The Seeds of Fiction

by Bernard Diederich

  Buenas noches, mi General,’ we each said and he offered his hand, unable to rise. He was sound asleep before we left the house.

  The lobby of the Continental Hotel was empty, and only a few dedicated gamblers remained in the casino. ‘Let’s have a nightcap,’ Graham suggested. He appeared astoundingly fresh, displaying no sign of weariness. He wanted to discuss our remarkable evening with the General. It was his habit. No matter how late or liquid an evening had been he liked to go over the day’s activities in case he had missed something. It was a sort of end-of-the-night debriefing. When he returned to his room, he told me, he usually wrote up a few notes.

  Later that afternoon as we watched the elephants there was a sharp knock on the door of Graham’s hotel suite. We looked at each other. It couldn’t be Chuchu; he normally called from the lobby before he came up. There was a second sharp knock, full of authority. I went to the door. I glanced at my watch. It was 5.45 p.m. I opened the door. A small nondescript man and a young woman stood in the hallway waiting. The man, his face the texture of old leather, peered at me through rimless spectacles. Only recently I had seen a photograph of the man, but even without seeing his picture I sensed that I would have known him. He was the legendary Salvadorean revolutionary, Salvador Cayetano Carpio, code-named Marcial. Cayetano was a tough ideologue of the left who believed in the theory of prolonged popular war. He was widely regarded as El Salvador’s Ho Chi Minh. The unsmiling young woman, obviously a guerrilla herself, turned and left without a word.

  I welcomed him, introduced myself and Señor Graham Greene, the celebrated English author. Cayetano sat on the sofa, his small feet dangling. He had been a baker as a young man and entered politics through El Salvador’s bakers’ union. He was one of the most successful guerrilla leaders in Central America, an almost mythical figure, but one would hardly have guessed it from seeing him in Graham’s hotel room. Maybe it was the spectacles, but Cayetano looked more like a kindly grandfather with an air of wanting to please. He appeared much older than his reported age of sixty-one. Sitting in a chair opposite him, Graham had become suddenly brittle, all business. He leaned forward just a little menacingly, like a wound-up clock or an over-alert MI6 officer.

  I told Cayetano that Graham had covered guerrilla wars elsewhere, and I mentioned Indochina, the Malay Emergency and Kenya during the Mau-Mau uprising.

  Graham became irritated by the direction the introduction was taking. ‘I’m not a reporter,’ he snapped.

  His annoyance was obvious, but Marcial’s expression didn’t change. There was not even a twitch in his sagging cheeks.

  ‘I am a reporter,’ I said and explained that Mr Greene was not. Then I went on to tell Marcial that I would not be taking part in any formal talks or negotiations but that Mr Greene would. I was interested in a story and wished to interview him at some later date.

  ‘Yes,’ Cayetano said, adding that he very much wanted to talk to me. I was excited by the prospect of an interview. I had a lot of questions about El Salvador’s guerrilla war.

  As we sat there I wondered whether Graham was actually angry at the man. The day before, Graham had read a bullying ‘interview’ with Ambassador Dunn, which had ostensibly been conducted in a ‘people’s prison’ somewhere in El Salvador. The interview was published in the 14 February 1980 English-language edition of the Cuban Communist Party daily, Granma. The pain of it had deeply affected Graham. He had let the paper drop to the floor, declaring angrily, ‘Abominable, abominable.’ His face twisted in disgust. ‘I’ll never read that newspaper again. This is filthy treatment of anyone who is obviously sick.’

  The Granma article was accompanied by a photograph of Ambassador Dunn lying in bed with a tape-recorder thrust next to his face. The caption read: ‘Dunn is a veteran officer of the Pretoria intelligence service in Central America.’ The interviewer was the Mexican newsman Mario Menéndez. He was a descendant from an old Mérida newspaper family, a leftist who in the 1960s had provided me with photographs of Latin American guerrilla leaders for Time and Life en Español. Menéndez had interviewed most of those guerrilla chieftains in the mountains of Central America and Venezuela. He had since moved to Havana and was reporting for Granma. He had written a whole series on El Salvador. Despite his other attributes he was not a sensitive interviewer, nor was he a doctor. Menéndez’s opinion, expressed in the Dunn interview article, was that ‘ He [Dunn] thought that by playing sick he might be able to exert psychological pressure on his captors through the press. So he refused to get out of bed. The content of his statements, the tone of his voice and his cynical laugh before the tape-recorder revealed him to be the individual described by South Africa’s Freedom Fighters.’

  Menéndez grudgingly reported that Dunn had withstood the verbal attacks of his inquisitor, who had blamed him for his government’s sins. ‘Why don’t you speak, Mr Dunn?’ the interviewer asked. ‘Once again, the cynical laugh. Then Dunn said, “The problem is that people don’t understand my country’s government”‘ Despite the obvious bullying by the interviewer, Dunn struck a note not unlike a Greene character in one of his human tragedies. ‘Look, let’s get something straight,’ Dunn was quoted as saying with a touch of finality and defiance. ‘I have consciously served the government of South Africa; I identify with its apartheid policy; and I don’t care what they do to me.’

  Suddenly, there was another knock at the hotel room door. I stood and quickly moved to the door. ‘‘ Quien es?’ (‘Who is it?’) I asked.

  The voice was muffled by the closed door. All I could understand was that the visitor was on a special assignment for General Torrijos. There was a deep urgency to the voice. I opened the door slowly. A young overweight lieutenant of Panama’s National Guard, sweating profusely, burst into the room and stopped short before Marcial. ‘My God,’ he exclaimed. ‘I found you!’ The old man’s face brightened in a fleeting smile of triumph. He had managed to elude the young intelligence officer. Four other Salvadorean guerrilla commandants were waiting downstairs. It was time to talk.

  The meeting moved into Graham’s bedroom where Cayetano sat at the bedside, separated from the Graham by proofs of Evelyn Waughs Collected Letters. The young Panamanian officer was excluded from the session. Marcial asked whether the other guerrilla representatives downstairs could join the meeting with Graham as the guerrillas were discussing a unified command of the five guerrilla factions. This now concerned all of them, and at least one of them spoke English and could act as interpreter. (Out of their historic unity meeting in Panama came the formation of the guerrillas’ umbrella group, the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación National, or FMLN). Graham acceded to the request. I closed the door behind the guerrillas and with the young lieutenant waited in the living-room hoping that we would have no unexpected visitors.

  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 t
o 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.

  19 | OUR MAN IN PANAMA

  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 or
ganize 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.