Assassin: The Terrifying True Story Of An International Hitman

by Robbins, Christopher

  Journalistically I moved into still waters. I was sent on therapeutic assignments for the Young Observer and interviewed schoolboys in Birmingham and child actors in the Cotswolds. Mid-summer found me office-bound and sweltering behind glass, a nameless minion engaged on a pointless task on an endless historical series designed to fill the magazine throughout the holiday period. There were moments when I almost missed the high drama of life with the assassin.

  My days became routine. I would arrive late for work, dedicate myself to the series throughout the morning and then leave early for lunch. The afternoons were hazy. I would return home in the evenings with both a back and a headache, dully aware that I had really earned my money.

  It was on such a day that I was handed a letter from Venezuela addressed to me at The Observer. My story on Evertsz had been syndicated throughout the world after its original publication in the Observer magazine and had been reproduced in Caracas in a paper called Momento. The article had been read with something of a specialist’s interest by Miguel Perez Aybar, a Dominican exile living in the city, and he had been moved to write to me about it. His letter said that he had been the assistant chief of the Presidential Intelligence Department for four years, and enclosed a photostat of his official identity card to prove it, and went on to say that if I thought Carlos Evertsz’s story was hot stuff I should hear his, or words to that effect.

  It was the first of several letters which I received from him in London. Perez told me that he had kept a diary during his period in Presidential Intelligence and he had also stolen secret documents from the department’s safe before he had fled for his life to Venezuela. Perhaps if Carlos had still been around at that time I would have avoided all contact with someone who promised to be a creature of a similar breed. It was enough to have to deal with such people when they crashed into your life - it was not necessary to seek them out. And while it struck me that I was in danger of becoming a journalistic repository for the stories of the world’s biggest bastards, I knew at the same time I was quite unable to turn down Perez’s offer: a close and detailed look into the world in which Carlos Evertsz had lived and killed.

  And so I flew to Venezuela.

  Everybody begins to look like a secret agent when you are on a blind date with one at an airport. When I arrived in Caracas to meet Miguel Perez after a period in New York sounding out publishers, the only clue I had to his appearance was a thumbnail photostat copy of his Presidential Intelligence identity card, but it was so small and blurred that it could have fitted fifty of the eager faces gathered at Maquetia airport to meet the plane. The only other personal details I had of him were the recurring references in his letters to failing eyesight and ill health.

  The idea of spending a week in an unpredictable South American country with an exiled intelligence agent in fear of his life was ginger to the imagination. I had sent a telex message to Perez giving him the time of my arrival and my eyes raked the crowd for a suitable heavy. All in all they were a sinister bunch and for a chilling moment I felt the sole outsider at a convention for exiled nasties. Oh to be safe and abed in England now, I thought.

  A fat man came through the entrance doors and marched towards the glass screen of the waiting room where he peered intently at the arriving visitors. He chewed at a rough unlit cheroot, which he occasionally removed to spit, and although it was night he wore sunglasses. He looked a brutal customer, all right, callous enough to run the dirtiest intelligence operation. He was very nervous and scratched at his flatulent belly and toyed with the cheroot as he waited. This had to be my man.

  As I was on my way over to introduce myself, an action made against my every instinct, he moved from the glass screen to the automatic doors where the arrivals came in. The doors opened, the man removed his dark glasses and threw aside his cheroot, and in stepped two nuns. The aura of menace fell away from him as he enclosed the nuns in a filial embrace, kissed them lightly and picked up their luggage.

  With my prime candidate off with two nuns I looked over what was left. A few men remained alone and waiting, but one by one they were joined by women or children and departed chattering. Perez had not shown up.

  The drive into town gave me a little time to deliberate on Venezuela’s particular brand of violence, the legacy of which is the background to everything Latin American. Indeed, the 12-mile stretch of four-lane autopista from the airport into Caracas is an ideal starting-off point for such reflections as it was built by the notorious Perez Jimenez, a dictator who ruled the country for ten years between 1948 and 1958 in a style of unimaginable barbarity.

  The strip of motorway taking me into town was built by the dictator at the enormous cost of $70 million which makes it the most expensive road in the world for its length. It also helps to explain how Perez Jimenez amassed his enormous fortune which has been estimated as high as $700 million and no lower than $250 million.

  But it is more likely that the dictator will be better remembered for his monstrous régime rather than his motorway. Its torture chambers would shame the worst of medieval kings. Political prisoners were slashed with razors, burned with cigarettes and sat upon blocks of ice for hours. They were stripped and made to walk naked around a razor sharp wheel rim and force-fed laxatives. As a reward for this hard line on ‘communism’ the U.S.A. presented the dictator with the Order of Merit, one of her highest honours.

  Before Perez Jimenez the country had to endure the rule of another dictator, Juan Gomez, whose power lasted until his death in 1939. Gomez too built up an enormous fortune, estimated at $200 million, and tortured his political opponents. They were put into leg irons which slowly turned them into permanent cripples, while more drastic punishments included being hung upside down until dead or dangled from a pole with a meat hook through the throat. Gomez could neither read nor write and never married, although he managed to spawn a vast family of almost a hundred illegitimate children.

  Today Venezuela is oil rich. It is now the most affluent country in South America and although still torn by violent political unrest, it enjoys a comparatively relaxed form of constitutional government. True, that expensive motorway is flanked on either side by ranchos, the tiny slum dwellings that a third of the population of Caracas inhabit; true, the student population is in constant clashes with police and the university is almost permanently closed; and yes, the residents of Caracas do have a reputation as a gun-toting, trigger-happy crowd, where at eighteen a young man is more likely to be given his first revolver than the key to the door, and staid, European diplomats drive to work with a gun at the ready on the passenger seat. A scrape in the town’s tortuous traffic is often resolved with gunfire and a nervous police force have been known to shoot drivers dead who inadvertently ignore checkpoints. Corruption and poverty are still rife, but things could be, and have been, much worse.

  At any rate, I understood that Caracas at the very most could only offer an uneasy haven to Miguel Perez. Relationships between Venezuela and the Dominican Republic had been poor for many years and while Caracas has been willing to receive the more respectable political exiles - no commies please - Santo Domingo has countered by playing host to the occasional fleeing millionaire/dictator (only until, of course, they could arrange a more comfortable retirement in Madrid or Miami).

  In more relaxed times I would have nosed out some little hotel tucked away somewhere but that night I made straight for the Caracas Hilton where a telex is a telex is a telex. And if I was going to spend time hiding under the bed I at least wanted to be able to reach for room service.

  I called Perez in the pension he was living in with his wife and kids the moment I had checked in, and heard his voice for the first time. It was a nervous rattle that tended to catch with emotion in mid sentence. During the call I had the feeling that Perez saw me as his saviour. He was so grateful I had come to see him, he said, and hoped that through me there might be a way out of the trap he was in. He told me he would meet me the following morning in my room and added that it
would be better if we avoided the use of the phone in all subsequent conversations. He said goodbye with a thousand thanks.

  When he arrived outside of my room the next morning his knock was so soft I hardly heard it. The assistant chief of Presidential Intelligence turned out to be tiny and frail as a sparrow. He wore a blue blazer and brown trousers, and blinked from behind tinted pebble glasses. There was an exhaustion in his grey face which told of the nightmare his year in hiding had been. Later I discovered that he had once been a tubby, jowly figure but had lost pounds in exile. It was difficult to accept that almost all of his adult life had been spent working in an atmosphere of secrecy and murder.

  I was soon to learn that his life in exile had been spent under constant threat of death, hounded by the agents of his old boss, Dr Manuel Sosa. Perez had worked as the doctor’s right-hand man for four years in an office similar to that of any other Latin-American bureaucrat; on his desk was a battered typewriter, stationery and the inevitable ‘In’ and ‘Out’ trays. But the reports that left his out-tray, neatly typewritten and occasionally misspelt, were a world away from the wordy officialese of other governmental departments.

  Perez dealt with the paper work of corruption and death. It was as routine for him to issue a formally polite and officially stamped death warrant as it was to type out a requisition for paper clips. Over the years he prodded at his old-fashioned typewriter with two fingers and ordered robberies, blackmail and murder. And as he filed reports, moving methodically around his office, he was a silent witness to a continuous flow of devious conversation and brutal acts.

  He began to keep a diary of the day-to-day goings-on of the Intelligence Department and also photostated certain compromising secret documents. The material became a form of life insurance. His hope was that one day he would finally break with the Department and this compromising data would keep him safe. When he fled the country in fear of his life to Venezuela, several attempts were made to recover the bureaucrat’s deadly cache.

  It was that diary and those documents that Perez was offering to me. His story, backed up by the diary and stolen documents, paints an extraordinary and graphic picture of the demented world in which men like Dr Sosa and Carlos Evertsz went about their business.

  At our first meeting Perez was accompanied by a smiling Venezuelan who had once lived in London for ten years and was to act as interpreter. (I never ever paid him much attention - which later proved to be a mistake - except to have a very dull dinner with him one night when he told me he liked to drink in the ‘intellectual’ beer parlours of Caracas and talk left-wing politics. Somehow I always imagined Judas Iscariot as a lean, clean-shaven man; this one was portly and had a beard).

  Perez was very nervous. He had taken the precaution of leaving both the documents and the diary behind for the first meeting but had brought official identification, Dominican and Venezuelan newspaper reports and the names of people I could later refer to and check his validity.

  But now that he was finally confronted with the reality of publishing his story internationally, together with documentation, he was in a sweat. His main fear was that members of his family who were left in the Dominican Republic might be killed if they were not smuggled out before publication of the material. He had received news only a month prior to my arrival that his aunt had been murdered in Santo Domingo. She was found washed up on a beach near her home with a caved-in skull. The Dominican authorities said that it was suicide, a claim which Perez dismissed as ludicrous.

  His reasons for telling his story were that he needed money to smuggle out two elder sons, and that it also gave him the chance to prove to his children that their father was not a murderer. Finally, in a great show of emotion, he embraced me manfully and announced with tears in his eyes that he would go through with it.

  I thought I might wrap up the proceedings with a celebratory drink and phoned room service. Perez was panic-stricken and hid in the bathroom when the waiter arrived. It was a procedure I was to get used to. If there was ever a knock on the door of my room he would disappear on to the balcony or lock himself in the lavatory.

  At first I found Perez’s displays of paranoia comical. Our meetings always took the same form. We never met anywhere but my hotel room. Perez would arrive each morning and instead of using the conventional lifts in the lobby he would take the bather’s lift from the pool to the top floor, change back to the usual lifts which he then took back down to my floor. Even then he would only enter the room if the corridor was completely empty.

  At our second meeting I recognized Perez’s soft knock and went to open the door. There was nobody in the corridor so, somewhat bemused, I closed the door. After a moment there was a frantic scratching. I opened the door and Perez dashed in.

  ‘Why did you close the door?’

  ‘There was nobody there,’ I said.

  ‘I was there,’ Perez said desperately, ‘hiding across the corridor.’

  He brought the documents and the diary to each meeting but did not allow me ever to keep them overnight. Instead, he took them away stuffed in his shirt. He also refused to be photographed or have his voice recorded.

  On top of everything he began to change his mind. One day he would be the brave exposer of thieves and assassins, the next a cringing weakling scared for his life. I began to get very fed up.

  There was something so rat-like about Perez, so lacking in human dignity and spirit, that it was very difficult not to treat him with contempt and I found myself treating him in a very cavalier manner. I interrupted and contradicted him and even found myself pushing him out of the room one night as he stood dithering at the door.

  Nine

  The whole business was very depressing and I awoke one morning feeling very low and made my way down to the poolside bar to see what I could do about it. It was to be a lunchtime meeting with Perez and by the time he arrived I was awash with bullshots.

  ‘Let’s go somewhere wonderful for lunch,’ I said looking amiable.

  Perez was clearly alarmed at my state. ‘Do you want to have us both killed?’ he shrieked. ‘I can’t entrust my diary and documents to a drunken man.’

  ‘Frankly, Miguel, you can keep your documents. I’ve had enough. I’m going back to New York and if you want to follow me there with the material you can. Otherwise, adios.’

  My hard line was a result of Perez’s cringing personality and the bullshots, but I meant what I said. I did go back to New York and Perez did follow me up, complete with diary and documents. But if I had known the reality of his existence in Caracas I would not have been so hard on him although I think I would have launched myself even more heavily into the bullshots.

  Perez was being followed both by Dominican agents of Dr Sosa and agents from the Venezuelan security service, I discovered much later on. The section of his diary recording his miserable day-to-day existence in Caracas was atrociously scrawled in a blunt pencil in his daughter’s school exercise books. The idea was that by writing in a child’s schoolbook the diary, which he jotted down in the comparative safety of the local post office, would not be found.

  For the first month of his exile he had enjoyed a small measure of peace and, although well aware that his safety was precarious, no move was made against him. Then Manolo Santamaria, the head of Dr Sosa’s Cuban agents, contacted him with a proposition. If Perez returned the documents the doctor would procure him a diplomatic post anywhere in the world. Perez turned the offer down flat. Every day after that he received calls threatening his life and those of his family. They were short and gave him no time to reply.

  The documents, together with the incriminating diary, were his life insurance. While they remained in his possession, officially stamped and personally signed by Dr Sosa, he was too dangerous to kill for they had been lodged with a friend in the church who had instructions to release them to the press if anything happened to him.

  But his ex-chief was a master in the craft of fear. Perez was never allowed to relax for a mom
ent and the threatening calls of the Department became a part of his daily life. Perez moved his family to another pension but it was not long before the calls began again. One from the Republic itself told him to lie low and keep his mouth shut or there would be no time for him to enjoy the fruits of his treason. ‘It was a worrying time,’ Perez recorded in his diary with typical lack of colour.

  On top of everything he had trouble renewing his residence permit and was told that he would have to return to the Republic. It became clear that Dr Sosa had a long reach when Perez attempted to plead his case to a senior official at the Immigration Office, arguing that if he returned to the Republic he would face certain death. The official looked directly at Perez and replied smartly that if he returned the documents to the Dominican embassy everything would be arranged.

  His passport was stamped ordering him to leave the country. Perez was faced with the impossible task of coming to grips with South American bureaucracy and traipsed from department to department in an attempt to have the decision repealed. He felt his self-control ebb away. ‘Everything is lost,’ he wrote in his diary.

  It took the personal intervention of the Venezuelan ambassador in Santo Domingo, who had originally granted him political asylum, to arrange for him to stay on in the country.

  Perez decided to put his wares on the market. He wrote to Colonel Nej Tejeda Alvarez, one-time police chief in the Republic who had been neatly removed from office by Dr Sosa and who had languished as an ambassador in the political backwater of Guatemala ever since. Perez told the Colonel that he could provide material to prove that he had been framed by the doctor.

  Tejeda immediately flew to Caracas, took copious notes from the documents and diary and flew on to Santo Domingo where he intended to see the president and plead his case. He returned a fortnight later with an offer from Balaguer - if Perez handed over the documents he would receive $50,000 and a diplomatic post. Perez simply did not dare to believe that the deal was genuine and turned the colonel down.