Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  Do I speak of such meetings abstractly? Be assured—I was not without my private awe at the unpredictability of our Cuban friends. Some were as mustachioed as pirates, others as bald as well-seasoned politicians, but one of my tasks was to chauffeur them out to whichever posh safe house had been chosen by Hunt in Key Biscayne, Coconut Grove, or Coral Gables for the political meet. Later, I would bring them back to rooms almost as mean as my own and would wonder at the logic of transporting them to an elegant if temporary milieu.

  Hunt continued to be my guide on such matters. “If we were to keep them in top-drawer accommodations, their arrogance would be unholy in a week. You have to get a grasp on Cuban mentality,” he said. “They are not like Mexicans, and they are certainly not comparable to Uruguayans. They are not in the least bit like us. If an American gets depressed enough to think of committing suicide, well, he just might, but if a Cuban thinks of packing it in, he tells his friends, has a party, gets drunk, and kills someone else. They’re even treacherous about their own suicide. I attribute it to the tropics. The jungle excites hysteria. A beautiful jungle trail allows you to step on a scorpion. A caterpillar can drop on you from a leaf tree overhead and sting you half-unconscious. Cubans act macho in order to keep down that hysteria. Our task is to punch into all their emotional lack of balance, and I’ll tell you, boy, it can be done. That’s exactly what we did to Arbenz in Guatemala.”

  He had told me the story in Montevideo, but I was to hear it again. “Harry, we had only three hundred men, three patched-up planes, and”—he held up a finger—“one radio transmitter working out of the Honduras side of the border, but we kept sending out messages to imaginary troops using a code so simple that we knew Arbenz and his people would be able to crack it. Before long, we had them reacting to our fake messages. We’d mention military units loyal to Arbenz, and talk in code about how they were plotting to defect. Within a week, Arbenz was keeping his battalions locked up in their barracks. He thought they’d march straight over to us. We kept increasing the size of our army, too. ‘Can’t dispatch two thousand men right now, but will manage twelve hundred today. Tomorrow we can send you the rest.’ It was all calculated to sow maximum hysteria in the other side. Arbenz quit Guatemala before the three hundred men we did have could even march into Guatemala City, and all the commies broke for the hills. One of our most masterful jobs.

  “Now, we are going to hit Castro with so many reports of multiple landings that he won’t know which tip of Cuba we’re aiming at.”

  “May I serve as devil’s advocate?”

  “That’s one reason you’re here.”

  “Castro,” I said, “knows all about Guatemala by now. Che Guevara was one of the people working in Arbenz’s government.”

  “Yes,” said Hunt, “but Guevara is only one voice among many. Our built-in advantage is that Cubans are without equal in the energy they devote to rumor-mongering. That little vice is going to be used by us. Right now, right here in Miami, with more than a hundred thousand of them already defected from Castro, we are going to flood their rumor mill with misleading information which will end up on Fidel’s desk. Since we are positioned in the very center of that hive of rumors, we can push Castro in any direction.”

  “Can’t we be as easily misled by the disinformation Castro sends back?”

  Hunt shrugged. “Call it a battle of disinformation. I’ll take our people over his. We are less hysterical, after all.”

  Hunt had been a novelist, I kept reminding myself, before he became a Company man. I could sense a romantic fellow who might be even more of a wild goose than me. Since he could also be as close as a straight-edge at keeping to the Company book, he kept me aware of the separate manifestations of Alpha and Omega, and that was an insight I could do without. Alpha and Omega inundated me with thoughts of Kittredge. A little later that day, forced off the road by a caterwaul of rain, I sat on the shoulder, motor turned off, my head on the wheel, and—to my horror—came close to weeping. Just so suddenly had I been overcome by whole longing for her. It was often like that. In the turn of a mood I would be desolate at the whole absence of Kittredge’s presence. I suffered abominably from the frustration of not being able to write to her, and kept writing letters in my mind. Tonight, before I went to sleep, I might compose another. But for now, the rain having ended, I started my car and sped down the highway again along interstates pale as ivory in the sun. I even had the luck to see a white egret standing on one leg in a dark swamp to the side of the road.

  4

  THAT NIGHT, I ACTUALLY WENT SO FAR AS TO WRITE OUT A LETTER BY hand. The act involved a most curious suspension of disbelief, for I knew I would not mail it.

  Miami

  June 15, 1960

  Dear Kittredge,

  How can I explain what I’m doing these days? I have so many small jobs and so little precedent to guide me. At worst, I am a flunky to Howard Hunt and pursue his whims; at best, I am Roberto Charles, aidede-camp to the legendary Eduardo, who is Political Action Officer for the oncoming Cuba op and is commuting many a day between Miami, New York, and Washington while I am left to protect our cover story, which is that Eduardo is an important steel executive fighting Communism in the Caribbean and has been asked to do this work by people with the highest political connections. Of course, this hardly deceives our Cubans, but it does fire them up. They want the Company to be in on this.

  All the same, Howard can be guilty of awfully capricious impulses. For instance, he wanted me to use Robert Jordan as a cover name. “Some of the Cubans,” I told him, “may have read For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

  “Never,” said Hunt, “not our guys.”

  We settled on Robert Charles. Pocket litter, credit cards, and a banking account followed quickly. Our Miami office has all the capability needed to deliver such stuff, so I now have certificational backing as Robert Charles. El joven Roberto, the Cubans are starting to call me, I fear.

  As for work habitat, we keep our desks at Zenith Radio Technology and Electronics, Inc., in Coral Gables just south of the South Campus of University of Miami. After being so long in Montevideo, I cannot tell you how odd it feels not to pick up my occupational cover from the American Embassy. But now I’m a sales representative for Zenith, our capacious operations headquarters—Zenith! From the exterior, it looks like what it used to be, a long, low office building with adjoining sheds for light manufacturing. Inside, however, it’s been converted entirely for our use. We can even justify the wire fence and high security level at the gates since we, of Zenith, are working on government contracts.

  Inside the building, more than a hundred of us have been installed already. By the ratio of desk space to square feet, we’ve even out-crowded I-J-K-L, although our air conditioning, at least, works—it damn well better; we’re in Miami! And we have even hung up bogus production charts and award plaques in the lobby.

  Behind such front, we are enclaved up to the nose; I couldn’t begin to know what most of the other personnel are up to, but then the majority of my activities take place away from the office. I spend a lot of my time with Eduardo’s Cuban exiles, and two days a week are spent receiving new Cubans for our project. Every exile in Miami seems to know by now that training bases are being set up in Central America, so Tuesday morning finds me at one of our storefronts downtown, while on Friday I drive up to Opa-Locka; in both places, I monitor interviews with recently arrived and long-term Cuban exiles who want to join the strike force. My Cuban assistant conducts the conversation in such rapid Spanish that usually I must ask what took place. It’s absurd. The secret—absolutely no secret—is that the Agency is behind all of this. Despite our fiction that the expenses are being underwritten by individual wealthy citizens of the generous-hearted U.S.A., an eight-year-old could spot the Company hand. I suspect the prevailing wisdom up at Quarters Eye is that after Castro falls to the exile movement, the Russians will scream that we masterminded it, and we will ask them to prove it.

  At any rate, ea
ch time a story breaks in the Miami Herald about more Russian presence in Castro country, we are besieged. What these Cubans are signing up for, of course, is left very much open. They do not know if they will become part of an invasion army, or will be dropped back in Cuba to become guerrillas in the hills. I am on the lookout for candidates who can serve in either capacity. I not only sit in on the interviews, but study the questionnaires and make the first cut. In addition to rejecting the men whose stories don’t add up, we do tend to trust Cubans who come from Catholic Action student groups more than solitary Cubans who just walk in. Indeed, the first of my tasks is to check out the applicant’s local references; nearly all of our volunteers must be able to show traceable roots in their local communities, and we have a genealogical computer at Zenith to check them out. It’s not a job of any great strain. Any fellow who passes through me and our computer still gets fluttered before being dispatched to Fort Myers for early training.

  I do, however, study the faces that pass. So many are both dignified and corrupt—a most unlikely mixture of attributes. I confess that there is some personal quality I cannot define about dark skin, some compound of pride and license. These Cubans are so different from myself, so alert to their honor, yet ready to indulge themselves in personal peccadillos that would leave me morally congested. I have also noticed that they are as proud of their names as a vain beauty is of her face. While there is an occasional José López or Luis Gómez, a Juan Martínez and a Rico Santos, such commonplace monikers are overwhelmed by our truly orchidacean samples: Cosmé Mujal; Lucilo Torriente; Armengol Escalante; Homoboro Hevía-Balmeseda; Innocente Conchoso; Angel Fejardo-Mendiéta; Germán Galíndez-Migoya; Eufemio Pons; Aurelio Cobían-Roig.

  Well, my dear, you get the idea. Many look like Quixote; a few like Panza. There are lawyers with starched collars and mustaches twirled to points at the tip. Some are so dandified they could step out of Proust, young, dangerous señoritos, others so menacing, so full of gangsterismo, that a state trooper would impound their jalopy on sight. They all come through—young students still pocked with acne, pale and petrified by the honest if terrifying choice they have made to endanger their lives, and there are old parties, fat in the gut, looking nonetheless to recover something of their youth. Physical weaklings pass before me bright with fever, cowards pushed forward by the scorn of peers. Three or four drunks usually show up, and one or two professional soldiers who remained with Batista to the very end and therefore cannot be selected. In they march—enthusiastic and/or paranoid, some brave, some timid, but all christened with a flourish: Sandalio Auribal Santisteban and Aracelio Portela-Almagro, Alejo Augusto Meruelos, Reinaldo Balan. Fireworks must have gone up in all the middle-class skies above their cribs.

  Naturally, my work takes a few practical factors into account. I’ve been obliged to give some study to the five political parties that Hunt and I work with—the Christian Democratic Movement (MDC), the AAA, the Monti-Cristi, Rescat, and the Revolutionary Recovery Movement (MRR).

  Are you disinclined to know the differences? Leave it that these groups, in varying degree, see themselves either as liberal capitalists or social democrats. Like Castro, they also hate Batista. Ergo, our cover story, to the degree that it is believed, only succeeds in arousing the suspicion that Hunt and his wealthy Americans are trying to put Batista back in power. Unholy accusations do fly. I can hardly believe Cuban displays of temperament. These, after all, are supposed to be leaders! They head up the five exile groups—the Frente Revolucionario Democrático—which is the Front, that Washington chose as a somewhat left-of-center coalition selected precisely not to alienate all that large part of Latin America that leans to the Marxist side of the street. On the other hand, they are also considered close enough to the center to keep Eisenhower, Nixon, and Company from becoming too miserable. As I must repeat, politics is not my strong suit, nor is it, I would assume, very much yours, but I’ve come to realize that a lot of our foreign policy is built these days on trying to undo the old Joe McCarthy image. We have to convince the rest of the world that we are more progressive than the Russians. This puts us in a paradoxical situation down here: Hunt is, if anything, more conservative than Richard Nixon, and wouldn’t mind replacing our guys with a right-wing group more congenial to him. Yet this is the team he has been given to work with, and to the degree they do well, his Agency standing will prosper.

  No routine task. I am perpetually amazed at how small a country we are dealing with. Cuba may be eight hundred miles long, but everyone here seems to have lived in the same quarter of Havana. These men have not only been associated with each other for years, but claim to have known Castro personally. It is not impossible, then, that one or more of them could be his agent. Even if they are trustworthy, they get along about as well as a highly charged Latin family, full of murderous dissension. Our five Frente leaders have been at serious political odds with one another over the last thirty years, thereby leaving Hunt in the unenviable position of striving to move them forward as a team while keeping them apart.

  Such are our elevated cohorts. One is a former President of the Cuban Senate (before Batista abolished it); another was Foreign Minister under President Carlos Prio Socarras; a third used to be President of the Bank for Industrial Development, yet they do not impress me as being all that distinguished. Indeed, it is sometimes hard to believe they held such serious positions in government.

  At this point, I considered signing off. Since I would never mail this letter, I was feeling as sad as a man dancing alone on an empty floor.

  Kittredge, just now I tried to go to bed, but it proved impossible. I think I have to confess the loneliness of my present condition. I am living in motel poverty and it is absurd—what I spend here for rent could provide me with a small furnished apartment in a modest outlying neighborhood, yet I resist such a choice even as I have resisted every small invitation from colleagues at Zenith. I have no social life, and that is my fault. I just do not care to make the solemn effort to be agreeable. In Uruguay, it was easier. One’s social life used to be all too comfortably folded into the round of Embassy parties. Here, however, with Agency personnel coming into Miami from every Station on the globe, and not an embassy in sight, we are more like a boomtown. With one notable exception. Everyone comes to Zenith in the morning, then scatters out at night to whatever Florida housing matches one’s paycheck. So I have two choices—I can hobnob with married couples, or get drunk every night with bachelor officers like myself. I want neither. The married couples, will, of course, have the wife’s girlfriend waiting for me, and/or the children’s plastic bicycle upended in the front yard; the bachelor officers give me pause. All too many down here are reminiscent of the paramilitaries at the Farm—drinking with them could prove more of a task than any work I might encounter in the day.

  Of course, there is always Howard Hunt. He and Dorothy did become a large part of my evening life in Uruguay. But now, Dorothy remains in Montevideo until the children’s school term is over, and Hunt commutes between Washington and Miami. I see him about once a week for dinner, and he invariably gives me another lecture on marriage. He no longer seems quite as central to my life. Under this hot Florida sky with its oleander and bougainvillea nights, its redolence of passion flowers on residential streets, I feel as if I am waiting for—it may be the most hopeless word of them all, Kittredge, but it does apply—I am waiting for romance, that good American wine distilled, I know, from the essence of many a cheap thrill out of many a movie forgotten.

  Here I did stop writing, and went to sleep. In the morning, I awoke with the bleak recognition that it was not possible to safeguard a letter like this in my motor court and so I had to stop at my safe deposit box to cache this unmailed item there.

  At Zenith, later in the day, as if the labor of writing my letter had produced its own small work of magic, I received an open call from Harlot. He wanted to talk to me. Could I find some excuse to run up to Washington? I could, I said. Howard had been talking abo
ut sending me up.

  “When earliest?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “See you for lunch. One o’clock. Harvey’s Restaurant.” The phone clicked in my ear.

  5

  “I’M SURPRISED,” SAID HUGH MONTAGUE, “THAT HOWARD HUNT PERMITTED you to visit Washington in his stead. He so looks forward to popping in.”

  “Well, my mission doesn’t appeal to him,” I answered. “I’m here to scrounge up some welfare for the Frente. It takes time, and you don’t get much in the way of results.”

  “‘Guns, not butter,’ I can hear our people say. How much do you need?”

  “Ten thousand might be good for Frente morale. It’ll enable our leaders to take care of a few of their needy.”

  “Piss on Frente morale. I merely look forward to confounding Howard with your fund-raising abilities. If he keeps sending you up to get more, you and I can restore our somewhat rusted links.”

  He had been just this affable through drinks and the entree. We did not speak of Kittredge, nor of son Christopher, but otherwise it was as if we had been seeing each other often.

  “Yes,” he said, “I’ll get you the money.”

  I did not have to ask how. It was accepted rumor that Allen Dulles put away pots of funds in the nooks and floorboards of every branch, division, and directorate. Harlot, I was certain, kept the maps.

  “It’s nice to visit a man who only has to make one phone call,” I remarked, but the air went dead on my flattery.

  “Why did you sign up for this Cuban business?” he asked.

  “I believe in it,” I answered. My voice, unhappily, was dogged in my ears. “It could be a most direct way of fighting Communism.”

  He snorted. “Our purpose is to undermine Communism, not to martyr it. We don’t have to fight them. I’m aghast. Have you learned nothing from me?”