“That was quick,” Johnny Oliver said to WOJG Zammoro when he walked into the apartment.
“Colonel Rangio promised to deliver me ‘within an hour,’ ” Zammoro replied. “He is a man of his word.”
“We’re going to have to talk about your friend Colonel Rangio, ” Oliver said.
“Yes, sir,” Zammoro said, as if he had expected this. He looked at Jack Portet. “With respect, sir, may we talk alone?”
“No, I want Lieutenant Portet in on this,” Oliver said. “I told de la Santiago and Otmanio to go to the movies.”
“Yes, sir,” Zammoro said.
“Your credibility, Mr. Zammoro, and thus your usefulness to this mission, has been called into doubt,” Oliver said. “The one way you might, repeat might, regain some credibility is, from this moment, give me the truth, all the truth, and nothing but the truth.”
“Yes, sir.”
“When and where did you meet Colonel Rangio?”
“In Argentina, sir, in 1952. I was sent to the Infantry School there. He was an instructor. And then I met him again in Cuba, in 1957.”
“What was Rangio doing in Cuba?”
“He was ostensibly the commercial attaché of the Argentinean embassy.”
“And actually?”
“He had been sent to Cuba by SIDE, sir.”
“And you were, then?”
“An infantry officer, a major. I was in an infantry battalion.”
“Not an intelligence officer?”
“General Batista used his intelligence service as a private police force,” Zammoro said contemptuously. “No, I was not one of them, I was a soldier.” General Fulgencio Batista was President of Cuba until the Castro-led revolution was successful.
“And how did you come to meet Colonel Rangio again?”
“He sought me out,” Zammoro said. “He offered his help.”
“What kind of help?”
“My regiment was then responsible for ‘controlling’ the insurrection in the Sierra Maestra mountains.”
“You mean Castro?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What was Rangio’s interest in that?”
“Castro’s medical officer—Ernesto Guevara de la Serna,” Zammoro said.
“You knew he was an intelligence officer?”
“I knew he wasn’t a ‘commercial attaché.’ When he told me he had just been promoted to lieutenant colonel—it wasn’t hard to figure out.”
“And what kind of help did he offer?”
“He let me know that if Guevara was killed, there would be no repercussions from the Argentine government. He had the idea that the reason our campaign against Castro was failing was because we were worried about trouble from the Argentines, and other South American governments.”
“Was that true?”
“Captain, when senior officers are appointed to major commands because of their support of a corrupt regime, you don’t get an efficient army.”
“I suppose not. Is that what happened?”
“Yes. If Batista had let his good officers run the Army, he would probably still be President.”
“What was the Argentine interest in Castro?”
“They knew Guevara was a Communist. This was, you will recall, when Castro was posing as a fighter against the corrupt regime of Batista. It was only after he took Havana that it came out he was a Communist. The Argentines had apparently told the United States what they knew, and the U.S. did nothing. It would have been in the Argentine interest for the Castro rebellion to fail, and for Guevara to die while it failed. There are Communists here, too, you know.”
“Obviously, you didn’t succeed in stopping Castro,” Jack Portet said.
“We exchanged a gangster in an officer’s uniform for a Communist, ” Zammoro said.
“And you felt you had to get out of the country,” Oliver said.
“Just as soon as Castro was in Havana, he had Rangio declared persona non grata, but before he left he got word to me that I was on Señor Guevara’s arrest and execute list. Guevara knew of my association with Colonel Rangio. And of course Fidel himself wasn’t too happy with me. I took out a lot of his men.”
“And your wife didn’t get out,” Jack said softly.
“She was arrested the day I arrived in Miami,” Zammoro said. “She’s in a cage—literally, a cage—on the Isla de Pinos, an island off the southern coast.”
“Shit!” Jack said.
“Why didn’t you tell somebody—General Hanrahan, Colonel Felter, Colonel Lowell, somebody—about this?” Oliver asked.
“I knew they would be—with ample justification—suspicious of anyone who had been an officer in Batista’s army. I really wanted to get in Special Forces, and didn’t want to put any obstacles in my way.”
“Why did you want to get in Special Forces?” Jack asked.
“Right now, Lieutenant, who else in the world is interested in doing anything about stopping Communism in South America except Special Forces?”
“Why didn’t you go to Argentina?” Jack asked. “You had the connection with Rangio.”
“There are no foreigners in the Argentine Army,” Zammoro said.