—
The intelligence game had changed so much. After the failings of 9/11, the United States’ multiple intelligence services had been reorganized. Instead of the clarity of a CIA Director leading America’s secret information-gathering and covert operations, a new super Director for National Intelligence was created to advise the President on all intelligence matters and to oversee all sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA. The DNI was suddenly above the CIA Director, a new player in town and a new layer between the CIA and the White House. To compensate for this slight, the boxes were shuffled and renamed in Langley, too. The Deputy Director of Operations, the person responsible for global covert operations, was renamed the Director of the National Clandestine Service.
In a classic Washington move, the elevation in title was actually a demotion. He believed this was political theater and textbook ass-covering, the kind of bureaucratic crap that he had grown to despise about Washington, D.C. Just like the incessant meddling from Congress, the politics of management was a growing distraction from the real work of fighting America’s enemies. And a further erosion of the CIA’s preeminence.
So when he was eventually promoted to run covert operations, he insisted that they call him by the old name, the Deputy Director of Operations. That was the great Cold Warrior Allen Dulles’s title, too, before he became CIA Director. A lesser title on paper, but a symbolic nod to better times and older ways of doing things. And he had made a bargain with himself to make it all worthwhile.
—
The Deputy Director closed the Operation Zapata file and randomly opened another. This outlined an aborted attempt in the 1960s to poison El Jefe’s cigars. The next file detailed a bungled attempt to add an undetectable toxin to the Cuban leader’s aftershave. Another plot had planned to induce paranoia and psychosis by lacing his coffee with LSD via a tainted sugar cube. A fourth scheme made covert payments to bribe his security guards into turning their guns on their leader. They had accepted the cash but never pulled the trigger.
None of these operations had worked. His predecessor Randolph Nye had let America down. And let down the brave Cuban people.
The Deputy Director sighed to himself, knowing that, decades later, he was still letting them down. All nineteen successors between Nye and the current occupier of this office had let them down, he thought. The Deputy Director knew he now had access to more money and more technology than anything Nye could have ever imagined. Yet the same old men, the same ragtag rebels who had seized Havana in 1959, still ran Cuba. The island was in a prison and part of the blame lay squarely on him.
It wasn’t for lack of trying. The Deputy Director had green-lit operations to spark street riots by creating false bread shortages, to disrupt the banking system by implanting a virus in the central bank’s computers, and to plant misinformation in the local newspapers about luxury homes in the Spanish Costa del Sol owned by top Cuban politicians. He had provided seed capital to Cuban exiles in Costa Rica to create a SMS text network about the Miami Marlins baseball team that was a cover for organizing social protests on the island.
His boldest PsyOps gamble was to launch AeroLibre, a high-altitude plane to beam television broadcasts into Cuban homes. The Deputy Director had even signed off on a Top Secret plan to create BesoPeso, a new electronic currency that could be used to evade the control of the Cuban authorities and, if necessary, pay off potential friends in Havana without drawing the notice of the U.S. Treasury.
None of these plots had had the desired effect. None had even made a dent in the Cuban armor. Cuban intelligence had countermoved each scheme. They jammed AeroLibre’s signal. They uncovered and blocked his phantom BesoPeso. Oswaldo Guerrero had found a way to choke his every move. The Devil of Santiago had to be the luckiest bastard on earth, he thought. Or, perhaps, the man known as O was actually the smartest.