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By Tony Paterson in Berlin and James Langton in New York.
Electronic Telegraph. ISSUE 1962
Sunday 8 October 2000
IT was a moment that might have changed the course of history. Fidel
Castro, the communist leader of Cuba, in a secret tryst with a former lover who
was now a CIA agent and under orders to kill him.
According to Marita Lorenz, it was only her re-ignited love for Castro that
stopped her administering poison, falling instead into his arms for a night of
passion. Had she followed her orders, the fiasco that was the Bay of Pigs and
the Cuban missile crisis would never have happened. Perhaps even President
Kennedy might have lived.
That is the version of events related in a new documentary about Miss
Lorenz. Wilfried Huismann, a Germany documentary film maker, who releases Dear
Fidel - Marita's Story this week in Berlin, believes her. He said: "At
first I thought the Marita Lorenz tale was a bit of a sailor's yarn, it was only
after I had interviewed countless former CIA people and Castro aides and then
got to know Marita herself that I became convinced that her story was true."
Fate has not favoured Miss Lorenz. Now 61, she recently suffered a heart
attack. Impoverished and forgotten, she lives in a run-down apartment in the
Queens district of New York. She survives on $411 (£290) a month social
security and a diet of doughnuts from the deli next door. It is another world
from the one she was born into. Her father was a German sea captain and her
British-born mother a political activist whose anti-Nazi sympathies condemned
the family to a concentration camp.
Liberated at the end of the war, the family moved to America. By 1959 the
young Marita had joined her father, now captain of the liner, Berlin, which one
winter's day anchored in Havana harbour. The revolution that had swept Castro to
power was barely six weeks old. The young dictator came on board the ship and
found a 19-year-old girl. "He looked very nervous and was chewing a cigar,"
she recalls. "I had never had a boyfriend. I was always something of a
tomboy. That night changed everything." Castro became her first lover. The
relationship lasted several months.
The couple met at a suite in the Hilton hotel, she said: "He would put
a sheet from the bed over my hair and hand me a spray of parsley from the room
service tray, saying 'Now you are Mrs Castro'."
Several weeks later she found she was pregnant. Concerned that her parents
would be scandalised, she was reassured by Castro that he would take care of
her, promising a house and a life in the fledgling communist state. What
happened next is still unclear. Factions among Castro's entourage became
suspicious of his teenage lover, especially as her mother was now working for US
intelligence.
In the autumn of 1959 Miss Lorenz was kidnapped, drugged and forced to
undergo an abortion. Un- attended, she was left bleeding for three days in a
Havana hotel room. To this day she is unsure whether Castro or the CIA ordered
the operation, but suspects that it was the latter.
Broken by the experience, she fled back to America, where she says a
concerted attempt was made to recruit her into American counter-intelligence.
One of her handlers was a man she met in Cuba, a mercenary with both US
intelligence and Mafia links who had fallen out with Castro. More than 10 years
later the same man, Frank Sturgis, was arrested for breaking into the Democratic
headquarters in the Watergate building on June 18 1972.
Sturgis presented her with a photograph of a dead and mutilated foetus on a
bedspread that looked like those in the former Havana Hilton, now the Habana
Libre. "He did that to you," she recalls him saying.
Whether it was the Mafia or the CIA who ordered an assassination attempt on
Castro in 1960 remains unclear. Mr Huismann's documentary, however, suggests
that Sturgis was a central figure in the plot.The film has also traced a former
liaison officer between the CIA and Mafia who recalls handing over poison pills
distilled from shellfish toxins at a CIA laboratory. Now 90, Robert Maheu, a
former aide of Howard Hughes, says that they were meant for Castro.
Miss Lorenz says she was brainwashed into going back to Cuba to carry out
the assassination attempt. On the aircraft she began to have serious doubts, and
after having arranged an assignation with Castro she flushed the pills down a
bidet instead of secreting them in his food, as planned. The couple made love,
fuelled by her guilt and repressed passions. Afterwards she returned to America,
uncertain how she would be received.
According to her account, she remained involved with the CIA for nearly 20
years. In the early Sixties she claims to have joined Sturgis on a gun-running
expedition to Texas that also involved Howard Hunt, another of the Watergate
conspirators. Depositing the weapons at Hunt's apartment, she was introduced to
a man she now knows to be Lee Harvey Oswald and believes that the Kennedy
assassination was ordered by the Mafia, angry that they had lost their powerful
gambling interests in Cuba and that Kennedy had allowed Castro to survive.
She later had a son by a CIA agent and a daughter by a former president of
Venezuela, Marcos Perez Jimenez. "Don't think I collect dictators,"
she says. "I had no idea who he was. He was just a nice middle-aged South
American man who got me drunk on German wine." Her links with the CIA ended
in 1976, when she was granted immunity from prosecution. She claims to have met
Castro twice since the end of their affair. Miss Lorenz agreed to travel to New
York for the documentary, the last frame of which shows her being told by the
Cuban authorities: "Fidel sends his regards, but unfortunately he has no
time for a meeting."
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2000. | 