The Pretender Page 30

  There were no arrests. No one dared interrogate Hugo. My gentle suggestion that such would be the logical thing to do engendered only chuckles from my new pal Cabral. Should he attempt any such thing, one phone call from Mariángela to Minister Benitez, and Cabral and his people would be running a jungle outpost, if they were not fired outright. They made it clear: Mariángela’s reaction to the merest hint that her darling Hugo may have been complicit would have been frightful to behold. As I packed my carry-on after those couple of weeks in Asunción, Minister of the Interior Osvaldo Rubén Benitez Galeano and Attorney General Oscar German Latorre Canete held the big press conference. Cabral and others in the background wearing their dress uniforms added color to the spectacle, but make no mistake, citizens of Paraguay, the true saviors of Mariángela were at the mic.

  A few months later, Attorney General Oscar Latorre in Asunción called me in Buenos Aires. Mariángela wanted to make an official statement. To the FBI agent. Now Augie Rodriguez, the Legat, was willing to assume the burden of spending a few hours with the ex–Miss Paraguay. But no, she wouldn’t have it. Not an FBI agent, the FBI agent, the one who had been so helpful during her ordeal. So I returned to Paraguay and was soon sitting in the short, stocky Attorney General’s enormous office. He sat there, dwarfed by his oversized Louis XIV desk. Mariángela and I sat at a distance on a couch. Of course, I would have preferred hearing what she had to say while alone with her, with no Paraguayan ears to inhibit her disclosures. But that was never in the cards. A remarkable beauty, Mariángela was in her late forties but seemed ten years younger. Clearly, she breathed the same air as the world’s supermodels and film stars. Her description of the abduction, the imprisonment, the overheard conversations, the blindfolds, the hygienic accommodations, the gag-inducing food—none of her story was playacting. I was certain of that. She had been kidnapped, and she had been in genuine fear for her life. In response to some gentle, delicate questions: yes, her son had lost a small fortune, but he was an entrepreneur, who would eventually make his mark. She trusted him. Case closed.

  * * *

  Not long after the kidnapping, counterterrorism officials at JEH determined that on-site intelligence was needed from a remote area covered by our Legat office. Two prominent magazines—The New Yorker and Vanity Fair—had featured pieces on Hezbollah training camps and major terrorist fundraising initiatives—but not in Lebanon or Yemen, the usual suspects, but in and around Ciudad del Este, Paraguay—the main city in the region known as the Triple Frontera, the border zone with Argentina and Brazil, delineated by the Parana River. Following a flurry of leads from JEH, I boarded a flight to Puerto Iguazú, twenty miles from Ciudad del Este, on the Argentine side of the border. My Argentine Federal Police contacts would provide my initial introduction to the region. (Although I had previously visited the spectacular waterfalls of Iguazú, I was now returning to visit the area’s dark side.) The city was formerly named Ciudad Stroessner. Then the nearly simultaneous death of the long-term, iron-rule dictator Alfredo Stroessner and the collapse of Paraguay’s infrastructure necessitated a change of name. Since its foundation nearly a century earlier, this town, whatever the name, has been the black-market capital of Central and South America. Yes, for that entire massive area and economy. Ciudad is a virtual no-go zone for every pertinent law enforcement agency in all three of the bordering nations: stolen and counterfeit goods are the foundation of the economy. As dusk falls, launches large and small move cargo back and forth on the Parana and various waterways between and among Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil—all unmolested. Day and night, traffic (much of it illicit) is bumper-to-bumper across the Puente de la Amistad, the only bridge between Ciudad and Foz de Iguaçu, Brazil.

  From Fino Palacios, top chief of counterterrorism in Argentina, I had learned of all the measures and operations taken to protect the country from the Hezbollah and Hamas operatives—some official, some not so official. The Triple Frontera was the black-marketers’ utopia, requiring law enforcement attention. Although it was getting plenty of attention, there was little in the way of enforcement.

  But terrorism was a different matter. Palacios’s Departmento Unidad de Investigacion Antiterrorista, Sección Triple Frontera had stretched a tight net across the frontier. Heading the Sección was Roberto Salvador “Toto” Ontivero, one of Fino’s most trusted lieutenants. Toto had an unofficial network of informants in Ciudad—very unofficial, since they were running sources in a neighboring country, which is just not done officially. No bad guys would be crossing his border. Profiling? Of course, profiling! Are we idiots?! Toto and his people didn’t have time to waste on elderly couples returning home with heavily discounted large-screen TVs.

  Dressed in T-shirts and jeans, three of Toto’s shaggy young officers drove me in an old Jeep Renegade from their outpost on the Argentine frontier, across the border into Brazil, first, and then onto the bridge that would take us into Paraguay and Ciudad del Este (there being no border crossing directly from Argentina into Paraguay without a long detour). Bumper-to-bumper traffic on the bridge, of course, but lane splitting moto-taxis whizzed by with their helmeted passengers. At the border, our driver shook hands with the customs officer, as did the drivers of virtually every car and van. Those who, through ignorance or avarice, failed to make the discreet cash handover would be waved toward a side ramp for a thorough inspection. Passports? Who needs passports?

  An American FBI agent riding around with three Argentine covert anti-terrorist officers in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay? As an old UC, with an understanding of the need for flexibility in conforming to rules when operating in a foggy environment, I was not concerned. I was unarmed, but my companions packed adequate firepower and would have loaned me a spare pistol should the need have arisen. Six thousand miles from home, I was feeling right at home. This liaison-work thing was proving to be not too dry for my tastes after all. Toto had assured me that I would not be traveling in the vicinity of the terrorist training camps, for the simple reason that they did not exist. Toto’s men and their sources had made an exhaustive search. There were no informants, natives, merchants, or anyone else who had seen or heard any sign of such a camp anywhere in the Triple Frontera. The magazine stories had been fed to eager journalists in search of a big story, willing to put the accounts to paper without corroboration and without personally venturing beyond Ciudad del Este into the bush to make personal observations. I don’t know where those reporters traveled in-country, but they didn’t actually see any training camps … Not that the articles were without significant elements of truth.

  I was astonished to hear from Toto that residing in the vicinity of Ciudad, situated on the edge of nowhere, jungle on one side and the Parana on the other, were sixty thousand Arabs and nearly as many ethnic Chinese. They were not terrorists, nor even sympathizers. They were merchants, participants in the famous black market where all transactions were in cash, lots of cash, and with virtually no rules and no taxes (other than the “tax of doing business,” the barely unofficial contributions to the retirement funds of poorly paid local officials). In recent years, however, and just for the Arab merchants, a new tax had materialized, administered not by Paraguayan authorities but rather by Hezbollah authorities. No forms to file, no deductions, no exemptions. The hardworking proprietor of a stall in a bazaar might gross two million dollars (yes, an enormous sum for a stall in a Third World bazaar, but this is no ordinary bazaar, as we’ll see shortly)—10 percent went to Hezbollah. Failure to pay? Old Aunt Alima back in Beirut—wouldn’t it be a pity if she was run over by a bus. A bit short on the percentage? Little brother Iqbal, what with six little children at home, he may have difficulty working with both legs broken … or a cracked skull … or blinded by a glass of acid. Everyone paid.

  For Hezbollah, this region of South America had long been a comfortable soft-target zone for terrorist attacks. Fino and Toto were particularly aware of this reality. In 1992, Hezbollah operatives had blown up the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires,
and then in 1994, the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association building (the Jewish cultural center), killing hundreds. The Jewish community in Argentina numbers several hundred thousand. (Juan and Evita Perón’s version of fascism had been light on anti-Semitism, but that was fifty years earlier.) Several of the operatives in the bombings were believed by investigators to have been using Iranian diplomatic cover. They had genuine diplomatic passports bearing fictitious names, though unlike RUN-DMV documents, they had probably not been fraudulently issued. The Iranians knew with what sort of political leaders they were dealing. Over several administrations, Argentine executive leadership had been notoriously open to barely concealed, surreptitious inflows of cash. Closed-door deals involving sale of Iranian oil to Argentina were believed to have been an influence.

  The bottom line: a decade after the bombing, all charged in the crimes were found not guilty. Prominent among them were a number of the provincial police accused of accepting bribes in exchange for turning a blind eye to evidence. Investigating magistrates and prosecutors were either discredited or persecuted, or, as was the case with Juan Galeano, the judge in charge of the bombings case, impeached. Before Galeano’s impeachment, he and I and the Legat enjoyed lunch from time to time in Puerto Madero, overlooking the Rio de la Plata waterfront. We discussed progress in his investigations of the two bombings and what assistance we, the FBI, could provide. Discreetly. A timely footnote to this narrative about the bombings was the involvement of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, aka Pope Francis, of course. The clergyman was the first public figure to sign a petition demanding justice in the bombings. A decade later, in January 2015—more than two decades after the Hezbollah bombings—Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman, still investigating the now-ancient bombings, was assassinated in his Buenos Aires apartment the evening prior to providing evidence to the Congresso Nacional of a Casa Rosada cover-up. (The Casa Rosada is the Argentine White House. The trail had led to the very top.)

  That was the brief background for my journey into the bowels of the Paraguayan black market. My three compadres and I drove through the steep, winding streets of Ciudad del Este, with countless dark passageways, sidewalks packed with vendors, panel trucks operating as makeshift shops as boxes marked with the Gateway computer logo passed into the arms of eager buyers. Those workstations had no doubt taken a wrong turn while en route from Seattle to wherever. Then we proceeded into the residential areas of Ciudad and Foz, where I was shown the mini-mansions of the more successful traders. Palaces in the jungle. That night, back across the bridge and into Argentina. In Misiones’s rustic steak house, an outstanding bife-de-lomo (filet mignon of the world’s best beef), a few glasses of the local Malbec, and the good company of Toto and his soldiers, eager for fresh conversation in their isolated northern outpost.

  Early the next morning, after crossing officially from Argentina into Brazil, complete with a stamp on my diplomatic passport from the smiling customs guard, I was handed over to a broadly smiling Victorino Fernandez, Paraguay’s Deputy Minister of the Interior, whom I had met and come to admire not long before, during the kidnapping. My Paraguayan host wore unofficial garb. Our driver sat behind the wheel of a discreet faded black pickup, and we were closely followed by a dusty SUV whose tinted windows concealed the four well-armed men.

  At my request, Victorino dropped me off on the Foz de Iguaçu, Brazilian side of the Puente, before we had crossed into Paraguay. I walked up to the group of rangy young moto-taxistas, smoking and waiting for fares. One U.S. dollar to cross. My man handed me a full-face helmet, I hopped onto the two-cylinder bike, and he flew onto the bridge, cutting lanes, racing over the white lane markings, a few inches to spare between both knees and the slow-moving (and contraband-laden, in many cases) cars—ancient Argentine-built Ford Falcons to late-model BMWs. Then past the customs men and around a corner. He smiled as I commented favorably on his racing skills. Any doubts I might have had about the ease of terrorists traveling across border were now resolved. Without any documentation, my features fully concealed, I had illegally crossed the border from Brazil into Paraguay. Cost: $1 U.S.

  Our hotel, built half a century earlier to resemble a small French château, and punctiliously maintained, was situated in a gated community. Really, the gated community of gated communities. With the wealthiest of the many expatriate black-marketers as residents—many with good cause to entertain credible security concerns—entry was controlled by paramilitary armed guards (read mercenaries), professional and well-paid. The cleared kill zone around the outer-perimeter fence was regularly patrolled. Inside, there was an oasis: palm trees, flower gardens, the chirping of birds and trickle of brooks; villas with small bicycles lying on lawns beside open garage doors; the rear panels of BMWs, Mercedes, Audis glinting in the setting sun.

  The next day, my little group explored the dark passageways leading into the galleries that constitute the primary shopping sources of Ciudad. Shopping malls from hell. Down decrepit halls, up a few broad flights of chipped and cracked stairs, are endless labyrinthine passageways, with endless shopping stalls and stores, small and large—the previously referred to bazaars which form the Hezbollah tax base—where the four thousand vendors average grossing two million dollars per year, many several times that figure.

  For purely professional purposes, Victorino and I stocked up on Polo sports shirts, Gucci dress shirts, Ralph Lauren windbreakers, Hermès ties, counterfeit DVDs. My only disappointment was finding later that The Lord of the Rings was dubbed in Portuguese. Departing the Triple Frontera, we drove the rutted roads inland toward Asunción, then joined the traffic on a two-lane “highway” through arid red earth. Along the way we drank chilled maté, a concoction prepared from yerba leaves. In an expression of Paraguay’s peculiar form of populism, the drinking of maté crosses all social and economic lines. In a country where temperatures are routinely hovering at 100 degrees year-round, the constant hydration with this beverage is mandatory, and the caffeine charge never hurts. The national beverage is transported everywhere in a Thermos (maybe small, maybe very large) and sipped through a metal, often silver, straw. One Thermos is shared by everyone in a given group—officials, officers, soldiers, drivers, FBI guests, it doesn’t matter. Everyone drinks, no one wipes the silver straw. I diplomatically took a visibly long pull, then passed the Thermos for another round. (The morning maté is blended in a tea-shop-like establishment to address any one of many distinct conditions, including fatigue, headache, constipation, dizziness, and so on. The afternoon maté, however, is universal, always the same beverage. And delicious.)

  Our destination was Victorino’s farm, where his wife, Maria Helena, had prepared the guest bedroom. I spent the weekend reading on a hammock, while Victorino tended his bees and looked after the farm. The steak, from the rugged and scrawny Paraguayan breed of cattle, required a particularly sharp blade and much chewing. The wine, however, was Argentine, and the company could not have been better. When I asked Victorino how he felt about the bribe-taking by customs officials—it was he who had pointed it out—he smiled, shrugged his shoulders, answered with resignation in his voice. Their salaries are very low … And they are far from Asunción. He was a pragmatist. As to the flagrant illegality in all directions, I said not a word, certainly asked no questions. He would have thought me naïve.

  My reports from the field (minus the shopping spree) filtered upward. Three months later, I was traveling up the Parana on a large launch, accompanying John Pistole, then number two in the FBI, Director Mueller’s top executive. Pistole had risen through the ranks but still remembered what it meant to be an agent. Accompanying the only SA with firsthand knowledge and personal experience of the Triple Frontera, John was game for the adventure. Connecting with Victorino’s men, I gave him the Cook’s Tour, something to talk about back in JEH. And he may have purchased a few Polos as well. He definitely revved up with the yerba maté.

  12

  Back to New York

  Nearly five months after th
e May 2004 shootout on Libertador Avenue in Buenos Aires, during which the shooter’s failure to seat the magazine of his 9mm Glock may well have saved me from termination with extreme prejudice, the Inspection Division’s Shooting Incident Review concluded that my discharge of my firearm was “justifiable and proper under the circumstances.” Bummer, in the eyes of Augie, the Legat (later Chief of Security for the NBA). He was visibly disappointed. His recommendation had been for a negative determination, arguing in a memo (which had not been intended for my eyes) that I had acted recklessly by firing a pistol in a public area, in the vicinity of innocent bystanders. (The Legat did not carry a firearm, sparing himself the inconvenience of intervention when present during the course of a violent felony. And depriving him of the capability of defending his family, should they be the target of the violent felons with which Buenos Aires was, and still is, burdened: a staggering level of robberies, kidnappings, burglaries, all enhanced with an abundance of weaponry.)

  The shootout turned out to be a turning point. Enough of that good life overseas. Let’s get back to what I do and like best—real operations, real crime-fighting. I was fifty years old, with nearly twenty years of FBI service behind me, ten years undercover, six months before possible retirement. Generally speaking, ten years of full-time UC work was and is considered all one agent can or should handle in a lifetime. Generally speaking, I agreed—except when it came to me. My plan was to become a tech agent. I’ve described them earlier: that select group who conduct surreptitious entries to plant bugs in the homes of mob capos and terror cell leaders (all sanctioned by search warrants, of course). I also thought that learning to use all the latest gadgets and technology would be a great augmentation of my UC skills. And a valuable addition to my CV. I had long ago abandoned any ideas about LEGAT Paris. The battle with SECDIV (FBIHQ Security Division), back in my Safeguard days, had firmly sealed shut that door.