The Seeds of Fiction (38 page)

Meanwhile leftist guerrillas were on the move in El Salvador. Eleven businessmen had already been kidnapped that year for ransom money that would go to the guerrillas' war chest. Washington, fearful of another Nicaragua, was pressing the government of General Carlos Humberto Romero to institute political reforms, but El Salvador's powerful oligarchy warned against any concessions to the left. At the same time the United States was secretly talking to progressive elements in the military that Washington hoped might forestall another bloody revolution in Central America. Yet while the big story in the region in the autumn of 1979 was El Salvador, there was yet another story back in Panama: the Shah of Iran.

A popular uprising had forced Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his wife Farah to flee Iran in January 1979. While bouncing from one refuge to another they descended virtually in my backyard, in the lovely eternal-spring resort of Cuernavaca, just over the mountains from Mexico City. Then shortly before Christmas the royal couple landed on the beach of Contadora Island off Panama. President Carter's press secretary, Hamilton Jordan, who was on good terms with Omar Torrijos, had arrived to consult with the General. Without hesitation, between puffs of his Cohiba cigar, Omar agreed to take in the Shah as a favour to Panama's friend President Carter, who was by now in deep political trouble over the seizing of American hostages in Tehran.

Carter had allowed the Shah to fly to New York for medical reasons, and
Islamic fundamentalist rebels in Iran had reacted by seizing the US embassy and holding its staff of fifty as hostages. The rebels demanded the Shah's return to stand trial in exchange for the hostages' freedom. For the United States the hostage crisis became the drama of 1980 and was to cost Carter his bid for re-election.

Mexico, already angered at the Shah for showing a preference for New York's medical facilities over their own, refused to allow the Shah back into the country, and the Carter administration felt duty-bound to find another haven for the exiled Iranian ruler.

By the time I arrived on Contadora Island to report on the Shah's move there, the pretty young aide whom Omar had designated to act as liaison with the Shah and his party was fed up. She pleaded with me to tell Omar she couldn't stand playing nursemaid to rude royalty. Ideologically, she would have preferred to have been on Via España in Panama City with the scores of students who were demonstrating against the Shah's presence in Panama. (Torrijos's National Guardsmen viciously repressed the anti-Shah demonstrators, several of whom required hospitalization.)

The bungalow belonging to the former Panamanian ambassador to the United States, Gabriel Lewis Galindo, where the Shah and his family were staying. It was hardly big enough for even a petite Peacock Throne, but the Shah and his wife managed. Almost daily they went out to play tennis with some of the chic guests at the new Contadora Hotel, a short drive down the hill from the bungalow. The Shah finally decamped from Panama for Egypt in March 1980.

Graham wrote in a letter dated 17 June 1980:

A tardy good wishes for the anniversary you must have been celebrating last Saturday. How time flies! You must have been very newly married when I first met you and Ginette. I very much look forward to reading your book on the Somozas. A young reporter who came to interview me this year — I think he was Dutch — apparently at one time knew the Somozas and was a friend of Tacho. He told me that Tacho used to read my books! Well, one isn't responsible for one's readers.

About Managua in August. I can't for the moment decide as it all depends on the situation here. Yvonne and [her daughter] Martine are having a good deal of trouble with the ex-husband of Martine who belongs to the Mafia and I don't like leaving them for too long at a time. I have to leave them on July 6 to go to Spain at the invitation of the Mayor of Madrid and afterwards to do my annual trip with my friend Father Duran, and I hope the trip will revive my interest in a comic novel [
Monsignor Quixote
] I began. But let's keep in touch about Managua.

In a letter dated 30 July 1980 Graham wrote, ‘Chuchu has been on the phone and I have told him that I'd go out to Panama some time between 16 and 20 August. Apparently the General wants me to have a look at Nicaragua. It would be great fun if you came too.'

He now stood at the corner window in Suite 921 in the Hotel El Continental and looked out at the vacant lot across the street where a circus was setting up. He was fascinated by the effort of two elephants, tethered to stakes in the ground, swinging their trunks back and forth in desperation, trying to reach what little straw was left in the mud just out of their reach.

‘The poor devils are starved,' he said.

I joined him at the window. Via España, Panama City's main thoroughfare, was filled with traffic. I drew his attention to the buses with their bright, exotic artwork, reminiscent of Haiti.

We had just returned from a gluttonous meal of
bacalao
(dried codfish), preceded by our customary rum punch ordered by Graham as ‘not too sweet and with an extra dash of Meyers's [rum], please'.

Not only did he show sympathy for the hapless elephants, but he saw their predicament as a metaphor for our own. We were virtually shackled to the room, waiting. Graham hated waiting. The past three days had been just that: waiting. But in this case a man's life was at stake, and we had no alternative but to wait. The conversation over lunch had been about family, which was rare for him; he rarely discussed his family.

‘Last year I put my money in a trust for my two children. I might live to ninety, and there is no reason why they shouldn't enjoy it before they get old,' he said.

I had picked up the bill for the rum punches at the Holiday Inn, and because they were made to his instructions the cost for the two drinks came to an incredible $37 — tip not included. Graham offered to pay with the credit card to which he charged all his expenses, but I insisted and put the bill on my
Time
expense account.

‘How generous they are,' Graham said of
Time
and
Life
and told me again of his reporting for
Life
in South-East Asia. It was also the year that
Time
had honoured Graham with a cover story introducing his works to millions of
the magazine's readers. (The fact that Graham had written articles for
Life
in no way influenced the editors of
Time
in their choice of Graham as a cover subject.)
Time
pegged their story to the publication of Graham's latest book,
The End of the Affair,
and pronounced him the writer of the day.

Graham was happy with the article in
Time,
which ended its long and provocative cover piece as follows:

How much fuss will posterity make about Graham Greene? Will it rate him as high as Hemingway or Faulkner? Will he outlast Evelyn Waugh? Will he be mentioned in the same breath as Dostoevsky? Only posterity can answer. But with these three contemporaries, at any rate, Greene can hold up his head. He is as accomplished a craftsman as they, and without the mannerisms with which the two Americans have begun to burlesque their own styles. He has neither the snigger nor the snobbery that are Waugh's trademarks. But when Greene is compared with Dostoevsky, the great shocker of the 19th century, all his books together would not match one
Brothers Karamazov.
That the comparison should even come to mind, however, suggests its inevitability. Graham Greene, like Dostoevsky, is primarily and passionately concerned with Good and Evil. There are not many competitors in that field.

In Panama City on 22 August 1980 the weather was as hot and humid as it always is in the midst of the rainy season. Graham had arrived three days earlier on a KLM flight from Amsterdam. It was his fourth trip to Panama, and this time he was on a mission. He could have been playing the part of a character in one of his books. The year before he had had an operation, and he had become obsessed with the complex marital misfortunes of Yvonne's daughter. It was not Martine's divorce that bothered him but the unjust and corrupt system that, he said, confined her to an area of the Riviera that was literally under the nose of the ‘scoundrel ex-husband' whom he said was terrorizing the family.

Still, he had found time to write another book,
Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party.
He dedicated the book to his daughter, Caroline Bourget, ‘at whose Christmas table at Jongny [Switzerland] this story first came to me'. The idea for the book, he said, came from the gaily wrapped Christmas crackers that produce a small bang and a few goodies when tugged apart.

One night in April 1979, an hour or so after midnight, Graham was awakened from sleep in his Antibes home by the persistent ringing of the telephone. It was Chuchu, wanting to know when Graham was coming to Panama. ‘Graham,' he said, ‘the General is sending someone to meet you.'

A few nights later the envoy from the General arrived in Antibes and
telephoned Graham. When they met the young messenger explained that General Torrijos was concerned about the fate of two English bankers kidnapped by the Salvadorean guerrillas. The rebels holding the two bankers had lost contact with the bankers' home office. Torrijos's messenger brought a mysterious Mexico City telephone number with him to be passed on to the bankers' home office to enable them to re-establish contact with the guerrillas and complete the negotiations for their release. The messenger explained that all they wanted Graham to do was find the home office of the bankers. Graham had never heard of the Bank of London, but his sister Elisabeth managed to track down their head office.

The guerrillas wanted the bank to know that they had modified their demands. Only the ransom remained to be paid.

Graham said that when they finally located the bank, ‘I told the bank people who were suspicious and surprised by my call that I had spent time in Central America and had good contacts there. It was a simple enough task,' he said, brushing off his involvement and ultimately saving the lives of two fellow Britons.

Whenever he told this story Graham said he had half-expected to receive a case of Scotch from the bank for his role in gaining the two bankers' freedom. No such expression of thanks ever arrived. ‘But then again,' Graham added, ‘they probably thought I got my cut from the $5 million ransom money they paid out.'

In January 1980 Graham received another cloak-and-dagger telephone call. He believed the caller was from the South African intelligence service. He introduced himself as Mr Shearer, Pretoria's
chargé d'affaires
in the French capital and explained that South Africa's ambassador to El Salvador, Archibald Gardner Dunn, had been kidnapped by the guerrillas there. No one had been able to establish contact with his captors. Shearer asked Graham for help.

In recounting the incident in
Getting to Know the General,
he wrote, ‘It almost seemed at that moment as though Antibes had become a small island anchored off the coast of Central America and involved in all the problems there.'

As he later told me, he remembered how the Mexico City telephone number had worked for the two kidnapped bankers. But he said he had destroyed it, ‘washed it down the loo'. He suggested Shearer contact an investigator at Lloyd's International who might still have the number. Indeed, the Lloyd's man had the number. He gave it to Shearer, who in turn gave it to Graham, asking him to see what he could do. After talking with his government in Pretoria, Shearer told Graham that no one in the Dunn family was up to the job of negotiating with the guerrillas. The ambassador's wife was dying of cancer in California, and his son, who ran a nightclub in
El Salvador, was not considered a good enough communicator. Dunn's daughter was too young. Graham said he had suggested that someone pretend to be a member of the family and initiate the negotiations.

It took a many attempts with the telephone before Graham got through to Mexico City. The mysterious telephone number was that of Habeas, a centre set up by Gabriel García Márquez. The 52-year-old Colombian writer lived part of the time in Mexico City and had created Habeas (short for habeas corpus) several years earlier to promote human rights and to help save lives whenever possible.

Gabo liked to keep a low profile. He felt the less publicity Habeas got the more effective it could be. From France Graham telephoned García Márquez and asked him for help. Gabo was opposed to political kidnapping, and he did what he could to help the victims in an anonymous way, but he was aghast at Graham's request because the hostage represented the white supremacist pariah state of South Africa.

I visited Gabo at his house in San Ángel in Mexico City, and he reiterated his position. When I told Graham of this he told me to ask Gabo if he had read
The Human Factor.
‘If he has,' Graham said, ‘he will know how I feel about the South African government.'

There were five different Salvadorean guerrilla groups in the field, and establishing contact with the faction holding the ambassador was no small feat. Yet, despite his philosophical distaste for the kidnap victim, Gabo called Graham back a few days later and told him the guerrilla group holding Gardner was the largest rebel faction, the FPL. The guerrillas deemed South Africa to be the devil incarnate; therefore contact with them should be made by the family and not a representative of the South African government. To everyone's surprise, and possibly thanks to a little prodding from General Torrijos, the guerrillas indicated that they would consider a plea from Graham Greene and agreed to meet him to discuss Ambassador Dunn, who at this point had become known as the ‘forgotten hostage'.

Thus six months later Graham went to Panama again and invited me to join him there. He also wrote to Shearer to inform him of his trip and the fact that the guerrillas appeared ready to meet him to discuss the case. Shearer thanked Graham but said that contact had been established and it was best to leave it to ‘people in Washington'. The South African government, Shearer added, had a very clear policy in such cases: no dealing with kidnappers. When Graham later briefed me in Panama I asked whether he thought
The Human Factor
had affected his contact with Shearer and his superiors.