by Ciro Bustos
From that moment, my brain worked non-stop for the next two months. The colic turned into fully fledged diarrhoea and I kept asking to go to the privy. I had invented a way to hide the dollars and everything depended on the time I was able to spend alone with Che’s jacket. Where the collar met the synthetic wool padding of the back – where the label usually is – I made a hole by ripping the seam about three centimetres. I inserted the rolled up notes and worked them down between the lining and the fake leather to the bottom hem. It was not easy because the rolls got stuck and I only had a few minutes for each visit, during which I had to make all sorts of onomatopoeias and appropriate sounds. Two thousand dollars, in twenty- and fifty-dollar notes, means innumerable little rolls that refuse to pass inadvertently. I had to spread them out along the hem which, fortunately, did not have any seams. It took me most of the night and several visits to the toilet to complete the task.
The next morning, I dozed on the bench in the corridor until the guard changed and new more excitable military behaviour made life harder. They did, however, offer me a coffee. The helicopter arrived at about nine. They tied my arms and led me to the waiting machine.
The transfer technique was self-explanatory since the helicopter had only two seats with a narrow space behind where I was put, on the floor tied to one of the supports. As well as the pilot, there was a guy from the Criminal Investigation Department who pointed a gun at me. The machine made an infernal racket as it took off. It was like travelling in a noise bubble pulled from above. I was twisting my neck to see the scenery below when we entered a dense totally impenetrable white mist, and my interest turned to panic. Nerves also affected the crew, rightly so, and they forgot about me. We flew blindly for a few minutes when, suddenly, the pilot pulled back on the controls. The layer of cloud lifted and five metres (or ten at most) in front of the helicopter was a wall of rock, a mountainside we would have crashed into had it not been for the pilot’s instinctive reaction. The helicopter turned its tip and, instead of stamping us on the rock like hieroglyphics, flew away like those suicidal folk who hurl themselves into the abyss tied to an elastic rope. Coming out of the white carpet, I saw the contour of a hill disappearing into the jungle. We would never have made it that far.
We landed in a clearing used as a football pitch. They took me unceremoniously from the helicopter, like a pig tied to a rope, and led me to some nearby huts. It was a barracks: Choreti, on the outskirts of Camiri. I was handed over like a parcel to some officers in campaign uniform who already had my documents, doubtless brought on the first flight. ‘You! What’s your name?’ shouted one of them. The performance was about to commence.
During my training courses in Havana, we touched on counter-interrogation techniques. The officer with whom I did the intelligence course repeated over and over again: ‘Deny everything!’ ‘Don’t stray from the memorized text and deny everything that doesn’t fit it, even when it’s obvious.’ ‘You know nothing. We don’t know you.’ Of course, it is one thing to be taught on a course, and quite another to know what will later be required politically. I knew that I had to play my role myself, and I could not expect anything from anybody to make it sound convincing.
The idea, broadly speaking, was this: I, under the name of Carlos Alberto Frutos, was a volunteer member of a committee set up to defend political prisoners of meagre means in the provinces. I was an engineer by profession, and I helped the committee by writing articles on the subject for limited circulation journals. This was why, or so I thought, I had been contacted by a Peruvian, Bolivian or Central American woman called Edma or Elma, and invited to a meeting on the rights of political prisoners in countries ruled by dictatorships where human rights abuse was rife and undeniable – apparently there was money for expenses, flights included. I had agreed to participate as an independent journalist and we were to meet in La Paz at the end of February. I was then told the meeting would be in the interior, and I had to travel to Sucre; a French journalist, Debray, an international observer, was on the same bus and that to me that gave the whole thing credibility. In Sucre we learned our journey was not over and we ended up in a guerrilla camp, disguised as a farm, where the first thing I did was to complain about the deceitful method used to bring me there – in other words, I had been led to believe I was attending a semi-clandestine but legal meeting, not an armed conference. I demanded to leave immediately but events had overtaken me; both Debray and I had only been in contact with a small group of guerrillas in charge of supplies. I wanted a lawyer to defend me.
The defeats the army had suffered made the officers in charge of the interrogation angry and bitter. Their tone was persistently violent, and their threatening behaviour suggested the outcome had already been decided. That same day, 21 April, Che wrote in his diary of ‘… the news on the radio of the death of three mercenaries, a Frenchman, an Englishman and an Argentine. There must be a response to this disinformation campaign so we can teach them a lesson.’ The officers talked of Che and Cubans leading a ‘foreign invasion’. ‘Your accomplices have already confessed’, they said, ‘don’t waste our time’. The tactic followed the manuals: set us against each other, get us to accuse each other. I had to stick to what we had agreed and deny everything.
Meanwhile, there was another strip-tease session. As I was getting dressed again, the officer going through my clothes picked up the jacket from the floor and emptied the pockets. Then he went on to check the sleeves, lapel and seams. As he ran his fingers downwards pressing the edges, I sensed catastrophe. He started on the bottom hem, squeezing it with his fingers, until he came across something strange. Scrutinizing the lining, he eventually found the hole. Using his fingers as pincers, he dug down to the bottom of the jacket and found something. Widening the hole to get his entire hand in, he began fishing out rolled-up dollar bills, like a magician taking rabbits out of a hat. The shouting that broke out was confusing: I could not tell if they were cries of indignation or joy. Two thousand dollars could be spread around quite nicely; the cantina would soak up the 5,000 pesos. (It has to be said in passing that Pombo had counted wrong: there were 1,980 dollars, twenty short.)
They ordered me to be handcuffed and a captain, or perhaps a sergeant, a big black guy, put my hands behind my back and tightened the steel handcuffs as far as they would go, to the sound of a cricket announcing bad weather. I was practically dragged over the entrance to the barracks where I was locked in a shed full of debris and rubbish; it had even been used as a shit house. They threw my jacket and bag in after me, in an effort to respect my property. The window had been boarded up with wooden planks separated by millimetres and nailed from the inside. The door, also of wood, was locked and secured with chains. The flies buzzing above the shit provided the mood music. Standing in a space two metres by two metres, I reflected that they had not given me time to pee, something I had wanted to do all morning; and now that I was finally in the appropriate place, I could not do it.
35
The CIA Takes Charge
I could not see my arms but the pain became proof they existed. It began to span the whole of my back, especially my shoulders and neck. My hands, it seemed, had swollen and each pore pricked from inside with a permanent neuralgia that sent spasmodic electric shocks not only along my arms but in a straight line down my body. I felt it pass through my buttock, my calf and die at the bottom of my foot, or negotiate my ribs upwards, and dig into my neck, behind my ear. My hands had gone to sleep, and the pain came from my wrists where the steel handcuffs were tightest. They were the sort that got tighter the more you moved, an error I could not commit because there was no margin for it. Buried deep in my flesh, they became so completely fused with it that the steel ring emitted pain like an external bone tumour, and throbbed through each link of the chain between the hands.
Between muscle cramp and stomach cramp, I saw the dawn break through the gap in the door. The barracks sprang to life, soldiers lined up in some kind of uneven and unwilling order, only to lat
er disappear, and I imagined them having breakfast of heaven knows what. I made a few futile attempts to get the attention of each new guard. At midday, twenty-four hours after being incarcerated, they came for me.
During the morning there had been some movement of vehicles and men, and I had seen tables and chairs being set up in the garden opposite. And that is where I was taken, handcuffed and wet as I was. There were no introductions, of course, but among the group of soldiers waiting, were two civilians who appeared to be in charge. The tallest, an authoritarian Bolivian whom I came to know as Major Quintanilla, had organized my first interrogation session, but the professional asking the questions was the other one, a Dr González, who as soon as he opened his mouth proved to be Cuban, the other kind of course, in the pay of the CIA. His technique was completely different from the terse Bolivian, and he demonstrated it straight away by asking the major to unlock my handcuffs. A sergeant brought the key and fiddled with the lock until my liberated arms hung by their own weight. I could not move them, not even to look at my hands.
Dr González, a pale-skinned man with a high forehead and black hair, the collar of his white shirt over his jacket in tropical sporty style, adopted a paternalistic stance: ‘No, not like that, major, that’s not how we do things. Just look at this!’ And raising my hands, he demonstrated what ‘this’ was: two pieces of swollen meat as big as feet, sliced by bloody purple furrows where my wrists should be, and fingers like sausages. Still protesting, he began massaging my arms, from fingers to shoulders. He asked for ice, there was none, alcohol, none either, and continued for a good half hour until he restored my circulation and I could feel my fingers. After making me drink a jug of water, which he held for me like a Good Samaritan, in a strange tense atmosphere that I could not call totally farcical, they sat down at the other side of the table, took out papers, documents, notebooks and a tape recorder.
There are two elementary interrogation techniques, based on contrasting principles: the use of violence to get information while the subject clings to life; and the intelligent use of facts to confront the subject and push him into a corner until his defence collapses. They both start from identifying the prisoner’s personality and behaviour in any particular circumstance. But, while the former is a dead end, because the prisoner’s death is also a failure, the latter works on the simple logic that the accumulation of contrasting information leads to success. Information can be exaggerated and/or false, but using it and following the thread can get to the truth. In a nutshell, the technique has to demonstrate the futility of denying known facts and the advantages of collaboration – an end to the pressure, restoration of identity, final respite, including prison or death. It was the way of the KGB school, whereby the victims thanked the party for allowing them a glorious death by firing squad.
But like any theory, this technique can be turned on its head and have unexpected consequences. The professional interrogator starts from what he knows, he is not operating in a vacuum. If the prisoner has principles or reasons that motivate him, he finds out more than he tells, and rations what he says in order to maintain a secret balance in his favour. One big lie is made up of innumerable small truths that end up creating a splendid illusion, like a jigsaw. I don’t pretend that I had mastered the technique in those days. But when I read real professionals later on, I was convinced that the fixed idea I had of omitting everything to do with Argentina and insisting on contacting my own lawyer was instinctively the right thing to do.
The picture I painted of myself was not at all flattering, or even relevant, but it was very effective. You only have to compare my final statements to the interrogators with the story told in this book of the real role I had played. However, I base my success on two things: one, my total denial of any link with the events in question and hence my repudiation of them – following the advice of my Cuban military intelligence instructors – and two, the amount of knowledge Dr González had was evident in the way he channelled the interrogation in certain directions, his accuracy and precision, the names he introduced, and the gaps he left. It was like driving a car with two steering wheels. One was mine, a secret one, and I gave it an inadvertent twist whenever I could.
Some things were undeniably true. I was arrested after the first three battles, the bloodiest defeats the army suffered at the hands of the guerrillas. From then on, all I could hide was my past, not the existence of the guerrillas. The army already knew where, when and how to fight them. I could only accept or deny what was more or less known, and use that knowledge. If, for example, the question was about the number of Cubans, it was because their presence was worth knowing about, and any Argentine presence was not. If they name Antonio and Arturo, it is because they already know their names; they cannot invent them off the top of their heads. I can delay my recognition, accumulate shared facts and release them when some route is blocked, knowing that it will not be news or do anyone any harm. The questions also helped in the sense that they provided information about what was happening. If details came out that they could not have known about, they must have come from another source.
So, there were signs of other detainees, although they were not confirmed until much later. (Loro, Jorge Vázquez Viaña, had been arrested on 22 April. My real identity was safe, because apart from Che and some of the Cubans, only Loro knew, and he did not reveal it.) My initial aim was to gain time with my false identity – Carlos Alberto Frutos, civil engineer – in the hope that Manuel in Buenos Aires would raise the alarm among our compañeros in the three or four cities most involved in the EGP, and that would give them time to put in place the necessary safety measures. You can never know where an interrogation that starts with a massage will end, but the assumption that we were dead ducks hovered over us like the trump card in a poker (or truco) game.
In the first session, I merely identified the person in the passport and reiterated the story I gave when arrested in Muyupampa. But it gave me a clear idea of how to weave threads into a fabric: I did not know Frutos and his family circle so I had to invent everything and, more importantly, I had to remember what I invented, because a basic knowledge of police techniques shows the interrogator may suddenly return to previous questions looking for inconsistencies. The first round of invented names I got from conjuring up groups of old friends, lost in time but not in my heart. This gave me a certain flexibility and the chance to create the organogram: parents, children, brothers, relatives, friends, family anecdotes; it was a particular social milieu and space/time framework that was easy to remember.
My main worry was how quickly I would be identified. In Argentina, all six-year-olds get a cédula, a police ID. It is based on Civil Registry records and the fingerprints of both hands, and is kept in the police archives. It was not until the second or third week that they began this process.
I was also worried about hiding a very hot potato indeed. In the years following the consolidation of power by the Cuban revolutionary government, the primary aim of US intelligence in Latin America was to undermine that power and destroy the example set by the Cuban model. Naturally they were anxious to capture informers who had come out of the Cuban programme to export the Revolution across Latin America. Every so often some bureaucrat or other took the plunge and fell into their net, but they were usually tram salesmen looking for a way into exile or counter-intelligence agents persuaded to get into bed with the US. In me they had a first-hand source that was potentially an unimaginable diplomatic and military propaganda coup, a real complication for the Cubans, and worse still, it implicated other countries. But they did not know it, nor could they imagine it. I, on the other hand, did know: it was a time bomb I had to swallow even if it exploded inside me, or in the best of cases, would take so long to digest that it would ruin my life anyway. The alternative was to make them kill me. But I did not want to die. So I sacrificed my vanity, and passed myself off as a first-class imbecile, consistent and believable.
The boarded up shack became my cell. They furnished
it with an old wrought iron bed, probably from a rubbish dump. The iron and bronze supports were kicked into place, but nothing could sort out the sagging rusty wire mesh base, which did not even have a mattress. Before bed, I ate the plat du jour, which was what the troops got every day: a sort of soup of potatoes and maize flour, with bits of fat or crackling floating in it, served on a tin plate accompanied by a tin beaker, both dented, for my own personal use. I also got a piss pot, a narrow-necked milk bottle. When the night sentry arrived at seven o’clock, my right wrist was handcuffed – with difficulty – to the wire mesh base. I used Che’s jacket to cover the part of the mesh without holes and lay down, able to change position painfully. Twelve hours later, with the change of guard, I was given breakfast: my beaker full of maté, and a piece of bread. They also took off my handcuffs, so settling myself by the crack in the door I observed what was going on.