Playa Madera, Nicaragua
March 2011
“So, are you surprised I knew El Gringo?” Ortega continued to sip his Cuba Libre and punctuate his monologue with long pulls off the fragrant joint he had been smoking. As flabbergasted as I was at listening to the president of Nicaragua’s spontaneous ramblings on questions of revolution and ideology, I was perhaps even more impressed at Daniel Ortega’s capacity for consuming drugs and alcohol and remaining coherent. Except for his half-closed, bloodshot eyes, Ortega showed few signs of downing close to a fifth of Nicaraguan rum and severely punishing his stash of potent weed from Costa Rica. His was more a rhetorical question, though, and I just shrugged in response.
“I first met Sloane in Havana. I think it was 1980. He had come to Cuba on a mission to assassinate me, but instead we became friends. More than that, really…we became bros.” Ortega once again switched to English slang as if the word ‘bro’ had more significance or spoke of a deeper, more soulful relationship than ‘friend.’
“Can you imagine waking up and seeing that big son-of-a-bitch calmly sitting in the chair next to your bed pointing a Soviet Makarov silenced pistol in your direction? Shit, at first I thought he was Argentine from the way he looked and knowing those homicidal bastards were already working against the revolution. Then, I heard the way he spoke Spanish and figured he was Mexican, but that made no sense at all, so I didn’t know who the hell he was. I just knew that the Makarov made me feel a little uncomfortable and real homesick for Nicaragua all of a sudden.”
Ortega laughed at the memory and shook his head. “How he got past security and into my bedroom was something he would never tell me, but one thing is certain: he could have killed me if he wanted to. But instead of pulling the trigger on that silencer, he put down the gun, lit a joint, and passed it to me. We got pretty stoned and talked about a lot things over the next few days. It took me a while to relax. I mean, one minute thehijo de puta has a gun on me, and the next he’s smoking a doobie with me. So, what am I supposed to believe?”
Ortega glanced at me, looking for reassurance that his fears at the time were understandable. Again, this was the comandante’s performance, and I was listening, so I just nodded my head in agreement.
“You know, at the time it really hurt my feelings to realize the American government hated me so much they wanted me dead. Listen, I know the Cuban missile crisis changed things for the gringos in Latin America. After that, it was impossible for us to do anything else down here except kiss American ass. But, come on! Look who we replaced. Anastasio Somoza, for Christ’s sake! He wasn’t exactly a choir boy or a poster boy for democracy, you know! That bastard kept a special prison at his residential compound zoo where he kept political prisoners in cages next to wild animals. Seriously, man, that motherfucker was ill, and you gringos supported him for years. But he was your son-of-a-bitch, wasn’t he?”
I had heard the story of how Somoza and his extended family, including wives and children, would stroll on Sunday afternoons past the cages where Sandinista revolutionaries were kept in barred cages next to lions and panthers. Still, it was mind-boggling to hear it from someone who knew about this bizarre practice firsthand. Ortega was not sober, but he was making sense.
“Look, I may not know how to run a country…. I mean, shit, you see what it’s like here. But one thing I do understand is geopolitics, and I know we’re living in what you gringos consider your backyard. So, we’re supposed to play ball according to your rules or suffer the consequences. Thank God, El Gringo had his own opinion on what American policy in Nicaragua should be. That’s what saved my life and got him into so much trouble with Reagan and his circle of lunatic advisors. They never really trusted him after that, I think. I’m not saying he thought Nicaragua was on the right track. He gave me an earful on how screwed up we Sandinistas were. Christ, I got tired of listening to how we had betrayed the revolution. Should have had the cabron shot. Lenin Cerna would have been happy to oblige, I know that.”
Ortega laughed and stood up. He walked over to the bar to add ice and lime to his drink. He still seemed steady on his feet, and to all appearances was sober as a judge. I could tell the conversation was dredging up conflicting emotions, and I sensed a certain tension in the air that wasn’t there a few minutes ago. I couldn’t help wondering what the history of Central America in the 1980s would have looked like, had Sloane carried out the assassination of Daniel Ortega as conceived by Reagan and his advisors.
Ortega refreshed his Cuba Libre and turned toward me gesturing with his left hand like a college professor trying to make a point.
“I’ll tell you one thing...that Oliver North was the biggest asshole I’ve ever seen.” Ortega walked back to the sofa, turned toward me again, and appeared to be ready to make another didactical pronouncement, but then appeared to think better of it. “Listen, I’ve got to crash if I’m going to catch the ‘outgoing’ this evening. Go talk to Colonel Cerna. He’s got something for you.”
With that, Ortega unceremoniously took off his khaki trousers and, wearing nothing but Ralph Lauren boxer briefs and his ubiquitous Che Guevara t-shirt, he lay down on the sofa and was snoring lightly before I had even left the room. The credits were running on the big screen forRiding Giants, and Ortega’s home-made soundtrack was playing ‘G.T.O.’ by Ronny & The Daytonas. I picked up the lighted joint that had fallen to the floor in front of the sofa and put it out before leaving the mini-auditorium.
I walked out on to the front terrace and found Lenin Cerna lying in a hammock with a pair of binoculars in one hand and a bottle of Victoria in the other. On either side of him were two armed bodyguards with assault rifles at the ready. About fifty yards in front of the house on the downward slope toward the ocean was the secondary security perimeter with several guards visible among the trees. Their president might be wasted, but the presidential security detail was vigilant.
Cerna looked up at me and asked, almost without curiosity, “I assume he went to sleep?”
I nodded my head. “This been going on for a long time?” I didn’t know whether I was pressing my luck by asking a question like that, but figured I’d soon find out.
“Long enough,” replied Cerna, obviously not wanting to talk about a subject that worried him and was none of my business. Cerna sat up in the hammock and reached for a leather envelope portfolio lying on the Saltillo tiled terrace. He extracted a bulging manila folder from the portfolio and reluctantly handed it to me. “The comandante didn’t know how long he would last today, and he wanted you to read this before I took you back to your hotel. I don’t think those two assholes from the embassy will be bothering you again. Just remember, whatever you read here didn’t come from us. Entendido?”
“Si, claro,” I responded. One of the bodyguards handed me a cold beer, and I sat down at a small circular bamboo table with four matching chairs. I looked at the manila folder, which was labled simply, “El Gringo.”
I didn’t know what to expect when I opened the folder. Maybe I thought I’d find Mako Sloane’s address and cell phone number in Managua or maybe an invitation to his wedding. That was fanciful thinking, of course, but I did suspect Ortega knew where he was and was protecting him. What I still didn’t understand was the apparent closeness of the two. Surfing, smoking weed, and chasing young, hard-bodied surf bunnies might be enough to forge lasting friendships among adolescents, but I hoped that two middle-aged veterans of the Cold War and connoisseurs of the human dark side required more to recognize each other as ‘bros.’
The ‘El Gringo’ folder contained mostly memoranda of conversations between Sloane and the Sandinista leadership in his role as unofficial envoy to the Nicaraguan government during the Contra war. Everything seemed pretty straightforward in those documents, and Sloane seemed to toe the Reagan administration party line in his discussions and negotiations. There were a few letters between Cerna’s state security directorate and the Sandinista leadership discussing Sloane’s role as a high-level advisor to the Contras and whether to accept him as a legitimate negotiator for the U.S. side. The Nicaraguan government obviously recognized his special relationship with Ortega, and, despite objections from Sandinista hardliners, the overall consensus was that he would be a much more effective tool in this capacity than the U.S. ambassador, and Sloane’s frequent presence in Managua during the 1980s was tolerated.
Transcripts of recorded telephone conversations between Sloane and unidentified Nicaraguan women were mixed in with conversations of a mostly administrative nature with Sandinista officials. Ortega never appeared in the transcripts, and there wasn’t really anything substantive in any of the documents, or anything that I hadn’t heard already from O’Keefe during my conversations with him. All in all, it was an anticlimax to an unforgettable afternoon spent with an intoxicated Daniel Ortega in the surreal atmosphere of his mini-auditorium watching a surf video, listening to 60s surf music and the comandante’s passionate monologue.
Anticlimactic, at least, until I ran across a short report from Cerna’s office detailing the cause of death of an unidentified individual, whose corpse was found inside the official Ortega residence in August 1986. The document was only four paragraphs long and probably would not have attracted my attention, were it not for the fact that the individual’s throat had been cut, and he appeared to be an American. Other than a forensic description of the body and wound, the document contained no other information of interest and appeared to be an excerpt from the coroner’s report. I couldn’t even guess why it had been included in the ‘ El Gringo’ file.
Colonel Cerna came out of the house where he had been for the last hour or more and curtly informed me. “There’s been a change of plans. Looks like you’re going surfing again with the comandante.” He tossed me a pair of surf trunks and rash guard and told me I had ten minutes to get ready. The security detail was already loading surfboards onto pipe racks welded on the quads and firing up the engines. With their backwards baseball hats, surf trunks, t-shirts, and flip-flops, the group would have looked like a bunch of wealthy Managuans down for the weekend for a little fun if it weren’t for the collection of waterproof AK-47s and Abakan assault rifles slung over their backs. Ortega appeared, seemingly none the worse for the wear, checked the wax job on his longboard carefully and nodded approvingly. “Colonel,” he remarked as he smiled at Cerna, “you’re finally earning your salary. You have learned how to wax a surfboard.” The entourage laughed, and even Cerna gave his imitation of a smile. Ortega gunned the 250 cc engine on his Yamaha ATV and shot off like a rocket toward the beach.
As we arrived at the turnoff to the narrow dirt road leading down a steep and deeply rutted slope to the beach, the last of the American and European surfers were being escorted out of the area at gunpoint to make room for the president and his entourage. Expressions of outrage and disbelief told the story on the faces of the disappointed tourists as they were forced off their favorite surf beach in an unexpected exodus back to the village of San Juan del Sur.
I drove a 4 x 4 quadraciclo behind Ortega, and we arrived at the beach, parked, and took our surfboards off the racks at the same time. Ortega put on his rash guard and ran toward the surf with his board under his right arm, stopping at the water’s edge to put on his leash. I was intent on engaging him in conversation in the lineup and hurried to keep up.
The comandante stood in the shallow water at the edge of the beach for a few minutes studying the surf, then pointed off toward the left and motioned for me to follow. It looked like there might be a channel through the breaking waves that would allow us an easier paddle-out. The waves were running about shoulder to head-high, and it looked like a perfect day for longboarding. The tide was just starting to recede, and we probably had about two hours of quality surfing left. Costa Rica was visible to the south, and the water was clear and warm. Jack fish could be seen in the faces of the waves before they broke.
The waves were perfect, and we rode each one almost all the way to the beach. Fortunately, the period was long, and I had time to talk to Ortega in between sets.
“Comandante,” I asked when Ortega turned toward me, waiting for the next set to come in, “so who was the dead gringo back in 1986?”
“Come on, you don’t know about that?” he asked incredulously.
“No, I’m afraid not.”
“He was some asshole the CIA sent to kill me. Didn’t quite complete his mission. Never wrote home.”
“What happened?”
Ortega looked at me again as if he couldn’t believe I didn’t know this basic piece of information. “El Gringo cut the motherfucker’s throat, that’s what happened.”
Ortega leaned back and turned his longboard 180 degrees, lay down and then paddled for a wave that looked impossible to catch. The comandante didn’t give up and managed to catch it although that made his drop-in a little too steep, and he didn’t move back on the board fast enough. His board pearled and he took a pretty gnarly wipe-out for a man his age. He came up laughing, though, and paddled right back out, turtle-diving under the last two waves of the set.
Ortega caught his breath and looked at me without any trace of humor. “That’s one secret Cerna’s people managed to keep. The CIA never knew who killed their assassin. If they find out now, it’ll be the last thing you ever write. Understand?”
Another rhetorical question, and there was really no need for a serious response. He had my full attention. “So that’s why you two are so close?”
“That and some other things that you’ll probably hear about eventually…unless journalistic curiosity gets you killed first. The Americans suspect Sloane has been guilty of half the bad shit that happened to them over the last two decades. He became a scapegoat, and anytime anything went wrong, they tried to hang it at his doorstep. If he hadn’t been saving their asses in so many other places, they would have arrested him long before they did.”
“You knew they had arrested him?”
“Yeah, even Nicaragua has an intelligence service.” Ortega’s voice had acquired a sarcastic tone, and I realized I had gone a little too far. “Tell Colonel Cerna to take you back to San Jorge. Just remember what I said about being careful. You seem to have a knack of finding out too much and then stepping on your own dick. We may not be there to bail you out next time.”
I guess Ortega had told me everything he planned too. I certainly wasn’t stealing his waves, but his dismissal had the ring of finality, and I paddled back in and reported to Cerna, who had his Land Cruiser waiting on the beach. He and Ortega seemed to have a telepathic bond. I piled into the back seat, still dripping water and mesmerized by the implications of what I had learned.
So, this was what O’Keefe and Marbelly had referred to when they spoke of the infamous debt the comandante owed Sloane although neither of them had known precisely what had taken place. Twice, in fact, Mako Sloane had saved Daniel Ortega’s life. No wonder there was a special bond between the two that transcended surfing, getting stoned, and whoring together. No wonder the comandante considered the famous CIA operative his ‘bro.’ But why had Sloane risked his life and career to save an unapologetic revolutionary hack?
As we drove back to San Jorge, I pondered where to go from here. Although I was still lacking important details, the overall picture had cleared considerably, and I now had at least a rough idea of what Sloane had been up to in Nicaragua. How much of that could be used in a biography depended at least in part on the main question which I still hadn’t answered. Was Sloane still alive?
I sensed that my reserves of political capital with Ortega and his crowd had been depleted and that for the time being there was little more to be accomplished in this impoverished country where mayhem and violence had been the byword for decades. I sifted through my options as we flew along the dangerous two-lane highway toward Rivas and San Jorge. There was little doubt that I would be back here, probably in the near future, but now I needed to pursue the most intriguing lead of all that had come out of my sojourn in Nicaragua...the Sloane—Yeltsin connection. That meant more travel, imprecise contact arrangements, and an unpredictable reception by the Russian Security Service and whoever else might have a vested interest in keeping details on Mako Sloane’s life a secret.