THURSDAY, 10:16 P.M.
Judd still hadn’t heard anything from Jessica. He had hit a dead end trying to uncover more on the Americans from The Big Pig.
Judd turned away from his whiteboard, with its photos of the men and the lines of the web that still didn’t make sense. Maybe I’ll never know the truth, he thought. Even if he didn’t know who these guys were or what they were up to, he knew he had to focus on his task: a hostage negotiation strategy for Landon Parker. He still needed a backchannel to Havana. And he needed a plan before the end of the day.
Judd had discovered in the archives that every White House since John F. Kennedy had tried to establish a secret dialogue with the Cuban government. LBJ, Nixon, Carter, Bush, Clinton—they all tried. And they all failed. Even the coldest of the Cold Warriors, Ronald Reagan, had attempted to find common ground with Havana by negotiating to end the presence of Cuban troops in Africa. Reagan had to strike a deal with El Jefe. The result of eight grueling years of talks was the departure of Cuban troops from Angola, a withdrawal of South African forces, and the creation of a newly independent Namibia. It was a complex triple agreement of historic proportions. But that diplomatic success in Africa never led to a broader détente between Washington and Havana. Instead, the Angola negotiations followed the same pattern as other attempts at dialogue: Small steps in confidence building eventually gave way to animus.
Judd had read through the history of failed diplomatic overtures to Cuba. It was a long record of missteps and misunderstandings. Minor advances toward compromise were simply swept away by political expediency. Hard-liners on one side or the other had found it too easy to scuttle any progress. Why should Landon Parker believe I can do better? Why should I think I can?
Judd had scrawled down the basic outlines of a plan on a single sheet of paper.
Good faith
Discreet negotiations
Plausible deniability
Incentives to deliver
Judd was stuck on number one. What kind of new gesture could the United States make that might entice the Cubans but not enrage Capitol Hill? How to thread the needle between the old men in Havana and the old men in Miami? How to find common ground between El Comrade Presidente and Brenda Adelman-Zamora? Judd jotted down a list of the least-controversial options that he could present to Landon Parker:
music, baseball, biotech sugar.
It was a pitiful list. Sugar might even be too contentious. Judd changed it:
biotech sugar tropical agriculture.
Still pathetic. But at least it was something to propose. The topic was beside the point, he reminded himself. It could be anything. He just needed to manufacture a new reason to talk to the Cubans. Any cover for making a deal to recover the Americans.
Were they hostages? Or ploys? Or pawns? The uncertainty burned at him. Judd turned back to his whiteboard, staring at the photos of the four men. What were they really doing in the Florida Straits? Why was Landon Parker so anxious to help them? What was their connection to Ruben Sandoval? And who was Richard Green?
Who the hell were these people?
40.
CIA HEADQUARTERS, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
THURSDAY, 10:42 P.M.
Sunday dug deeper into the CIA archives on the Bay of Pigs. Most of the records on Brigada Asalto 2506 had been redacted or were so old that they had been boxed up and taken to off-site storage, probably some warehouse in a nondescript office park off a northern Virginia parkway. There was no way he’d get to the original records tonight.
The CIA had increasingly been relying on “open source intelligence,” what government officials called any material that was also available publicly. Crucial nuggets of information could often be found in newspapers or on websites that were just as reliable as clandestine sources. Sometimes open source was even better.
So far, Sunday had confirmed from open sources that Brigada Asalto 2506 had, in fact, been a group of Cuban exiles that formed the core team of a covert paramilitary CIA operation to invade Cuba in 1961. The plan, hatched by the Agency’s Deputy Director of Operations at the time, Randolph Nye, was to have 2506 land at Bahía de Cochinos and establish a beachhead. They would then make contact with a local underground force, inciting a popular counterrevolution and eventually retaking power in Havana. Assassinating the Cuban leader was not a formal objective of the plot, but all members of 2506 knew that wealthy Cuban exiles in Miami had placed a large bounty on the head of El Jefe.