Mongoose, R.I.P.

by William F. Buckley

  “Morales turns out to have been a big-timer in Mexican social circles. Huge funeral. Married to an American only a few months ago. Old Spanish family. But nobody, not anybody, is able to find out what in the hell he was doing with Blackford Oakes. We only discovered Oakes by tracking Morales. The driver talked privately in the hospital room with our consul, told him the hit man was convinced it was really Oakes after observing them with binoculars during their picnic lunch. The rabbi getup didn’t fool him. He had looked hard and long at Oakes during the earlier San Angel Inn meeting with Morales. It was after that we told him to fire away if Oakes was spotted back in Mexico. And Morales led them to Oakes.” He paused. “Oakes is a pretty sharp shooter, Che. Too bad you didn’t succeed in converting him last year.”

  “Or in executing him.” Raúl was salting an old sore. And succeeded in drawing pain.

  “What are you going to do, Raúl, when we run out of people to execute?” Che asked. “Move to another country with a fresh population?”

  Fidel burst in. Tamayo was with him. Che thought him appropriately dressed. All black, like an executioner. An executioner who had had a long day.

  Castro said to Tamayo, “Tell them.”

  Tamayo bowed his head to the Armed Forces Minister, the Minister of Industry, and the Minister of the Interior.

  “Gentlemen. Well—” Castro was pacing the floor behind him. The others sat in armchairs behind their trays. Tamayo wondered whether to continue standing or to sit. Castro gave no directions, so he continued to stand, as though addressing a seminar.

  “—the prisoner was very, very tough. But finally we moved him. A telephone stuck by his ear, his mother at the other end, under—persuasion—”

  “We don’t need those details, Tamayo,” Che Guevara interrupted. Everyone in the room knew about Tamayo’s special skills.

  Tamayo went on. “It was indeed an American operation. Of course, Cubela is a traitor. One cannot blame that on the CIA. But we have the whole story. The rifle was delivered from Miami to a pickup point. We know exactly where. Also, of course, the ammunition. Cubela was to be taken from the offices on Cuba Street by car—one of Jesús Ferrer’s men, and we do not know his name, though we have the telephone contact number, and Security is taking appropriate measures there. Security has also gone to the dock at Luz where a speedboat was waiting for Cubela—a Miami-based boat. He knew only the dock number, and that the boat is called La Vallarta. It was prepared to take him to Jamaica. From there he planned to go to Mexico. Someone called Antonio Morales was prepared to give him one hundred and fifty thousand dollars—a gift of the American Government!” Tamayo concluded triumphantly.

  Raúl looked up sharply at Fidel. Evidently Fidel had elected not to tell Tamayo what they knew about Morales. Accordingly Che and Valdés were silent.

  Tamayo remained standing. It was up to Castro to decide whether he should continue in their august company.

  Castro was deep in thought, and no one spoke. Suddenly he turned to Tamayo. “Ingenio, go upstairs to my library. Order whatever you want. I will call you.”

  “A sus órdenes, Comandante.”

  He left the room.

  Castro turned to his three closest confederates.

  “This does it. Last week, they send a whore to try to poison me. Today, a rifleman. In my own headquarters. There have been raids all along the coastline. In Matanzas we captured three guerrilleros, all U.S.-supplied. I warned Kennedy. I said in my April speech, I said, those who practice subversion against other countries must expect like treatment. Those who attempt assassination need to know it goes both ways.

  “Six months ago”—he turned to face Raúl—“you wanted me to order the execution of the Mayor of Miami, and I said no, that would be a meaningless act. I do not intend now a meaningless act.

  “I intend to bring about the assassination of the President of the United States.”

  There was silence. Che Guevara, the closest student of Fidel’s character, knew the profundity of Fidel’s outrage. It was now all-consuming. Something like the passion that had sustained Castro from 1953, when he launched his puerile attack against the Moncada Barracks, to the triumphant January day six years later when, entering Havana, he found not only Cuba, but the world at his feet. It was the single-purposed Castro he was hearing now.

  And yet: was there something besides the assassination attempt that was driving him? He supposed that there was. Could it be the fact of Rolando Cubela, a close confederate for so long, turning traitor? But Fidel had experienced that before, comrades-in-arms who had turned against him. True, none had tried to kill him. Their “treason” was ideological; better, it was disloyalty. Some, Castro had had shot; others he sent to Cabaña and to Piños. Was it a special feeling he had for Cubela? They had been close, but not quite in the category of blood brothers. Was it something else? Something Che didn’t know about? Another traitor, maybe?

  He looked about the room.

  Raúl? Inconceivable.

  Valdés? Preposterous—though Ramiro was less enthusiastically pro-Soviet than Fidel. On the other hand, Fidel’s own feelings about the Soviet Union were affected by events. All Fidel could talk about between the October crisis and the mollifying visit to Moscow was the disloyalty of Khrushchev during the missile episode. Could it be President Osvaldo Dorticós? Augusto Martínez, at the Labor Ministry? Carlos Rafael Rodríguez?

  Or was it something entirely different?

  Castro pointed to Valdés. “Just last week—maybe it was more than a week ago, I forget—you told me that Perjuez in Mexico reported that an American veteran, married to a Russian and living in Texas, had approached him about assassinating Kennedy in Dallas—”

  “I told Perjuez,” Valdés replied, “to show the American veteran the door and to speak to no one, not even to his wife, about the conversation. The American got in to see him only because he had a letter from our Fair Play for Cuba Committee, making the special request—”

  “Did Perjuez keep his name and address?”

  “I can only assume so, Fidel.”

  “The first thing tomorrow, Ramiro, get in touch with Perjuez. Tell him if there is any leak, I myself will tear out his throat. He is to locate the American. Have him come to Mexico again, as a tourist. Tell Perjuez to arrange a meeting and ascertain what specific plans he had in mind. I cannot imagine that he would need direct help from us, except perhaps to make an escape—”

  Raúl interrupted. “Fidel. We would not want the assassin of an American President to make an escape.”

  “Let alone an escape expedited by the government of Cuba,” Che added.

  Fidel bellowed. “Of course I am not going to implicate Cuba! But I am going to see Kennedy dead! On my sacred honor, I mean to avenge what he has tried to do to me!” Che was startled. He had never heard Fidel Castro so angry.

  Castro paused for a moment. “Kennedy over there”—he pointed in one direction—“and Khrushchev over there.” He pointed in the opposite direction.

  Khrushchev? Has he gone mad? Che wondered.

  Suddenly Castro’s voice quieted. He walked over to the desk and pressed a button. Instantly an aide opened the door. “Get Tamayo. He is in my library.”

  Tamayo came in.

  Castro sat down. He motioned Tamayo to sit and pointed to a straight-backed chair, facing the semicircle of armchairs and sofas.

  “Compañeros,” Castro said grandly, “Khrushchev left a medium-range ballistic missile in Cuba. It is underground at San Cristóbal. The chief Soviet technician has defected. The missile has a range of eleven hundred miles. It is pretargeted, as all the Soviet missiles were pretargeted. The missile’s control settings, with the launch properly oriented, will guide the missile to Dallas, Texas—eleven hundred miles. Khrushchev has engaged in the deception of Cuba on a grand scale.

  “Tell them the story, Tamayo.”

  29

  Fidel Castro had got out of the habit of furtive midnight meetings, far removed from the handy
personal and political apparatus he had got so used to which, with the push of a button, would get him a world leader on the telephone, a woman on his couch, or a French, Chinese, Mexican, or even Cuban meal. It was only five years since he had eaten and slept in the Sierra Maestra, but now he was used to different arrangements. Still, he bowed to Raúl’s plans, Raúl having taken over the planning for the critical visit with Kirov and with the ballistic missile, the SANDAL.

  “I rather wish we could junk Tamayo,” Fidel said to his brother as, in Castro’s spacious office at the INRA, they discussed arrangements, early in the afternoon of the evening designated for the meeting. “But for some reason that useful reptile seems to have got this Major Kirov hooked, and I suppose we’d better not take any chances.”

  “There’s something else, Fidel. Kirov doesn’t know Spanish, and we don’t know English. We hardly want a conventional interpreter on this one. Kirov and Tamayo both speak English. And Kirov’s cooperation depends—explicitly—on his meeting with you.”

  Fidel nodded, and dragged again on his cigar. Raúl gave him yet another lecture on the responses Fidel absolutely needed to make in the event Kirov began “what Tamayo calls his ‘Marxist seminar.’ You are to agree with everything he says.” Raúl found himself smiling. “It will be good for you, Fidel. Just remember: We can destroy the missile, knowing where we now know it is. But we can’t use it, in any sense, without Kirov’s help.”

  Fidel spat out a bit of tobacco.

  The historic introduction of the most important defector in Soviet history and the most glamorous young Communist leader in the world was to be held in a Cuban military armory, only a few hundred yards from the San Cristóbal cave. Appropriate orders had gone out. The camp commander, Major Gutierrez, had been told by the office of Armed Forces Minister Raúl Castro to place guards around the armory’s entrance and also the entry to the cave because he, Comandante Raúl, and two “guests from the Soviet Union” would be conferring in the armory, and after that inspecting the matériel in the cave. No one, Raúl specified, was to be admitted into the area after sundown, and, after sundown, only a single military truck. The driver of the truck would be Major Ingenio Tamayo (whom the camp commander had a few days earlier met); seated on his right would be Comandante Raúl himself. In brief, only the vehicle with the Armed Forces chief in it could be admitted.

  The arrangements were concluded, and on the pretext that he was leaving to have dinner, as from time to time he did at the house of a friend, Castro and his personal guards would leave INRA. Arriving at a point on the outskirts of Havana near the Guanajay military installation, Castro’s sedan would stop. Waiting for him at the gates of the installation would be the army truck. In the back, Ramiro Valdés. Castro would tell the guards to return with their jeep to Havana, that he desired no accompaniment where he was going. Tamayo would get into the driver’s seat, Raúl into the seat next to him, and off they would go, unescorted, the eighty kilometers to San Cristóbal.

  Raúl telephoned Fidel from the main entrance. “Are you ready?”

  “I have decided not to go.”

  “You what?”

  “Come upstairs.”

  Raúl found his brother spread out on a couch, cigar in hand, a copy of Revolución on his lap. Raúl recognized the set expression on his face.

  “What’s going on? You approved all of the plans.”

  “The plans were made on the assumption that I needed to lay eyes on the SANDAL missile. But you tell me that Tamayo has seen the missile, and indeed Tamayo told me he had seen the missile even before you knew about it. It occurs to me that there is no need for me to see another missile. I have seen a great many. I have all the information I need. Instead of you, me, Valdés, and Tamayo going to San Cristóbal, bring ‘Tolstoi,’ as we are agreed to call him, here.”

  In fact there was sense in what Fidel said, though Raúl was humiliated at having to cancel plans so elaborately made. And he did not know—this he would need to check with Tamayo—how easy it was for Kirov—for “Tolstoi”—to depart the camp unobserved. The possibility of his arriving that very night, to discharge the pledge of a personal meeting with Fidel, seemed to him offhand, remote. He said as much to Fidel.

  Fidel answered that in that event, Tolstoi could come “tomorrow. Or, for that matter, on Saturday. We know what we want, but what we want we don’t need to have tomorrow or the day after. Let’s not get carried away. And don’t take the opportunity to suggest to me that it is I who have been carried away: I know what I am doing. Every hour it becomes clearer to me what I am doing.”

  Raúl left the room. In his own office, he made three telephone calls. The fourth was to Tamayo to whom he explained that existing plans had been canceled. “Our friend Tolstoi is to come here.”

  “I am not sure how easy that is to arrange.”

  “Your job is to arrange things whether they are easy or whether they are not easy. You have only to concern yourself with security. If Tolstoi cannot come to Havana tonight, call me back and tell me when next he can get to Havana.”

  In forty minutes Tamayo was back on the phone, very pleased with himself. “It has been arranged. The gentlemen Tolstoi needs especially to worry about is away. The—head man pays no attention to senior—people coming and going to spend the night hours in two or three especially attractive places in town. Tolstoi will go to one of those places, make necessary arrangements, come out the back door, and drive to Havana. I will meet him at eleven-fifteen at a particular spot. We should be with you twenty minutes after that.”

  Raúl relayed the word, first to Valdés, then to Che Guevara, and only then—he was still miffed—to his brother, who received the news as he might have received news that the day after Wednesday would be Thursday.

  Because Fidel Castro was thinking about Dallas. He had not worked out a suitable revenge to take against Khrushchev. But he contemplated with dizzying satisfaction the “divine boomerang”—the phrase he was turning over and over in his mind. The Americans still thought him a banana republic caudillo, didn’t they? Someone they could dust off, as Trujillo had been dusted off? Well, their gringo government would discover that things were very different. No, Fidel had no intention of suggesting by the least inflection that he was in any way connected with the idea—and, indeed, it had not even been his idea. He was not proposing to Perjuez that Cuba provide any technical aid for the American veteran. He just wanted to know that the desired end would be accomplished. What worried Fidel, in his single-minded desire to see Kennedy dead, was what, exactly, he would do if the American veteran changed his mind. Or, for that matter, if he fired and missed. Would he, Castro, then need to become active in pursuit of Kennedy, as the CIA had been active in pursuit of him? His mind was floating from one to another approach, from hypothetical plan B, to plan C, to plan …

  And, he gritted his teeth, he did have a nuclear missile. Preset for Dallas.

  At 11:30, Raúl was called to the telephone. It was Tamayo. “Comandante, Tolstoi has said that in no circumstance does he agree to go to—to any place where—where your brother regularly works. He says he simply will not take that risk.”

  “Can’t you satisfy him that we can arrange to bring him in unseen?”

  “I have tried that. I have tried even suggesting he come in disguised. He says, simply, No.”

  “What would he find suitable?”

  “He says a small private house, with not more than two bedrooms. He thinks that would pose the least hazard to him.”

  Raúl was gritting his teeth. If the engagement were for the next day there would be no difficulty. But at 11:30 P.M.? Suddenly he thought to ask, “Where do you live, Ingenio?”

  “In an apartment.”

  “Are you married?”

  “No, Comandante.”

  “Where is your apartment?”

  “Avenida Quinta A, #8602 in Miramar. It is very humble, Comandante.”

  “What floor is it on?”

  “Five-B.”


  “Ask him, right now while I am on the telephone, if he would agree to meeting there. I can’t guarantee it will work with the Comandante, but tell me what he says.”

  Tamayo was back on the phone. “He says yes!” he almost shouted his relief. Then, more soberly, “Tolstoi says yes.”

  Raúl drew a deep breath. “Are you at a telephone where I can call you?”

  “Not easily.”

  “Very well, call me. Call me in five minutes. If I decline to take the call, call me in ten minutes. Keep doing that until we speak again.”

  Fidel was astonished by the development. All 220 pounds of Fidel Castro Ruz wanted to say, Fuck Tolstoi. But—of course, of course. The strategist was thinking now. In fact, there was hardly any demand made by Tolstoi that Fidel would not honor. There was no man in Cuba more important to him than Tolstoi … at this hour. Castro knew how to control himself, when controlling himself was necessary to the advancement of an objective. All this took fifteen seconds. He said to Raúl. “Very well. Take me to wherever it is you intend to take me.”

  But the confrontation turned out to be very gratifying to Fidel. When he walked into the little flat, Tolstoi stood at attention. Then he knelt on one knee, and bowed his head.

  “This,” he said in English, while Tamayo stuttered out the Spanish translation, referring to his prostration, “is still in my blood, as a Russian. It is the veneration we felt in our blood for our sovereign. You, Comandante Fidel Castro, are my sovereign. You are the carrier of the flame of Marxism-Leninism. You, by your example in Cuba, will illuminate the Marxist movement throughout the world, and perhaps even expunge the cruel and barbaric Marxism being practiced in the homeland of Lenin.”

  It was quite a show, and the histrionic element in Castro, always easily aroused, was instantly alight. He found himself stretching out his hands as a czar might have done in conferring blessings on a postulant. His hands over the bent head of Kirov, Castro said, “Rise, Major. You do honor to me, and to your sacred convictions. Indeed, we are all gathered here to pursue the word of Marx and of Lenin.”