José Latour

Grove Press
ISBN: 0–8021-1810–0 / 978–0-8021–1810-3 (USA edition)

CHAPTER 1

One of Cuba’s well-kept secrets is that for sev­eral years the most respected indi­vid­ual in the Gen­eral Direc­torate of Intel­li­gence was Colonel Vic­to­ria Valiente, a psychologist.

Brigadier-general Edmundo Las­tra (cryptonym Gabriel) was gen­eral direc­tor, Colonel Enrique Mor­era (Bernardo) was his deputy, but the woman who headed the Miami desk of the USA Depart­ment had won the admi­ra­tion of supe­ri­ors and sub­or­di­nates alike with her long list of remark­able results. Under her guid­ance, the desk had sub­mit­ted reports, issued warn­ings, and given fore­casts judged extremely valu­able by the country’s top lead­er­ship. She had achieved this by plant­ing new, well-trained secret agents in the Greater Miami area, acti­vat­ing sleep­ers, approv­ing the recruit­ment of valu­able inform­ers, oppos­ing the enlist­ment of some who turned out to be FBI inform­ers, exhaus­tively scan­ning pub­lic sources, and mak­ing edu­cated and usu­ally cor­rect guesses. Known in the island’s intel­li­gence com­mu­nity by the cryptonym Micaela, Vic­to­ria was trans­ferred to Interior’s Gen­eral Direc­torate of Intel­li­gence from the Min­istry of the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Armed Forces in late 1989, in the wake of the drug smug­gling scan­dal involv­ing cor­rupt Cuban intel­li­gence and mil­i­tary officers.

On July 12 of that year, the world learned that four per­pe­tra­tors had been exe­cuted by fir­ing squads.

In 1983, Vic­to­ria had joined the Min­istry of the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Armed Forces’ Mil­i­tary Coun­ter­in­tel­li­gence Direc­torate fol­low­ing grad­u­a­tion from the Uni­ver­sity of Havana’s fac­ulty of psy­chol­ogy. At the time, she had seen such tools of the trade as tele­phone lis­ten­ing devices, mini­cam­eras, and tap detec­tors only in movies. She was igno­rant of basic cryp­tol­ogy, had fired a pis­tol twice in her life, and abhorred judo, karate, and other forms of unarmed com­bat. She had never trav­eled abroad.
Phys­i­cally, Vic­to­ria was one shade below non­de­script. As a child, one of her teach­ers in grade school had quipped that the girl’s mother poured the baby and raised the after­birth. What seemed strange to her par­ents and teach­ers alike was that Vic­to­ria obtained good marks in exams despite the fact that the asth­matic and astig­matic girl rarely read textbooks.

Even though her appear­ance improved notably dur­ing puberty, Vic­to­ria stood a mea­gre five-foot-two, never weighed more than 112 pounds, had a rather homely face, and wore her mousy brown hair in bunches. The glasses needed to cor­rect her astig­ma­tism made her green eyes expres­sion­less, and her fig­ure was more angu­lar than rounded where it counts. Nei­ther dirty old men nor young vir­gin males ogled her when she sun­bathed on the beach in a two-piece bathing suit.

Per­haps for that rea­son, from a sex­ual stand­point, Victoria’s life had been saintly. She lost her vir­gin­ity at twenty-one, and by the time she got mar­ried eleven years later she had cop­u­lated with just three men. Con­trary to pop­u­lar myth, this most unas­sum­ing, unat­trac­tive late-bloomer fre­quently expe­ri­enced three orgasms in half an hour and, ten years into her mar­riage, enticed her hus­band into hav­ing inter­course two or three times a week, four if he felt like it. Lack­ing moti­va­tion for giv­ing birth or a feel­ing of suit­abil­ity for moth­er­hood, she had popped con­tra­cep­tive pills for sev­en­teen con­sec­u­tive years.

Her remark­able sex­ual appetite was not Ms. Valiente’s most admirable qual­ity, though. She pos­sessed vast amounts of three oth­ers: One was brain­power.
An admirer and dis­ci­ple of British psy­chol­o­gist Ray­mond B. Cat­tell, she had read sev­en­teen of his forty-one books and many of his arti­cles. Cat­tell was the first to pos­tu­late that the key prob­lem in per­son­al­ity psy­chol­ogy was the pre­dic­tion of behav­iour. He clas­si­fied traits into three cat­e­gories: dynamic (those that set an indi­vid­ual into action to accom­plish a goal), abil­ity (con­cern­ing the individual’s effec­tive­ness to reach a goal), and tem­pera­ment (aspects like dis­po­si­tions, moods, and emo­tions). After her trans­fer to Interior’s Gen­eral Direc­torate of Intel­li­gence, Divi­sion of Per­son­nel, Eval­u­a­tion Depart­ment, Vic­to­ria devel­oped her the­ory of how to per­form a prospec­tive spy’s remote psy­cho­log­i­cal pro­fil­ing based on Cattell’s teachings.

She stud­ied the files of can­di­dates sub­mit­ted by field offi­cers, rejected many, and asked for addi­tional infor­ma­tion about those who seemed to have latent pos­si­bil­i­ties. Then she elim­i­nated a few more, rec­om­mended which oper­a­tives should approach each of the cho­sen few, and wrote scripts. With a good nose for pol­i­tics, Vic­to­ria fol­lowed world events on a daily basis to choose the ones that, if reminded of a prospec­tive or active informer, may strengthen his or her resolve to betray their gov­ern­ment, insti­tu­tion, or com­pany. She pre­ferred the recruit­ment to be based on ide­o­log­i­cal affin­ity, but would set her scru­ples aside if black­mail or sex would let the cat out of the bag. In strapped Cuba, buy­ing infor­ma­tion was a means of last resort.

Dur­ing her four years in Eval­u­a­tion, Vic­to­ria pro­filed many pos­si­ble inform­ers: peo­ple work­ing for M.I6, the Vat­i­can, DGSE, SISDE, FIS, the Fed­eral Secu­rity Ser­vice, three dif­fer­ent United Nations agen­cies, the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion, the Ger­man and Span­ish Min­istries of For­eign Affairs, the Mex­i­can pres­i­dency, Amnesty Inter­na­tional, Roche, and Aven­tis. All the while, she devoured books on espi­onage. The lieu­tenant in charge of Intelligence’s library was absolutely flab­ber­gasted and even­tu­ally com­piled a list: In four years Vic­to­ria read 132 books, includ­ing all the clas­sics. She was always the first to read new titles.
Even­tu­ally her judg­ment was highly respected and her rec­om­men­da­tions rarely ques­tioned. But it had not always been like that. In the early nineties, her supe­rior offi­cer could not believe she was seri­ous when she argued for tak­ing a promis­ing can­di­date to Dis­ney World to ask him to work for Cuban Intel­li­gence there and then. On another occa­sion, she sug­gested recruit­ing a pious, sixty-six-year-old priest as he lis­tened to the handler’s con­fes­sion. In both instances the offi­cer, now retired, had asked her to con­vince him. She did it dis­pas­sion­ately, using her remote psy­cho­log­i­cal pro­fil­ing. She was so con­vinc­ing that the two plans were approved.

And they worked.

In 1993, a few weeks after she had aston­ished every­one by chore­o­graph­ing the recruit­ment of a top Euro­pean sci­en­tist who agreed to pass on the results of his firm’s research on an AIDS vac­cine, Vic­to­ria was ordered to report to a third-floor office of the State Coun­cil at 10:00 a.m., where she was asked to take the Mega Society’s Id test.

This was quite sur­pris­ing to her because, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, com­mu­nist par­ties in power pre­sented a rather sim­plis­tic and homo­ge­neous offi­cial front when it came to pol­i­tics, eco­nom­ics, soci­ol­ogy, and psy­chol­ogy. Non-Marxist-Leninist the­o­ries in the fields of social evo­lu­tion and human responses were dead wrong. Dialec­tic mate­ri­al­ism pro­vided the only key that unlocked the com­plex behav­iour of indi­vid­u­als and soci­eties. Hav­ing stud­ied in the years when intel­li­gence quo­tient tests were shunned as cap­i­tal­ist hocus-pocus, Vic­to­ria had scant knowl­edge about them and had never taken one.

In prac­tice, how­ever, hav­ing real­ized that this sort of prej­u­dice ren­dered use­less impor­tant research and knowl­edge, from the six­ties on almost all gen­eral sec­re­taries of com­mu­nist par­ties had appointed a cou­ple of their most trusted hench­men to head small, spe­cial­ized units that applied tech­niques such as stan­dard­ized tests to mea­sure intelligence.

On her first attempt, Vic­to­ria Valiente gave forty-two right answers. Accord­ing to Hoeflin’s fifth norm­ing of the Mega Test, she scored 176. In com­mon par­lance this meant that out of half a mil­lion peo­ple, only one had Victoria’s high level of intel­li­gence, emo­tional sta­bil­ity, and phys­i­cal coordination.

The old man who had asked that the test be taken—simply called Chief or Com­man­der by the mem­bers of his inner cir­cle, Com­man­der in Chief in pub­lic. God­fa­ther behind his back, Come­dian in Chief in Miami, and Holy Father by an abjectly sub­mis­sive historian—sat back in his exec­u­tive chair to pon­der Victoria’s results. On one hand, it was dis­ap­point­ing to find out that a semi-literate car­pen­ter and a dress­maker had pre­sented the world with a super genius, whereas none of his chil­dren had scored above 130. On the other, look­ing on the bright side of things, he found com­fort in the fact that among the incom­pe­tent, grov­el­ling, mealy-mouthed bas­tards that sur­rounded him, there was an indi­vid­ual sci­en­tif­i­cally proven to be extremely bright.

The Chief was fur­ther seduced when he began read­ing her secret per­son­nel file. Born on Jan­u­ary 1, 1959, her par­ents had named her Vic­to­ria because, on that day, dic­ta­tor Ful­gen­cio Batista fled Cuba. The rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies pro­claimed it Vic­tory Day. Her father’s sur­name was Valiente, so her full name, both in Span­ish and in Eng­lish, lit­er­ally meant Valiant Vic­tory, and fig­u­ra­tively, Gal­lant Vic­tory. With­out meet­ing her per­son­ally, he had Vic­to­ria pro­moted to lieu­tenant colonel and trans­ferred to the Miami desk.

In her new posi­tion, Gen­eral Las­tra dis­re­garded Victoria’s objec­tions twice. Colonel Mor­era over­ruled her on four occa­sions. The con­se­quences were cat­a­strophic. Three of those six recruits turned out to be dou­ble agents, two of whom man­aged to infil­trate a twelve-person net­work in Miami that the FBI, after a three-year stint, dis­man­tled in 1998. On the evening he learned of the deba­cle from his min­is­ter of the inte­rior, the Chief had Las­tra and Mor­era sum­moned to his office.

“Did Micaela approve the recruit­ment of those sons of itches?” he had yelled, apoplec­tic with rage, when told who the FBI agents were.

Look­ing at their well-polished boots, the gen­eral and the colonel had shaken their heads.

“I knew it!” the Chief growled triumphantly.

In the adjoin­ing ante­room an overzeal­ous aide, upon hear­ing his idol rant and dread­ing that he may suf­fer a stroke or a heart attack had the physi­cian on duty come up. After hur­ried whis­per­ing, the physi­cian knocked and entered the Olym­pus to take Zeus’s blood pressure.

“Get out of here!” the patient had thun­dered, arm rigidly point­ing to the door, the instant he saw the newly arrived. The doc­tor paled, did a quick about-face, and closed the door behind him. A preg­nant, six-minute pause fol­lowed as Num­ber One hob­bled around the room. Las­tra and Mor­era kept their gazes on the floor. Finally the Chief came to a halt in front of the offi­cers, giv­ing them the eye.

“Look at me!“
His face flamed; his gray beard shook with ire.

“What­ever Micaela rec­om­mends, even if it is against your bet­ter judg­ment, you do it. You’ve made great sac­ri­fices for the Rev­o­lu­tion; I don’t want to send you into early retire­ment. But if you over­rule Micaela again, you are fin­ished. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Com­man­der in Chief,” the cul­prits had chorused.

“Okay, let’s see now what we can do for our comrades.”