Corruption of Blood (25 page)

He shook these maunderings away and refocused on how to nail David’s slick CIA ass to the wall. On this too he was drawing a blank. The problem was secrecy. If the CIA was allowed to be the sole judge of what could be revealed and what could remain hidden for reasons of national security, then the committee might as well hang it up. Karp was willing to bring it to the test of a subpoena, and he thought that Crane would back him on it. The CIA people might claim that their oath of secrecy took precedence over the obligations under a testamentary oath. Fine—they would jail David on contempt charges, and then get the next guy in line and jail him, and so on. Obviously it would be subject to judicial clarification, maybe even a Supreme Court case. Karp started to feel better. He got out a pad and began making notes for a succulent piece of legal research.

The phone interrupted him.

“Butch? Clay here. I’m at National, just got in. Where do you want me to bring Veroa?”

“He’s with you? How is he?”

“He’s fine. Doesn’t say much. Didn’t give me any trouble about coming up either. Kind of a mild chubby little guy, an accountant. Doesn’t strike me as much of a terrorist leader. You sure we got the right guy?”

“What did you expect, a slouch hat, flaming eyes, a beard, and one of those round bombs with a smoking fuse? Believe me, he’s no sweetheart. I tell you what—stick him in the TraveLodge down the street—no, why don’t you bring him over to the office. I want him to watch our movie.”

They arrived forty minutes later. Veroa did indeed look like an accountant: tall for a Cuban, about five-nine, mustached, with thick black-rimmed glasses and a soft-looking pear-shaped body. Karp went into the file room, and from a locked file in a drawer labeled Administration Forms withdrew the spool of film. He called Charlie Ziller in to run the machine. Fulton, Karp, and Veroa grouped themselves in front of the screen while Ziller cranked the film up to the point marked by the little paper slip. The screen lit up on the road through the swamp.

“This is you, right, Mr. Veroa?” asked Karp when the right frames came by. “Freeze it right here, Charlie.”

Veroa peered at the dim scene of the men around the jeep. “Yes, that is me. Younger, of course.”

“Could you identify the other men for us?”

“Some, I think.” He placed his finger on a squat, pop-eyed man standing near the jeep. “This is Angelo Guel. And here is Gary Becker.” He rattled off some more Cuban names. He had forgotten who the driver was. Fulton wrote down the names in a notebook, also marking down the frames they appeared in.

“Who’s the tall guy with his face moving away from the camera?” Karp asked. “Near the front wheel.”

“That is Maurice Bishop.”

“It is, huh? Are you sure?”

“Oh, yes. He was in charge of the whole operation. I knew him quite well.”

“Good, okay roll it slow until I tell you to stop. A little more, more, stop! Do you recognize this man?” Karp pointed.

“It looks like Lee Oswald, but it is dark. I can’t be sure.”

“You never met him at these exercises?”

Veroa shrugged. “No, but there were many hundred men, and many exercises. He was not active, if he was there at all. I did actually meet him once, though.”

“You did? When?”

“In September of sixty-three. I went to meet with Bishop at a hotel in Dallas, and Oswald was with him.”

There was silence in the little room while they all digested that. “Let’s, uh, move on, Charlie. Okay, Mr. Veroa, here’s a scene in broad daylight. Let’s see what you make of this.”

The man in the black shirt and ball cap appeared.

“Oswald again, right?” Karp asked.

Veroa shook his head. “No, I know who that is. That is Bill Caballo.”

“A Cuban?”

“No, not Cuban. But he spoke Spanish, I think with a Central American accent. An American. Bishop gave him to us, for weapons training. He was an expert with small arms, and an armorer.” They were all staring at him. Veroa glanced back at the screen. “He resembles Oswald, certainly, especially in the shape of the face and the coloring. But Caballo was thinner. He had many … what?
Pecas
—freckles on his arms and his hands. Also, he was shorter than me, and Oswald was perhaps a little taller than me.”

“But it might have been possible to confuse one with the other, huh? If you had never seen both of them together?”

A slight nod. “Yes, in that case, perhaps. I knew Caballo more than I knew Oswald. I met Oswald only that one time, with Bishop. Really, I didn’t even remember that he was on this exercise, on this film. So
I
would not have confused them.”

They watched the film a few times more, with Veroa filling in as many details as he remembered on the recognizable people shown in it. Then they grilled him for some additional hours about his long association with the man he knew as Maurice Bishop: the initial contact while Veroa was still in Cuba, the conversion of an unassuming but patriotic Cuban accountant into an underground agent, the failed assassination attempt against Castro, the escape from Cuba, the foundation of Brigada 61, the raids, the additional attempt on Castro’s life in Chile, in 1971. Bishop had been closely involved as a planner and financier throughout his clandestine career, purportedly as the representative of “anticommunist businessmen.” The CIA had never been mentioned.

“And are you still in contact with Bishop?” Karp asked. Veroa confirmed that this, at least, was too much to hope for.

“No, in 1971, after the Chilean thing failed, we … no longer trusted each other too much,” said Veroa. It seemed to sadden him.

“How did that happen?”

“I had set up an organization in Caracas to run the operation. We had, the Cuban resistance, I mean, many assets in Venezuela, in the police and so forth. And we had a good deal of money too. The plan was that after Castro was killed in Valparaiso, the Chilean army would arrest the two assassins and allow them to escape. But the assassins didn’t trust that plan; they thought they would be killed instead.” He paused. “Actually, it was because of Caballo.”

“Caballo? The man in the film?”

“Yes, he was in charge of the escape, in Chile. The assassins, they didn’t trust him, so they arranged their own getaway plan. Which they kept secret from me. But somehow this other plan was betrayed to the DGI—”

“That’s the Cuban counterintelligence agency,” said Ziller.

“Yes, and then the assassins refused to go through with it.”

“Who betrayed the new plan, do you have any idea?”

Veroa shrugged. “It was—how can I say—a cloudy situation. The Cubans on both sides, the Venezuelans, the Chileans, all penetrating one another, and the CIA penetrating them all. I have heard, although I cannot vouch for the report, that it was Caballo himself who sold them to the DGI, and then let it be known to them that they were sold.”

“Why would he do that? Why should he care how they escaped? Didn’t he want Castro killed?”

Veroa shrugged again. “Fidel is still alive, yes? And many other people are dead.”

Karp glanced at Fulton and Ziller, who both looked blank. “Mr. Veroa … ah … help me out here. I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying. Are you trying to tell us that all these plots against Castro that you were involved in were in some way phony? That the CIA guys you were working with, Bishop and Caballo and the others, were running some other kind of game?”

Veroa spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness and shook his head slowly from side to side. “It would be hard for me to believe that. Bishop I worked with closely for over ten years. He made it possible for us, for the Brigada, to do much damage to the Fidelistas. On the other hand … there were times when he did things that I did not comprehend.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, once we were asked to deliver a briefcase to a couple of men sitting in a bar in Caracas. As our man left the meeting he heard them talking in a language he did not know. Later we learned that these were both Russian agents. Another time we were on a raid at night on the Cuban coast. We were involved in a firefight with the militia. Many of our people were wounded and several were killed, but we drove them off. We destroyed a power plant and left. Later, back in Miami, I heard rumors that another Cuban anticommunist group had been in a raid that same night on the same part of the coast, and had been badly hurt. I thought it was possible that these were the people we had fought. When I asked Bishop about it, he laughed and told me not to worry. He said that all this was coordinated at a level above him and they would not make such a stupid mistake.”

“Did he ever identify this level above him?” Karp asked.

“No. We never talked about it.”

“And you never worked with any other CIA contact?”

Veroa looked at Karp quizzically. “No, and I am not entirely sure that Bishop was a CIA contact. He certainly never said so. He always presented himself as an agent of private business interests.”

“What about Caballo? The same?”

Veroa shrugged dismissively. “Caballo I always thought was Bishop’s dog. He was a man with no conversation, a blank, a technician. Bishop was very different, a man of a certain quality, a thinker. But he was certainly getting orders from someplace, you understand. We knew this because often, when we had planned an action, he would say he needed a go-ahead. Then there would be a delay, and we would either do it or not.”

“Do you still have contact with him, with Bishop?”

A shake of the head, and Veroa answered in a slow, reflective voice, like that of a wife abandoned for no reason. “No. He began to distance himself from us, from me personally, after the failure in Chile. He contacted me in the summer of 1973. We met in Hialeah, at the racetrack parking lot. He told me that the people he worked for no longer wished him to continue his relationship with me. He was sorry but this is the way it had to be. Then he handed me a briefcase and drove off.”

“What was in the briefcase?”

“About a quarter of a million dollars,” said Veroa.

Twenty minutes later, Karp and Ziller were still talking in the file room, by the light of the small blank screen, when V.T. Newbury strode in, his cheeks bright pink from the brisk outdoors. He held up a thick manila envelope.

“Our stills. Want to take a look?”

V.T. spread two dozen or so eight-by-ten glossies across a table. Consulting the notes Ziller had made during the recent viewing of the film, they were able to put names to most of the portraits. V.T. examined the picture of Bill Caballo with interest and they filled him in on what Veroa had said.

“So it’s not Oswald after all,” said V.T. “Fascinating! So now we have a guy who looks like Oswald, who’s an operative with the anti-Castro movement, connected to the infamous Bishop, and is apparently an expert shot. My stomach is tingling.”

“Yeah, this is a break,” agreed Ziller. “I’ll tell you one thing I’d like to do with these pictures. Take them out to Miami and let Sylvia Odio look at them. It’d be interesting as hell if she was able to identify the guys who showed up at her place as one of them.” He looked at Karp as he said this, expecting some response, but Karp was staring fixedly at one of the photographs.

He said to V.T., “A couple of weeks ago, when we were talking about getting testimony from Paul David, you showed me a picture of him that they took when he appeared before Warren. Could you get that for me?”

V.T. went to the filing cabinet and brought back a folder. Karp pulled out a yellowed clipping and placed it beside the photograph Veroa had identified as Bishop.

“What do you think? David is Bishop, right?”

V.T. and Ziller studied the two portraits. “It’s hard to say,” said Ziller. “The one from the paper is a full face and the one from the film is a side view, and it’s dark and blurry too.”

“But I saw the guy in the flesh today,” replied Karp. “It’s the same guy. It has to be.” He took the folder V.T. had given him, shuffled through it, and drew out a sheet of paper. “Look at his record,” he continued, excitement starting to show in his voice. “David was a major player in the Bay of Pigs. He was a covert agent in Havana at the same time that Bishop contacted Veroa. He spent his whole career, practically, doing covert work in Latin America,
and,
of course, he was in charge in Mexico City when the fuckup about the tapes of Oswald’s supposed visit happened.”

“Yeah, the only thing missing is a link between David and this guy Caballo. If it turned out Paul Ashton David just happened to have a faithful Indian companion who just happened to look like Lee Harvey Oswald …”

He didn’t need to finish the thought. They all rolled their eyes and made other gestures indicative of astonishment.

“I think this is what the poet meant by looking at each other with a wild surmise,” said V.T. “This could be the road out of the swamp. It seems to me that the next steps are, one, getting Veroa close to David in the flesh to see if he’ll make a positive ID of him as Bishop, and, two, putting the hounds out on Caballo.”

“And three,” added Karp, “getting that fucker back in front of the committee with a contempt citation ready if he tries the trick he pulled today. Charlie, why don’t you get that started with Flores and his people, and get Clay to set up the ID run with Veroa.”

When Ziller was gone, V.T. said, “Something else interesting in this Depuy material from Georgetown. Let’s go into my office.”

“This is the last notebook that concerns David Ferrie,” said V.T., bringing out a tattered steno pad from the recesses of his desk. “Depuy interviewed him on February 12, 1967, about two weeks before he was found dead, apparently of a drug overdose. Ferrie was drunk or doped up—he usually was, toward the end—but Depuy wrote down everything he said, whether it made sense or not. Ferrie was complaining about being broke and abandoned by all his friends. He says, ‘I was supposed to get ten grand on that PXK thing. It wasn’t my fault. I could’ve … what the hell, I could still get whatever I want out of those bastards.’ Interesting sentence; what does it mean? In the margin Depuy wrote ‘PXK? Check out.’ He must have asked Ferrie right there, but Ferrie says, ‘No, the time isn’t right. I gotta think what to do.’ Then he starts rambling again. A little later, Depuy must’ve brought up the subject again, because Ferrie says, ‘I need to talk to Term on that first. Goddamn Term won’t talk to me anymore, none of those PXK cocksuckers.’ Then more drivel. Depuy’s got a marginal note, ‘Term who dat?’ ”