habits. One of the men in the cell had a weakness that, had his terrorist buddies known about, would have gotten him executed. He smoked pot.
As ironic as this sounds, the professor’s movement did not tolerate drug use. For the true believers, even as they were moving mountains of cocaine out of the country, using any drugs was an immediate death sentence.
The other cell members underwent harsh interrogation by our hosts within hearing distance of the pot smoker, Miguel. By the time my contact brought him to me, he was wide-eyed and terrified of what he would soon face.
My counterpart in the security force told Miguel he was in for a rough time. But he may have a way out of his predicament. He introduced Miguel to me in a car pickup meeting. I sat behind my counterpart, who was driving, and Miguel, who was riding shotgun. We made sure to strap his seat belt in place, and we’d scooted his bucket seat all the way forward. I patted him down, even though I knew my counterpart was sure he was clean. This was SOP, but it also delivered the message: you are under our control. You never make assumptions.
“Look,” I told him, “I don’t care what your politics are. I don’t care about democracy or communism. I am a businessman.”
My cover for action (CFA) in this case was a phony passport for flash purposes only. It supported my background that I was a Costa Rican who owned a security company.
“All I care about is getting information that I can use to help my clients who do business here keep their people safe.”
Miguel was perhaps twenty-one or twenty-two. He’d been a student recruited out of one of the universities. His decision to cast his lot with the ideologues now looked like a dreadful decision that had destroyed his life. He was looking at years of imprisonment in a system known for its cruelty.
“You help me with that, and I’ll make sure you’re released, well paid, and taken care of—provided you tell me the truth. But if you ever lie to me even once or provide me with bullshit information, my colleague here will make sure you end up back in prison … permanently!”
His saucer eyes stared into mine. He knew I was giving him his only chance at some semblance of a normal life. Or at least one not defined by bars.
He started talking. He was a treasure trove of information and provided great insight into their modus operandi (MO), cell structure, compartmentation discipline, and even as much of who is who to which he was privy. That turned out to be only a few people, as this Marxist group practiced very thorough compartmentalization, tradecraft, and operational security. Miguel knew his immediate handlers, and that was about it.
He served the professor’s bandits as one of the countless “bomb mules” in the capital. His job was to pick up a prepared and assembled bomb from another cell and receive orders where to leave it. He’d take it to the designated spot and hide it in some concealed location. Once he delivered it, the actual attack team would retrieve it, then arm and emplace it at the designated target. He was sort of a low-level terror middleman, the link between two chains in the organization. He gave us valuable insight into how that system worked and how the attacks were carried out.
The revolution’s foot soldiers were not very bright or trustworthy to the higher-ups in the organization. Their fieldcraft wasn’t very good compared to the higher levels of the organization. In the early years of the war, the government’s forces scooped them up or killed them pretty regularly. To minimize those operational weaknesses, Miguel would leave the bombs within about a mile of the target area. That way, the attack teams were not on the street for very long, carrying compromising materials. They would get the explosives, emplace them at the target area, and clear out.
In 1988, there were dozens if not scores of such teams operating all over the capital. Their support came from the revolutionaries fighting in the mountains outside of the urban areas. Ratlines moved the dynamite from the mines to the cities, where bomb makers cut their fuses, often split the dynamite sticks up, and prepared them for an operation.
There were perhaps fifteen thousand revolutionaries devoted to their Maoist cause in 1988. Most of the fighters lived wretched lives in the jungle or in mountain caves. The support people lived better lives in the cities, laundering money, arranging for safe houses, providing medical and legal support, and carrying out a myriad of tasks that kept the revolutionary nodes in the cities functioning.
A bomb mule like Miguel possessed only a fraction of the chain that ran from the professor to the mountains and into the cities, but the puzzle pieces he did give us turned out to be important ones in the fight against the bombing attacks.
I gave him a pager and taught him a simple number code to use when he wanted to meet with me. He would call my pager, and that code would be displayed, telling me where and when he wanted to meet. The technology was brand-new, and it was the first time I used it operationally. It proved to be so much easier than the dead drops and street-side signals we’d used up until then. It was also much less vulnerable to interception and deciphering than a cryptic phone call initiating an emergency meeting.
After that, we turned him loose. A few of his buddies ended up in the prison system, and a few others were also released to obfuscate Miguel’s new role, so the revolutionaries were none the wiser. He picked up where he’d left off, running his deadly errands between the bomb makers and the attack teams. We had a few routine meetings to further debrief him on his knowledge of the group and its players, and to reinforce our “sacrosanct” agreement.
My pager beeped one afternoon a couple of months later. I looked down at the text display and knew at once it was Miguel, wanting to meet. The code he used indicated extreme urgency, and he had picked a site near his home—a particularly bad and dangerous neighborhood. My counterpart in the security service would normally come with me as backup, but he was out of the capital at the moment. Taking anyone else was a breach in operational security, so this meeting I would have to do alone.
Miguel’s rendezvous point was an area of the city where foreigners dared not tread. Fortunately, my native Spanish and my penchant for disguises afforded better odds, as I could blend in. Hopefully, both of us would survive the encounter without compromise. My older, battered, white Toyota operational rental would also fit in the ’hood and allow for an inconspicuous pickup, using the pre-cased location with great cover and flow. No Jason Bourne red Mini Cooper or Bond’s Aston Martin for this gig.
On the Cooper scale, I was in Orange; then again, in this place, I was always in Orange. As meticulous as I was about running great SDRs to the meetings, I was even more anal-retentive about my post-meeting SDRs back home. No way I could afford to have someone follow me back to my sanctuary.
Other than the well-received debriefings, Miguel had yet to provide us with anything that truly justified the risk of meeting alone with a terrorist. I had no idea if he was trustworthy yet, or if he’d double-cross me and set me up. I ran through scenarios I could face. His terrorist buddies might ambush and try to kill me. They might try to kidnap me. I’d have to be ready to take whatever action necessary, from avoidance to taking lethal force to protect myself. The great lesson from the Buckley kidnapping in Beirut was a CIA officer can never be kidnapped. You’ve got to do everything to evade being snatched and thrown in a car.
I kitted up, starting with soft body armor and two radios (in ops comms, two is one and one is none). These days, the PPK was enjoying a well-deserved retirement. In its place, I holstered a Colt 1911 A-1 on the hip, a 1911 Officer’s model in a shoulder holster, and my stainless five-shot .38 caliber “Lady Smith” (no macho ego here) on my left ankle. I studied the neighborhood on the local maps, devised my SDR, then picked up my white Toy-motor and set out to the rendezvous point.
That night, I headed out, head on a swivel. I reached the meeting point. Miguel slipped into the car. We kept the exchange short and to the point. He explained he’d been ordered to pick up a bomb and deliver it to a drop-off site in a section of town near the international quarter. An attack within a mile or so of that X would take place within hours of his delivery.
He proved to be no threat. There was no terrorist countermove. His pot smoking combined with the leverage we had made him compliant—and ultimately a very good asset. As quickly as he’d come, I dropped him off at his preferred location. Like a ghost, he slipped away and blended into the ghetto.
I went back to base and studied his intended dead-drop area on a map. We looked over every building and potential target within a one-mile radius and came up empty.
Finally, one of our team noticed that there was a property owned by the Chinese, less than a mile away. It was part of the ambassador’s residence or at least that of his entourage.
Would the Maoists bomb a Chinese communist diplomatic property? At first blush, this made no sense. In the past, some of their cadre had allegedly trained in China and received some logistical support. Why would they attack an erstwhile ally?
I typed up my report and sent it up the chain of command. Word came back that nobody thought the revolutionaries would attack a Chinese target.
There comes a tipping point in most revolutionary organizations where the ideologically impure are purged. This happened with our own domestic terror groups like the Weather Underground in the 1970s. It happened during the French Revolution and in the aftermath of Lenin’s takeover of Russia. Marxist revolutionaries always go through this phase where loyal members are driven out or killed simply because somebody within the ranks does not believe they showed enough commitment to the cause.
That was happening with the professor’s terrorists at this point in the uprising’s history. Instead of seeking out allies, they sought to destroy anyone on the left they considered traitors to the cause because they were not radical enough. Already, they’d attacked socialist journalists, kidnapped or killed fellow communists from other terror groups and revolutionary fronts. They purged their own ranks of the less ideologically pure and shamed some of their subcommanders into suicidal attacks to prove their loyalty.
Set into that context, a Chinese target made perfect sense. Through the late 1980s, the Communist Party of China turned increasingly toward free market capitalism. To the ideologues, that was a betrayal of Chairman Mao’s teachings. They were traitors to the cause, not fellow travelers.
The revolutionaries blew up several vehicles parked outside of the Chinese residence just a few days later.
The attack confirmed two things. First, the terrorists were spiraling out of control. They were losing support from even the most left-wing adherents in their country. The majority of the population had turned against them and the very people they claimed to represent; the workers and peasants had formed militias in their rural villages to fight off their depredations. They were flailing and killing people senselessly now.
Most importantly, it also confirmed that Miguel told the truth with his first tip to us. That was a harsh way to confirm the intel, but there is no more undeniable proof of intel than proven by events. This is actual verbiage used in our intel cables when an asset’s predictions pan out in open-source documentation.
We worked with him for many months, and while he never gave us the sort of scoop to rival the Chinese attack, his information helped develop our understanding of the opponent we faced. Ultimately, he vanished without any warning or notice. It was one of those sad loose ends from my tenure in the Agency that I wish I could tie up. Was he compromised and killed by his revolutionary comrades? Or was he simply transferred to the countryside to continue the fighting there? That was a standard thing the revolutionaries did. To be a true devotee of the cause, the city dwellers had to do their time in the countryside, living like primitives in the caves and jungle shelters as they fought the army and the increasingly hostile population.
When I think about Miguel, I hope he survived his immature naïveté. He was a kid who fell victim to the siren song of a terrorist group’s efforts against a corrupt and failing government. He was a young fool caught up in the emotion, romance, and excitement the revolution supposedly offered. He was not unlike a young Ric Prado, mesmerized by the attraction of rebellious bad boys from the streets of Miami … and the girls who loved them.
Those are the worst days to come home. An agent disappears. Somebody dies.
You return to your house emotionally spent, unable to share the details of what happened with those who love you most. The hardest part for me was finding a balance on what I could, or should, tell Carmen and what to compartmentalize for her sanity’s sake.
First off, you cannot share operational details of who you met where, or for what.
That mandatory secrecy can cause friction and doubts. If you share too much of your “adventures,” you risk making your family members paranoid and apprehensive. After all, it is not their world. If you keep them completely in the dark, then there is little sympathy or understanding for the stresses you cope with on a daily basis. When “Johnny’s” dad has a bad day, it is because a business opportunity fell through or the stock market took a dip. When a CIA officer has a bad day, an operation was compromised, or people got killed.
Every CIA family had to find the balance that worked for them. For us, balance sometimes included using Carmen operationally. Carmen had been a translator for us in Central America and had done other things for our station as well. While she was compartmentalized from the daily bruising work we did in the street, she had her own security clearance and was always part of the team. But in this tour, Carmen rose to the occasion and smacked one out of the park for our team. I’d never been prouder of her.
When I had first arrived in country, I’d found a beautiful house to rent that belonged to a prominent doctor. It was absolutely palatial, with an enormous office for me and plenty of room for Carmen and the kids. It was U-shaped, built around a beautiful patio that could be accessed through many sliding doors.
Given that security was always a concern, the house’s twelve-foot-high concrete walls that defined its perimeter fit the bill for what we needed. It was an incredible place, one that we’d have never been able to afford anywhere else. But in this desperate, impoverished nation, the rent was well within the housing allowance. The constant violence, the bombings, and the military’s crackdowns created so much instability that everything remained cheap—especially the value of human life. And we paid our rent in U.S. dollars!
The situation was so tenuous that we were under what was called a “fifteen-minute burn notice.” After the Iranian embassy was overrun, stations and bases in hot spots overseas had to be able to burn all their paperwork in fifteen minutes or less, just in case the situation quickly went to hell.
The international community in the capital city existed in sort of an isolated world of its own, complete with its own rules. The Soviet and Chinese diplomats rarely crossed paths with Americans or other Westerners. Same with the Warsaw Pact types from Bulgaria or Hungary. They’d have their own diplomatic events, we’d have ours. The overlap was few and far between. Even then, the overlap usually occurred at sterile events hosted by the local government.
Diplomatic functions make for great places to identify and develop contacts.
Those parties are important for intelligence agencies, so restricting access to them was equally important. In this country especially, we rarely saw our adversaries as a result.
That changed, thanks to Carmen and our house. After we first arrived, I asked Carmen to join the Women’s Diplomatic Association. With her native Spanish and background in bookkeeping, the group quickly made her its treasurer. Every other year, the association hosted a massive party for all the diplomatic missions in country. It was the social event of the season, and everyone was invited.
In 1989, I asked Carmen to offer hosting the party at our house. It was perfect for a large social gathering, and the association quickly agreed. I went to the Chief of Station, explained the coup, and asked for the Agency to help sponsor the party beyond what the Dip Association could normally afford. Here was our clandestine angle: Carmen, being a native Spanish speaker, was never associated with the U.S. mission in country. Our place was owned by a local doctor. There was no obvious connection to the United States, much less to the Agency. Because of that, I hoped we’d get a chance to mingle with our Cold War adversaries and hopefully make some unique contacts.
Our COS agreed. He secured funds for plenty of alcohol and great food. Carmen was put in charge of making the entire thing happen. She did an amazing job, setting up a dinner party and reception for over 150 people. And no one had any clue this was an all-American operation.
The night of the party, the crowd began to show up, dressed in their Sunday best. It was a dapper, semiformal affair with all the protocol associated with such events. As the night wore on, the music, the great food, and the flowing alcohol took effect, and so everyone relaxed and became far more informal. Laughter echoed through the patio, and men who’d never met before held drinks and swapped stories in every language imaginable.
The Hungarians were there. So were the Chinese and Soviets. All our rivals and adversaries packed into my patio, drinking American-funded booze. I couldn’t help but smile with pride at Carmen for pulling this off.
And believe me, our handpicked officers were like sharks that night, swimming through the small talk, making contacts, trying to learn who was who in the missions where we never had the chance to meet. Carmen was a rock star, the perfect hostess as she circulated through the crowd, charming the socks off everyone. One of the most important parts of tradecraft that often goes overlooked by Hollywood is rapport.
Usually, to develop an asset, you’ve got to be patient, have charisma, and build a connection. It takes time—sometimes it takes years. But those moments at social gatherings like that one sometimes pay off.
Everyone changes stations and assignments as they progress through their careers. A contact made in South America may end up in a significant post somewhere else in the world and may subsequently be willing to share information with us. That was the beauty of Carmen’s night, and I loved how we made a great team.
There were other husband-and-wife teams in our office that year as well. “Mary Beth” was a first-tour case officer. A beautiful young brunette with a razor-sharp intellect who proved utterly fearless in the field, she’d met her husband at the farm. “Bob” and Mary Beth were frequent guests at our house and were beloved by our sons. Bob taught our oldest boy to wiggle his ears, a trick he can do to this day.
One day in early 1990, Mary Beth came to me with an issue. She had been running one of our base’s most productive agents for months. His intel was absolute gold, material we could never get from any other source. Yet a policy change in Washington caused havoc in our corner of the world. Word came down from Langley that we had to cut ties with this asset. It was a ludicrous order, and our COS protested it. The response was firm and nonnegotiable: do it.
The reason? In the year after Iran-Contra, the legal cases and investigations revealed the Agency ran agents with sketchy moral backgrounds. Congress wanted that cleaned up. No more morally questionable foreign agents on the payroll.
This looks great on paper. The good guys making sure they only work with good guys overseas, right? Well, take a look around your town. If you want to identify and bring down a local drug ring, do you think the well-behaved Boy Scouts in your area will be able to help? Of course not. Genuinely good people rarely know who the local criminals are. The dark world is a seedy place, the human underbelly. To find out who is trying to do what to our fellow Americans and allies, we are at our most successful when we realize that reality and exploit the contacts we can make within the shadow world.
The change in policy hamstrung us and forced us to give up one of our most productive agents. Since Mary Beth was his case officer, she had to break the news that the Agency was cutting him loose. He’d be losing a significant chunk of his income, so this was news that would not go over well.
Granted, the agent worked for a pretty rough organization. He had a violent past, but in countries like this one where terrorist violence was rampant, George Orwell’s quote comes to mind: “We sleep safely in our beds, because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.” So for those effete bureaucrats demanding we fight a ruthless enemy while abiding by Queensberry rules, this priceless asset was a natural to cut from the Agency payroll. Yet for those of us on the ground, all we could think of was the loss of the information he provided. He gave us insight that nobody else could deliver.
When the COS told Mary Beth to fire the agent, they discussed the dangers that might arise. His violent past made this a legitimate concern. He was powerfully built and muscular. Should he lose his temper, Mary Beth could face real danger. The COS told her to come talk to me and work out a plan to deal with this termination.
Mary Beth and her husband were, and to this day are, personal friends of mine.
There was no way anything was going to happen to her on my watch. I told her I’d be her backup. We worked through the details. She set the meeting up.
On the appointed day, Mary Beth began her SDR. I was waiting in a second car at a predesignated point. After she made the rendezvous and picked up her agent, she drove past me. I slipped behind her and followed a few cars back. She pulled over a few minutes later and parked on a street we’d agreed on. I parked behind them, a car length away and at a forty-five-degree angle to the asset’s rear.
If the agent looked to get violent and Mary Beth feared for her life, she would signal me by stepping on and holding the brake pedal. The brake lights would be my cue to intervene, even if it meant putting a bullet in the back of the guy’s head. I sat behind the driver’s seat, watching them talk, my M1911 Colt in easy reach in my cross-draw holster. “Whatever you do, don’t accidentally tap the brakes. And wear your disguise glasses so you don’t get any blood or brain matter in your eyes,” I told her in our final briefing, only half in jest.
That last suggestion didn’t even faze Mary Beth. She nodded, then selected a set of fake prescription glasses. I was in complete awe of my young colleague; she had more cojones than most men who brag at being mucho macho.
The asset was no fool. He glanced over one shoulder and saw me. I deliberately did not make eye contact. That would have been too obvious. Instead, I looked away, staring off at the street scene around us.
Of course, he didn’t buy it, and that was the point. Every few minutes, he’d look back and check me out. I’d play dumb. But we both knew why I was there.
Mary Beth went through her speech, telling the agent that due to budget cuts, we had to break contact for a while. We were hoping that in a year or so, things would improve so we could bring him back on the payroll. She gave him a nice “termination bonus,” but for now, the Agency had to let him go.
Nobody takes getting fired easily. When the CIA does it with a foreign agent, we are very careful not to burn our bridges; even more so in cases like this one where this asset had always kept his end of the bargain. You never know when things might be different down the road and that agent might be of use again. In this case, it would have taken a policy change from Washington, but those happened all the time anyway. Even if they are never brought back on the payroll, we made a point of making every split amicable. Nobody wanted pissed-off former agents with axes to grind against us running around doing damage. That served no purpose.
So Mary Beth’s speech was as gentle and hopeful as the situation allowed. The agent took it surprisingly well. When she finished, and they said goodbye to each other, the agent glanced back at me, then smiled at her. “By the way,” he said, “please tell your pit bull back there everything is okay.”
How many short, slender, beautiful brunettes do you know who are willing to get into a car with a man so notorious for his violent streak that it alarmed official Washington? How many would be willing to sit in that car alone with that person and fire him? Mary Beth had only been in country for a few months, yet she had a veteran case officer’s courage.
When I look back at my career, working with people like Mary Beth was the best part of it. Nowhere else outside of the Agency could I have had such a privilege.
There were times, of course, that I had to cut somebody loose, too. During the final stages of my time in country, I had a particularly rough one that turned into the exception that proved the rule.
We had professional colleagues from another U.S. government agency who’d been running an agent of theirs for almost five years. He’d been giving them exceptional intelligence in their realm of responsibility. “Pedro” had been their golden rock star, but that eventually changed, and he stopped delivering on his usual topics. Instead, he started giving them details about the professor’s organization and their imminent plans to attack our U.S. ambassador. They passed the information along to the embassy’s regional security officer (RSO), who immediately started a massive security personnel buildup. At our ambassador’s request, I was brought into the case because of my now-proven expertise in the local CT account.
Remember, like most hard-target intelligence work, the counterterrorism game is one of gathering tiny, disconnected pieces of information. The professor’s organization was well insulated and highly compartmentalized. Each link in the chain knew only what they needed to know to carry out their role. Unless you turned a senior leader, you were never going to get the full picture, just a keyhole glance from here or there that makes no sense until you match it up with other sources via different methods.
Pedro painted the biggest intelligence picture and the deepest knowledge of anyone inside the professor’s organization. He was a gold mine again, and as our colleagues laid out the details, I was at once surprised and suspicious. To me, this seemed too good to be true, yet the guy was a battle-tested confidential informant whose intelligence reporting had produced dozens of operational successes for many years.
Additionally, he reported just enough credible nuggets of CT information that jibed with what we already knew that we could not dismiss him offhand, especially with the ambo’s life as target.
In consultation with the COS, the ambassador tasked me with personally meeting the CI and doing a sniff test.
Rapport and building a personal connection are everything in this aspect of the intelligence world. We talked over how best to do this. We settled on me playing the role of a higher-up from Washington who had come into the country to meet our rock star informant personally.
My colleague “Vince” set up a meeting. I rode in the back seat of the car, strategically behind the driver and the front passenger seat, dressed in a suit and tie, shades over my eyes. The asset climbed into the car, and Vince made introductions.
I started out by thanking him for all the great threat information he’d been providing and told him I had flown down to personally thank him for his efforts.
He was smiling and very happy to know we were happy.
Elicitation and rapport building go hand in hand, so while complimenting him on his spectacular new access, I asked him to review the information he’d already provided. Having read all of his previous reporting, I would be looking for discrepancies in the regurgitation of his “facts.” Additionally, the best interrogation question is the one you already know the answer to! I had a few of those on tap as well.
I asked him, “So please tell me about these guys you have managed to get so close to. Who are they? What are their plans? In your expert opinion, how disciplined and determined are they?”
He started talking. The cell he was working with had begun planning an attack on the U.S. embassy. He gave us names, weapons they possessed, and details of the plot they were working up. He told us about meetings they’d already had and what happened at them.
“This is great stuff, and we appreciate it a lot. But we need you to let us know when they are planning to meet next. That way we can wrap them up.” I also added that if we could disrupt this terrorist cell, his payoff would ensure he could retire and be set for life.
“I understand,” the informant said.
A few weeks went by before Vince called to tell me that Pedro wanted to meet again. We set it up, and the guy told us about another meeting that had just taken place.
“They showed up so fast, I had no time to call you,” he explained.
This time, I was not shoveling praise on him. I was polite, but clearly disappointed. I leaned on him. “We need you to give us something we can exploit. Not just things that have already happened.” I also explained that if we could not get to the bottom of this soon, we would have to pull the ambassador out of the country. Unstated, but surely obvious to him, this also meant that the cell would grow suspicious of a leak and they would dissolve and disappear. Either way, this would be the end of his lucrative meal ticket.
A few days later, Pedro called Vince right at five o’clock and tipped him off to a meeting. It would start in an hour. He gave the address. Vince hung up and immediately called me. What no one but the ambo and COS knew was that through their local contacts, we had arranged to have a unit on standby for just this event. I made a call, and a special squad raided the target house.
After breaking through the door, they found an elderly couple inside. The woman was knitting. The old man had no clue what was going on. There was no meeting, and they certainly were not running a safe house for the professor’s minions.
Vince’s agent had fed us bad intel. Why?
To find out, I suggested an easy trap. Nothing apparently would change—at least at first for Pedro. I was again dressed as a headquarters executive when I got into the back of Vince’s car. Vince drove the predesigned SDR, then met up with his CI for a rolling-car meeting. Pedro slipped into the passenger seat in front of me. I did all the talking. “We appreciated the call. But it was too late to set up a raid, so we missed them. So please tell us what happened.”
The CI began to talk. The meeting went well, he said, and laid out once again in great detail who said what and how things unfolded.
As we already knew, this was all bullshit. Vince grew furious as we listened to this made-up tale, but as a true professional, he kept cool and never tipped his hand.
Stealthily, I reached between the seats and popped Pedro’s seat belt. Right then, Vince hit the brakes and sent him flying into the dashboard. Stunned, he had no time to react as Vince reached over and grabbed him.
“You lyin’ motherfucker!” he screamed at his asset. “We hit the house, and nobody was there!”
Terrified, Pedro broke down in tears. He began wailing, swearing he was sorry.
Gradually, the entire story came out.
The intel he’d been providing for five years came from connections that, for whatever reason, were severed a few months before. The end of those relationships dried up his useful information. His paycheck from Vince was on the line, and he had no other source of income.
Out of desperation, he’d conceived the plan to give Vince intel on the professor’s terror group. Of course, the RSO’s piqued interest further fueled Pedro’s confidence and made it impossible for the whole embassy, including Vince, to ignore. The trust so carefully cultivated through those five years was shattered in an instant.
Now, Vince was not CIA, yet parting ways with an agent/informant was usually done with the same sort of care Mary Beth displayed in her pink-slip moment. This guy was the exception. Vince bounced him out of the car with a stern “Don’t ever call us again!”
The guy had wasted a great deal of our time and limited resources, as there was genuine concern the embassy would be attacked. Then there was the elderly couple whose door had been kicked in. They’d been terrified by the arrival of our friends in the security forces. We compensated them for the damage, but we were not in the business of traumatizing the elderly. All of this pissed us off and ensured this particular agent would not get a gentle send-off.
As disappointing as it was, the incident taught me a couple of valuable lessons. First, it confirmed that trusting my instincts would usually be the right way to go. The intel smelled too good from the outset. That was the key. When somebody comes to us with a bucketload of information and no way to verify it, chances are it is bogus. From that point on, if a source gave us too much, my BS meter would go off. Intelligence is a game of scraps and pieces. A bit here, a bit there. Somebody comes in with a whole puzzle put together and delivered in a nice, tidy package is going to be full of crap.
I got a lot of mileage out of that lesson in the years ahead.
We did our best to assist our allies in this dark and terrible time. The country continued to writhe in the agonies of civil war. Such wars are always the most merciless. Brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor. Passions run hot, and fury-filled atrocities mark the passage of the fighting. Bombs destroyed buses, trains, and neighborhoods. The army’s counterterrorism commandos descended on mountain villages whose people had been traumatized into supporting the revolutionaries.
As the war reached its bloody climax, the professor and the senior revolutionary commanders, including his wife, lived a life of luxury unbeknownst to all but a few close confidants. He was always a middle-class man with a taste for the good life. Living in caves was not for him. Instead of fighting in the countryside along with the rank and file, he cowered in mansions rented for him by engineers, doctors, and other academics who supported his cause. The homeowners had no idea their properties harbored one of the worst mass murderers in modern South American history. If ever there was a Marxist revolutionary who proved George Orwell’s point in Animal Farm, it was the professor.
And the pigs had become men.
After Miguel’s disappearance, we stepped up our efforts. Getting an asset inside the revolutionary cells proved an exceptionally difficult challenge, and foibles like drug use that could be leveraged into a recruitment proved few and far between. Nevertheless, our work with the local security teams on the network we’d uncovered helped take down some significant support personnel whose role in the city simply could not be replaced. Subsequent efforts ultimately did penetrate the professor’s organization again, this time at a higher level. We made a big impact, as did my handpicked replacement, Bob. A first-tour officer, Bob showed the grit and groin to handle these kinds of assets. When I rotated home in 1990 in preparation for a fourth high-threat tour, this time in the Philippines, Bob worked with singular devotion to expand that penetration. He succeeded brilliantly, and those efforts materially aided in ending the civil war.
Ultimately, one of the professor’s safe houses, an apartment above a ballet studio, was discovered and staked out by government forces. He was wrapped up in a raid a short time later, a frail, aging man devoted to a cause that had long since proven totally bankrupt. By the time he was captured in late 1992 and subsequently imprisoned in a cell on a remote island, the Chinese had gone full capitalist, the Soviet Union had collapsed, and the adherents of Marx had spent a century murdering millions in the failed pursuit of their workers’ utopia.
The professor, like the ideology he embodied, was swept off the world stage at last. His revolution collapsed in most areas and barely survived in some inconsequential and distant strongholds, and the country spent the next three decades trying to heal the wounds the civil war he started had inflicted on the population he so ardently claimed to represent.