The Seeds of Fiction (40 page)

After two hours Graham, politely indicating that the meeting had concluded, ushered Marcial and the other guerrilla commanders out of the bedroom. He
showed no sign of being elated. By now he had learned too much about the reality of life in these volatile latitudes to expect charity or kindness for the kidnapped diplomat. These were true revolutionaries who were in a life-and-death struggle. Human life in El Salvador had, it seemed, lost all value.

Once the guerrillas had left the room Graham gave me an account of their meeting. He said he had realized he had few cards to play, but he told the guerrillas he would do what he could to correct any wrong impression in the European media of their struggle — by that he meant with accurate information, not propaganda. He also said the guerrilla commander who spoke English forced him to listen to a long harangue on their efforts to free their small country from feudalism and a repressive military that had been at the service of the landed oligarchy and claimed that armed struggle was the only path to freedom.

There had been problems with unity, but unity had been achieved. Marcial had agreed there was still work to be done to perfect this new consortium, but only with unity and the support of the people could they go forward to victory. They had no doubts that they would win in the end. (Seven months earlier Marcial had removed his own customary hood, which he and his guerrilla commanders had adopted to conceal their identity not only from the government's security forces but from each other. They were ultra-clandestine and believed that their movement's survival depended on absolute secrecy. They had good reason to be paranoid. The end of wearing hoods came only when the guerrillas felt strong enough. The time had come for their leadership to go public.)

When the subject of Dunn came up — Graham said he had to finally broach the subject — South Africa was roundly denounced for its apartheid policy and its racist repression of blacks. Yet Cayetano appeared to understand that mercy in this case might help the guerrillas more than a dead Dunn. However, guerrilla unity also meant that Marcial could not act unilaterally, even if he was favourably disposed to heed Graham's plea for Dunn's life. The other four groups (after August 1980 it became five) had to be consulted and had to agree to allow the agent of the ‘despicable racist country that oppressed the blacks', as the guerrilla who was interpreting put it, to go free.

The old man talked to me before they left. I secured an agreement for an interview for
Time
at some future date. At that point Marcial had not given any interviews to the Western press. ‘I have read your book,
Kidnapping and Hoods,
I told Cayetano, adding that I was aware of his own experiences as a kidnap victim of government agents. They had tortured and held him in a secret prison for a year, during which time they kept him hooded at all times. What bothered me about these guerrillas, however — and I posed the question to Cayetano — was how they could summarily execute suspected enemy spies
in villages and expect to win the support of the people in those villages. The military and the right-wing death squads had committed countless crimes and massacres, but was the guerrilla policy of
ajusticiamiento
(execution) necessary?

Cayetano's response was that those who had been executed were members of the rural militia, Orden, a paramilitary group organized by the government. He spoke in a calm, almost gentle voice, saying that such action had been necessary. ‘But we recently changed that policy,' he added.

‘Did you notice his eyes?' Graham asked me later.

Indeed, I had noted Cayetano's heavy-lidded eyes behind his glasses, but still I thought the man looked like anything but a fanatical guerrilla.

‘His eyes are hard,' Graham mused thoughtfully. ‘I wouldn't like to be his prisoner.'

That evening over dinner — the next day we were going to Nicaragua — Graham now seemed buoyant about Dunn's release. ‘Maybe they would free the ambassador,' Graham said, ‘if they believed they had a need to enhance their image in the world. However, it's not done until it's done.' Once again he was right, only this time tragically so.

I wrote a report for
Time
on the meeting between Graham and the guerrilla leader, but the story was embargoed by all involved, including the editors, until the kidnap victim was released. My editors in New York felt that it was only a story if Graham's intervention helped save the ambassador's life. However, an editor took Graham's description of Marcial's hard eyes out of that story and inserted it in a story I reported the following year on the Salvadorean guerrillas. Graham was livid. He wrote to
Time
and to me. He objected to the quote, and noting that it was taken out of context said it made him sound like a supporter of the Salvadorean governing
junta.
‘The opposite is true,' he protested. ‘I was not criticizing Señor Cayetano, but describing what I believe to be the result of the imprisonment and cruel torture he has suffered.' Indeed my original file to
Time
had observed: ‘A man who has lived most of his life in hiding, hounded by security agents, informers, and spent a year in a secret government jail hooded and tortured would not be expected to have smiling eyes. There is absolutely nothing to smile about in El Salvador. Hard eyes come naturally to the guerrilla fighters. Cayetano's survival, all these years, is an incredible feat and story. His eyes mirror that Calvary.'

The next morning we were waiting again, this time for the General's jet. There was nothing left to do but continue that scheduled August trip to Managua. The Salvadorean guerrilla leaders went back to fighting their bloody war. Marcial, the gentle-appearing old man, was to become, five months later, commander-in-chief of the combined guerrilla forces, the FMLN. We awaited news of his kidnap victim.

Before our guerrilla rendezvous Graham and I were sitting alone on the hotel terrace in Panama. I had invited Reece Smith, my Panama stringer, to join us for lunch at the Balboa American Legion Club in the Panama Canal Zone.

‘Your man Smith,' Graham paused and looked in the direction of the driveway, ‘works for us.'

The white-haired Smith, with his rhubarb complexion and Santa Claus belly, was normally a jolly fellow with a ready sense of humour, but around Graham he was uncharacteristically quiet. I sensed that he felt intimidated, as some people were around Graham.

Smith didn't own a car and was habitually late for meetings, preferring to walk and save the taxi fare. As we waited for him I suddenly realized that by ‘us' Graham didn't mean British newspapers but, instead, Her Majesty's Government. For a journalist to be accused of working for a government was a serious charge.

‘No, definitely not!' The alarm in my voice caused Graham to frown. I noticed a certain reproach in his look, but I found his allegation preposterous. I wondered whether Graham wasn't a bit of a spy-confectioner, having been a British agent himself during the Second World War.

In Panama Chuchu, perhaps because of his Marxist leanings, was quick to label any American as a CIA agent. He had told Graham that a certain American author and teacher living in Panama was a CIA operative. I had warned Graham not to take Chuchu's accusations seriously. That particular American, I advised Graham, had written a respectable novel set in Panama that he would enjoy reading. He was also stringing for my competition.

Graham laughed when I suggested that Flor, the barmaid at the Señorial bar, was probably working for Panama's G2, the country's intelligence arm, then under the control of Colonel Manuel Noriega. Still, if Graham's remark about Reece Smith was correct, I would have to fire him. During the Cold War days foreign correspondents for US publications were permitted informal contacts with CIA station chiefs in order to glean information, but such contacts were severely curbed after a US Senate Select Committee, led by Senator Frank Church, revealed in 1976 that fifty American newsmen had at different times been on the CIA's payroll. Others had been ‘unwitting sources'.
That year I had forwarded a directive from the chief of correspondents of the Time-Life News Service in New York to all my part-time correspondents in Central America and the Caribbean, reminding them that they could not work for
Time
if they had any kind of inappropriate relationship with any intelligence agency. As we waited, Graham opened a wide-ranging discussion on espionage, a subject that he thoroughly enjoyed and which led to his discussing his former MI6 boss, Harold Adrian Russell ‘Kim' Philby (who had worked as a reporter as well as for the Soviet Union), who, as Graham put it, ‘had taken great risks for what he believed in'. Graham described how he himself had left MI6 near the end of the war, before the Normandy landings. He admitted he was not cut out for the job, and on arrival at his post in Africa during the war he had accidentally locked his codebook as well as the key in the safe. It was on the whole, he said, a ‘bloody boring business'.

‘Why did you quit?' I asked.

Graham explained he felt he was wasting his time shuffling paper in London, so when Kim let him know that he wanted to promote him he became angry and felt he was being used as there was another agent far better suited that he was. Graham conceded that today's world was a good deal different from the old days and told me how he had contrived to have a little fun, even during his wartime post in Africa, by devising funny lines in his coded messages. His superiors were not amused. His project, he said, to use a pro-Gaullist madame to organize a brothel in Portuguese Bissau to glean information from Vichy French visitors was foolishly rejected by London. It wasn't an original idea, he added, because the combination of the oldest profession being used by the second oldest was as venerable as espionage itself. He had likewise got into hot water by poking fun at MI6 in
Our Man in Havana.
The book revealed how he felt about the service.

I ventured the observation that Panama City was of little interest to the British. Graham listened patiently as I argued that London could not possibly have any interest in maintaining a presence or wasting money on what was strictly US intelligence turf. Besides the Central Intelligence Agency, in Panama the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and National Security Agency (NSA) were operating, along with the US Army Southern Command's intelligence unit. (The highly sensitive NSA operation in Panama was later given unwelcome publicity by General Alexander Haig who revealed during the Falklands War that Washington was providing its ally, Great Britain, with secret satellite information — information that reportedly led to the sinking of the Argentine battleship
GeneralBelgrano
in 1982.)

As in Mexico, in Panama the CIA was known to spend most of its time, energies and money targeting the pro-Castro Cubans who were present in both countries. Cuba's spy chief, Comandante (Major) Manuel Piñeiro Losada,
nicknamed Barba Roja for his red beard, was the CIA's main headache in Panama. ‘Red Beard' was coordinator of Cuban activities in the western hemisphere, and agents of his ‘Americas Department' were said to use Panama as their springboard to Central and South America. Everyone visiting the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City was secretly photographed by the CIA from a building across the street, and it was assumed that the same held true in Panama. To enliven the CIA's photo archives we newsmen would make faces, scowl or pose on entering or leaving the Cuban Embassy's consular section in Mexico City when applying for a visa to Havana.

When I first met Piñeiro on 3 January 1959 in Santiago de Cuba, where he had taken command two days after Castro's revolutionary victory, his beard was long and flaming red. Just ten years later it was grey. When, still later, Graham eventually met him in Havana his beard was white. Such presumably were the pressures of revolutionary spying! He had ended decades of intelligence gathering and retired to his home in Havana. Graham was to marvel that such a high-ranking spy did not know the difference between MI5 (Britain's internal security organization, overseeing counter-espionage on British territory) and MI6, its international spying service.

There were, however, other agents representing other interests. They included the Israelis, who were in the arms business and who also kept a close eye on the Libyans and the Palestine Liberation Organization, both of whom had offices in Panama. Mike Harari, a former officer in Israel's spy agency Mossad, had built up a special relationship with the Panamanians, but the few times we spotted him we were not introduced. In those years Noriega was equally stand-offish. On the rare occasions when Graham and I sighted him Omar would simply say, ‘You know Tony? Everyone knows Tony', and would not bother to introduce us. The Soviet Union's KGB, according to Torrijos, had only one agent responsible for local operations, and he was a non-resident living in Mexico City, a Russian journalist. A high-ranking Russian official had presented Omar with a fine samovar, saying it was a present from then Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev. Omar had no use for tea.

The only British agents that my news colleagues and I believed were present in the area were one covering Central America (notably Guatemala) out of Mexico City and a young man attached to the political section of the British High Commission's office in Kingston, Jamaica, whom we used to encounter around the Caribbean. We assumed he was the lone MI6 or MI5 agent covering the British Caribbean and former territories. His main reporting chore appeared to be Belize, formerly British Honduras, where British troops were still stationed to ward off any invasion from Guatemala, which had long had claims on Belizean territory.

London's Embassy in Panama City was located in an elegant ancient
residence near the American Embassy on Avenida Bolívar. Time seemed to have passed it by. At one time, in the distant past, the British Embassy had had to provide consular services for the thousands of British West Indian subjects, mostly Jamaican, who worked on the Panama Canal. But as Jamaica and other British Caribbean territories became independent their citizens in Panama were no longer the Embassy's responsibility. Beginning in the late 1950s, Britain's most illustrious resident subject, who provided the Embassy with the most excitement, was Dame Margot Fonteyn, one of the world's great ballerinas and a one-time acquaintance of Graham. In 1955 she had married Roberto E. Arias, a Panamanian politician, lawyer, editor (of
El Panamá América)
and diplomat, while he was Ambassador to the Court of St James in London. Arias, who was nicknamed Tito, was the son of Harmodio Arias, a businessman of humble birth who was President of Panama from 1932 to 1936. Tito had first seen Dame Margot dance in 1937 when he was an eighteen-year-old student at St John's College, Cambridge.