In Mexico City, we rented a small furnished apartment on a somewhat busy commercial street not far from where the embassy was located, then I presented myself to the OSO station chief and to Charge d’Affaires Paul Culbertson at my earliest opportunity. Since I was ostensibly a part of the foreign office, my wife, even in her advanced state of pregnancy, made the necessary social calls on the other embassy wives.
While Culbertson was pretty amiable, telling me that he and his wife were “as easy to get along with as a pair of old shoes,” the embassy itself was short of space, and I was shown an ugly storeroom that was to be OPC’s office. True to J. Edgar Hoover’s instructions, the former FBI station left nothing usable when they vacated their offices to make way for the CIA. My secretary and I cleaned up our new space, then borrowed some chipped government-issued metal desks, file cabinets, and threadbare chairs to make it serviceable. I hoped the arrangement would be fairly transient, as the entire delegation was scheduled to move into a new building downtown along the Paseo de la Reforma.
The embassy was in a state of transition, expecting the arrival of a new ambassador, William O’Dwyer. O’Dwyer was a charismatic and somewhat controversial figure who had been born in Ireland, then worked his way up from day laborer to become a New York City policeman before entering law school. As a lawyer, he built up a successful practice in Brooklyn, New York, eventually serving as a judge and later as the district attorney, becoming a national celebrity after his prosecution of “Murder, Inc.,” the cadre of vicious hit men who worked for organized crime. He was elected mayor of New York City in 1946, in which capacity he served for four years, until he resigned after a major police scandal that included accusations that he had associations with organized crime members. Among his lasting accomplishments was getting the newly formed United Nations to make its home in New York City. O’Dwyer cashed in some political chips after his mayoral resignation, and Truman appointed him ambassador to Mexico, where he would have a short tenure until his mob ties caught up with him.
At the time, however, O’Dwyer’s Irish extroversion and ex-model wife were well received by the Mexicans and embassy staff. Interestingly, during my bachelor days in New York City, I had actually dated his wife, Elizabeth Sloan Hipp Simpson, among several models I had been going out with at the time. We did not broadcast the past relationship, and there was no direct fallout, but my wife often found reasons for us to turn down social invitations from the couple.
Little by little, my outside agents began to trickle into town. Among the first was Bill Buckley, who arrived with his pregnant wife, Pat. She and my wife got along well and became great friends, as did Bill and I. We frequently found excuses to exchange information over lunch at the only decent French restaurant in the city, La Normandia.
I soon became accustomed to recruiting assets to help gather information. I hunted for prospects at embassy functions, which were generously stocked with leading American businessmen in Mexico. If they were involved in an area of industry that might prove useful, I would draw them into conversations, steer the subject toward this or that political view, possibly find out whom they had voted for or how they viewed America’s position in the world. I had those whom I deemed useful name-checked in Washington, D.C. If no abnormal associations or legal hassles were uncovered that might make them a security risk, I asked for permission to contact them as informants.
Once a person had been recruited, he was often able to help identify other Americans and Mexicans who could prove useful. A casual meeting would be arranged, during which I would go through the usual steps. This procedure permitted me to acquire a large group of external assets in a relatively short amount of time. Most of the informants were businessmen, but occupations varied. There was even a popular Catholic priest who worked in the anti-Communist movement at one of the universities.
I met one asset on the tennis court, a businessman from Pheonix, Arizona, named Stanley. After a routine name-check with headquarters, I invited Stan to work with me against Communism in Latin America. He agreed, and we began bird shooting together: ducks and an occasional goose. Stan was great at introducing me to his friends who might qualify as agents, which added to my now fully staffed station.
Over the years, Stan remained a friend and a shooting companion while he worked for successive station officers. In retrospect, Stan was one of the most responsive and productive agents with whom I ever worked, and he set a high standard of performance.
Dorothy’s due date approached, forcing us to start looking for a more comfortably sized home in the Lomas de Chapultepec district overlooking the city from the west. Our belongings had finally reached Veracruz by ship, from where they were trucked to Mexico City. The gorgeous white convertible Cadillac I had splurged on with the Bimini Run film money, however, was conspicuous by its absence.
It took an investigation from the consulate and a conference with the Mexican customs chief to locate the car, which was hidden at the rear of a customs shed. Whatever official had sought to purloin the vehicle had apparently caused a load of sand to be dumped on it out of spite. From under the sand, the tattered remains of the top fluttered in the wind. The white paint had been blasted from the surface by a few days of bad weather.
After bailing the sand out of the car, finding a new battery, and filling the tank with a few gallons of Pemex gas, I was surprised to find that the engine started readily. Under a sweltering sun, I drove the car slowly back to Mexico City, stopping frequently at roadside stands to drink cold bottled beer to avoid the parasites I had found prevalent in many of Mexico’s nonalcoholic drinks. I reached my destination after dark and left the car in a commercial garage next door to our humble apartment.
I reported the news to Dorothy, including the dismal fact that the damage was of such a nature that our U.S. insurance would probably not cover it. The next morning when I went to retrieve the car to bring Dorothy to our new house, I turned the corner to find that the poor Cadillac had received more insults to its injuries. The night attendant had decided to test the merchandise but had been unfamiliar with driving an automatic transmission. Unable to stop the car, he had headed for the exit and rammed it against the lamppost across the street.
The misfortune turned in our favor when the garage’s insurer had the car repaired at the Cadillac dealership, where the front end was fixed, the car repainted, and a new top thrown in.
Dorothy and I now had another domestic dilemma—stay in our apartment until the baby arrived or move to our new house, which needed work before we could move in, with the concern that the new addition might catch us only half unpacked. Our decision was soon made easy, however.
Below us was a club that played mariachi and samba music until late at night, making it hard to sleep. But one evening the jukebox must have been broken, for in the relative silence, we suddenly heard the sounds that the music had previously disguised—the unmistakable rhythmic creaking of beds with the accompanying grunts, gasps, and other sounds of men and women together.
“Oh my God,” Dorothy said. “Is that what I think it is?”
I had to laugh. “I think we’re living over a cathouse!”
By the next evening, after a long day of unpacking, we were sitting exhausted in the single bedroom that we had managed to put together in the new house—and just in time. Suddenly, Dorothy gave me a strange look.
“Honey…,” she said, and stopped.
“Yes, what?” I asked, perplexed.
“I’m afraid you’re not going to get a good night’s sleep tonight, either.”
“No? Do you hear something?” I asked, striving to listen to whatever noise was disturbing my wife.
She smiled a bit shyly. “No, sweetheart. But you’re going to be up all night because you’ve got to get me to the delivery room—right now.”
Like any expectant father, I drove my wife at breakneck speed to the hospital—the British Cowdray—and waited anxiously in the anteroom until a pink light signified that we had a daughter: Lisa Tiffany Hunt.
Relations between me and some of the other personnel started to become a bit strained when I learned that the OSO station chief had basically been spying on me by having our radio handler show him all of my dispatches before they were sent. My division chief in Washington complained that my requests for name-checks were too numerous for his staff to handle (to which I pointed out that my OPC station and its projects were breaking new ground). Relations with the local FBI staff were frigid at first, too, but warmed up after a few of the bureau agents realized that I shared their enthusiasm for hunting and fishing. Our friendship was cemented when I helped finance and form a largely FBI duck-hunting club about forty-five minutes from the embassy. The OSO bureau chief could only simmer with jealousy noticing the new cooperation between OPC and the FBI.
Still, the cooperation did not extend to some delicate operations. At one point, one of the FBI agents inquired if I knew the whereabouts of the former Spanish Republican guerrilla General Valentín González, known by the name “El Campesino.” The FBI had been charged with locating him to testify before the congressional subcommittee investigating the international Communist movement. A member of the Communist Party, the general had fought in the Spanish Civil War against the nationalist army. A rough, untutored peasant, he was famed for conceiving brilliant guerilla tactics and was notorious for his brutality. When the Communist side capitulated and the war ended, the Soviets welcomed El Campesino into their country, along with thousands of refugees, and more importantly almost all of Spain’s gold reserves, which the general had helped capture in Madrid.
Like so many others, González became disillusioned with Communism, especially after he had been imprisoned and forced into hard labor digging subway tunnels in Moscow. The wily guerilla genius engineered his escape to Iran and eventually surfaced in Paris, where our station identified him and suggested that the born-again capitalist write his autobiography. Unbeknownst to the FBI, OPC considered this a great opportunity to help discredit the Communist movement, and I had him squirreled away in a Cuernavaca safe house, where he was telling his life story to a writer, Julian Gorkin.
After all this effort, we did not want to see González testify in front of Congress, where the glare of Washington publicity might diminish his credibility. His location remained secret until after the book was published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1952, under the title El Campesino: Life and Death in Soviet Russia, one of the first personal revelations of Soviet and Stalinist terror and barbarity. It was translated into many languages and found a great Spanish market, selling well throughout Latin America. Later, after Castro took over Cuba, I noticed La Vida y La Muerte en la URSS prominently displayed in Havana bookstores, but copies were quickly confiscated and destroyed.
Another such book program adopted by OPC was the case of Eudocio Ravines, a Chilean Marxist intellectual and follower of Mao Tse-tung. While he had once helped install the Popular Front regime in Chile, the first Communist Party rule in the Western Hemisphere, he had become disenchanted with the ideology. This had come to the attention of the CIA, which contacted him and sent him to live under an alias in Mexico City, where he was writing a book about Communist plans to take over the world.
This, I felt, was finally a great project worthy of Bill Buckley, whom I assigned to help Ravines finish the book, The Yenan Way. Bill dove into the mission, and Scribner’s accepted the English translation several months later. After that, Buckley decided to leave Mexico and the CIA. He told me that he was considering the purchase of American Mercury magazine—the popular intellectual publication founded by H. L. Mencken that had been on a downward track for the last several years—or he was going to start his own magazine.
I tried to talk him out of it, but his mind was made up, especially as Pat was not enthusiastic about staying in Mexico much longer. It was hard to see the couple go. Not only had Bill done a superlative job, but he had become such a good friend that we had named him the godfather of our daughter. Bill went on to edit American Mercury for a year, before founding the influential conservative political magazine National Review in 1955, and later the television political staple Firing Line. Additionally, he has had a fine career as a journalist and an author. Besides being godfather to three of my children, he is considered by many to be the godfather of American conservatism.
Meanwhile, my station agents had established anti-Communist front organizations that embraced the core of Mexican life, including students, women, churches, and laborers. We recruited several journalists who wrote for some of Mexico’s most respected newspapers and were able to penetrate the Communist Party of Mexico and a Trotskyite offshoot, both of which could muster fairly good-size demonstrations on a moment’s notice.
While most of the work was covert, some of it was obvious, a bit sophomoric, and, admittedly, a bit fun, such as when we sent agents to disrupt a major speech by the artist and Communist supporter Diego Rivera, using CIA-manufactured stink bombs and itching powder.
Another campaign included the creation of weekly anti-Communist posters, which we pasted throughout the city to educate the Mexican public about the menace of international Communism. Reports were that the posters, appearing under the guise of a reputable organization, had a considerable amount of influence among the populace.
We were constantly on the lookout for ways to discredit Communist rhetoric. I learned that Bob North, posted in Bangkok, was trying to establish a Thai film industry, hoping to make a movie about an epic Thai legend. Maxine North, Bob’s wife, apparently was enjoying life undercover, learning the language and honing an already skilled golf game. On route to Washington for consultation, Bob flew into Mexico for a few days, and we came up with a complicated operation to discredit a prominent Mexican Communist who was visiting Peking. The plan required critical timing and the top-notch printing work of the CIA’s Technical Services Division in Washington.
North flew back to Asia, where he airmailed me a copy of a Chinese newspaper with an article about the Mexican Communist Party leader’s visit. I quickly wrote a fabricated story in which the man was quoted as deprecating Mexicans, saying among other things that Mexican peasants could never hope to achieve the cultural level of the superior Chinese. I cabled my fictitious story to headquarters, where a special font was created to reproduce samples of the original newspaper. My fabricated story was set in the duplicate typeface and the entire front page re-created by the technical staff. I was sent a dozen copies by diplomatic pouch, which I received before our target returned to Mexico.
I made the doctored papers available to our contacts in the news media, who believed the story to be true and published translations in Spanish. When the target protested the story, technical tests on the CIA-manufactured newspaper proved that the paper matched other type samples of the same newspaper, and so proved its authenticity.
Mexico City was a sort of Latin American version of Casablanca: a large city full of conflicting ideologies, with agents from different countries spying on one another; peasant uprisings with big business trying to control them; gun running, drug running, money laundering; people hiding out, people seeking the people hiding out; and every other permutation of a vast international power struggle imaginable. One day we would be handling an Eastern European defector, the next trying to keep a spy from giving away U.S. secrets. It was constant, exhausting work.
Amid this, I was also keeping up a family life. In the fall of 1952, Dorothy and I welcomed another daughter, Kevan, into the world. Dorothy’s mother came to town to help out during the event, followed for the first time by my mother, who flew in to see her two grandchildren, a visit that signaled a family détente.
About this time, the priest I had recruited came to visit me. He was a charming and handsome Notre Dame graduate who had played football in school and gained a sizeable congregation in Mexico, led no doubt by adoring females. According to Mexican law, he was not allowed to wear an abbot in the country, so he was dressed in civilian clothing. I had met with him several times and never seen him disturbed before.
He explained that his church had been sending religious delegations to Guatemala.
“The last group we sent,” he told me, “were seized by police, beaten up, and thrown out of the county.”
We both knew that one of the first things that happened in Communist-leaning governments was a power struggle between government and the church. This was not good news.
“I’ll send someone to assess the situation,” I told him.
I did as I promised and sent a delegation of Mexican anti-Communist students to visit their counterparts to the south. They fared worse than the religious group had. They were rounded up and tortured by the police of the left-leaning president Jacobo Arbenz, their testicles electrocuted and water forced up their noses and rectums.
Arbenz was a man of modest intellect; the true power behind the thrown was his strong-willed wife, Maria Cristina Vilanova. They seemed an unlikely couple to be championing the underclass. Arbenz, the son of a Swiss immigrant, was a handsome man with a high, intellectual forehead, thin lips, and small, almost feminine features, who taught science and history at the Guatemalan Military Academy. His wife was the beautiful daughter of a wealthy San Salvadorian family, with a movie-star smile that lit up the room. The couple dressed well, and was well educated and glamorous.
Yet Maria, the real brains of the two, organized socialist political discussions with two like-minded friends, the Chilean Communist leader Virginia Bravo and a Salvadorian Communist in exile, Matilde Elena Lopez. Meanwhile, she guided Arbenz up the military ranks to the presidency (Arbenz was widely rumored to have killed his predecessor) while indoctrinating him with Communist philosophy.
I reported the beatings of the Mexican students to headquarters but heard nothing in return. Part of the reason for the puzzling and frustrating silence was the new American ambassador in Guatemala, who had insisted that all CIA messages from his embassy be approved by him before they were sent to headquarters in Washington. This was because the previous ambassador had been embarrassed when it was discovered that the CIA had bugged the headquarters of the Guatemalan Communist Party. So, at a time when the Communist Party was rapidly consolidating power in Guatemala, the CIA station there was unable to supply Washington with the intelligence.
I dispatched more Mexican students over the border to gather information, and as a result of the alarming reports that I forwarded, was soon summoned to headquarters for a consult with the director of Central Intelligence, Walter Bedell (“Beetle”) Smith, a few staff members, and my division chief, during which I assured them that there was indeed a Communist link to the events.
Finished with my debriefing, I visited some old friends on the staff, then stopped into the security office for a standard polygraph test covering sex, money, and foreign contacts that was periodically required of all agents. With that unpleasant ordeal completed, I dropped in on the security officer who, among other things, reviewed materials that had been written by agency employees before they were allowed to be published.
I had forwarded the CIA and the State Department a copy of my latest manuscript. I thought that as long as I was in the neighborhood, I would take it home with me. But when I inquired about the book, the security officer’s face reddened and he had trouble clearing his throat. “There’s a little problem,” he said finally.
“Did I let something slip?” I asked, thinking that I must have inadvertently committed a security breach.
“No, nothing like that,” he said. “It’s just that ... well ...”
“Well, what?” I queried. “I can’t think of any protocol problem. Is there some operation going on that I don’t know about that’s similar to the book?”
His face got redder. “It’s this way, Mr. Hunt. My secretary took it home to read it and somehow lost part of it.”
“Lost it?” I exploded. “The CIA lost my manuscript?”
“On the good side, she says she couldn’t put it down. I liked it, too, and didn’t see any security problems.” He fished a bundle of pages from a desk drawer. “You can have these, and I’ll get you the rest if she finds it.”
I told him that I wasn’t writing for the amusement of his staff. And, “If the Office of Security doesn’t take the review procedure seriously, then I won’t, either. From now on, I’ll publish what I want, and you can lodge a complaint after the fact.”
I had not made and retained a carbon copy, as I had been under the misapprehension that I was sending the manuscript by diplomatic pouch to the most secure office in the world, so I naturally assumed that it would be safe until I arrived. The missing pages were never found, so I had to reconstitute them from my longhand notes and drafts from which Dorothy had typed the original. Despite my remarks, I did submit some of my future works—especially nonfiction—to the office before publication, a few of which were held up for long periods of time before they could be printed. The agency still reviews all books published by former agents, though recently it has issued guidelines saying that a book won’t be edited strictly because it portrays the CIA in a negative light. Usually, just names, places, and dates need to be changed if they may be associated with an ongoing operation or can be used to deduce the true identity of a current agent or assets.
Back in Mexico City, I received a visit from the chastened Guatemala chief of station. He turned out to be an older FBI retread who acted like the ambassador’s lapdog, seemed to be having a grand old time living in the tropics, and was not inspired to exercise any operational responsibilities. He knew that I had been called to Washington about a problem in Guatemala and hoped that I could be persuaded to stop rocking the Central American boat.
“Everything’s the same as it always is down here,” he said. “The Communists are organized but contained.”
“Tell me you haven’t informed the ambassador about my meeting in Washington,” I said.
He shook his head.
“Promise me you won’t.” I told him about Arbenz’s move toward a more Communist ideology and about the student beatings. He was visibly shocked by my revelations, but I could tell he was just counting the days until retirement. This was more action than he was prepared for. I made a mental note that he would give me problems until he was replaced. Per my expectation, I soon learned from a visiting branch chief that despite my reports, no initiatives were being taken in Guatemala.
Interagency gossip slowly filtered down to my station that Beetle Smith was trying to merge OPC and OSO stations around the world, and that Wisner and the OSO chief were negotiating which stations the local OPC chief would take over and which the OSO would run.
The OSO chief in Mexico had seniority by virtue of his career in the FBI but had already received orders to take charge of a station in Europe. I figured that my position would be predicated on the seniority of his successor.
One morning I was called into Ambassador O’Dwyer’s office with the OSO chief and the legal attaché. For some reason, I thought that this was something to do with the CIA power struggle, but I was confronted with a different situation entirely. The Fuchs-Rosenberg-Gold atom spy ring had been making headlines, and it turned out that the FBI had kidnapped a Rosenberg associate, Morton Sobell, who had been hiding in Mexico City (more shades of Casablanca), and spirited him back across the border. The ambassador rebuked the FBI bureau chief for making an illegal arrest on foreign soil, but the agent did not even apologize.
During the exchanges that followed, it became clear that the FBI had advance knowledge that the fugitive was hiding here and that the Soviets had promised to provide him passage out of Mexico.
“This should have been a CIA matter,” Ambassador O’Dwyer declared. “Can you imagine how embarrassing this would have been if the Mexicans found out that the FBI made an arrest here?”
While I was embarrassed that the CIA had not known of Sobell’s presence, I had to remind O’Dwyer that the CIA had no arrest powers either.
Twenty years later, I learned that what the bureau had done to Sobell, they routinely did to fugitives whom they were able to locate abroad.
I had not been involved in a surreptitious entry operation since my OSS experience in China. And some of those were hardly secret. Once, in Shanghai, for instance, we raided the office of the Italian counsel, sending two jeeps’ worth of uniformed men bursting into the building, where we set up a camera and photographed records without caring about whether the counsel appeared.
But now I decided on the most daring mission during my Mexico posting. The Guatemalan embassy in Mexico City was located a scant two blocks from the U.S. embassy. From our CIA offices, we had an overly enticing line of sight to the front windows of the other building, and I occasionally amused myself by watching the office workers with binoculars. In a later decade, technology probably would have permitted me to read the papers on the desks, but at that point even a good telescope wouldn’t have given me much more information. Now I would get my chance to see what they were up to as I determined that we should penetrate the embassy. We consulted with the National Security Agency (NSA) to fix a date to enter.
A team of CIA safecrackers flew into town a week before the scheduled operation. We cased the target and mounted twenty-four-hour surveillance on the building and its embassy officers, and equipped several vehicles with high-frequency transmitters then unknown in Mexico.
One of the prime steps in the plan was to recruit the embassy’s maid, who secreted a microphone in the ambassador’s office that broadcast to a listening post in an apartment we rented in the building. This installation supplemented several wiretaps that had been active for some time. We pulled blueprints for the building from local records and paid the maid to give us a description of the safe and make a putty imprint of its keyhole. For an additional sum, the clever woman even supplied us with a key to the embassy service door, which we duplicated.
Now we were ready for action. We selected a Friday night for the entry, as our surveillance revealed that the Guatemalans were not the hardest workers, customarily departing their offices early in the afternoon and not returning until midmorning on Monday. That afternoon, I watched the offices through my binoculars and alerted our surveillance team as each staff member exited the building. As the staffers left, our agents tailed them back to their home or apartment (or to a house of ill repute or a bar), keeping them under constant watch until it was reported that everyone seemed to have settled in for the evening.
The bug in the office had stopped broadcasting noises after everyone left, but I still asked someone to call the embassy from a pay telephone before I gave a green light for the operation. We could hear the unanswered phone ringing through the pickup.
“It’s a go,” I said into my transmitter.
The entry team gained access through the service door with the duplicate key, and the leader’s voice whispered through the walkie-talkie, “Everything is dark and quiet.”
I told him to proceed.
Once they had penetrated the embassy office, we could hear the team on the microphone, and they didn’t even have to communicate with us over their transmitters, as we could hear their conversation through the bug.
The first thing they did—as in all such operations—was cover the windows with opaque black muslin to make sure that no one outside could see their flashlights. As an added precaution, we had subverted the night watchman, who was drinking tequila and playing cards in the basement with one of our agents who had cultivated the friendship during the prior month.
The specialty team went to work on the safe, pushing a type of soft metal putty into the keyhole, from which they could fashion a key. Before actually opening the safe, they applied an amplifying device to listen for such things as the tick of a time bomb or another kind of booby trap.
When the team opened the safe, they snapped a Polaroid picture of the contents so that everything could be replaced exactly as it had been found. Then, in a small room off the ambassador’s office, the entry team set up a special camera that the CIA had designed to photograph documents, plugged floodlights into the embassy’s electrical system, and spent the next three hours documenting the entire contents of the safe.
Besides the papers, the team also found $30,000 in U.S. currency but were ordered to leave it in place. When the mission was completed, the team packed up and withdrew from the target area in reverse order, finishing with the black drapes.
Within hours, the entry team was on a flight to Dallas, where they changed identities and flew on to Washington. The photographic evidence was pouched separately to headquarters, where it was developed and examined by various sections of the CIA, and the codebook film was handed over to the NSA. Some of the results were soon sent back to our Mexican station. Among the information were lists of Mexicans whom the Guatemalan embassy had subverted, as well as the names of some prominent citizens who were targeted.
It turned out that among the team’s take were the ambassador’s notes covering his efforts to buy weapons in Mexico, a physical description of the ambassador’s contact in the Soviet embassy, and, quite interestingly, a series of profiles in which the ambassador appraised senior officials of the U.S. embassy.
While we might have been satisfied with the outcome of our burglary, it was apparent that Mexico City was home to some of the world’s most brazen thieves. An FBI agent and his wife were chloroformed and their dog killed while Mexican thieves ransacked their house and took everything away in a moving van.
Our own home was looted twice, with the resulting loss of my wife’s jewelry, my trusty typewriter, our sterling silverware, a radio, and other valuables. While these items were insured, most of the jewelry pieces were Dorothy’s family heirlooms, which she was heartbroken to lose.
With a lot of prodding from the embassy’s legal attaché and the promise of a nice insurance award, police soon located one of my wife’s distinctive sapphire earrings in the downtown Thieves Market. One arrest led to another, and soon I was summoned downtown to identify a strongbox full of jewelry, which thankfully held most of my wife’s treasured belongings.
Instead of allowing me to leave with the merchandise, however, the police official smiled and closed the box.
“We will need these as evidence to prosecute the thieves, of course,” the man said in Spanish.
“But they will stay locked up, and we will definitely receive them later?” I queried.
“Yes, señor,” he answered. “Tell your wife not to worry. She must be very attached to these fine pieces. Is she not?”
I conceded that she was.
“And she would like to see the men in jail?”
“We’d just like to have the jewelry back.”
“It shouldn’t be too long,” the man continued. “Justice works fast in Mexico.”
I consulted with the insurance company, which had a slightly different story, saying the jewels should be released directly after the reward was paid. After this occurred, I was summoned downtown, where I was once again allowed to see the jewels.
“But this case has taken many man-hours,” the official told me. “And the insurance reward does not really take care of all the detectives who participated.”
“I think the insurance company has given you a very generous reward.”
His slimy smile dropped simultaneously with the click of the closing strongbox.
“What kind of extra reward do you have in mind?” I asked.
His vulpine grin returned as he opened the box, allowing me to glimpse my wife’s sapphires and diamonds. “My men would love to rejoice in the return of the lady’s jewelry. Five cases of scotch would be a fitting reward for such fine detective work. Don’t you think?”
I felt like shooting the man but instead tried the more diplomatic approach that was expected of me. “The detective work was very good,” I admitted. “But it is difficult to find so much scotch here. Perhaps the detectives would be satisfied with three cases.”
He acted as if the weight of the world were on his shoulders but finally said, “Because you are such an esteemed member of the community, perhaps three cases would be enough.” He held his hand out to shake.
The official delivered the strongbox to our home the following day and carted off the three cases of scotch that I procured. I knew that his men would never see a bottle of it and that he would sell it on the black market for three or four hundred dollars—a very suitable ransom at the time. It was a lesson about the traditional way to deal with Latin American police that I would never forget.
The interagency wheeling and dealing finally came to a head. A dispatch issued to the OSO station and me from Beetle Smith informed us that the two stations were scheduled to merge and that the new OSO station chief who was scheduled to arrive would be named the overall boss. I was named the deputy. It was difficult to swallow the bile that rose in my throat, but I accepted the change with what good grace I could muster—and asked to be reassigned. Both the new station chief and my replacement reported to the embassy, marking the end of my tenure.
There was a little overlap and free time at this point, so Dorothy and I took the opportunity to enjoy Mexico’s culture and be remarried in the Catholic Church, and have our daughters baptized as Catholics. I knew I had to keep this fact from my parents, as it could easily rupture the uneasy truce that had been established between us. Then, after a month of farewell parties, purchases, and packing, our household was trucked away. We flew to Florida, where Dorothy’s mother had given us a vacation cottage.
As my leave drew to an end, I traveled to Washington to find out about my next assignment. I was told to find a house nearby for me and my family. True to what must be unpublished government specifications to hire the worst person for a job, I found out that my new position was as chief of covert operations for an area of the world that I knew absolutely nothing about—the Balkans.