She placed her paper down and looked straight into the television cameras. The nine-term congresswoman from Florida’s 22nd District was a political pro. Brenda Adelman had grown up on Long Island on the fringes of the powerful political machine of Rockland County. Witnessing the mass migration of her elderly Jewish relatives from New York to the Southern states, she, too, moved with her political ambitions—and built an impressive congressional career on the magic formula of the South Florida triple defense: Social Security, sugar subsidies, and Israel.
Brenda had been less successful in romance, however. She’d hastily married an ophthalmologist of Cuban descent. They quietly divorced after only a few months and the episode appeared to have had little impact on her life. The political benefit of a hyphenated last name was, however, substantial. Becoming a champion of democracy in the Caribbean bolstered her hawkish foreign policy credentials—and turbocharged her fund-raising capabilities across South Florida.
“Consent of the governed,” Adelman-Zamora lectured. “Those words have meaning. We as a nation believe in democracy and freedom. We defend these values at home and we promote these values abroad. This means we must fight against dictatorship and repression, wherever it may rear its ugly head. That is the destiny of the United States. Freedom and democracy are interwoven into our values and ultimately into our national security. And that brings us to our topic of this hearing this morning.
“A principal task of our intelligence services is to monitor and analyze the political forces of tyranny. We cannot defeat an enemy that we do not understand. We rely on the capabilities of the great men and women who serve our country in the intelligence services to look underneath every rock, to listen in the dark corners, to unearth the secrets of our enemies so that the march of freedom can resume. However, too often we have failed to foresee change coming.”
The chairwoman returned to her written text and continued, “We did not predict the Iranian revolution coming in 1979 and we continue to fly blind on political change in Tehran. We did not foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union and we have been unable to foresee new Russian aggression. We have repeatedly missed the signs of new threats to the state of Israel, our most important democratic ally in the Middle East.”
Chairwoman Adelman-Zamora removed her reading glasses and sighed deeply for the cameras. “And most obvious of all, our neighbor to the south has been imprisoned by tyranny since 1959. That once-proud nation should be a close American ally. It should be an engine for prosperity in our hemisphere. Instead, our long history of failure to bring liberty to a country just ninety miles from our own shores is an affront to free people everywhere. Our missteps are a lingering embarrassment for these great United States. Today, we are continuing to fail freedom-loving people around the world by the misguided policy of our own administration. Despite the ill-advised steps by the State Department to embrace dictatorship and apologize for oppression, our neighbors remain locked in chains. I have called this special hearing today to ask a simple but vital question: How are we still losing Cuba?”
6.
CIA HEADQUARTERS, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
TUESDAY, 11:15 A.M.
The red file taunted the Deputy Director. He snatched the folder labeled OPERATION RAINMAKER and threw it across the room. It flew like a Frisbee for a second before the papers scattered everywhere and floated down around his office like snowflakes.
“Dammit,” he swore to himself. He grimaced at the tall pile of files on his desk, a catalog of every covert operation by the Central Intelligence Agency against Cuba since the revolution in 1959. OPERATION TASMANIAN DEVIL, OPERATION PANDORA, OPERATION DEMON BARBER, OPERATION PIT BOSS, OPERATION BANANA SUNRISE. This mountain is a pathetic collection of history, he thought. A graveyard of bad ideas.
On the very bottom was a file much fatter than the others. He extracted OPERATION ZAPATA, tipping over the rest of the folders into a fan on his desk. As he opened the thick ZAPATA file, he winced as his chest tightened. The first document was a memo summarizing the Agency’s most embarrassing fiasco, the April 17, 1961, botched invasion by CIA-supported Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs. The memo to the CIA Director had been by Randolph Nye, the Deputy Director of Operations during the height of the Cold War. Nye was the man who had occupied this precise office, this seat. His seat.
Nye had accomplished many things that the world would never know about, but he had died a year ago, unredeemed. Quiet victories in Egypt, in the Congo, in Mexico, and in the Philippines. But the world would always remember the black eye of the Bay of Pigs. The air cover wasn’t approved. The ammunition ran out. The weather turned. The cash never arrived. Everything had gone wrong on that day.
Randolph Nye was now gone, but his ghost lived on in these walls, thought the Deputy Director. He wouldn’t allow that to happen to him. He wouldn’t allow that to happen again.