His Own Man Read online

  19

  “Easy, my friend,” laughed the colonel. “Take it easy. It’s a funny story. And a good one at that.”

  He was right: now that we’d plunged into the past, I needed to let him speak freely, without voicing my own concerns.

  “Despite Max’s understated position in the embassy’s hierarchy, he was soon noticed by the secret services of both countries, the US and Britain, which had bugged several foreign missions, ours among them — ‘a regional power to be reckoned with,’ in Eric’s words. Max’s intellectual brilliance stood out in the recordings.”

  The colonel again turned to the bucket, retrieved the bottle, and this time stopped at my glass before pouring into his. “I don’t know how well you knew Max. As I learned from Eric, he was cold and calculating above all, traits that are greatly appreciated in this field. He also had a rare quality valued by the foreigners who were watching his moves closely: he was extremely adaptable. Depending on who he was talking to, he could just as handily swing to the left as embrace the right. The guy was an artist!”

  I kept my mouth shut, other than to take another sip of champagne.

  “Max’s words had intellectual clout. That was how Eric put it. He could hold his own in serious conversation with professors, journalists, politicians, and supporters of the most diverse causes. Even with militants connected to the Tupamaros, during the lead-up to the military coup in Uruguay …”

  As the colonel spoke, I noted how naturally he had resorted to the term coup. In which he had been involved up to his eyeballs, albeit in a secondary role.

  “Max was worth his weight in gold,” my dinner companion went on. “He was brilliant, subtle, discreet. A natural. No one compared to him, and everyone coveted him.”

  Just then a curious notion took hold of me. That the former head of the CIA in South America was now a peaceful retired man, probably on a bowling team and helping to raise his grandchildren. But he had once been a protagonist in events that had affected the fate of several countries in our region — not to mention the unhappy destiny of some of their inhabitants. I wondered if Eric Friedkin and Max had ever met.

  It didn’t occur to me to ask — nor did it seem important to know. But that same night I learned other things. Among them, that the CIA had come to the conclusion that its police and military training center wasn’t achieving optimal results with the Uruguayans and Chileans. Due to “cultural differences,” Friedkin had told the colonel. The CIA had then decided to ask Brazil for help, suggesting that former Brazilian trainees who had completed the program go on to lend “technical assistance” to the Uruguayan and Chilean police forces. “But not to the Argentineans,” he had emphasized, “because they had learned everything they knew from the French mercenaries, people who trained during the fall of Indochina and honed their skills during the Algerian War.”

  I took advantage of the colonel’s excellent performance to interrupt. “But where does Max fit in? How did he get himself into all of these …”

  The colonel smiled, evidently pleased by my amazement. “They ended up splitting Max. Don’t you get it? The two secret services made use of Max by shared agreement.” The colonel reached for the bucket.

  “What was Max in charge of at the embassy?” he inquired.

  “Technical cooperation … as far as I recall,” I replied hesitantly.

  “Exactly. Technical cooperation … That, let’s say, was the CIA’s domain, the confidential part. Max’s task was to make sure the Brazilian police officers and their Uruguayan counterparts understood one another, so they could carry out their efforts with maximum efficiency. That was the CIA half.”

  “And the other?”

  “The British. And it wasn’t just confidential, it was top secret. For more than two years, no one knew what it involved. That’s why the CIA, concerned about a lack of transparency on the part of the Brits, began to keep tabs on MI6! According to Eric, it wasn’t the first time, and he suspected that the British secret service occasionally returned the favor. So it’s possible — as my ex-boss, our attaché in Montevideo, reasoned — that on receiving the first signs that something serious might be going down, the CIA burned Max along with the SNI. Particularly because, at that point, our hero was about to be transferred to Santiago. And, as far as he knew, in Chile, the CIA … Well, the CIA wanted Max for themselves.…”

  “But what were the signs? Of something serious?” I persisted, casually pouring myself another half glass of champagne. “What did they have to do with?”

  “That, Eric only told me about superficially. He mentioned uranium smuggling, nuclear energy, and Germany. From a few other garbled remarks, I assumed that the British must have smelled a business opportunity in the nuclear market with Brazil. And they might have tried to cut Germany out of the deal, but without letting the Americans know. So they wouldn’t enter the field, of course.”

  “Which they couldn’t prevent,” I said. “Westinghouse ended up selling us the Angra 1 nuclear plant. But that’s as far as it got. Because in 1975, the Americans became outraged when Brazil signed a nuclear agreement with Germany.”

  “Exactly.” The colonel sighed, as if he were the one who had lost a billion-dollar deal. “And KVD, a subsidiary of Borgward-Stitz, was the one that made a fortune in this transaction.” He consoled himself by digging into his sizable dessert.

  “Anyway,” he remarked after two forkfuls, “heaps of money were at stake. The matter is of course clearer seen today. But back then, it was all guesswork. Before serving in Montevideo, our ambassador had headed the Brazilian mission in Germany. And from then on, he’d spend his vacations in Bonn, all of them. Only no one vacationed in Bonn, not even Korean tourists!”

  For a few minutes, the colonel gave himself over to his dessert. Once he’d conquered that challenge, he blurted out, “You can’t even imagine the consequences of this whole ordeal. Some of them are unbelievable. One occurs to me now. Max had a colonel friend who happened to be from my class, Newton Cordeiro. A complicated character, that guy. He worked with us at the SNI until we found out about his involvement in some shady scheme, which we had to cover up. He was forced to retire and wound up at the Coffee Institute. But then it seems he started getting into stranger things. Well, to my surprise, Newton Cordeiro showed up in Montevideo and headed over to the embassy. I met up with him at the entrance. Since I figured he was there to see me, I frowned. Picture my astonishment when he brushed right past me without a single word and went straight into Max’s office — without even knocking. Later I found out that he was staying with Max and his wife! He was in Montevideo at least three times. And always stayed with them.”

  As intrigued as I was, I instinctively sensed that Newton Cordeiro was a subject that might well derail our conversation. At that stage, I wasn’t particularly inclined to raise issues involving the Operation Condor article in Foreign Diplomatic Review. Better to let go of this piece of the puzzle. Besides, I was tired. It had been a heavy meal. And although enjoyable, the conversation hadn’t spared me from its painful resonances. As for the drinks … they just kept coming. I decided to take advantage of the arrival of the tray of liqueurs to change the subject.

  “Colonel,” I began, affecting mere curiosity, “did you ever meet Marina, Max’s wife?”

  The colonel’s face disappeared briefly behind the first puff of his cigar. And there was nothing discreet about the swig of cognac he took. The combination of these two acts reinvigorated his voice.

  “Marina. She came up to me at a reception one time and, without realizing what she was saying, told me that Max would arrive home from our night gatherings ‘and lock himself in his office.’ And she further kidded, in that husky voice of hers, ‘What kind of game do you guys play, Major, that has my husband losing money at poker and then, when he gets home, forgoing his place in bed with me for some report? Just what is it you talk about while you’re playing?’ ”

  And here my old bear ended up showing that life had taught him som
ething useful after all, albeit in the form of unresolved doubts. “Marina … Sometimes I think she knew a thing or two about us. But whose side she was on, I never figured out. Their relationship was strange, tense, at any rate. I never knew what was going on between them.”

  And so it came to be that dozens of anecdotes gathered during my nights out with the colonel in Vienna, as well as myriad fragments that lay dormant for years in my files, joined forces to make me a virtual hostage of my saga. As if fate wanted to reward me and punish me at the same time for my blind diligence in piecing together the puzzle I was dealing with. This is the story to which I now return, picking up in the early 1970s, when Max had first arrived in Montevideo.

  PART THREE

  20

  Having landed in Montevideo in 1970 with a crusader’s spirit, suited in armor, a shield on his left arm, and an unsheathed sword in his right hand, Max found his first two weeks at the embassy a letdown. There were quite a number of staff on board and so, despite his promotion to first secretary, his hierarchical position was relatively obscure: five diplomats, as well as the three military attachés, had seniority over him, several with direct access to the ambassador. The latter did not fail to warmly invite him into his office for coffee. He also scheduled a luncheon in Max’s honor at his residence for three weeks later, at which time he would also “see off the naval attaché transferred to Brasilia.” The rest of their colleagues and their wives would be in attendance. At this the ambassador let slip a disparaging sigh and, before bidding Max goodbye, concluded, “You and your wife will then get to know all the members of our little diplomatic zoo.”

  Three weeks, thought Max, scarcely containing his surprise. Worse yet: the talk between the two, which he had been anticipating for quite some time, hadn’t lasted five minutes. Scheduling difficulties, the ambassador’s secretary had suggested on seeing him emerge crestfallen, before sending him back down to the first floor. For someone who had shared a moment of great intimacy with his future boss in his library just months earlier, the treatment was a slight. It occurred to him that on the occasion of their original conversation, he was being wooed. And that he’d now fallen into the less important category of the conquered. As such, he was but another member of a team — led, it’s worth remembering, by one of the ministry’s strongmen. Although hurt, Max made a point of sending flowers to the ambassador’s wife, briefly mentioning what a pleasure it would be to see her again and introduce Marina. He did the same for the wife of the minister-counselor. The couple received a polite note of thanks from each.

  Despite these initial disappointments, our recent arrival knew, once again, to be patient and bide his time — aware that, sooner or later, it would come. Just as it had before. In Montevideo, however, the scene was much different. He was now abroad. And not only that: he was posted in an embassy ruled with an iron fist by one of the ministry’s most feared men. Itamaraty’s jargon alone reinforced his feeling of imprisonment. To begin with, he hadn’t been transferred; he had been relocated. Furthermore, being away from the broader horizons of headquarters, he felt claustrophobic, like a sardine packed in a can.

  From the minister-counselor, second-in-command at the embassy, he had received word that, by orders from above, he would be in charge of technical assistance. The news surprised him, since he had imagined that his known experience in South American matters would qualify him to join the political team. Even so, he merely lowered his head and bit his lip. They had given him an office on the ground floor, with a desk, three chairs, and a faded sofa, which barely disguised the fact that two armchairs had formerly been there also, as eight deep impressions remained in the rug, four on either side of the sofa. Someone must have pilfered them, Max thought, taking advantage of the weeks since my predecessor left. His secretary confirmed his suspicion with a cryptic smile. She would reveal more, her pose suggested, were she treated right.

  Esmeralda was Uruguayan and counting the days until retirement. Her white hair and calm demeanor were representative of her thirty years of service, during which time she had been through, in reverse order, all the positions entrusted to local aides. She had started in the 1940s as the private secretary of the then ambassador and became his lover. She had gone on to work for the minister-counselor, and from there moved down, both bosses and floors, until reaching the bottom, where the youngest diplomats and assistants to the military attachés were clustered.

  She would become Max’s friend in a matter of days — soon finding out just whom she was dealing with. Not one to mince words, especially when encouraged, she didn’t hold back her thoughts on life, men, and diplomats in particular. Such candor took Max by surprise, quickly delighting him and proving to be his only true source of joy those first few rough weeks. He liked to goad her into revealing trivial secrets about the embassy and its characters, which she meted out in dribs and drabs, always receiving some bit of information from him in return. These she would store away for future use — a game at which they were both skilled players and that would draw them even closer over time.

  Esmeralda occupied a small office space next to Max’s. On their first day working together, she had detected her new boss’s disappointed look as he took in the mediocre paintings on his walls. “What’s more, they’re dreary,” she had said, surprising Max, who was used to guessing the thoughts of others but not to seeing his own so readily exposed.

  “To match the view from our windows,” he had observed in turn. And rightly so, since the days of his arrival had coincided with an intermittent rain that brought out the bleakness of that street, which had no pedestrians.

  “The rain in London brings out poetry,” she had said, quoting verses by her first boss and lover who, unhappy with his transfer from England to Uruguay during the war — a transfer to which he owed his life, since his residence in London had been destroyed by a bomb days after his departure — spent his time lamenting, “but in Montevideo it’s woeful water that further dampens the mood …”

  How dreadful, thought Max on hearing the verses (loosely translated, for as Esmeralda sheepishly admitted, she no longer recalled the original English version, “which sounded infinitely better”). He envisioned the two depressed lovers in bed a generation ago, looking out at the same rain still coming down now. Yet he smiled at her and praised the poem, understanding that it represented what was left of the relationship. Then he cast aside the secretary’s depression in order to concentrate on his own. To think that I could be in Washington or Paris …

  To lift his spirits, he devoted his first days to Marina and the task of finding a home, in which he was assisted by information from various colleagues and their wives, who kindly invited them to dinner. Based on these suggestions, they got in touch with a real estate agent known by the embassy and went out house hunting. Their belongings, which had come by land and already arrived in Montevideo, were held up in customs awaiting clearance. From there it would all go into storage, until the couple had an address.

  Put up at a comfortable and centrally located hotel, but one that had seen better times (“It’s decent,” the minister-counselor had told him indifferently over the phone), Max and Marina found themselves prisoners of a tiny room whose carpeted floor undulated beneath their feet. They were constantly bumping into one another, and whispering apologies, as if some degree of formality had covertly infiltrated their relationship. They sighed without knowing why and spent a good part of the late nights reading in the lumpy double bed, which seemed to creak with the turn of each page.

  Because she was younger and more outgoing, Marina handled the situation better. Over those first two weeks, she dressed simply and wandered around the city, whether with the realtor recommended by the embassy, prescreening residences she would look at again later with Max, or in the company of some spouse of a colleague, who took turns with the other wives in this task. For that’s what they were: a support group, continuing a tradition that had helped them all in the past — and that, with Marina now on the t
eam, would benefit the families still to come to Montevideo.

  Far from bothering her, the variety of companions enabled her to get to know the women’s world — at her husband’s professional level, of course, since the wives of the senior colleagues, and with greater reason those of the military attachés, weren’t part of this collective effort, reserving their energy for recent arrivals of their stature. She took in all of these small social cues, which had gone undetected in the upper-class Rio de Janeiro society she came from, with the painful feeling that they were being employed with extra rigor in her case given that she was a Magalhães de Castro. Her surname had actually sounded the alarm at the sorority’s highest levels since it put the ambassador’s wife — not to mention the other members of her court — in an inferior position.

  This had been the main reason the ambassador’s wife tried to veto Max’s assignment when, months earlier, she’d learned of the offer her husband had extended to the young diplomat. Informed of Marina’s aristocratic lineage by the wife of the minister-counselor, she had asked her husband one night, while removing her earrings in front of her vanity, “Just what is it that a Magalhães de Castro would hope to find in Montevideo?” To which the ambassador, who was taking off his shoes just then, freeing his feet from the prison in which they’d been confined since that morning, had responded succinctly, “Her husband.” Beneath his wife’s stern look, he had added, “And, with any luck, the happiness to which we all aspire, with varying degrees of success.”

  In private, the ambassador was a man with a sharp sense of humor and a winning personality — a secret to which no one, not even his wife (who had stopped listening to him years ago), had access. A secret, I might add, that he guarded closely and intended to reveal only in his memoirs. Meanwhile, he concentrated on going against the tide, convinced that there was no political solution for our region without sacrifices that wouldn’t be understood for two or three generations. He believed that each and every drop of blood shed in this process, which he deemed both warranted and legitimate, would be forgotten over time.