Ghosts of Havana (A Judd Ryker Novel) (5 page)

Brenda Adelman-Zamora scanned the room over the rims of her reading glasses before continuing to read her opening statement. “The Founding Fathers of this great nation wrote in our Declaration of Independence that ‘all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.’”

She placed her paper down and looked straight into the television cameras. The nine-term congresswoman from Florida’s 22nd District was a political pro. Brenda Adelman had grown up on Long Island on the fringes of the powerful political machine of Rockland County. Witnessing the mass migration of her elderly Jewish relatives from New York to the Southern states, she, too, moved with her political ambitions—and built an impressive congressional career on the magic formula of the South Florida triple defense: Social Security, sugar subsidies, and Israel.

Brenda had been less successful in romance, however. She’d hastily married an ophthalmologist of Cuban descent. They quietly divorced after only a few months and the episode appeared to have had little impact on her life. The political benefit of a hyphenated last name was, however, substantial. Becoming a champion of democracy in the Caribbean bolstered her hawkish foreign policy credentials—and turbocharged her fund-raising capabilities across South Florida.

“Consent of the governed,” Adelman-Zamora lectured. “Those words have meaning. We as a nation believe in democracy and freedom. We defend these values at home and we promote these values abroad. This means we must fight against dictatorship and repression, wherever it may rear its ugly head. That is the destiny of the United States. Freedom and democracy are interwoven into our values and ultimately into our national security. And that brings us to our topic of this hearing this morning.

“A principal task of our intelligence services is to monitor and analyze the political forces of tyranny. We cannot defeat an enemy that we do not understand. We rely on the capabilities of the great men and women who serve our country in the intelligence services to look underneath every rock, to listen in the dark corners, to unearth the secrets of our enemies so that the march of freedom can resume. However, too often we have failed to foresee change coming.”

The chairwoman returned to her written text and continued, “We did not predict the Iranian revolution coming in 1979 and we continue to fly blind on political change in Tehran. We did not foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union and we have been unable to foresee new Russian aggression. We have repeatedly missed the signs of new threats to the state of Israel, our most important democratic ally in the Middle East.”

Chairwoman Adelman-Zamora removed her reading glasses and sighed deeply for the cameras. “And most obvious of all, our neighbor to the south has been imprisoned by tyranny since 1959. That once-proud nation should be a close American ally. It should be an engine for prosperity in our hemisphere. Instead, our long history of failure to bring liberty to a country just ninety miles from our own shores is an affront to free people
everywhere. Our missteps are a lingering embarrassment for these great United States. Today, we are continuing to fail freedom-loving people around the world by the misguided policy of our own administration. Despite the ill-advised steps by the State Department to embrace dictatorship and apologize for oppression, our neighbors remain locked in chains. I have called this special hearing today to ask a simple but vital question:
How are we still losing Cuba?
”

6.

CIA HEADQUARTERS, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

TUESDAY, 11:15 A.M.

T
he red file taunted the Deputy Director. He snatched the folder labeled
OPERATION RAINMAKER
and threw it across the room. It flew like a Frisbee for a second before the papers scattered everywhere and floated down around his office like snowflakes.

“Dammit,” he swore to himself. He grimaced at the tall pile of files on his desk, a catalog of every covert operation by the Central Intelligence Agency against Cuba since the revolution in 1959.
OPERATION TASMANIAN DEVIL,
OPERATION PANDORA,
OPERATION DEMON BARBER,
OPERATION PIT BOSS, OPERATION BANANA SUNRISE.
This mountain is a pathetic collection of history,
he thought.
A graveyard of bad ideas.

On the very bottom was a file much fatter than the others. He extracted
OPERATION ZAPATA
, tipping over the rest of the folders into a fan on his desk. As he opened the thick
ZAPATA
file, he winced as his chest tightened. The first document was a memo summarizing the Agency’s most embarrassing fiasco, the April 17, 1961, botched invasion by CIA-supported Cuban exiles at the
Bay of Pigs. The memo to the CIA Director had been by Randolph Nye, the Deputy Director of Operations during the height of the Cold War. Nye was the man who had occupied this precise office, this seat.
His seat.

Nye had accomplished many things that the world would never know about, but he had died a year ago, unredeemed. Quiet victories in Egypt, in the Congo, in Mexico, and in the Philippines. But the world would always remember the black eye of the Bay of Pigs. The air cover wasn’t approved. The ammunition ran out. The weather turned. The cash never arrived. Everything had gone wrong on that day.

Randolph Nye was now gone, but his ghost lived on in these walls, thought the Deputy Director. He wouldn’t allow that to happen to him. He wouldn’t allow that to happen
again
.

—

T
he intelligence game had changed so much. After the failings of 9/11, the United States’ multiple intelligence services had been reorganized. Instead of the clarity of a CIA Director leading America’s secret information-gathering and covert operations, a new super Director for National Intelligence was created to advise the President on all intelligence matters and to oversee all sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA. The DNI was suddenly above the CIA Director, a new player in town and a new layer between the CIA and the White House. To compensate for this slight, the boxes were shuffled and renamed in Langley, too. The Deputy Director of Operations, the person responsible for global covert operations, was renamed the Director of the National Clandestine Service.

In a classic Washington move, the elevation in title was
actually a demotion. He believed this was political theater and textbook ass-covering, the kind of bureaucratic crap that he had grown to despise about Washington, D.C. Just like the incessant meddling from Congress, the politics of management was a growing distraction from the real work of fighting America’s enemies. And a further erosion of the CIA’s preeminence.

So when he was eventually promoted to run covert operations, he insisted that they call him by the old name, the Deputy Director of Operations. That was the great Cold Warrior Allen Dulles’s title, too, before he became CIA Director. A lesser title on paper, but a symbolic nod to better times and older ways of doing things. And he had made a bargain with himself to make it all worthwhile.

—

T
he Deputy Director closed the Operation Zapata file and randomly opened another. This outlined an aborted attempt in the 1960s to poison El Jefe’s cigars. The next file detailed a bungled attempt to add an undetectable toxin to the Cuban leader’s aftershave. Another plot had planned to induce paranoia and psychosis by lacing his coffee with LSD via a tainted sugar cube. A fourth scheme made covert payments to bribe his security guards into turning their guns on their leader. They had accepted the cash but never pulled the trigger.

None of these operations had worked. His predecessor Randolph Nye had let America down. And let down the brave Cuban people.

The Deputy Director sighed to himself, knowing that, decades later, he was still letting them down. All nineteen successors between Nye and the current occupier of this office had let
them down, he thought. The Deputy Director knew he now had access to more money and more technology than anything Nye could have ever imagined. Yet the same old men, the same ragtag rebels who had seized Havana in 1959, still ran Cuba. The island was in a prison and part of the blame lay squarely on him.

It wasn’t for lack of trying. The Deputy Director had green-lit operations to spark street riots by creating false bread shortages, to disrupt the banking system by implanting a virus in the central bank’s computers, and to plant misinformation in the local newspapers about luxury homes in the Spanish Costa del Sol owned by top Cuban politicians. He had provided seed capital to Cuban exiles in Costa Rica to create a SMS text network about the Miami Marlins baseball team that was a cover for organizing social protests on the island.

His boldest PsyOps gamble was to launch
AeroLibre
, a high-altitude plane to beam television broadcasts into Cuban homes. The Deputy Director had even signed off on a Top Secret plan to create BesoPeso, a new electronic currency that could be used to evade the control of the Cuban authorities and, if necessary, pay off potential friends in Havana without drawing the notice of the U.S. Treasury.

None of these plots had had the desired effect. None had even made a dent in the Cuban armor. Cuban intelligence had countermoved each scheme. They jammed
AeroLibre
’s signal. They uncovered and blocked his phantom BesoPeso. Oswaldo Guerrero had found a way to choke his every move. The Devil of Santiago had to be the luckiest bastard on earth, he thought. Or, perhaps, the man known as O was actually the smartest.

The Deputy Director collected the files again into a neat pile and carefully aligned the corners. He plucked every page from
OPERATION RAINMAKER
off the floor and returned it to the top of the pile. Then he sat back in his chair to clear his head. The long list of Agency failures was an embarrassment. He didn’t want to end up like Randolph Nye. He didn’t want the next man sitting in this chair to muse over
his
failings
.

Most Americans had long forgotten about the fight for Cuba. Hell, most Cuban exiles in Florida had given up, too. Inside the Agency, there were only a few Cold Warriors left, only a few old men like him that even remembered the competition with the Soviets and what it really meant to wage war for freedom. The chess games they played in Poland, Romania, Chile, Angola, Vietnam, Nicaragua. The current generation didn’t even think about communism. They studied Arabic and Pashtun and Mandarin. They wrote computer algorithms and tracked terrorist bank accounts and flew satellites and built biometric databases.

Worse, the civilians at the White House and over in the State Department were going soft. They were surrendering our goals in the Western Hemisphere for the sake of taking the easy path on Cuba. No one worried about old communists on a tropical island anymore. They were only too happy to ignore history for the sake of expediency. To just roll over and pretend history didn’t matter. That freedom didn’t matter. The administration he served, like most of the country, was willing to just give up on Cuba. Open the embassy, exchange ambassadors, do the POTUS whitewash tour. Close our eyes and take a victory lap. Pretend everything was just normal. Nothing to see here, amigos. It made him sick. But he wouldn’t abandon the Cuban people.

The Deputy Director just needed a fresh idea. He needed to spark something. To break the regime. To rally the crowds. The Cubans just had to want more than what brain-dead El Comrade
Jefe and his little brother El Comrade Presidente could offer. This could be redemption for Randolph Nye and for the Central Intelligence Agency. This could be
our
historical triumph. The Deputy Director cracked his knuckles as he thought of how, after so many decades of American failure and humiliation, he could be the man finally to break Cuba free.

But how to ensure that Operation Triggerfish wouldn’t merely join the other flops sitting on his desk? How would he outflank Oswaldo Guerrero this time? The CIA’s Caribbean Special Projects Unit was no match for O. He knew that wouldn’t do. He would need his best people to make Operation Triggerfish succeed. To free Cuba and to redeem history, he would need no one less than his very best.

He knew exactly who to call.

7.

U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT HEADQUARTERS, WASHINGTON, D.C.

TUESDAY, 11:45 A.M.

C
uba will be the Secretary’s legacy,” Landon Parker declared. “That’s why I’m worried.”

Across the coffee table from Judd Ryker sat the Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs Melanie Eisenberg. As the top U.S. diplomat for Latin America, she was known as a determined, sharp-elbowed veteran of Washington, D.C. elite circles.

Parker had asked Judd to join this meeting with Eisenberg in his private seventh-floor office to talk about the State Department’s unfolding Cuba strategy. Judd knew from turf battles past that Eisenberg wouldn’t welcome his presence this morning. But since the topic was Cuba, her top policy priority, she would humor the chief of staff. Moreover, she wouldn’t want any disasters derailing her ambitions—or her next Senate confirmation hearing.

“We’ve looked like blind, bumbling fools in Cuba,” Parker continued. “For my entire life we’ve been embarrassed by Havana thumbing its nose at us from across the Straits of Florida. But this administration has committed to fixing U.S.-Cuba relations once
and for all.” Parker began counting on his fingers. “We’ve removed most of our sanctions. We’ve taken Cuba off the blacklist of state sponsors of terrorism. We’ve restored diplomatic relations and cut ribbons on shiny new reopened embassies. The president’s visit was a tremendous success. After so many years of failure, it’s all finally happening.” Parker opened his arms wide. “That’s why I’m worried.”