November 1988
Jonna
I saw the large lens of the video camera before I spotted the man standing behind it. A Cuban national, he was wearing a khaki uniform of some sort, with a black beret.
We filed up to the few open immigration counters at Havana Airport, forming long meandering lines that wound through the dark, empty space. It was two-thirty in the morning and we were dead tired. The lines moved with an exhausted rhythm, like snakes slowly going to sleep. The whole process of traveling to Cuba had been like something out of a Marc Chagall painting: one of the dream sequences with donkeys flying and everything upside down.
John Winslow and I had flown to Miami from Washington, D.C., earlier in the day, then had to cool our heels until almost 10 PM before making our way back to Miami International Airport. We reported to a certain Eastern Airlines counter, where, as the clock turned to midnight, the Eastern sign was flipped over to reveal the name of a Spanish charter airline. The Eastern employees took off their jackets and checked the passengers in, paying a lot of attention to the number of bags each of us had. We were taken out to an Eastern Airlines airplane being piloted by one of their uniformed pilots. The flight wasn’t much more than an hour. The other passengers were apparently Cubans returning home for a visit.
I kept track of the movements of the guy with the camera as my line slowly wound forward. Although he lowered his camera once we had all queued up, I had the distinct impression that he’d been videotaping me.
In keeping with procedures, Winslow had moved to a separate line and we were going through the immigration procedures separately. Even though we were traveling under the same cover, we knew not to stand together in line. Unless you have the same family name, you are considered separate travelers in most countries and will get separate treatment. In any case, this worked well for us from an intelligence point of view: we could collect two separate sets of data on the border controls being used. We would compare notes later at the hotel and write up the arrival procedures in detail. Our OTS alias-document specialists always liked to know how you were treated when you arrived in a country, what the procedures were going in and going out, and how you were treated when you left. It was the beginning of building a recipe for penetrating the border of a particular country.
When I got to the front of the line, the immigration officer maintained a poker face as he closely scrutinized my documents, then my face, then my documents again. I was traveling under an alias, Jennifer Calloway, and I knew that the documents were completely backstopped and would pass any scrutiny they cared to give them. The name had been carefully chosen because it had to resonate with me whenever anybody used it. Jennifer came from my sister; Calloway was a nod to Jerome. I had my cover story well memorized and was prepared to answer endless questions about my boring job as a low-level bureaucrat, but no questions were asked. He did not consult any watch lists that I could make out, nor was he using a computer database. The officer slammed down his foursquare date stamp on my passport and slid the document across the desk to me.
I had slipped into Cuba.
I met Winslow outside of immigration, and we headed off to pick up our luggage. I noted the video camera again, back against a wall in the baggage area, and was aware that the same guy was still running the camera, this time clearly taping the group that Winslow and I were walking with.
Clearly, we had already met the Cuban intelligence service, the DGI. I already knew what to expect: that they were very good at what they did. Shortly after I had transferred to the subcontinent, there had been a brouhaha in the international press about a reported DGI operation in which, it was claimed, the Cubans had run thirty-five double agents against the CIA in various operations, and we were unable to detect even one of them. They later claimed that each of their agents had been trained in biofeedback methods for defeating the polygraph machine. The polygraph was one of the Agency’s primary security tools in evaluating foreign agents and was also used routinely on CIA employees. All Agency employees had to pass a polygraph examination at the time they entered on duty, and then again every five years during their employment. My husband, John, had been a polygraph operator for a number of years, and I knew how much credence the CIA placed in its ability to ferret out useful information and also to serve as a deterrent. The story went that thirty-five times the poly was defeated by Cubans working for the DGI, which meant, if true, that thirty-five foreign agents were placed in our intelligence acquisition process and thirty-five streams of false information had begun flowing into the CIA. It was also claimed that we thoroughly trained these agents in our modus operandi—the way we conducted operations around the world—then tasked them to collect intelligence for us. If this were so, it would have been clear—to the Cuban DGI and to their sponsors, the Soviet KGB—from the questions we asked the agents, what information we were holding and what information we needed. If it had been just a poker game, it would have been equivalent to showing the table your hand before the betting began.
Anxious to demonstrate this intelligence success, the Cuban government had produced a documentary for the world to see. While we had read the reports in The Washington Post and The Miami Herald about the botched operation, it was easy for us to dismiss them as speculation by the media or disinformation being exploited by the Cubans. Because we didn’t have a need-to-know in our department, we knew very little. However, we soon received a videotape of the documentary that had been shown on Cuban television, and all of us had gathered one day to watch it. I went away thinking that if it was true as reported, the story would have to go in our Hall of Shame as one of our Most Humiliating Moments.
It was almost five o’clock in the morning when we arrived at our hotel. We were staying in the famous, Mafia-backed, Frank Sinatra–sponsored Riviera Hotel, right on the Malecón, the oceanfront that bordered Havana City. In fact, as we checked in, we were too tired to care that “Old Blue Eyes” had prowled this same lobby and had probably signed the same register. The book clearly looked old enough to hold his signature, and many of those before his. In fact, everything looked old.
Later that morning, before breakfast, we strolled around the lobby. The hotel had never made it out of the 1950s; everything that at one time had been new and modern and hip was now passé, worn, and dirty. The pool area was still in pretty good shape, and later I would be able to say that I had swum in the same pool that Ginger Rogers and Esther Williams had once splashed in when Cuba was a playground for the rich and famous.
My colleague and I had apparently done something very good in a previous life because we had a stroke of great luck. It seemed that once a year the Riviera and its comrade-in-arms sister hotel, the Metropol in East Berlin, had an exchange of cuisine and chefs. By sheer luck we were booked at the Riviera for the two weeks that the exchange lasted. This meant that instead of the rather meager fare of rice and beans and fish that we had expected, we would dine on ingredients that had been imported from Europe for this event only. The menu posted prominently in the lobby spelled out the first week’s selections: chateaubriand with béarnaise sauce, caviar, Wiener schnitzel, oxtail soup, and on tap, the remarkable Pilsner Urquell beer from Czechoslovakia, one of the best beers in the world. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the poor unsuspecting souls who had checked into the Metropol in Berlin that week, as they no doubt received the worse end of the culinary exchange. The waiters were walking around in tuxedo pants and nearly floor-length white aprons, serving the luncheon menu. Reservations were almost impossible to get, restricted to hotel guests and invited VIPs, mostly government officials, including Castro himself.
Alas, Fidel never showed. Or at least if he did, we never saw him.
After breakfast, we exited the hotel to get our bearings and begin to form a plan of action. Our first impression of Havana was dramatic. The city was falling apart, crumbling, on its knees. Think of decaying colonial grandeur; beautiful old mansions and public buildings were simply melting away. It reminded me of Calcutta, only in India they were putting things back together again. Not in Havana.
And they must have the world’s most antiquated auto fleet. Winslow was able to call them out because he was into classic cars. They all dated back to before the Cuban Revolution: the dove gray 1949 Chevrolet Fleetside with its teardrop streamlined shape; the maroon 1940 DeSoto with Fluid Drive and built like a tank; the 1950 Hudson Hornet in forest green with a massive grill and bug-eyed headlights; the lime green 1949 Buick convertible that looked like a huge bathtub turned upside down, and many more. All were American-made, and most of them looked shiny and new, but they were all models from the 1950s, just like the hotels.
We had entered a time warp.
The main blocks along the Malecón were rhythmically punctuated with billboards blaring out the proclamations of Castro’s propaganda machine. “Viva Fidel” was spray-painted on many of the vertical surfaces. Halfway down the Malecón, about a hundred yards from the U.S. Interest Section, was a large sign with a growling Uncle Sam in top hat and striped pants, and next to him a Cuban soldier with a rifle. The soldier was saying, “Senores Imperialistas, No Les Tenemos Absolutamente Ningún Miedo.”
I had some Latin under my belt, and a smattering of French and German, but did not speak Spanish. Neither did Winslow, so we got out our Spanish-English dictionary. We figured out what the soldier holding Uncle Sam at bay was saying. Something like: “Mr. Imperialist, we absolutely have you.” As in, I suppose, Don’t make any false moves.
The most amazing piece of propaganda we saw was a memorial in a park to Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, the infamous American atom bomb spies who had been executed for treason in 1953—the only contemporary Americans to pay the ultimate price for treachery in a time of peace. The Cuban memorial noted cryptically that they had been “asesinados 19-6-1953.” I looked up “asesinados” in the book, and discovered it meant assassinated or murdered.
We stood quietly in front of the brick-and-concrete edifice. I had long understood that one country’s traitor was another country’s hero, but had never seen such palpable evidence of that truism.
That morning we continued down the Malecón, the great meeting place of Havana that served as the city’s front porch. It was where you took your 1950 Buick to wash and wax and linger by it, nursing your beer all afternoon. It was where you brought your young children and let them run free on the low wall overlooking the harbor. The street along the water was also the lovers’ lane of Havana. On Sundays, we discovered couples every four or five feet sitting together, holding hands, smooching, doing all the stuff that young people in love do. I probably stopped too often and looked too long. I missed Tony terribly and couldn’t write or call, but could only daydream.
The Malecón was one of the only places where residents could fish, as it was forbidden to own a boat of any kind or to catch certain kinds of fish, which were reserved for export only. We were approached by an East German expatriate who offered to sell us the two small fish he had caught that morning. When we declined politely, he offered to cook them for us in his home and serve them with some boiled potatoes for a small price. We declined again and moved on. Even on this, our first outing, we were aware of a group of young Cubans who seemed to be moving down the Malecón with us. We paid them no attention this first day; there would be plenty of time for that in the two weeks to come. EVERYONE IS POTENTIALLY UNDER OPPOSITION CONTROL. I started automatically to apply the Moscow rules to the situation, as I would continue to do throughout our stay in Cuba.
To our amazement, there was almost nothing in the store windows. We had known that the economy of Cuba was in pretty dire straits, but we had not been prepared for the absence of a lot of the simple things of life. We were going to have a tough time pretending to do a cost-of-living survey in a country with almost nothing for sale. How do you calculate the average price of beef if there is no beef in the stores? I was reminded of the stores in Moscow as we moved through the commercial district. Large stores were displaying only three or four garments in a picture window; food stores would have six bottles of salsa displayed on a shelf meant to hold dozens. There were lines at the bakeries for bread and other baked goods. Evidently, though, there was no shortage of rum, and we would be able to do a nice sampling of rum prices. It seemed that there would always be ingredients for Cuba Libres and Mojitos.
On our maps we identified several spots that were of operational interest to our Latin America Division. We were planning to meet with the local CIA chief, and have some input into his ideas for future planning. During his last trip to Washington, he had told me that the surveillance inside the residences of foreign nationals was just as it was in Moscow, with live video and audio feeds. The U.S. Interest Section offices in the Swiss Embassy were considered insecure, so the only place to have a safe conversation was out in the open, preferably on the move.
Our plan for the next two weeks included a lot of walking, but I was used to walking many miles a day as part of our team exercises, so that would not be a problem. ESTABLISH A DISTINCTIVE AND DYNAMIC PROFILE AND PATTERN.
We threw in several of the tourist sites in and around Havana. We wanted to look at them for many reasons. Some required a car to get there, and we wanted to see what vehicular surveillance looked like and how it would handle us. These sites were also of interest to the local chief. He thought that they might provide fertile ground for some operational scenarios, but he could not go and evaluate them himself. To do so would raise the profile of the sites, and make them less useful. So we made a short list of places that we had to visit, including Hemingway’s Finca (his old estate outside of Havana City), the Tropicana nightclub, the Marina Hemingway, and several of the museums in the old part of the city. We had no cover reason to stray any further from the city than those points. MAKE SURE THEY CAN ANTICIPATE YOUR DESTINATION.
After a day of recovering from the all-night trip to the island, we reported to the U.S. Interest Section the next morning. We were greeted by the local chief, Josh Barnett, a freshly scrubbed, vibrant officer, and his young wife, Ellen, a CIA employee who worked with him. They gave us a brief tour around the offices and poured us cups of excellent Cuban coffee. As we sat with them that morning describing our cover plans for the next two weeks, Ellen briefly left the office, then returned with a frown on her face.
“I had hoped to copy your schedule,” she said, “so that we could keep track of you. But the Xerox is down again.” She looked over at her husband with a wrinkled brow. “The last time it broke it took a month to get it serviced.”
Winslow got up to check out the machine in the other room, and the three of us continued our conversation. Ten minutes later, he returned with blackened hands and the news that the Xerox was up and running. The Barnetts had had no idea that Winslow was a highly skilled mechanical engineer with several advanced degrees, and that he could fix almost anything. They were elated, and invited him to transfer to Havana.
We headed out for a foot tour of the old city. It was the section most seen by tourists, and the part that had had the most restoration work done to the old buildings. The national museums and government buildings were very much intact, and some new construction had actually taken place over the years. The overall effect, however, was of a decaying, Third World capital. Winslow and I wound our way through this quarter, moving into and out of stores, stopping at windows, and as part of our cover, making notes on my clipboard whenever it seemed appropriate.
It was going to take a day or two to develop our eyes, to be able to see into the crowds that we were moving through and past and to pinpoint the surveillance team that we knew was there. It was not unlike hunting morels in the woods. In the beginning, all you see on the forest floor is a carpet of leaves; it takes time before you can make out the mushrooms poking up through the leaves. MAINTAIN A NATURAL PACE.
The next day, we broadened our path and began moving through some of the broad boulevards that broke up the city. We believed that there were static observation posts along these major streets and wanted to try to identify them. The first day we went out of the old city we must have walked ten miles. We had both brought good walking shoes, Rockports, but on the fourth day, Winslow started to develop blisters that became very uncomfortable for him the rest of the trip. GO WITH THE FLOW AND USE THE TERRAIN.
For the trip out of Havana to Hemingway’s Finca, we picked a splendid day, with clear skies and a cool breeze. The estate was located up on a promontory with a view of Havana in the distance. I could understand the appeal the setting must have had for Hemingway, who bought the place in 1940 and used it as his official residence until his death in 1961. His wife, Mary, had later donated it to the Cuban government.
Cubans had long worshiped Hemingway. He was proclaimed a friend of the Cuban people in every publication and on every sign at the house, and was still widely read on the island. While you could not go into his house, the large exterior windows were open, and you could glean a very personal look at where Hemingway had lived and worked.
We had gone out to Finca Hemingway in a rental car. It had been easy going; traffic on the island of Cuba was not heavy, and the roads were decent. What had been hard was finding real maps to get us there—I suggested to Winslow that they were afraid of another Bay of Pigs invasion and didn’t want the arriving army to know how to get to Havana. It was a joke, but the lack of good maps was a real problem.
Of course, the surveillance teams did not need maps—if they were as good as I suspected, they would know every bump in the road, every shortcut, every dead end. As Winslow drove, I watched them discreetly in the rearview mirror and in the mirror on the side of the car.
There were three cars that I could make out. They changed positions, rotating “the eye”—the car in front—so that it didn’t appear that any one of them was right on top of us. As we had parked at the estate, so they had parked too, all together just inside the gate, which I thought odd.
When we left, I noticed two of the drivers chatting with the guard at the gate, while the third car was positioned to slip out behind us as we left the estate. The other two then caught up and we proceeded back into Havana, sort of like a parade out of the 1950s. This was a classic watcher-team operation, sitting back, rather relaxed, and just keeping an eye out. Nothing threatening. LULL THEM INTO A SENSE OF COMPLACENCY.
The next night we decided to do an interior surveillance run. If we were going to change the Moscow rules, there was nothing like trying it out here and now.
An evening at the famous Tropicana was our plan for Thursday night. One of Havana’s enduring legends, the Tropicana continued to provide the sort of nightlife that had been associated with the city’s heyday in the 1940s and 1950s. A reservation was required for the performance, which came with dinner and a multitude of rum drinks. As we parked our car and entered the theater, the rhythm of the Cuban music was reverberating throughout the building. The floor show was on an outdoor stage, set in a courtyard of the building. The tables were all under a roof, but the show was in an open-air area. Tropical trees and dramatic footlights gave the stage area a very lush look. As the lights came up very slowly, we discovered that there were dancers on stages set up in the trees as well as down on the main stage. The room filled up quickly with an international audience—Canadians, East Germans, Soviets, some Europeans. We seemed to be the only Americanos in the room.
After the show began I excused myself to find the ladies’ room. I conveniently became “lost”—at least that’s what I would claim if I were discovered snooping about. I had the opportunity to explore some of the corridors and anterooms of the theater before finding the rest room and returning to my seat. I had made mental notes of the exterior doors and the corridors that led to them. Tomorrow, I would sketch them out. After about half an hour, Winslow made the same trip, and also seemed to lose his bearings, while deftly expanding our reconnaissance wider to the south. By the time dinner and the show were over, we had a pretty good understanding of how the building worked and where the security was—including the team that was surveilling us.
I would have guessed that the surveillance team would come in with us. The show, after all, had a lot of scantily clad beautiful women—what healthy Latin guys wouldn’t want to check it out? Depending on how discreet the team wanted to be, they could have entered the club without alarming us. Also, they might have wanted to ensure they knew exactly where we were after thirty minutes or so—just like our SST team. But they did not come in. Instead, they set up outside and covered every exit, which indicated that they were very disciplined, and sharp—giving us no uncovered back doors to exit through.
In giving us freedom to move about undetected inside the building, however, they were playing by the old Moscow rules. This was important information.
BUILD IN OPPORTUNITY, BUT USE IT SPARINGLY.
Josh Barnett and I stood on a high point of ground in East Havana, across the harbor from Old Havana. We had driven there in his car and parked halfway up the drive to the Castillo del Morro, an old ruin overlooking the city. When we walked up to the edge of the cliff, I pulled out my ever-present camera to photograph the scene. Out of film, I reached into my purse and took out a fresh canister, but dropped the distinctive gold box over the cliff’s edge. It landed on a rock ledge, about ten feet down.
“Great move,” Barnett exclaimed, grinning widely. “You know, the DGI will set up on that box now, probably after commandeering a window in that apartment over there. They’ll bring in a static camera, man it twenty-four hours a day, and wait to see who comes for it. If I had enough of you scattered around the island, Jonna, I could tie them all up in knots.” He had clearly been pleased with the small drama he had sketched out, and we both laughed at the outrageous truth he had described.
We had gone to the overlook to have a secure talk. We were followed by at least three surveillance cars that we saw. Two had stopped below the crest of the hill, and the occupants were also moving discreetly around the overlook, attempting to enjoy the view. One car had gone on up ahead of them, to the top of the hill and to the castle. It had turned around and was prepared to depart as soon as we got back into Barnett’s car. This was the watcher team, of course. It was pretty easy to find them—and they didn’t seem to mind being sighted. They were just doing their job—making sure that we did nothing untoward. Like meet with a Cuban citizen. Or mail a letter that they could not intercept. Or leave a dead drop. They were making sure that the two of us were staying out of trouble. PICK THE TIME AND PLACE FOR ACTION.
In fact, you could contract and expand the watcher team at will. The team was like an amoeba, with you in the center. They moved around you as you moved forward. If you went into a small space, like a courtyard, they would come in with you and you could check them out. If you went through a chokepoint, like a tunnel or a bridge, they would squeeze through with you, and that would bring them in closer. If you were in a large public space, they could give you all the room you wanted because they could watch you from a distance.
We also knew that we could whittle a surveillance team away. By moving quickly and aggressively through population centers, and stairstepping through town, you could cause considerable attrition. If you really knew the area you were in and took advantage of natural shortcuts and cut-throughs, without looking as if you were trying to break free, you could, in fact, lose them. Not for long, but long enough to do something.
IF YOUR GUT SAYS TO ACT, OVERWHELM THEIR SENSES. This is exactly what Winslow and I set out to do during our last week in Cuba. If we lost the watchers, then presumably the invisible ghost team would have to come in over the horizon and see what was going on.
We were here, after all, to find the spooks.
Winslow, a former Princeton rugby player, had the build and look of a weight lifter. Tall and heavily muscled, with a trim waist and an athlete’s walk, he was a pale reddish blond with a conservative haircut and no facial hair. Winslow stood out in this city of three million ethnically diverse Havanans, as he was a very visible gringo. We had decided to make use of that fact, and let it help the watcher team stay with us. In fact, Winslow hadn’t worn a hat on the entire trip because he wanted them to use his reddish blond hair and pale look as a marker. It was easy to see him fifty feet ahead, even on a crowded avenue.
We had decided to split up on the street, something we had not done up to this point, a mini “star-burst” maneuver. USE MISDIRECTION, ILLUSION, AND DECEPTION.
“Let’s split up in Vedado,” Winslow suggested, “about three blocks behind the Riviera.” Vedado was a dense residential area with lots of foot traffic on the streets and plenty of alleyways and sidewalks that cut through the city blocks. “They won’t know what to do at first. I think that most of them will follow me. They are Latin and predominantly male, and probably have underestimated the female part of our team. Besides, you are more difficult to follow—you blend in better in a crowd. You have a better chance of losing them.”
I thought this over. It sounded good to me. With my dark hair and almost perpetual tan, I melted into a crowd readily.
BREAK YOUR TRAIL AND BLEND INTO THE LOCAL SCENE.
“I think you’re right,” I said. “Those that stay with me I’ll take through Vedado, then cut over to the old Hotel Nacional on the Malecón and drag them through some of those long stairs and bridges. I might be able to get out of sight long enough to give the ghost team a chance to get worried and come in and find me. If they are there, that is. Let’s try it.”
Thirty minutes later, I sat on a bench in a small plaza in Vedado, and waited.
It was a quiet time in the city, the hour after lunch when a lot of businesses shut down and the city slowed down for a siesta. The pace would pick up again later, around four-thirty, and the crowds would once again own the streets.
The bench was at the far end of the plaza, occupying the only bit of shade in this piece of urban landscape. I had moved at a brisk pace through the streets of Vedado, but not too fast, not fast enough to draw their eye. Still, I was out of breath and my heart was pounding. I knew that I had lost several of them at the hotel because there were simply too many entrances and exits to cover, and too many stairways spilling down the hill toward the Malecón. It was almost impossible to parallel me that close to the water; they would have to make exaggerated end runs around large apartment blocks to try to stay with me.
I sat with my camera, map, clipboard with my survey forms, and a tourist guide. There was nobody else in the plaza, and the only sound I was aware of was my own labored breathing and the rapid beat of my heart. I was alone. I had lost my watchers. The question now was, Would they come? Would the ghost team appear? Were they out there, and would they come in? I waited.
LET THEM BELIEVE THEY HAVE LOST YOU; ACT INNOCENT.
Five minutes later, there was a small movement in my peripheral vision. I turned my head slightly and saw a young man on a bicycle pedaling down the street. He was barefoot and dressed in khaki shorts and a T-shirt, as close to a national uniform on this island as you could get. As he approached the plaza, I unfolded my tourist map and began studying it. He continued toward my position in a straight line, then steered onto the sidewalk and began to cut through the plaza diagonally. He was moving so slowly now that I wondered how his bicycle could remain upright. He did not look at me. I discovered that I was holding my breath and made a conscious effort to breathe in.
He passed me about thirty feet away, then gradually started to move out of the plaza.
Suddenly, there was a loud clatter.
I glanced up and saw lying exposed on the concrete what appeared to be a walkie-talkie radio, with a remote earpiece attached to it by a long wire. The radio was broken into pieces. The young man jumped off the bike, dropping it roughly to the side, and ran over to the radio. He picked up most of the pieces and the earpiece, stuffed them inside his shirt, hopped back onto the bike, and sped away as if on a leg of the Tour de France.
So there it was. The first sighting of the ghost team. So discreet and so invisible that had it not been for that exotic radio and the young man’s sloppy tradecraft, we would have never known. That’s once, I thought.
Over the next three days, we set up two more scenarios designed to force the hand of the ghost team, and each time we managed to draw them out. ONCE IS AN ACCIDENT; TWICE IS A COINCIDENCE; THREE TIMES IS AN ENEMY ACTION.
The third time that the ghost team was forced to show itself, I just moved through the small streets of Old Havana trying to contain myself. I had an enormous sense of relief that we had found them and been able to manipulate them by forcing them to come in close enough to us that we could see them. This was the final piece of information we needed for the exfiltration of ORB and his family—we now had confirmation that the KGB and their sister intelligence services used more than one surveillance team on the street watching any given individual. Our plan would have to take that into account.
I could not help thinking about how much Tony was going to like these action reports. I couldn’t wait to get home and share these experiences with the person in the world it mattered most to, and who could and would use the lessons learned for a higher purpose.
Now it was time for Winslow and me to let the ghost team cool off, or they would begin to suspect something was up. Our last couple of days in Havana, we acted like dumb bureaucrats, maintaining the pattern that we had established all along without the provocative maneuvers. When we departed Havana at the end of our trip, they probably looked after us and thought, You two gringos are probably CIA pigs, but we kept you from accomplishing anything while you were here. THERE IS NO LIMIT TO A HUMAN BEING’S ABILITY TO RATIONALIZE THE TRUTH.
Our flight out of Havana was as surreal as our flight in. The Eastern flight attendant must have counted the passengers fifteen times before local security, convinced there were no stowaways, would allow her to close the door on the airplane.
We arrived in Miami around midnight under the dark of the moon.
Our findings on the trip would make the planning for the Moscow operation more complicated, but at least we had the answer to the big question. We now knew for certain that we would perform the rescue maneuver inside—off the street. We could not count on eluding street surveillance in Moscow, not with the ghosts waiting in the wings.
At home on a cold November evening, Tony and I were walking across the yard toward a large stack of firewood that he stored underneath the deck.
Suddenly, in the darkness, he grabbed my hand.
We stopped, mesmerized by the sky unfolding above us. It appeared to be formed out of a soft green fabric and seemed to be moving slowly, at a great distance away.
Tony stepped behind me and put his arm around my waist.
We understood they were the northern lights. As long as both of us had been living and working in Washington, D.C., we had never seen them this far south.
“This is my dream,” he whispered in awe. “When I was in Moscow a few months ago, I dreamed the two of us saw this together. I didn’t know what it meant.”
“Any ideas now?” I asked, sinking farther into his strong arms.
“Yes, dear. That we were going to be together.”
Later that night, Tony and I sat on the big red sofa in his living room, and we quietly began to sketch out the final details of the escape plan.
He was smoking a Cuban Montecristo No. 4. The cigars had recently been smuggled off the island by someone who loved him dearly. Two Cuba Libre rum drinks were on the coffee table, and one of Sinatra’s albums from the war years was playing. The song was “Someone to Watch Over Me.”
We were in the zone.
At the same time, we had our hands almost on the lever. We were about to throw the switch, and in doing so, possibly change the course of world events.