Sometimes things don’t go exactly as planned. Other times nothing goes as planned. This was one of those times.
MacMurphy was known as a meticulous planner of operations. It was one of his strengths and was well documented during his almost fifteen years with the CIA. He had the uncanny ability to see all possible outcomes for his operational moves and adapt accordingly to ensure operational success.
In this case, Murphy’s Law was written all over the operation.
His colleague, Culler Santos, had been arrested and was being held in a steamy prison in the jungle on the outskirts of Belmopan, Belize. At first glance, though, the operation had been promising.
The child’s Belizean mother, a tall, thin, pale woman with stringy, waist-length brown hair named Elmira Minita, had abducted the six-year-old girl and taken the child to live with her parents in Belize. She had secured a job as an administrative assistant for the Belizean Tourism Authority.
The father, an American citizen living in St. Augustine, Florida, had legal custody of the child. The girl was a United States citizen by birth and the mother, a cocaine addict and convicted felon, was deemed unfit by the United States courts. The father had exhausted all legal efforts to get the child returned to him. Belize, despite being a signatory of the Hague Convention—which was established to ensure that the best interests of the child were paramount in international abduction cases—refused to order Elmira to return the child to her American father.
So he turned to Global Strategic Reporting, a business intelligence and investigation firm located just down the Florida coast in Fort Lauderdale. The firm had a reputation for “getting things done” in all manner of unusual cases. The father wanted GSR to help him re-abduct the child and return her safely to the United States. And, at first, the operation went smoothly.
Santos set up his cover as a point man for a large United States developer exploring tourism opportunities in Belize. That justified his request to meet with the head of the Belizean tourism director in the government office building where the mother worked. Santos bluffed his way into the American embassy to discuss his Belizean development plans with the embassy’s economic officer. The economic officer was helpful and offered to call the Belizean tourism director to set up a meeting for Santos.
The following day Santos drove his rental car to his meeting with the director. Santos was ushered into the director’s office by his assistant, Elmira, who occupied a desk outside of the director’s office. When his meeting was over, Santos stopped at Elmira’s desk, exchanged some pleasantries, and engaged the woman in conversation, asking what she liked to do for entertainment in Belmopan, what the best restaurants were and what hotel she would recommend. His questions about her marital status and whether she had children were deftly evaded.
Elmira was polite but did not pick up on any of his veiled efforts to get her to show him around town. Finally, Santos just came out and asked her to have dinner with him. She politely refused, saying that she was seeing someone who worked in the building and that he would not take too kindly to her having dinner with another man.
Disappointed and wishing he possessed the good looks and easy charm of his partner, MacMurphy, Santos returned to his hotel to mull things over and eat dinner alone. His goal had been to learn more about Elmira Minita—where she lived, what her personal circumstances were, how the child was doing and what the kid’s daily routine was—but he had failed miserably.
MacMurphy shouldn’t have chosen him for this task. He wasn’t the cool, suave type who could easily pick up women. Just the opposite actually. He was direct and forceful and sometimes women were put off by his looks. Santos was built like a tree trunk, with a face scarred by many battles.
He needed to gather enough information about the mother’s lifestyle to figure out how the child and father could meet with enough privacy and time for the exfiltration team to spirit them out of the country and back to the United States. The exfiltration route had been outlined, but the plan lacked very important details about how they would get the child away from the mother and safely into the arms of the father and the exfiltration team.
Santos concluded that if he couldn’t gather the information he needed the easy way, through direct contact with the mother, he would have to get it the hard way, through surveillance.
That’s where things started to unravel.
The one thing that Santos was not aware of—and that Elmira had not revealed during their conversation—was that the mother’s current paramour, the one who occupied the other corner office just down the hall, was the country’s solicitor general.
He also was unaware that as soon as he left Elmira’s office, she walked down the hall to the office of Shankar Gandhi, the solicitor general of Belize, and told him all about the rugged American with the Kennedyesque-Bostonian accent who had tried to pick her up and had asked too many questions about her and her daughter.
She was aware that her husband wanted the child back in America and thought there was a connection.
As she was relating the story to Gandhi, they walked over to the office windows overlooking the parking lot and watched Santos walk across the lot, get into his black Chevy rental car and drive away.
Gandhi was one of the many Indian functionaries who remained behind when, in 1981, British Honduras obtained its independence from the United Kingdom and was renamed Belize. Now in his sixties, the bespectacled little man had reached the pinnacle of his career and felt all-powerful. Moreover, he carried a strong grudge against those colonial powers that had once lorded over him.
He had also fallen in love with the tall, willowy, fair-skinned drug addict and had vowed to protect her and her child. So, when Culler Santos showed up late the following afternoon in his black rental car and took up a surveillance position in a shaded corner of the parking lot, Gandhi called the police.
Elmira and Gandhi watched from his office window as the police arrived, checked Santos’s identification papers, cuffed him and took him away in a patrol car. On Gandhi’s instructions, the police charged Santos with conspiracy to commit kidnapping—specifically, Elmira Minita’s six-year-old daughter.