Che Guevara (92 page)

Che was, of course, determined to do something about it. As Ciro Bustos recalled, “When the tension [over the missile crisis] relaxed, we were brought back to Havana and Che told us: ‘You’re leaving. I want you out of here.’ Those were special days. They were still afraid there might be a [U.S.] invasion. There was a very heavy war atmosphere. ... There was also bad blood with the Soviets. ... He was very angry with the Soviets.” They were told to leave the safe house as they had found it, to remove all traces of their presence. Federico Méndez was sent off for a field-radio training course, and Bustos underwent a weeklong intensive course to learn the art of secret codes and cryptology. He was taught a Soviet code system based on ten never-repeated numbers. “It was James Bond–style,” Bustos recalled. “You burned the papers after using the codes.”

Piñeiro’s passport experts gave each man in the group a different nationality. Bustos, who became a Uruguayan, was unhappy when he saw his passport. “It was unbelievable,” he said. “They gave me a really young age and blond hair. I was pretty bald even then, and what hair I did have left was black.” When he complained, the expert reassured him that it was to be used only as far as Czechoslovakia, a friendly country where no questions would be asked.

By now the men knew little more than that they were to continue their training until Cuba’s security apparatus could prepare a safe rearguard base of operations for them on Bolivia’s southern border with Argentina. They also knew that they were to be called the Ejército Guerrillero del Pueblo (People’s Guerrilla Army). They were all were given noms de guerre: Bustos was now Laureano; Masetti was Comandante Segundo. The
comandante primero
, of course, was Che, aka Martín Fierro, who for the moment would remain their invisible guiding hand. The mission itself was called Operación Sombra (Operation Shadow). These were all double entendres. Their pseudonyms and the name of the operation corresponded to the Argentine gaucho archetypes, Martín Fierro and Don Segundo Sombra.

In Prague, the group—Masetti, Hermes Peña, Bustos, Leonardo Werthein, Federico Méndez, Miguel, and Abelardo Colomé Ibarra—was met by Major Jorge “Papito” (Little Daddy) Serguera, who was operating out of the Cuban embassy. He drove them to Lake Slapie, about an hour outside the city. They were booked into an exclusive hotel. It was the dead of winter, and there were no other guests—just them and the hotel staff. By agreement with the Czech intelligence services, they were given a simple cover story to explain their presence. “We were a group of Cuban scholarship students,” said Bustos, “who were going to stay awhile.”

Papito Serguera visited them once or twice, but apart from that, the seven prospective guerrillas were on their own. They had nothing to do, so, to keep fit, they began making cross-country treks through the snow, twelve to fifteen miles in every direction. Finally, growing ever more frustrated as the weeks dragged by, they contacted Serguera at the embassy in Prague to complain. He told them to be patient: the Bolivian farm that was to be their base had not yet been purchased, and more details had to be settled before they could travel. Meanwhile, he told them they were to stop their hiking around. They had apparently been seen wandering into an unauthorized military zone.

Masetti and his men spent another month incommunicado in the hotel at Lake Slapie before Serguera finally allowed them to come to Prague. By now it was December, and the Czechs were becoming increasingly upset over the Cubans’ prolonged presence. Finally Masetti could stand it no longer and announced that he was flying to Algeria to arrange for the group
to go there to complete its training. The Front de Libération National was now the government of an independent Algeria, and the former Algerian revolutionaries owed him a favor. Ahmed Ben Bella, the new Algerian premier, had been in Havana on the eve of the missile crisis, had met with Che and Fidel, and, before leaving, had signed a declaration of revolutionary fraternity with Cuba.

“Masetti flew off to Algiers and came back two days later,” Bustos said. “He told us that Ben Bella and [Houari] Boumédienne [the Algerian minister of defense] had welcomed him at the airport and agreed to help us. We left immediately.” But to fly to Algiers they had to lay over in Paris for several days, and this posed a problem for Bustos, who was still traveling on his blond passport. He solved it by putting peroxide in his scarce hair. “Suddenly my hair was yellow,” he recalled, laughing ruefully. “I looked like a cabaret transvestite.” For three or four days, they stayed in the hotel above the Gare d’Orsay, pretending to be tourists. “We went to the Louvre,” Bustos recalled, “and we walked around a lot.”

They arrived in Algiers on January 4. The Algerians were still engaged in a “cleansing” process like the one that revolutionary Cuba had applied four years earlier to its
chivatos
and war criminals, and FLN gunmen roamed the city hunting down suspected collaborators or ex-torturers. Suspicious Arab civilians looked upon Europeans or foreigners with open hostility. Conscious of the risks faced by Che’s guerrillas in the uncertain climate, Algeria’s revolutionary leaders sent two generals and an entire security retinue to meet them at the airport. They were driven to an isolated seaside villa on the city’s outskirts and left under armed guard for their own protection. After some time, they were moved to a villa with a walled garden in Algiers itself, but because of the danger of being misidentified as French, they rarely went out. Whenever they did, they were surrounded by Algerian security men.

For the next few months, with a permanent retinue of Algerian revolutionary veterans, the Argentine team practiced their marksmanship, did calisthenics, and took military courses. The Algerians took them to see their former front lines, the ingenious cave-and-tunnel system that had been used to hide fighters and weapons during the war, and also the former French lines. Papito Serguera soon arrived, having conveniently been appointed the new Cuban ambassador. In addition to his other duties, he served as the group’s relay for communications with Che.

The Argentines were feted with a banquet, and they reciprocated with a traditional Argentine
asado
attended by Houari Boumédienne. But time was dragging on, and Masetti was anxious to get moving. In answer to his incessant queries, Papito Serguera relayed what Bustos called “strange and contradictory” messages from Havana, supposedly sent by Che. Colomé
Ibarra flew back to Cuba to find out what was going on and returned with some disquieting news. He and Che had gone over the messages the group had received, and Che had identified several that had not originated with him. Since all their communications were channeled through Barbarroja Piñeiro, they speculated about a “malfunction” in his security apparatus. Some, including Bustos, came to suspect there was more to it than that—perhaps even an intentional sabotage of Che’s plans. It would remain a mystery that Bustos, at least, was never able to unravel.
*

In Cuba, two of Che’s bodyguards, Alberto Castellanos and Harry Villegas, who had been sent away to be trained as administrators in the Ministry of Industries, awaited their own marching orders. Many months had gone by and Che had not sent for them. Castellanos had reentered the armed forces and begun a military training course. Arriving home in Havana on a weekend pass in late February 1963, he suddenly received a summons from Che. He assumed that he was going to be punished. “Every time Che sent for you it was to pull your ear about something or other,” he recalled. “I said to myself: ‘Well, what a coincidence! This weekend I didn’t do anything—didn’t even get drunk,’ so I couldn’t imagine what Che wanted to see me about.”

When Castellanos walked into Che’s office, Che reminded him that several months earlier he had said that if Che was involved in a mission, he wanted to be part of it. “When do we go?” Castellanos asked, excitedly. Che told him to hold on a minute and to listen. Reminding Castellanos that he had a wife to consider, Che warned him that the mission was not to be taken lightly. “This mission is either twenty years fighting, or else you don’t come back at all,” he admonished. Che told him to think about it seriously before making up his mind. Castellanos remembered that he stood there and “thought” for a moment or two before asking again, “When do I go?”

“OK,” Che said to Castellanos. “But don’t go getting dressed up as an Indian, because you’re not one, and tell Villegas he can’t go with you because he’s black, and where you’re going there are no blacks.” Che didn’t spell it out any more clearly than that, except to tell Castellanos that he would find some people he knew personally when he arrived at his destination. “You’re going to wait for me with a group of comrades I’m sending,” he said. “You are going to be the boss until I arrive.” He said he intended to join them by the end of the year. Then Castellanos went off
to see Piñeiro for his debriefing, his new clandestine identity, and his travel itinerary.

At about the same time, Tamara Bunke began receiving training in espionage by Piñeiro’s department. “She approached us and asked to be taken into consideration for a mission,” Piñeiro’s deputy, Ariel, said, adding that Cuba’s secret services had checked her out and cleared her for training. They considered her a prime candidate as a future espionage asset in Argentina, “to be activated when the need arose.”

Ariel’s pointed mention of Tamara Bunke’s security clearance is noteworthy because of the enduring mystery surrounding “Tania,” as she later became known. According to East German State Security files, Tamara Bunke was an “IM” (informal informant) for the Stasi, or secret police, before she went to Cuba in 1961. She was also under consideration by its overseas espionage division, the HVA, as a deep-cover agent for insertion first in Argentina, and eventually the United States.

Considering the tightly controlled internal security system of the German Democratic Republic and Tamara’s own Marxist-Leninist upbringing, the fact that she became an informant for East Germany’s secret services is hardly surprising. To inform on her fellow citizens or foreign visitors on behalf of the Communist state she so fervently believed in was a patriotic duty she would have performed—and evidently did perform—without compunction. But who was Tamara working for when she was in Cuba: the Cubans, East German intelligence, or both? Speaking with the habitual opacity of a lifelong revolutionary
cuadro
still living in Cuba, her friend Orlando Borrego said that he had “no doubt that she worked for the German services,” but neither did he have any doubt about her loyalty to the Cuban revolution. Speaking in a vastly altered Moscow nearly three decades after her death, the veteran KGB official Alexandr Alexiev indicated that she had been a German agent seconded to the Cubans for their own use. “The Germans wanted to help,” he explained. “They tried to have a friendship with revolutionary Cuba that was as good as ours, and they wanted to do even more, and for that reason they fulfilled any desire or whim of the Cuban leaders—even more than we did.”

Pressed for additional details, Alexiev insinuated that when it came to assisting Che in his foreign revolutionary ventures, German and Soviet intelligence had an agreement to divide up the work. “The Germans considered themselves to be more ... revolutionarily aggressive than us. They were younger; we were older, had more experience and maturity. And if
we [the KGB] had gotten involved, there would surely have been even more risk of failure. Our services were a big bureaucracy, but the Germans were technically more equipped, the case of Tania being probably the most important.” As for Tamara/Tania herself, Alexiev agreed with Borrego, saying that he had no doubt her loyalties were “with the Cubans, with Fidel, and with Che.” He surmised that Che had “conquered her with his ideas; he was such a convincing and attractive personality.”

Tamara Bunke in a Cuban military uniform and sunglasses in 1961. She assumed the nom de guerre “Tania” in the spring of 1963, when she began receiving espionage training from Barbarroja Piñeiro’s agents.

Another man, an Argentine who worked closely with Che and who also knew Tamara personally, said that his impression was that she “worked for the German services and transferred to work for Che’s intelligence service, that she asked for license to do it. Neither Che nor the Germans would have liked her to be sending reports to two places at the same time. Che wasn’t stupid; he wasn’t going to permit a double loyalty.”

According to the East German files, Tamara Bunke had been recruited as an informant by a counterintelligence official named Gunter Mannel, who was in charge of the United States department of the Stasi’s HVA. A month after her departure for Cuba in 1961, Mannel slipped into West Berlin, defected, and before long was working for the CIA. He soon betrayed the identities of some of his agents, who were arrested in the West, and it might be assumed that he also informed the CIA about Tamara, the gifted and fiercely committed young Communist agent who had just gone to Cuba. Evidently, the HVA made this assumption. Immediately after Mannel’s defection, according to an internal HVA report dated July 23, 1962, Bunke
was sent a letter in Cuba warning her of the danger and requesting that she not attempt to “go to South or North America and that in any case she should consult with us beforehand.”