Brought to you by KeVkRaY

www.apostrophebooks.com

Contents

Preface

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Postscript

Copyright

About the author

‘I don’t think my life has been so extraordinary. It’s just been my life, it’s been routine to me. I’ve never had any other kind of life. I just think that I’ve been well trained to do what I had to do. I’m an operator, a liquidator just doing his job. To me, it’s just a way of making a living. Some people learn a trade, well this is my trade.’

For André, who led me into the web.

Preface

In case you feel, as you turn these pages, that you have stumbled upon some cheap thriller bursting with impossible coincidences and unlikely events, remember that what you are about to read is the truth. It is usual to state at the outset that the characters in a book are not drawn from the living and that the country written about is but a region of the imagination; unfortunately that is not the case with Assassin.

This is a strange tale that deals with an extraordinary world, but the men in it are real enough. Carlos Evertsz the assassin is not a paperback villain but a man of flesh and blood still in our midst today, a real life double agent who has been licensed to kill. Dr Manuel Sosa the demoniac intelligence chief with a taste for orgies and blackmail, Haitian voodoo, torture and murder, is also alive and well.

The tropical Caribbean island of the Dominican Republic, the unhappy paradise which has been their stamping ground, not only exists but remains unchanged. The names and places mentioned are real names, real places. Every word quoted was said and every conversation reproduced actually took place.

Lowlife has a habit of seeming to imitate art, so if the real thing sometimes reads less convincingly than polished fiction, and tends towards the melodramatic, it is only because that is the way the facts have it.

Hunched up in the back of the taxi I stared vacantly at the drab winter streets of suburban Madrid and glumly accepted the first rush of adrenalin. Dreadful unease moved through unbearable tension to vague nausea. Familiar ground. My strange mood was born of an obsessive curiosity which was compelling me to visit the local gaol to make contact once again with a man I knew to be a mass murderer. A man who could not even remember how many people he had killed; who had robbed me, broken into my apartment and finally threatened to kill me.

The argument for going out was a slim one. A need to keep tabs on a rare animal; a desire to keep my notes up to date and get the maniac down on paper. Our lives had become entwined and had been crossing for five years. And here we both were, back in Madrid again where it had all begun. Fate seemed to be egging me on, destiny beckoning.

The truth is that I don’t know why I wanted to see the monster again, except that after such a long relationship I felt that he was my monster, part of the family. The relationship itself is difficult to explain. After so long, so many bars and restaurants and cities, so many ups and downs and fallings-out, it had settled into something like a bad marriage, an unpleasant but manageable routine. In a way we had become . . . friends?

I could have tapped the taxi-driver on the shoulder at any time. ‘Forget it. Turn around.’ Instead, I dug my hands deeper into the pockets of my coat and watched the meter revolving like a slot machine, musing darkly that whatever figure it stopped on had to be an unlucky number.

When I arrived at Carabanchel, as Madrid’s local gaol is known, I was more favourably impressed by it than other prisons I had visited the assassin in. Its rounded red brick turrets and arches gave it a demented Andalusian charm. In Spain only the immediate family of a prisoner is allowed to visit so I told the warder that I was looking for my brother. My information was that Carabanchel was such a mess, with so many men flooding through it daily, that it was possible to slip in with the other visitors.

I stamped about in the cold for two hours waiting for my name to be called. From time to time troops or police carrying old-fashioned rifles and the occasional submachine gun were let in through the main gate; three cops arrived for work squashed into a tiny Seat, their rifles wedged awkwardly between their knees; a prison van, bringing new men to the gaol, cut across the yard and drove through the main gate. And an incongruous sight in that prison yard - Spanish matrons, dressed in black, struggling with great toy animals made by a member of the family in the prison workshops. As I watched them carting off the curious products of their wayward offspring I wondered if the assassin was at that moment engaged in sticking a trunk on a comical elephant or stuffing some cuddly thing with fluff.

Finally the warder came over to me carrying a clipboard and I saw that my name had an asterisk against it. He looked at me suspiciously. ‘There’s no Englishman here!’

He had the look of a man who liked to get to the bottom of things so I accepted the news without comment and made off. On my way back into Madrid I felt let down. Back in the apartment where I was staying there was a letter for me which had been forwarded from London. It was from the assassin, telling me he was in gaol in Carabanchel.

One

It all started in Madrid, almost five years ago, when I first met the assassin, Carlos Evertsz. Despite the fact that I knew nothing about him then, and stumbled across him in the most casual circumstances, our very first meeting was a head-on collision.

I was staying with a young, wealthy Spanish-American named Gregorio Webber and arrived back at his apartment one Sunday morning to find a drinks party going on. It was just another gathering in a long idle summer, which had been a succession of sunny, fearless days.

Webber’s apartment was a satyr’s den luxuriously decorated like an 18th-century brothel with endless mirrors, lush drapes and inviting love couches; the terrace was hung with plants and boasted a fountain and a chilled draught beer machine. More serious drinks were usually mixed by a flunkey in the kitchen so on the morning of the party I headed in that direction.

‘Make mine a Cuba Libre,’ I said to a man bent over a tray of ice cubes at the sink.

He turned around and there was something so contemptuous in the movement that even before he looked at me I knew I had made a mistake and the dead black fish eyes of Carlos Evertsz took me in for the first time. It did not take intuition to realize that you did not ask this sort of character to mix drinks. But there was something much more to it than that. I had made, after all, only a minor gaffe, yet I felt really unnerved.

For the brief moment that Evertsz stared at me I actually contemplated backing out of the kitchen. He dropped his eyes and went to the fridge and took out a large bottle of coke and shoved it at me.

‘The rum’s over there,’ he said, jerking his head, and turned back to the ice cubes.

I muttered my thanks, mixed myself a stiff drink and fled from the stifling atmosphere of the kitchen to the terrace. A fellow house guest, a tough black New York ex-basketball champ, was leaning against the plant-covered railing.

‘Jesus, who is that in the kitchen?’ I asked, taking a massive swallow of rum.

The facial muscles of the basketball champ seemed to tauten. His answer was a mixture of a hiss and a stage whisper. ‘Carlos!’

The champ moved over to our mutual host and they bent their heads together and began to talk, glancing first at me and then towards the kitchen. Eventually Webber came over to me.

‘Peter and I are driving over to St Tropez for a few days,’ he began.

‘Have a good time,’ I said.

‘Thanks. The thing is Carlos might be around a bit - looking after the place.’

‘Looking after the place?’ I asked confused.

‘Yeah, you know - keeping an eye on things.’

I must have looked blank.

‘Anyway, I’ll let him know you’re going to he here so he won’t bother you.’ Webber continued. Suddenly he dropped his voice. ‘Whatever you do don’t let him in the apartment. Bolt the door and close all the windows - even when you’re inside. Especially when you’re inside. Don’t wander around the terrace. Double-lock the place when you go out and tell the concierge, whom I’ve told to call the cops if he tries to get in. Okay?’

I wanted to ask how this man was going to look after the place and keep an eye on things if the doors were to be bolted against him and the cops called every time he came near, but Webber had moved away before I could even work out a question. The basketball champ came over.

‘Gregorio’s put you in the picture?’

‘Well . . .’

‘Don’t worry, you won’t get any trouble,’ he continued. ‘But remember - Carlos is a Very Dangerous Guy.’

More questions formed themselves but they were not to be asked for Evertsz himself had wandered in amongst us. Webber had obviously told him I was a guest and he was now attempting to be friendly and was smiling, although the effect was menacing rather than comforting. Evertsz and the basketball champ made small talk - something about kicking ass in the tougher districts of New York, as far as I could make out - and I talked to Webber about the high cost of fun in St Tropez. I didn’t get much out of them at all about Evertsz before they left for their trip and the first night alone in the apartment was distinctly unpleasant. I bolted the door and shut the windows, even looked under the bed.

At first there was no sign of Evertsz, under the bed or anywhere else. After a couple of days he called.

‘Everything okay?’

‘Yes thank you.’

‘Okay.’

He rang off.

During the following week I began to hear rumours about him. He was wanted for murder in the Dominican Republic; he had worked as a bodyguard for Ramfis Trujillo, the playboy ex-dictator; he had worked for Webber but it had gone badly wrong; he had robbed Webber’s brother Tom; he was blackmailing so-and-so; he was pushing drugs; he was a hired gunman - and so on.

Madrid was certainly the right place for somebody with such a disquieting background. It provided a sophisticated and secure haven for the dead wood of yesteryear’s tyrannies. The political flotsam and jetsam that washed up on General Franco’s shores was an ugly mix. Crumpled, out-of-work dictators were as thick on the ground then as faded football stars. The celebrities among them included Fulgencio Batista, who was leading a life of sumptuous isolation made possible by the $70 million he took with him when he left Cuba; Juan Peron of Argentina was enjoying his estimated fortune of $500 million and living a quiet life with his third wife and the remains of his first, who had been magnificently preserved since her death in 1952 by a $100,000 embalming job and lay in one of the bedrooms in a glass-windowed coffin. Ramfis Trujillo, from the Dominican Republic, was also there in a cocoon of immense wealth.

And then there were the run-of-the-mill old-world fascist types: generals and colonels from South America, Nazis in their thousands from the Second World War, émigrés from Cuba - most of them so heavy that they were not even allowed into Miami - and a whole population of minor shits dressed in ill-fitting suits, cheap white shoes and dark, mirror glasses.

There are places in Madrid where these people need not feel that history has left them behind. At the Cuban émigrés club — where the members form a crowd of white suits turning grey over daiquiris - the toast is, ‘The true Cuba, the old Cuba!’ (The barman used to mix daiquiris for Papa Hemingway, incidentally, and they are, without doubt, the best in the world.) And there is a superb restaurant run by Hitler’s personal chef where the Aryan waiters have cropped blond hair and click their heels.

But even in such a setting of chipped, lacklustre glamour among this seedy crew of psychos, war criminals and political gangsters, Evertsz stood out from the crowd. The more I found out about him the more devotedly I fastened the bolt at night. The truth about Evertsz outstripped the rumours.

He first began to come into focus when I went around to Webber’s office one day and was talking to Eddie and Adolfo, his two tough Philippino accountants. Evertsz’s name came up in the conversation.

‘That prick is a menace,’ Eddie barked and tugged open a drawer to expose a plump black revolver lying in it. ‘That’s for him if he ever comes round here again.’

Apparently in the days when Evertsz had been employed by Webber as his private security man he had soon grown bored with the job and embarked on a policy of fraud and blackmail against his employer.

His first ruse was to pretend to be Webber’s brother and to sign cheques to the value of half a million pesetas in his name. He then attempted to withdraw a large sum from his Swiss account and capped the whole episode by breaking into Tom Webber’s apartment.

Posing as a personal assistant, Evertsz gained access by telling the porter that Webber was going on a hunting trip and that he had been sent to pick-up the necessary equipment. Unsuspecting, the concierge helped him pack. Evertsz brought out two large leather suitcases, laid out underclothes, shirts, suits, an electric razor and was careful not to forget the toothbrush.

‘I’ll guess he’ll need a warm shirt,’ he said thoughtfully.

He then filled the other case with expensive camera equipment, rifles and binoculars. The cases were so heavy when he had finished packing that he enlisted further help from the concierge to carry them to the lift and load them into a taxi.

In a mood of maniacal self-aggrandizement he telephoned his employer. ‘Your brother’s security needs attention, boss,’ he said. ‘I just cleaned his apartment out.’

When Tom Webber threatened to go to the police Evertsz answered coolly that if he did he was a dead man. A compromise was arrived at. If Evertsz returned the stolen property the brothers would forget about it. Evertsz sent round a bunch of pawn tickets.

This incident was capped some time later when he went into Tom Webber’s office on the Gran Via and held his English secretary to ransom. He phoned Eddie and told him to bring 50,000 pesetas with him but the accountant took a gun instead.

‘When I got there Carlos was in a chair with his feet on the desk playing Al Capone. He said, “Have you brought the money?” and I saw him look at the gun in my waistband. He had his in a shoulder holster.’

After a long session of bluff and counter-bluff combined with mutual threatening - ‘I thought, Christ, the crazy bastard really is going to kill me!’ - Eddie got the secretary out of the office. Evertsz let the incident drop by telling the accountant he would kill him one day.

I left the office with a holy dread of bumping into Evertsz again and, sure enough, everywhere I seemed to go he would be there. That very night I was sitting in the foyer of what was then the Castellana Hilton when he came in. I had been with friends who had moved on and left me to finish a bottle of champagne. Evertsz came over.

He was with a peculiar looking girl with glasses who dressed as if she had been let out of a nunnery twenty minutes earlier and the ways of the world were foreign to her. At her side was a really stupid-looking, stocky little man who opened his mouth in a vast yawn. I shook hands with everybody and they all took seats around my table.

Evertsz dropped a friendly hand on to my knee and smiled. ‘Playboy,’ he said, indicating my champagne with approval. When I asked if the girl would like some she laughed in a strange, hysterical shriek which I thought would set off alarm bells. The stocky man yawned again and then held up both hands as if he was trying to stop a lorry going down a one-way street.

‘He doesn’t drink,’ Evertsz explained, tipping the remains of the champagne into one of the glasses left by my friends. He smiled at the girl. ‘Nor does Rosa.’ The girl shrieked at the sound of her name and stabbed furiously at her glasses. My grip tightened around the fluted champagne glass, a hopelessly genteel and ineffective weapon.

‘I’m giving them a taste of the dolce vita,’ Evertsz continued. ‘This guy’s Rosa’s brother. He’s the chaperone.’

This would have brought a peal of wild laughter from me in normal circumstances. The thought of the moron before me - picking his nose with thick, shovel-shaped fingers and his mouth open in a garlic yawn - protecting his sister from Evertsz conjured up all sorts of hilarious situations.

I fidgeted, mumbled an exit line and stood up.

‘Don’t go,’ Evertsz said.

He was smiling but his words came out flat, like a man unused to people doing things against his wishes. I sat down.

For another uncomfortable half-hour I sat drinking with the weird trio. Evertsz acted the bon viveur and somehow managed to generate downright menace from behind a shield of impenetrable politeness. They were all going dancing and I was invited to join the merry group at a club later on. I told them I would try and meet up with them. Rosa was hysterical as I said goodbye; her brother yawned. Evertsz squeezed my shoulder tough-guy style.

I fled into the night.

Two days later I stumbled across them all again in a club late at night. It seemed that Evertsz had broken his companions down for they both had drinks in front of them and were, in fact, pie-eyed. The chaperone jumped to his feet and embraced me, yawned and collapsed back into his seat. I said hello to Rosa, and steeled myself against the inevitable cackle of nervous laughter, but she stared blearily before her and was silent.

‘Why don’t you dance with my chick, man?’ Evertsz asked. ‘Go on, man. Dance.’

The expected hysteria began. I tried to laugh it all off while Rosa cranked up the insanity until the whole table was wracked with brittle laughter.

‘Go on, dance with my chick,’ Evertsz insisted. It was all friendly enough but his eyes brooked no refusal. Groaning inwardly, I led my demented partner to the floor and was a party to her giggling jackbooting for several excruciating minutes.

Back at the table the chaperone belched a single syllable laugh. It was Rosa’s turn to yawn. Evertsz looked happy.

‘Aren’t you going to dance?’ I asked.

‘No - I don’t go in for that teenage stuff,’ he said.

That night I had my first assassin-induced nightmare. I dreamt I had left a window open and awoke to unbearable anxiety. Some days later I was shaving in the bathroom of the apartment with the sun streaming through the open window.

‘Bang!’ a voice said gently.

I looked out of the window and crouched on the roof about 25 yards away was Evertsz, a pretend rifle at his shoulder. He sprang up, laughing. ‘Watch yourself now. The boss likes his security tight. Close that window.’

He disappeared. I closed the window.

That night at dinner I tried to explain to a friend, a Spanish film producer called Pedro Vidal, how I had felt. ‘He just said, “Bang!” and laughed,’ I said shrugging. ‘I was petrified.’

Pedro’s eyes bulged and he took a swallow of wine and I knew that I had triggered off a memory. He told me of the first time he had spoken to the assassin.

‘He scared the shit out of me. The phone goes and a guy says, “I’m Carlos Evertsz”. I didn’t know who the fuck he was. “Do you know where Gregorio Webber is?”’

‘I had just been with Gregorio in Paris but the way the voice sounded I just said “no” automatically. It was the first time in my life that I’ve gone and locked the door after a phone conversation. I knew I was talking to a nut and I was so scared it was unbelievable. I looked for a weapon, a knife - anything - and stood here like a jerk. Waiting - for what?’

‘That was just on the phone. And I didn’t know the guy, but I bolted the door and closed all the windows!’

When Vidal did meet Evertsz some time later he knew well enough why he had bolted the doors and windows. Those eyes! Those unbelievable eyes! You look in those and you know that he’s a murderer.’

Madrid had suddenly lost its appeal for me. I decided that the summer was over and made plans to return to London, where the cops don’t wear guns and nobody really believes that people like Evertsz exist. A bizarre occurrence in the middle of the small hours sent me on my way.

When I awoke I realized dimly that the doorbell must have been ringing for some time. I wrapped a towel around me, peered through the spyhole and saw a woman in a nightdress in some sort of panic.

‘Agua! Agua!’ she screamed.

Stranded in the frightful no man’s land between total blitzed drunkenness and the rigours of a ferocious hangover, I sensed the urgency of it all but failed to understand exactly what she wanted. I wandered off into the kitchen to fetch her a glass of water. Halfway the carpets began to ooze under my feet and by the time I reached the kitchen I understood that the place was flooded.

Together we began a search for the mains water tap. Spanish plumbing being the mystery it is we had to go through the entire apartment.

And I began to find them.

Guns. Everywhere.

First of all it was embarrassing, then alarming. A rifle behind a screen, a revolver under a sofa; an automatic in the bathroom, a shotgun under the bed. Finally, behind a curtain at the back of the bar we found a hidden door and opened it. Water was gurgling from a mains tap in a dark corner, otherwise the hidden room was an armoury. Ammo belts, a sub machine gun. I picked up a small leather case which had been soaked in water and it fell open. A cascade of a thousand .22 bullets rattled to my feet. I turned off the tap and the woman slunk away.

I went back to bed and felt better for the automatic, freshly loaded with damp ammunition, under my pillow. For the first time I began to realize the extent of the paranoia that Evertsz spread in his wake. Webber had enough armour to take on the Guardia Civil, but I knew that all of it was there to protect himself from a single man. And what the hell was I doing with a gun under my pillow?

Two days later I flew back to the sombre banking city of London. Its dullness, solidity and atmosphere of ‘such-things-do-not-happen-here’ struck me as being as festive as a carnival.

And that was how things stayed for a while. Dull, sombre and solid. Winter arrived and dripped gloom and the drab tableau of sober citizens, without a single hit man among them, was immensely appealing.

Two

Evertsz arrived just after Christmas.

Life for him in Madrid had gathered such momentum that it had eventually careered out of control. He had simply overdone everything and pulled too many crooked strokes until the police began to take an active interest in him.

He was in a spot and went to Tom Webber for help. ‘He sat in the chair, and you won’t believe it, but he was wearing one of my suits and ties stolen from my apartment. He came on really heavy and my knees were knocking behind the desk. But I told him he had taken us as far as we would go. I refused to help.’

Instead he offered a compromise. There was an Iso Grifo he owned being driven to London to be sold and Webber told Evertsz that he could take a chance and risk the ride through customs. The officials at British immigration were duly impressed when Evertsz was driven into the country in an expensive Italian sports car and showed them his old police papers from the Dominican Republic.

Once in town he lost no time in looking me up. The voice on the phone was the portent of months of gloom. I was virtually the only contact he had in Britain so he moved into a cheap hotel around the corner from my apartment just to make sure he could take the maximum advantage of me.

I dreaded the beginning of each and every day. Evertsz usually arrived before I was out of bed and waited for me to open the door. My place became an annex to his hotel room and took on the atmosphere of a Nazi bunker. Any money I was careless enough to leave around would be picked up by Evertsz and pocketed in front of my eyes.

‘I need a little change,’ he explained.

On the days when he was in a bad mood he brought a gloom into the apartment that was deadening. On one occasion I returned to the flat to find him already there, sitting in the front room with his feet up on my desk. He had forced the catch of the window and broken in. Nothing had been stolen. It was one of his rare attempts at humour, a heavy-handed practical joke which underlined my vulnerability and his expertise.

He began to talk about his earlier life, how he had been used by the Americans and how he had blown it back in the Dominican Republic. Eventually I thought, Oh hell, if he is going to be here anyway I might as well get it down. I suggested the idea of a series of taped interviews to him and after initial reluctance he agreed.

There is nothing odd in the fact that Evertsz agreed to broadcast his crimes. He was vain and clearly believed that his past activities deserved kudos and recognition; he was also bitter about the way he had been used by ‘the Americans’ and wanted a chance to get back at them.

He turned up one wet afternoon immaculately dressed, obviously intending to be formal about the whole thing. It was so dark that day that I had to have the lights on in the front room. The first interview lasted a solid six hours. It was an extraordinary, gruelling experience that was quite unreal and hopelessly saddening. At the end of it I felt drained and so did he.

Evertsz told me that he was born Carlos Evertsz Fournier in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic on 14th May 1942. He described a suspiciously happy childhood with a strong father he respected, a loving mother, doting sisters and an obedient younger brother.

By the time he was old enough to begin High School he had an ambition. ‘To be a decent cop, that was what I wanted. It wasn’t something I got from books or films or anything, it was just something that always appealed to me. That was my idea in the beginning - to be a decent cop. Later I found out there was no such thing as a decent cop any longer.’

I could hardly believe my ears. Was he serious? That was the sort of line even a ham of a script editor would put the blue pencil through. But Evertsz was serious, intensely so. It is ironical that he would not stand up as a fictional character for both his personality and his story are unreal.

He seems to have been born with the instincts of a mean cop. At the age of 15 he had already been marked out and his career as a secret agent began. A Lt. Rodriguez introduced him into G2 - Army Intelligence - and he was designated to find out the political colouring of his fellow students. He did his job thoroughly, spied on friends and sent four of his young companions to prison. ‘Two got a couple of years but the other two never came out. The Trujillo police were real tough.’ He discovered afterwards that the two who had lived had been tortured.

Meanwhile, out of school, Evertsz was spotted by Capt. Ramon Molina Urena, a wealthy landowner who lived in the same neighbourhood on the east side of Santo Domingo, the Ensanche Ozama. Molina was the uncle of the country’s dictator, Rafael Trujillo, and an influential military man. ‘I was a straight boy and being a straight boy - not communist - he kind of liked me. He used to take me hunting on his farm and let me drive around in his cars.’

It was Molina who initiated him into murder. ‘He used to have this big farm and he wanted to spread the farm and take more land. There were campesinos around the area - poor people with a little bit of land - and he used to say, “This guy doesn’t want to move - I’ve got to make him move.” So he went with me on horseback - we were always packing guns - and we went to this guy’s house. He said, “Man, don’t mess around, you’ve got to move out. I need this land.” And the man begs: “No Captain, don’t throw me out, this is my only way of living.” He didn’t give a damn. He pulled a gun and shot the guy straight away. I watched it in cold blood. It got me sick - really. I thought perhaps he would go to prison or something, I didn’t expect that. Molina said, “Don’t worry Carlos, things have to happen. I’ll show you how to do it.”

‘Two weeks later he said that he had a little problem, another campesino didn’t want to hand over his land. At that stage I always used to go over to the farm after school to look things over. He called two of his peones and we got the man and buried him alive up to his neck. Molina said, “You shoot him now”. I shot him.

‘I felt shocked - completely sick. It made me think real hard that I was bad. I was scared for myself. Remember, I had a very strong moral background, with my father and the Catholic education. To me it was a very distasteful thing.’

Evertsz was leading a very full life after school and he was encouraged by Molina to take an interest in the country’s raw politics. He joined the Vanguardia Juventud Trujillista (The Trujillo Youth Vanguard). The movement was modelled on the Hitler youth - ‘But I wanted to make it a little stronger’ - and his job was to tighten up its security. Characteristically, he worked quietly behind the scenes as a special delegate, forever checking on members’ loyalties. He sent one of the leaders, Manuel Frometa, to prison for, ‘Getting a little bit on the left side.’

Evertsz finished school and his political involvement with the ruling party had been precocious enough for good passes and grades to be arranged for him. He joined the Batalla de las Carreras - the Air Force Military Academy - and was spotted by the chief of the school, Col. Rames Troncoso, and again told to spy on his fellow cadets for left-wing sympathizers. It was a job that he was already expert in. Before long seven cadets were imprisoned and twelve thrown out of the school.

He received the usual military training until 1959 when there was an invasion from Cuba and all the cadets were promoted to Second Lieutenants, put in charge of a platoon and sent straight into combat. ‘It’s funny, there was only a small group of people against us - about 180 - and we took a very heavy loss. None of us, from the top generals to the very last private, knew what combat was all about

‘We took prisoners to the San Isidro air base about nineteen kilometres outside of Santo Domingo. Some of them we chained together and we threw gasoline over them and lit them up. Then we put the flames out immediately and then we’d do it again - two or three times. Some guys died right away from the shock, others didn’t.

‘We took some prisoners and tied them out on the airstrip and left them out in the sun to die. Then we tied some up, put them in a DC3 and pushed them out of the door.’

It was a small war and when it was over Molina used his influence to get Evertsz in Air Force Intelligence, known as A2 or Km9, due to its position on the highway Carretera Mella. A2 was the Intelligence service’s crack force and was led by Trujillo’s son-in-law, Col. Jose Luis Leon Estévez.

It was as a member of A2 that Evertsz saw for the first time how political prisoners were treated. ‘I hadn’t done a person - you know, torture - by that time. I saw how they got the fingernails out. Then we had an electric chair. Anybody who said they didn’t like what was going on in the country would be got hold of and put in prison for six months where they beat the living shit out of them.’

Evertsz favoured the skin torture. The prisoner would have his chest neatly lined by a razor and then the skin would be slowly peeled from the flesh. More elaborate methods included attaching electric wires to a man’s genitals.

Tools of the trade included electric chairs for slow electrocution and a sophisticated shock applicator with many arms, which were attached to a prisoner’s skull with tiny screws. The torture department came up with new appliances with demoniac inspiration and one of their masterworks was a rubber collar that could be tightened to sever a man’s head. Routine tools included nail extractors, scissors for castration, leather-thonged whips and small rubber hammers. The torture chambers themselves leaned more to the futuristic than the medieval: public address systems in the cells carried every blood-curdling scream to other prisoners awaiting their turn.

Three

Most of Evertsz’s work was concerned with keeping the pressure on the communists (although an opposition leader remarked at this time: ‘In my country there are not enough communists to administer a good hotel.’) Anti-communist feeling was stirred up by a simple method. Bombs were placed in churches, priests were shot and an outraged population naturally accredited the incidents to the communists. (At this point in the interview Evertsz started to tell a story of how he had murdered two priests and taken their bodies to the waterfront in Santo Domingo and disposed of them. Suddenly he grew agitated, refused to go on and demanded that the tape with the offending passage be wiped clean. It was the one time in the interview that he showed any diffidence at all in going into details of a killing. He mumbled something about the church ‘getting back’ at him and refused to be drawn.)

Apart from official business Evertsz performed a special personal mission for Estévez whose wife had been unfaithful to him in an affair with a handsome Air Force pilot called Caanan. ‘We arrested him and took him to Kilometre 9. Estévez was already there waiting for us. He ordered one of the men to cut off the man’s penis. The guy kicked and kicked. Then Estévez shot him and took the penis and gave it to his wife. His wife said nothing - she was a bloody bitch.’

But again there were more sophisticated approaches and Evertsz was becoming a master of his craft. It is as if he looked upon murder as an art and when he describes some of the techniques it is with the pride of a man who knows that his work is good. One of his favourite methods was with a needle which he used for the first time on an engineering student suspected of being involved in a plot to assassinate Ramfis, Trujillo’s eldest son. Evertsz kidnapped the student at the university, knocked him out with chloroform and drove him out of town. He then pushed a four-inch needle into his brain from underneath the right ear lobe, pulled the needle out and brushed away the pinpoint of blood with alcohol. Evertsz drove him back into town and dumped him on a park bench in the Park Colon for the police to find.

‘The needle method leaves no trace - there’s more than a 99 per cent chance that not even a good doctor will be able to know what happened. In the autopsy it seems as if the victim had a cerebral haemorrhage. The pinprick just looks like a pore and it is behind the lobe anyway.

‘Another well-used method was throwing people out of a car on a bad bend. There’s a highway going out of the city to the north and there’s a place with some very bad bends. We used it often, very very often.’

In 1960 Trujillo sent a special team to assassinate Romulo Betancourt, then president of Venezuela. It didn’t come off and Trujillo brought down on his head economic boycotts from several countries and the wrath of the U.S.A. ‘The CIA decided to have Trujillo assassinated and they were going to use people who were close to him. I heard about it from my uncle, Freddie Evertsz - currently working for the CIA in Santo Domingo, by the way. He told me that the weapons for the assassination were brought over in Mazola oil cans which were delivered to certain supermarkets.’

Trujillo was assassinated in a manner that Hollywood would thoroughly approve of. In May 1961 two cars pulled in front of the dictator’s as he was driving to a ranch to keep a midnight rendezvous with one of his many mistresses. Seven men piled out of the cars firing machine guns. Trujillo kept three machine guns in his car at all times but did not have a chance to get at them. Instead he leapt out, blood spurting from his back, and fired his revolver. There was a final burst of gunfire and he fell. The illustrious leader was later found dumped in the boot of his own car with 27 bullets in his body.

‘They got him. It was a shame. We got five of them but General Imbert Barreras and General Luis Amiana Tio survived. They were hidden in the U.S. Embassy. It was the one place at the time we didn’t look in.’

Evertsz had discovered through his informers that a 16-year-old girl had been the mistress of one of the men involved in the plot. ‘I wasn’t quite sure. As the result of it we got the girl and we killed her.’ I wanted to know exactly how the murder of the girl had happened but it was clear that Evertsz did not attribute much importance to it. He was impatient to continue, completely uninterested in going into the details of such a minor killing.

—But how did you kill her?

‘We put a bullet in her.’

—Did you do it?

‘Yeah.’

—What was she like?

‘Beautiful.’

—What did you feel about it?

‘Nothing at all.’

—You just went along and killed her?

‘That was my orders.’

And with an awful gentleness that made the murder sound even sadder and more unnecessary he added, ‘I didn’t give her time to think about it. I said, “Look honey, I want to ask you a couple of questions” and . . .’ Evertsz snapped his fingers.

He passed on to more important things - the shooting down of one of Trujillo’s assassins. ‘I was there when they got one of the guys. We had an alarm and when we got there, there were three other cars already arrived - three agents, two army lieutenants, myself and my man. We all started shooting right away and we killed the guy. He was walking, presumably to pick up a car, and we got the guy right there in the street. He didn’t want to give himself up and he started shooting.

‘After the assassination Trujillo’s wife wanted to kill the whole population,’ Evertsz laughed. ‘She ordered poison to be put into the water deposits of the city. She wanted to kill everybody - every fucking body! She was crazy with grief.’ Even Ramfis, who had stepped into his father’s shoes, baulked at the idea.

Ramfis’s control of the country was shaky and he was unable to hold his position. He soon decided to quit and on the night before his departure he personally shot the three assassins who had been captured. His revenge was extreme. He started shooting them in the legs and riddled them with bullets. One body had more than seventy shots in it.

With the departure of Ramfis the tables were turned on the Trujillo men and they became the hunted. ‘Things became a little bit rough,’ Evertsz said. ‘Once in a while we got a crowd against us - “Hey, that’s a Trujillo man!” And we had to pull our guns sometimes, right there in the street. We were always on the ready. I used to sit with a sub machine gun on the passenger seat and my pistol drawn. Sometimes I would scare off some people - shoot at them and they would stop it. A whole group would come with big sticks, chains. The anarchists and communists had worked on them - you know how it is. The mob - you can’t control the mob. You use the mob, you use the people - they don’t know what they want or what they don’t. You just use them.’

The country was then taken over by a State Council. The military had decided to hold elections to ease tension. By a strange coincidence the two surviving assassins, General Imbert Barreras and General Luis Amiama Tio, were in charge. They disbanded the Km9. ‘We burnt everything. We destroyed the records of the Trujillo Youth because Trujillo was no more. Then I’m without a job - just having a good time.’

Evertsz helped to run Molina’s farm again. ‘I went to see Amiama Tio after a while and said I wanted to go back in the Air Force as a lieutenant. He asked me why I was going to him when before I was trying to kill him. I said, “Well, you know how it is.” He said, “Well, sonny boy, I love your father - I know how it is”.’

Evertsz was assigned to Rafael Ellis Sanchez, who was in charge of security, as his personal aide. Previously Sanchez had been one of Trujillo’s political prisoners and had his nails pulled out. Evertsz and Sanchez got along well.

Evertsz worked as Sanchez’s personal bodyguard for about six months. ‘He soon got tired of me. He was a little communist and he started to hire communist agents and then he started to hire Dominicans as secret agents from the streets! Guys without any preparation at all . . . just guys from the streets! One day I went to get paid and there was a big mob of agents - about seven agents and ten or twenty more guys. They said, “Hey, there’s Carlos - he’s the one who’s doing this.” I ran up the stairs to Sanchez and I said, “Look I’m going to have to kill several agents of yours so I might as well leave.” He said, “Yeah, go to the back, pick up the car and leave.” The following day I took off.’

Four

Evertsz went to the States. In New York he spent the money he had and then worked in a factory for three days. ‘Then I said - this isn’t for me.’

Times were lean but Evertsz contented himself with the thought that at least he was not in gaol, along with many of the other Trujillo men. He worked in supermarkets first as a delivery boy at the Pioneer (now defunct) on Broadway at West 163rd Street and then as the manager of a Royal Farms supermarket. He had married a German girl called Rosemary and had two children by her, a boy and a girl. It was to be the first of four marriages (although there have been no divorces).

He was fast becoming an honest tradesman. In 1965 he bought a grocery store on West 29th Street in Brooklyn, Coney Island. By this time he had married an Irish girl called Shirley and they had a little boy. The store went well and he began to make a little money.

In March 1966 he was contacted by a Mr Jim, an agreeable person, Evertsz said, with a straightforward way of speaking. He asked Evertsz what he thought his position would be if he returned to the Dominican Republic. Evertsz said that he was not thinking of returning as he was doing well.

‘I told him to level with me and he said he wanted me to go back and work for the CIA. He asked me if I thought I could work for the Dominican intelligence again. I told him I didn’t know, but I thought it would be pretty easy as by that time the men at the top were old friends of mine from the Military Academy, guys I knew since we were kids. He said he wanted me there in May and told me to think about it.’

Evertsz decided to go and saw Mr Jim again in May. He remembers staying the night in the International Hotel at the airport before boarding the midnight plane to Puerto Rico. The idea was for him to relax and make it look as if he was on vacation before returning home.

He stayed in Puerto Rico until 14th May and then flew to Santo Domingo. It was his birthday but he did not celebrate. ‘I’m not sentimental at all,’ he explains, ‘that’s not my line.’

He did nothing for a month and then he contacted Col. Jorge Antonio Vanderas, chief of a section of the national police. ‘He was a joker, always had a smile - he was a small, nice man. He said to me right away, “I hear you’re working for the CIA” - just like that. I said no, but right away he had the hint. I asked for work and he asked me why I didn’t apply to the Air Force where my friends were. I told him that I always wanted to be a good cop.’

Antonio was organizing a group of ‘Nice clean-cut boys’ to work as undercover agents and agreed to use him. The communists had been active and the agents’ job was to be the usual one of locating political enemies. ‘At the time there were continuous assassinations and bomb attempts - there was a lot of work to be done. I worked for him for about three months - heavy, heavy work. Then he put me on plainclothes night patrol in a car with a police sergeant called Tito. During this time I did a little bit of shooting at the university and used a few grenades and bombs to create an anarchic situation to blame on the communists.

‘The CIA eventually contacted me. It was a Mr Anthony Ruiz from the U.S. Embassy. He was supposed to be some technical aide to the underdeveloped countries but was head of the CIA in the Dominican Republic. As far as I know he still is. He told me that things were under control in the Republic and that our intelligence was doing a good job. But they were worried that there might be a coup from the top officers and secret service men, so they asked me to find out the feelings of the top officers and bright secret service men towards the U.S.A. The Americans used to tell the Air Force what to do - there was no two ways about it.’

He left his police job when he was contacted by Air Force Intelligence and invited to join them. He was under the command of Col. Manuel de Jesus Sanchez Cuevas and Evertsz’s job was to act as a civilian and investigate men in the force and find out their political opinions, contacts, social habits etc.

‘Then in 1967 Anthony Ruiz asked me to put a bomb in the men’s lavatory in the American consulate. I didn’t ask why. It was obvious that political capital could be made out of it. We timed it so that it would go off at night and that nobody would be hurt. Then right away I started an investigation for the Dominican government into who put the bomb there. I lent a hand to the U.S. State Department as well - they still don’t know who was responsible because I never did find out. They’re still looking. I also put a bomb in the American library, again for Ruiz, again at night.’

He married again in 1967. When asked for the name of the girl he pursed his lips, broke into a laugh and replied, ‘You won’t believe this - but I can’t remember the name of the chick.’ He thought hard. Eventually he did recall the name - Milady. She had his son.

The same year Col. Luis Ney Tejeda Alvarez, the police chief, sent for him. He wanted him to pick up a girl in a hotel near Santo Domingo who was travelling with a married couple, a Jamaican teacher at Washington University and his American wife.

‘I went to the lobby of the hotel and met her. We had a drink and then the usual stuff between a man and a woman - we appealed to each other. I took her out for a ride and a nice dinner - I didn’t lay her out all that day. I introduced her to my mother and everything. Meanwhile, I found out that they were going to Jamaica to meet Stokeley Carmichael who was on his way to Cuba.

‘I reported back to Tejeda who sent me to Jamaica. They were worried about Carmichael because they thought he was stirring up the communists all over Latin America. About four days after the girl left I went to Jamaica and I used her to get to Carmichael who was staying on a farm up in the north. I talked to him, checked on him around and about, and returned to the Dominican Republic. He was a very, very likeable person.

‘I went back and filed my report and sent a copy to the CIA. A couple of months later Ruiz contacted me. Now that I had been to Jamaica I had the contacts to get to Cuba.’ Ruiz asked obscure questions about whether Evertsz could get close to Castro if he was sent to Cuba. ‘He asked me if I was willing to take a chance for big money and get into Cuba and kill Fidel Castro - just like that.’

Evertsz was not sure that he would come out of it alive. Ruiz outlined a brief plan and told him that details would be provided by a Cuban who knew the country well. But nothing came of it and Evertsz heard no more of the plan.

In October 1968 the foundation of a plot was laid that was to be the biggest intrigue Evertsz was ever to be involved in. He was contacted by Col. Luis Ney Tejeda Alvarez, who had lost his position as police chief but was still in the country. ‘Col. Tejeda asked me if I would like to become a captain. I said, “That sounds fine - who do I have to kill?” He told me that it was heavy stuff, but that I would be a captain with special privileges and so on. Then he asked me, “Are you willing to kill the U.S. Ambassador?” I was shocked. I didn’t believe him. Then he laid out the whole thing and he said that right away, before we went any further, if I refused I would be killed.

‘Then he told me the plan. He said, “We kill . . .” and then he corrected himself, I remember that, and he said “You kill . . . the ambassador and we leave proof that the communists did it”.’

Tejeda’s plan, according to Evertsz, was to create friction between Balaguer and the U.S.. Pressure would be put on the president to carry out a purge of the left and its continued existence would show the government to be weak. Tejeda’s friends, on the other hand, were in the military and would willingly pursue the course dictated by the Americans.

‘I told him that we could not do it alone and he said that he had the army in the north backing him up,’ Evertsz said. ‘As a member of A2 I had access to the U.S. Embassy. I had to check the movements of the ambassador and find out what security arrangements were made around his movements. I had to find out which security men were with him, which car he used, which doors - the whole layout.

‘I told him that I would do it, but that I needed time. He said that I had fifteen days. I left and had myself a real stiff drink. I have been shocked only twice in my life and this was the second time. The other time was the first time I killed a man. This was big - to kill the U.S. Ambassador, that’s hell . . . big.’

Evertsz immediately reported the meeting to Anthony Ruiz who called in Cyril Frank, the chief of security for the U.S. State Department in the embassy. They refused to believe the story and said they wanted proof. It was agreed to plant tapes in Evertsz’s car.

‘They fixed the car at the embassy, a real nice, neat job. Four days later I met Tejeda on the highway by the beach. He got out of his car and got into mine and we drove away. He asked me what I had done and I told him of the ambassador’s movements. Then I asked him if he really wanted to kill him. He said, “Yes, we have to”. Everything was going down on the tape. I suggested that we did it on a certain corner by throwing a grenade under the ambassador’s car and then shooting everybody in it with a submachine gun. Another guy would throw the grenade and force it to stop. If we just started to shoot he could get away. He might get hurt and he might not. Also his car had bulletproof windows. A grenade under it would blow the doors open. “Fine, it sounds good,” Tejeda said.

Evertsz went back to the embassy with the tapes. They still refused to believe him. ‘I got pissed off. I said call the Chief of the Air Force, I’m not putting up with any more of this crap. We had an argument and finally they arranged for us to do it again. This time it was planned for night and they were going to follow us. I picked up Tejeda at his house and we drove down Bolivar Avenue to Maximo Gomez Avenue and parked the car. We had the final meeting on 17th October and we set a date to do the job on 21st October. I went to the embassy at this time and they did believe me. They called Washington direct and they ordered the ambassador to leave Santo Domingo for a few days on a little vacation.

‘I had met the ambassador several times. I knew him from the days when I put the bomb in the American embassy. This time he saw me and thanked me personally. He said that not only had I saved his life but saved a bad situation between the U.S. government and the Dominican Republic - you know the kind of things ambassadors say. “We’re proud of you,” and all that baloney. Washington told the embassy to drop the whole thing and pretend that nothing had happened.

‘They told me to go back to my office. I said, “Hold it a minute. This is not right. How can I go back to this man and tell him there’s no more plot against the ambassador? What’s he going to think - he’s going to say I double-crossed him and knock me off right away.” Then Anthony Ruiz said, “This is none of our business. This is your job, this is your risk. You’ve done your duty - that’s all. That’s what counts. Whatever is going to happen to you now in your personal life is none of my business.”

‘I said, “Well, listen, I’m going to be in a tight position. Is this thing going to come out or not?” They said that they were not going to say a word about it - they had their man secure and now knew that they had to watch out for Tejeda. I said that it wasn’t going to be that way. I had to leave the country. “Put me in Puerto Rico, put me in Australia - any place - Hawaii, any place, but now, right away, tonight. This cat is going to find out and knock me off.” He said “Well, that’s your business” - just like that - “There’s nothing I can do for you”.’

Evertsz told them he would catch the next commercial flight to the States. Ruiz replied that they were refusing him entry. ‘I told them, “I have a right, I’m a legal resident, a former U.S. citizen. I’ve been working for you long enough, let’s cut that crap”. They said no, because if the thing came out they were ready to disown me. Imagine the impact - a CIA man working in the Dominican government! It was going to come out real bad for them.

‘I told them they had an hour to think about it or I was going to put it in the paper. They said, “Hold it”. I said, “What do you mean - hold it? What do you mean telling me to go fuck myself?” They thought I was kidding.’

He telephoned Radhames G. Peña, editor of El Nacional. When Peña heard that Evertsz wanted to give him a story he suspected a trick but the news was too big to ignore so he arranged a meeting. Evertsz gave him the outline of the story. ‘Have you turned into a communist?’ the editor asked dryly. Peña telephoned a left-wing member of the government, Jotin Cury, and an appointment was fixed for the same evening. During this day Evertsz had not been to his office at A2. He was supposed to check in personally or phone every morning and he knew that Tejeda would be worried. ‘I passed the time by going to the movies and then going to see a girl. I was going crazy.’

Cury was nervous when Evertsz saw him and said that he didn’t think there was much he could do unless he would agree to sign a statement. Evertsz agreed and Cury tried to get him political asylum. The Brazilian embassy refused but the Mexicans accepted.

The following day El Nacional splashed the story with a picture of Evertsz on the front page and Col. Tejeda took the wise precaution of leaving for Miami.

The Dominican Police immediately surrounded the Mexican Embassy. After four days the ambassador saw Evertsz and said that they could not extend asylum any longer as the Caracas Convention decreed that embassies were not allowed to grant asylum to military personnel.

He said that Evertsz could try and get away the best way he could. He was given back his weapons.

There were no radio bulletins or government statements about the affair. Evertsz had not said a word and nobody really knew what was going on except for the story that appeared in El National. The American embassy had not denied or affirmed the plot, but had merely pointed out that plots against their ambassadors in Latin America were frequent.

‘So I had to leave. The Dominican Police were only allowed to have one man in the embassy grounds but the whole of the front was covered. I got out through the backyard into the back streets.’

Tejeda had ordered Evertsz’s death before leaving and sent men to his home. Evertsz was warned by his brother and spent an uneasy night hiding at his sister’s house. The following day he petitioned the president for a guarantee of safe conduct to the airport. ‘I was suffering from complete nervous shock, my whole system was broken down. You don’t know what it’s like to be in that situation. I didn’t want to kill anybody else.’

The president was not wholly unaware of CIA skullduggery on the island, and believed enough of Evertsz’s story to allow him to board an Iberia flight to Spain. ‘In Madrid I lived in a pension for a while, trying hard not to be seen because I knew that the guys might try to get me. I was trying to find out what was going on in town before I made any move whatsoever.’

Slowly he drifted into the world of the émigré in Madrid and life was not too difficult. He attended parties given by Ramfis, and was used as a bodyguard and given money by him - later Ramfis was killed in an aristocratic auto accident when he was in a head-on collision with the Duchess of Albuquerque in the town’s Gran Via. Also in Madrid was Col. Estévez, who had murdered his wife’s lover, and Evertsz was fond of telling stories of how he tricked him out of money. So for a time he fared well on the guilty charity of fellow Dominican émigrés.

He started to work as Webber’s security man . . . got married again to a 16-year-old Spanish girl called Conchita . . . bounced cheques . . . and once again created an impossible situation for himself. Which takes us back to London.

Five

The interviews with Evertsz were strange affairs and fell into a pattern. He would arrive in good spirits and begin to reminisce in a boastful manner. Slowly, as the story grew, his attitude changed and he started to gripe about the way ‘the Americans’ had treated him. Again and again he returned to the theme of being a decent cop, an honest Air Force officer with a position and respect, and how all his chances had been ruined by dabbling with the CIA. Then finally the braggart’s veneer disappeared and the extent of his loneliness showed through. Exposed to the bleakness of his own existence he became self-pitying and mawkish.

There were moments of long silence. Evertsz would finish telling of some terrible murder and grow quiet. Faced with the ridiculous task of putting this bloodshed into some kind of date order I found myself asking, again and again - ‘And who did you kill then?’ or ‘Did you kill this one before or after X?’

And then there would be silence. Even for Evertsz it was proving too much. The story of his young life spewed out in long, rambling episodes was a more painful proposition than he had bargained on. He had started out eager as an actor to be interviewed but had finally come to the point where he openly admitted that he sometimes questioned his sanity. At one point he became so self-indulgent in his misery that I thought he was going to weep.

‘Sometimes I wonder if I’m losing my mind.’

On another day when I returned to this remark I tackled him too openly and he denied flatly that he ever questioned his sanity. There was no doubt of it, he said, and quoted IQ and personality tests which he had passed without difficulty. He was embarrassed at having shown so much emotion and looked upon it as a weakness that might prove fatal if allowed to blossom. Men like Evertsz dare not allow themselves the luxury of cracking up.

There was a moment on one afternoon when I felt compassion for him despite the monstrous acts he confessed to. I think it was the totality of his loneliness that made me feel sorry for him. I had opened a tiny window on to something so vast, cold and empty that I wondered how he could survive in such a stark mental landscape. For a moment I had the illusion of understanding him.

Later my compassion was to dissolve but during that long afternoon, as it grew dark outside, we became close. I had not drawn the blinds so that only the light from the sodium street lamps and the gas fire shone in the room. I was half drunk from drinking too much brandy too quickly on an empty stomach and sat quietly while Evertsz struggled with the impossible task of telling another human being what it felt like to be him.

‘Sometimes when I talk about this, bring all these things back like this, I think really hard. It seems to me a crazy life. I don’t have a target, I don’t have ambition - except like any other man I would like to have a future, a secure future. I have lived like a millionaire because I’ve been living with people who had the bread and I’ve been working together with them. I have tasted the good things of life but for me it doesn’t fulfil everything.

‘It is not that it has given me a mental problem, for to become a secret agent of any government you have to pass psychological tests. But it has made me lonely.

‘Life is boring now. I feel that I have done everything any man could have done for my years. There’s nothing new for me - absolutely nothing new. Not sex even - I’ve been into all kinds of sex, varied sex, orgy parties. No materialistic things, speed, any kind of kicks, chicks — I don’t think there’s anything for me.

‘I guess about the only good thing I have in life is great family background. My relationship with my family has always been great. It’s not that I write to them or anything. And there’s no such thing as Christmas for me. I go to the movies or go out on a motorcycle if I have one.

‘I’m crazy about cars and motorcycles. I race them. I’ve been trained to drive fast. I take out a scrambling bike into the mountains or something and do the danger stuff - I really love to do that alone. I love my skin but I like to risk my neck. I like to prove myself - I’m proud of myself. I know I’m good.

‘I guess now I have to fulfil my place in society. It would be nice for a change to have a normal life. I don’t know if I would like it because I’ve never had it. I think it would be nice. I see a lot of you people having normal, boring lives so I might as well have a little taste of it.

‘Sometimes I wish I was a bricklayer or a carpenter, or a truck driver or an accountant - just a normal guy. I just want to be a normal fellow - work in an office. Anything normal! It’s not that it would make me happy because I don’t think I’ve ever been happy or know what people call happiness. What do you people call happiness? I don’t know. I think it’s just a vision you create.’

It makes sense that Evertsz’s favourite author is Nietzsche. ‘I like the way he put the words together and he makes you think a lot. The philosophy I read is getting to me every day more and more. I have enough command of my mental system not to get deeply involved with it. If you take that stuff hard, and you think about things and you take things apart you’ll drive yourself mad. If you took Nietzsche and followed him all the way to the end you’d go nowhere. You can’t do that, I know it won’t lead to anything positive.

‘But I only read philosophy and psychology, I never went for the cowboy stuff or police stories. I don’t believe in fiction at all.’ His own existence does not strike him as unreal.

‘I’ve lived my life so I cannot say it’s fiction. But sometimes it’s been too fast. It’s shocked me sometimes. I get scared sometimes. I have my whole life before me, after all - if I keep on the move. A guy who is leading this kind of life is bound to have enemies who for personal vengeance want to kill you - some for political reasons, some for . . . I don’t know - I’ve done, a lot of damage I guess. So I reckon I’ve got something coming to me. I’ve been sent several warnings.

‘The funny thing is nobody has threatened my family. That’s the funny thing. They love my family. My mother still loves me - as mothers do. She thinks what I’ve done is wrong but then I’m her eldest son. My brother thinks that everything I do is right and my sisters love me. But the rest of my family, apart from my grandmother, don’t want anything to do with me.’

Evertsz regards his past activities as mundane, day-by-day events. He has merely followed his profession along the route it has led him. He becomes irritated if the abnormality of his position is brought up.

‘I don’t think my life has been so extraordinary. It’s just been my life, it’s been routine to me. I’ve never had any other kind of life. I just think that I’ve been well trained to do what I had to do. A secret service man has been trained to kill - to kill your own brother if you have to. I had my brother put in jail once. He was going a little bit to the left side and I had to make him go the right side. It made him go to the right side straight away.

‘Yet I love him. Perhaps I shouldn’t use that word - I don’t know what it is. Let’s say I dig this guy. I don’t know what others mean by love. I don’t have friends, except perhaps my brother. Not even my mother. When my father died in 1962 I got the news over the phone in New York. Later that night I was dancing. But I really dug my father as well. But his death was just nothing - no personal feeling or anything.

‘All this business has made me a very, very sad man. If you see me laughing sometimes I’m really sad beneath it. Refreshing all these things and thinking about them again makes me think hard. Not just about these things but all my life. I could have been something else, I could have been to school and been all that my father wanted me to be - a real honest man.

‘I don’t regret my life - but I won’t do it again. As a matter of fact I don’t regret what I do. I know what I’m doing. A man should know what he’s doing, and what he is going to do. What I would have liked to have been is a decent cop or a good intelligence officer. I wish that I had never worked for the CIA. I would have liked just to have been with Dominican Intelligence and worked through the proper channels and never have played with a double card.

‘Now I’ve given up any idea of being an agent or a military man. It destroys you as a human being. In many ways I would like to have stayed with my last wife and see if she could share in my psychological situation.

‘I’m morally destroyed, humanly destroyed. I get very, very depressed without any reason at all.’

I asked him if he felt that way because of the people he had killed.

‘I don’t give a damn about the people. People have never meant anything to me.’

— How many people have you killed?

‘You mean personally? About thirty. Thirty or forty.’

— That’s a lot of people.

‘No. You could do much better if you wanted.’

— But it’s still a lot of people.

Evertsz shrugged. ‘Yeah.’

It was a concession.

‘Sometimes I feel very anti and very alone. I’m a very lonely person. I always feel lonely, real sad. Even with my wife now, who I love - well, not love . . . you know. I feel different from everybody else. Sometimes I really think hard. Then I feel anti, real and honest to God.

‘Before my father died he wanted me to get out of the wrong crowd. At that time I wasn’t really involved, and he didn’t even know how involved I was. Otherwise I guess he would have killed me. He was a straightforward man. Actually he never touched me. We used to have man-to-man talks. He was real good to me - about the only person I can say that about.

‘When I was at school I used to go to church every day. I still have faith in God in my own way. Sometimes when I’m in a tight spot I say, “Hey, fellow, would you lend me a hand?” I don’t really know if it’s faith or fear. Sometimes you’re so frightened that you can’t do anything to get out of it, even if you have created the psychological situation.’

—What about your children? Do you miss any of them at all?

‘Not at all. Not at all. I don’t miss anything. I don’t miss any of my children at all. No, I don’t.’

—How do you feel about the people you meet casually around and about?

‘People get along with me very well. I fool people, because I’m a very sociable fellow.’

—And deep relationships?

‘What do you mean? No, I don’t get deeply involved.

‘I’m careful not to get involved. I don’t give it the break. It doesn’t work. There’s no such thing. You are always after something, one way or another.’

—Why don’t you give it the break?

‘I don’t have an answer - really.’

—Aren’t you worried what might happen to you after this is published?

‘Aren’t you? In the Dominican Republic reporters who step out of line get their fingers smashed.’ He laughed. ‘Look, I don’t give a damn about me. Maybe I’ll be here - maybe I’ll have gone. Nobody will know. If anything does happen you know who to blame. If I were you I wouldn’t go to the Dominican Republic for a long while. If anything does happen you’ll know who to blame.’

‘But there are other journalists to follow up your story - there’s nobody to follow up mine.’

He laughed again. ‘Don’t look so worried. If they smash up your hands you can learn to type with your feet.

‘Actually I haven’t given you all the names and details of the things of my life because that would fill a couple of books. Names like General Ilcantara, who was a famous general in Trujillo’s time. He was a sadist. He would go to the prison, line up guys and shoot them. And General Paulino - he did the same, killed people for fun. I consider those people animals - they were killing people just for the fun of it. They were not killing people for the purpose of accomplishing a mission. Those cats and the young men like myself who are in this line - there’s a difference. Fine, we go out and kill a man - but because we have been told to and it has to be done.

‘I’m an operator, a liquidator just doing a job. Part of the machine. I don’t enjoy this any more. To me it’s like typing is to you. Those other people do it because they enjoy it I don’t see anything to be enjoyed out of it.

‘If we tortured a person it was because they would respond psychologically. I used to try interrogation first but sometimes it doesn’t work and you have to put some physical pressure on. Every man in life has his price and every man has his weakness. So if a guy doesn’t talk after a nice way - you have to get tough. I don’t enjoy doing it but I think it’s necessary.

‘Every police force in the world does it. No bullshit about it, everybody does it. I mean aside from politics - for thieves as well. Forget about the political side - let’s talk about police work, the real McCoy. To me there is no emotion at all involved. It doesn’t necessarily have to be government stuff—it could be someone who paid me to do it. You can come and say, look I’ve $20,000 and this guy is interfering with my business.

‘You have to understand - it’s a job, just a job. To me it’s just a way of making a living. Some people learn a trade, well this is my trade.’

Six

Slowly, I began to accept the idea that Evertsz had become a part of my life. The Observer wanted to run my interview with him in a truncated form but were worried about its authenticity and had somebody checking the story in Santo Domingo. Meanwhile, in an attempt to ease the financial burden of Evertsz from my shoulders, I had helped him get a job as a bouncer in a nightclub.

He used to patrol the club like a vigilant schoolmaster, or stand at the bar nursing a glass of milk - and God help anybody who thought it was funny. One night I was standing with the non-smoking, milk-drinking non-dancing assassin when the barman slipped out on to the dance floor with a Chinese waitress.

‘Look at that teenager,’ Evertsz said, not unkindly.

He put down his milk, walked across the dance floor and slipped an arm around the barman’s neck. I saw panic flash across the man’s face and understood that it was not because the assassin had him in a necklock but simple uncontrollable claustrophobia. And then my heart stopped. The barman swung a wild backward punch which caught Evertsz awkwardly on the side of the head.

Evertsz released his grip and stood back. There was a brief exchange of words. The barman rubbed his neck; Evertsz walked back to the bar and picked up his milk. I looked on, unable to believe that the barman was still in one piece.

‘My fault, man,’ Evertsz said magnanimously. ‘I shouldn’t have made him look small in front of that chick.’

The curious logic of Latin machismo had saved the dancing barman’s skin.

Evertsz fitted easily into the club scene and as an ex-government assassin he had pedigree. Every night two or three tables would be set aside at the back of the club for the local villains to drink champagne and talk business. A few younger men always sat on the fringe where they eagerly played up to the bosses. Evertsz took his place among them.

He was given a Ford Escort - a stolen one - which he referred to affectionately as ‘one of the gangster cars’. He displayed a driving skill and nerve that would credit a stuntman and threw the car down the streets of London at full speed, drove up on pavements, roared the wrong way down one-way streets and forced cursing cabbies off the road. He was incapable of driving a hundred yards without putting on an exhibition.

But inevitably he fell out with his employers and was reduced to devising desperate confidence tricks. One plan involved gaining access to an office in the embassy of the Dominican Republic which he used as a base to meet rich punters in elaborate attempts to borrow money on bogus business deals.

How Evertsz managed to use an office in the embassy remains a mystery. The Dominicans deny that he was ever given access to the embassy but they did hand on mail to him. One letter, marked ‘Official Business’, arrived from Fort Bragg addressed to Carlos Evertsz, Latin Dominican Air Forces and Allied Forces, Dominican Embassy, London.

‘Dear Mr Evertsz,’ the letter ran. ‘Many thanks for the card you sent of the Kennedy Memorial at Runnymede. It was a pleasure to hear from you and learn of your support of the U.S. Army Special Forces. Those of us who wear the Green Beret feel we are playing an important role in the U.S. Army, and it is very gratifying to hear from someone like you and know that our efforts are appreciated.

‘Thank you for taking the time to write, and I wish you the very best of success in the future. Sincerely, Henry E. Emerson, Brigadier General, U.S.A.’

The Observer’s contact in Santo Domingo sent periodic reports to say that the story was checking out while in London the paper dealt cautiously with Evertsz, photostating documents he produced, demanding that he sign each page of the interview and also a release note designed to put everybody out of the danger of post-publication revenge.

When the story finally appeared Evertsz stared tight-lipped from the front page of the colour magazine and fixed his dead, black eyes on the British public. Apart from the eyes, which will always betray him, he was a study in neatness. His hair was cropped short, his moustache trimmed, his tie pushed tightly into a Windsor knot and he stood correctly erect against an oak tree.

The British authorities and the general public received the grisly tale with a disturbing amount of phlegm. However, the U.S. embassy in London felt obliged to deny the story and privately leaked a ‘secret’ CIA report from Santo Domingo to The Observer. Like all good denials it admitted a little but baulked at the cardinal crimes. xxx

‘EVERTSZ LEFT HERE IN FEAR OF HIS LIFE AFTER BIZARRE TWO WEEK EPISODE IN WHICH HE APPROACHED EMBASSY WITH REPORT OF ASSASSINATION PLOT AGAINST AMBASSADOR. SOUGHT BUT DID NOT RECEIVE OUR SUPPORT FOR INVESTIGATIVE EFFORT. NAMED HIGHLY PLACED DOMINICAN OFFICIALS IN SUPPOSED PLOT, SOUGHT ASYLUM IN TWO LATIN AMERICAN EMBASSIES, AND FINALLY “TOLD ALL” TO MAJOR OPPOSITION PARTY AND TO TABLOID PRESS. AS HIS STORY FINALLY EMERGED, IT PROFESSED PUT HIM AT LEAST FORMERLY IN EMPLOY OF CIA (TOTALLY UNTRUE) CAST EMBASSY IN ALLEGED ROLE OF CONDUCTING INVESTIGATIVE OPERATION AGAINST GODR OFFICIALS, AND ACCUSED PRD OPPOSITION PARTY OF OFFERING EXFILTRATE HIM TO CUBA IN EXCHANGE FOR INFORMATION ON U.S. INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES IN DOMINICAN REPUBLIC.

‘EVERTSZ DISPLAYED TRULY UNUSUAL ABILITY EMBARRASS AND ALIENATE ALL WITH WHOM HE CAME INTO CONTACT. IN WELTER OF PUBLIC DENIALS, CLARIFICATIONS, RECIPROCAL ACCUSATIONS ETC. WHICH FOLLOWED EVERTSZ “EXPOSÉ”, DOMINICAN AIR FORCE ANNOUNCED IT HAD FIRED HIM FROM CIVILIAN POSITION OCTOBER 10 AND INTER ALIA PRODUCED SERD2S INTERROGATION REPORTS REVEALING EVERTSZ HAD CLEVERLY USED CONTACTS WITH AND VISITS TO THIS EMBASSY TO ROB UNSUSPECTING VISA APPLICANTS OF SIZEABLE SUMS OF MONEY. WE, IN TURN, DISCOVERED EVERTSZ IN ADDITION REPEATED EFFORTS IN U.S.A. ASSOCIATE SELF WITH U.S. SECURITY AGENCES ALSO HAD ROUTINE APPLICATION PENDING FOR EMPLOYMENT WITH THIS MISSION.

‘EVERTSZ CLAIMS HAVE NATURALIZED U.S. CITIZEN WIFE AND TWO CHILDREN RESIDENT IN U.S.A. OTHER SOURCES STATE HE “ABANDONED” THEM. PRIOR TO DEPARTURE FOR SPAIN HE SOUGHT ON OCTOBER 21 APPLY HERE FOR TRANSIT VISA BUT WE AVOTOED RECED7T OF FORMAL APPLICATION. NO OTHER TYPE OF VISA DISCUSSED.

‘IN LIGHT OF ALL DEVELOPMENT, WE CONSIDER EVERTSZ VERY CUNNING TROUBLEMAKER, PSYCHOLOGICALLY DISTURBED AND FABRICATOR AND PERSON WITH WHO NO RPT NO CONTACT SHOULD BE MAINTAINED, END.

‘QUOTE, GP - 3 IRWIN.’

In fact The Observer had published a copy of a document signed by President Balaguer himself accrediting Evertsz to the Air Force, but the British continued to pay the assassin scant attention. I had expected his instant expulsion on the publication of the story but nothing happened. A question was asked in the House of Commons why a confessed murderer was allowed to stay in the country, but otherwise the piece seemed to have acted as an exercise in public relations, an elaborate advert for a gun, and tipped Evertsz for celebrity status. I received the following letter:

‘Dear Mr Robbins, I would appreciate your forwarding the enclosed letter to Carlos Evertsz, the former Dominican secret agent described in your fascinating profile. You would not be party to any political intrigue or assassination plots by so doing. The letter is simply to ask Mr Evertsz if he would be willing to act a gunman in a film for which we are casting . . . the offer contingent of course on his ability to act the part and his willingness to do so. Sincerely, William Lee.’

It did not take genius to deduce that the Lee writing that weird letter was none other than William Burroughs’ alter ego, the victim of Naked Lunch. Burroughs later explained: ‘I saw that face on the magazine cover, helpless yet brutal - someone who could carry out any order but was totally incapable of giving one - and wanted him to play one of the policemen in The Naked Lunch.’ Burroughs wrote to Evertsz and left a phone number but he did not call for several weeks. ‘He asked for a Mr Lee and I had forgotten the elaborate precautions I had gone to and told him he must have the wrong number. He said, “I do not have the wrong number, give me Mr Lee.” I thought, “Uh huh, I know who that is”.’

Bill Burroughs felt Evertsz’s evil telephone vibe straight away and decided not to audition after all.

Originally the bit in Burroughs’ letter assuring me that I would not be a party to any assassination plot had amused me. Just old Bill’s paranoia showing, I thought. And then suddenly I found myself involved in exactly that.

A woman with a light Spanish accent phoned me to say that she had been intrigued by the article and would I meet her for tea at the Ritz to talk further about Evertsz. I was to tell the head-waiter my name as I sat down and she would then ask for me.

I sat and waited and the waiter eventually brought over a slim dark-haired woman in her late thirties who looked as if a collection of Europe’s most chic and expensive couturiers and jewellers had all got together to deck her out. I gave the background on Evertsz to this sophisticated lady while she gave me the background on herself. Very calmly, she outlined a dismal, imprisoned family life dominated by an impossible and vicious husband. It became clear that she wanted to enroll Evertsz’s services to set her free.

As we ate the tiny triangular cucumber sandwiches, I felt again that I was badly cast in a poorly scripted movie, an unlikely cardboard character in somebody else’s paperback.

‘Sugar?’ my companion asked, teapot poised for the second cup.

What response was in order to this elegant creature, who poured tea with the sure hand of an English woman and wanted to knock off her husband? He certainly sounded as if he deserved all that he got, but even so . . .

My reply, when it came, was absurd. In an almost collaborative undertone I told her that she would not be hiring a killer but putting herself at the mercy of a blackmailer, and that even the CIA had been made giddy by Evertsz’s deviousness. She accepted all this with a faint air of sadness and smiled so disarmingly that I had the ridiculous emotion that I had disappointed her quite unnecessarily and been unforgivably rude.

Suddenly she stood up, thanked me for talking to her and insisted that I stayed to finish my tea. She had to rush to catch the shops in Bond Street before they closed, she explained. She turned on her heels and drifted across the foyer of the hotel like some fantastical Vogue giraffe and slipped out into Piccadilly to buy . . . what? A tie-pin for her husband?

And so it went on . . . Evertsz on the loose and up to every trick in the book. Finally he was picked up by the police. The charge was simple enough. Evertsz’s permit to remain in England had expired and was nearly a month overdue. He was accused of failing to leave Britain by the date specified by the Home Office under an Alien’s Order. The dry legal language covered a multitude of sins.

There was nothing spectacular about the case which formed part of a dreary morning of petty offences. Evertsz was brought in and stood in the dock and did not appear very frightening or terrible, but simply out of his depth and a little ridiculous. In fact, in a sad round of adult men and women being punished and admonished for trivial crimes - two dustmen had stolen a dumped car and sold it for a fiver, a nurse had taken a dress from a boutique - Evertsz provided unintentional light relief when he tried to make a deal with the magistrate.

The police opposed bail and Evertsz was remanded in custody and fined a pound. Back in prison he became obsessed by the idea that I had betrayed him to the police and it caused a plunge in our relationship. I went to see him in gaol, walked down the row of booths provided for visitors and took a seat on my side of the glass. Evertsz was leaning back in a chair with one leg thrown over the other. He looked at me with sublime distaste.

Even with the thick plate glass between us I felt uneasy. As far as Evertsz was concerned I had betrayed him and he intended to make me sweat for it. From then on he pulled the old hard-and-soft con on me. That day it was ‘hard’ and there were threats; later it was ‘soft’ - ‘You’re the only friend I have, help me.’ It may be an old con, or even a crude con, but it’s an effective con.

Evertsz was moved to Pentonville prison and I received a note from prisoner 097414 on the tasteful headed notepaper the place provides. It was the soft con:

Dear Criss, first, of all I’d like to thank you for all you help and interest that you have take on my case, would you please keep at mind that you always could count on me. Thank you again. Later in the letter (reproduced here as he wrote it) he asked me to go and see him.

This time Evertsz came into the visiting booth snappily dressed in blue dungarees with a yellow stripe down the right-hand side. He was in excellent spirits. I had brought some of his clothes and he had chosen to forget my previous misdemeanours. He needed somebody on the outside. He talked a great deal, complained about the terrible food and said something surprising: ‘I’ve been putting people in gaol for a long time - now I’m getting some of my own medicine.’ The twist of fate seemed to amuse him.

Then he told me he was to be deported back to the Dominican Republic any day and he was convinced that he would be shot on arrival in his native land. ‘I know how those boys do their stuff,’ he said.

He estimated he had two chances - escape, which seemed unlikely, or a hijack attempt on the plane, a last resort he intended to try. In the meantime he needed money and wanted me to smuggle $500 in to him in the lining of a tie. I told him it was impossible.

His mood changed — he was not asking, but demanding. He then accused me of putting the police on to him in the first place and said that this was the only way I could make things up to him. My denials were useless and I sat there quietly while he threatened murder. Eventually time was up and the guard returned. Evertsz pretended to be back in his jovial mood and told me firmly that he would expect me the following day.

I never did go back. The following week I had to go to Spain which I thought would take me off the hook. When I returned to London there was a pile of Pentonville correspondence waiting for me, all employing the soft con.

Dear Criss

As you see I am still in the “city”.

I hope you had a good time in Spain.

I will look forward to see you very shortly.

Please try - and not to fail - to bring the items I ask you last time I see you.

It is very important you bring the tie with, the especial linen in it, they don’t make like those back home.

Well, I should see you soon.

All the best.

Carlos.

There was another short note with a picture of a tie decorated with a dollar sign. And again:

Dear Friend,

As you can see I’m still in Pentonville, therefore I will be much obligated to you when you will bring the items that I ask you the last time that you visit me.

In case all the booze and birds has made you lose yor memory I’m listing the items again.

2 Pair of slim fit trousers

2 Shirt 14, big sleve

4brief &TIE

2 Pair boots (1 black & 1 brown, six 10)

Please do not forget and try to make it soon as possible because I could be going one day. I hope that you will get together with me sometime next year—If I still alive - on the continent.

Thank you for everything.

CE.

Altogether Evertsz was in prison for more than two months before the Home Secretary approved the court’s recommendation to deport him. Finally he was driven by the police to Heathrow Airport and delivered on to the plane with a one-way ticket to the Dominican Republic.

Seven

Evertsz never arrived. When the plane touched down in Madrid to take on more passengers he slipped out and did not return. It was as well, for the Dominican Republic had let it be known that they were not prepared to accept Evertsz back under any circumstances.

I started to receive a series of late night collect calls from him under the name of Mr Carlos. I refused them and sat tight. Then I had a call from Eddie, the Philippine accountant.

‘What happened?’ he asked in simple astonishment. ‘We’re back to square one. He was here in the office today asking for money. He’s in a very desperate mood - very ugly. He’s been calling you every name in the book and has been screaming it around that he’s going to kill you if it’s the last thing he does. You are número uno, amigo. Keep your head down.’

There were several other attempted calls from Mr Carlos which I managed to duck. Then suddenly there was a period of calm. I checked with Madrid and he had not been seen. I waited. Four weeks later he called to say that past misunderstandings were buried. He was in a good mood for romance was in the air. His Spanish wife had been typically abandoned in Madrid and his new bride-to-be was a young American girl.

Weeks later she called me from Antwerp. ‘The Americans’ had shot at Evertsz in Zurich and he had fled to Paris. They had since moved to Belgium where . . . Evertsz had disappeared.

Another gap until I started to receive picture postcards from him, although they gave little away and were mostly concerned with making urgent demands for cash. After his disappearance he turned up in Moscow and Prague (defection? I wondered incredulously), New York, Puerto Rico and then back to the U.S. to live for a while in Passaic, New Jersey. For a man the United States wished to avoid all contact with, Evertsz displayed a remarkable freedom of entry. One card arrived with a Brooklyn date-mark and featured a night-time shot of Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge at Garden State Parkway in New Jersey. It was a publicity card and enthused that the lodge was Bergen County’s newest and most beautiful, only twenty minutes from New York and complete with pool, sauna bath and colour TV in every room. Evertsz had simply arrowed these luxuries with the cryptogram, ‘All the Goodies’. He was back in the bosom of Uncle Sam, apparently forgiven for his previous transgression, and living well.

Then, suddenly, he returned to Europe and arrived in Paris where, with the usual uncanny coincidence, I was going the very same weekend. I intended to stay with Gregorio Webber and received a call from him in the morning I was due to leave. Apparently my relationship with Evertsz was in the doldrums again as I had not replied to his cards or sent money.

‘He says,’ Webber shouted down a crackling line, ‘that he is going to shoot you.’

The death list again, but the threat had been bounced around for too long and I simply did not believe it. When I arrived in Paris I went straight to Webber’s apartment on the Avenue Rapp where there had been a party that same afternoon to celebrate the first communion of his daughter. Several of the guests had stayed behind in the salon and were still drinking champagne. The little girl herself was floating through the room in a flowing white dress. A heavy gold chain and cross hung around her neck and her hair was tied into a tight white cap. My eyes scarcely had time to take in this angelic figure when they fell on Evertsz sitting silently in an armchair. The contrast was ludicrous. It was as if Innocence and Evil had stalked on to the stage to act out some medieval morality play.

Before I had time to panic Evertsz was out of his chair and greeting me warmly. ‘You’re lucky to have a friend like Gregorio,’ he told me amiably. ‘I’ve been pretty angry with you.’ I looked confused as he slapped me on the back and walked away.

After Paris Evertsz began spinning through Europe at a dizzy rate. He flew to Stockholm where he applied for political asylum. It was refused so he moved south to Copenhagen where he stayed for several weeks before flying to West Berlin. In Berlin he was arrested on suspicion of forging a BEA airline ticket but was released after eight days in gaol. Somehow he had discovered a way of phoning free from public booths and I began to receive a barrage of calls in the early hours of the morning with the familiar requests for money.

He had a new French girl in tow and wanted to go back to Paris with her, write his memoirs and realize a dream. His idea was to run a filling station in the States, a curious ambition for a retired assassin. ‘I’ve changed my life,’ he said on the phone. ‘I’m going straight now. I’m going to quieten it all down.’

I couldn’t bear those calls. They came in the small hours and were immensely depressing. Then it occurred to me there was a very easy way to get rid of him.

‘Okay,’ I told him the next time he phoned, ‘I’ll send you two single tickets from West Berlin to Paris but you must pay me back the moment you get to Paris. I’m completely out and desperately need the cash.’

‘Don’t worry about that,’ Evertsz said in a voice quivering with sincerity. ‘You’ll get the money. This chick is loaded.’

‘Well okay, but I’m really out on a limb here and if I don’t get that cash next week I’m in a terrible spot. I’m putting my trust in you.’

‘You can trust me like a brother,’ Evertsz said and for a moment I thought, Oh, dear God, no, he’s going to pay me back.

The airline wired the tickets to Berlin and Evertsz called to say how much he appreciated what I had done for him. He said that they were leaving for Paris that day and would send the money the moment they arrived - maybe his girl would come over to London and pay me in cash.

But no, come Monday, nothing. And on all the subsequent days there was nothing. The curse was lifted from my phone, the black cloud which had hung over me for so long dissolved. I had been right. The assassin was bought off with two air tickets, a total cost of $200. Cheap.

Eight

Life without Evertsz was dull: wonderfully dull, joyously and ecstatically dull, and I wallowed in the exquisite ordinariness of it like a hippo in mud. One month of peace and quiet followed another and for almost a year there was not a peep or a whisper from him.

It might have been a very quiet year and for a while it almost was. My life settled into something approaching normality. Friends dropped into my apartment once more and eventually I was able to move among people without bludgeoning them with manic outpourings on assassination and its kindred trades. Slowly, I began to relax.

Journalistically I moved into still waters. I was sent on therapeutic assignments for the Young Observer and interviewed schoolboys in Birmingham and child actors in the Cotswolds. Mid-summer found me office-bound and sweltering behind glass, a nameless minion engaged on a pointless task on an endless historical series designed to fill the magazine throughout the holiday period. There were moments when I almost missed the high drama of life with the assassin.

My days became routine. I would arrive late for work, dedicate myself to the series throughout the morning and then leave early for lunch. The afternoons were hazy. I would return home in the evenings with both a back and a headache, dully aware that I had really earned my money.

It was on such a day that I was handed a letter from Venezuela addressed to me at The Observer. My story on Evertsz had been syndicated throughout the world after its original publication in the Observer magazine and had been reproduced in Caracas in a paper called Momento. The article had been read with something of a specialist’s interest by Miguel Perez Aybar, a Dominican exile living in the city, and he had been moved to write to me about it. His letter said that he had been the assistant chief of the Presidential Intelligence Department for four years, and enclosed a photostat of his official identity card to prove it, and went on to say that if I thought Carlos Evertsz’s story was hot stuff I should hear his, or words to that effect.

It was the first of several letters which I received from him in London. Perez told me that he had kept a diary during his period in Presidential Intelligence and he had also stolen secret documents from the department’s safe before he had fled for his life to Venezuela. Perhaps if Carlos had still been around at that time I would have avoided all contact with someone who promised to be a creature of a similar breed. It was enough to have to deal with such people when they crashed into your life - it was not necessary to seek them out. And while it struck me that I was in danger of becoming a journalistic repository for the stories of the world’s biggest bastards, I knew at the same time I was quite unable to turn down Perez’s offer: a close and detailed look into the world in which Carlos Evertsz had lived and killed.

And so I flew to Venezuela.

Everybody begins to look like a secret agent when you are on a blind date with one at an airport. When I arrived in Caracas to meet Miguel Perez after a period in New York sounding out publishers, the only clue I had to his appearance was a thumbnail photostat copy of his Presidential Intelligence identity card, but it was so small and blurred that it could have fitted fifty of the eager faces gathered at Maquetia airport to meet the plane. The only other personal details I had of him were the recurring references in his letters to failing eyesight and ill health.

The idea of spending a week in an unpredictable South American country with an exiled intelligence agent in fear of his life was ginger to the imagination. I had sent a telex message to Perez giving him the time of my arrival and my eyes raked the crowd for a suitable heavy. All in all they were a sinister bunch and for a chilling moment I felt the sole outsider at a convention for exiled nasties. Oh to be safe and abed in England now, I thought.

A fat man came through the entrance doors and marched towards the glass screen of the waiting room where he peered intently at the arriving visitors. He chewed at a rough unlit cheroot, which he occasionally removed to spit, and although it was night he wore sunglasses. He looked a brutal customer, all right, callous enough to run the dirtiest intelligence operation. He was very nervous and scratched at his flatulent belly and toyed with the cheroot as he waited. This had to be my man.

As I was on my way over to introduce myself, an action made against my every instinct, he moved from the glass screen to the automatic doors where the arrivals came in. The doors opened, the man removed his dark glasses and threw aside his cheroot, and in stepped two nuns. The aura of menace fell away from him as he enclosed the nuns in a filial embrace, kissed them lightly and picked up their luggage.

With my prime candidate off with two nuns I looked over what was left. A few men remained alone and waiting, but one by one they were joined by women or children and departed chattering. Perez had not shown up.

The drive into town gave me a little time to deliberate on Venezuela’s particular brand of violence, the legacy of which is the background to everything Latin American. Indeed, the 12-mile stretch of four-lane autopista from the airport into Caracas is an ideal starting-off point for such reflections as it was built by the notorious Perez Jimenez, a dictator who ruled the country for ten years between 1948 and 1958 in a style of unimaginable barbarity.

The strip of motorway taking me into town was built by the dictator at the enormous cost of $70 million which makes it the most expensive road in the world for its length. It also helps to explain how Perez Jimenez amassed his enormous fortune which has been estimated as high as $700 million and no lower than $250 million.

But it is more likely that the dictator will be better remembered for his monstrous régime rather than his motorway. Its torture chambers would shame the worst of medieval kings. Political prisoners were slashed with razors, burned with cigarettes and sat upon blocks of ice for hours. They were stripped and made to walk naked around a razor sharp wheel rim and force-fed laxatives. As a reward for this hard line on ‘communism’ the U.S.A. presented the dictator with the Order of Merit, one of her highest honours.

Before Perez Jimenez the country had to endure the rule of another dictator, Juan Gomez, whose power lasted until his death in 1939. Gomez too built up an enormous fortune, estimated at $200 million, and tortured his political opponents. They were put into leg irons which slowly turned them into permanent cripples, while more drastic punishments included being hung upside down until dead or dangled from a pole with a meat hook through the throat. Gomez could neither read nor write and never married, although he managed to spawn a vast family of almost a hundred illegitimate children.

Today Venezuela is oil rich. It is now the most affluent country in South America and although still torn by violent political unrest, it enjoys a comparatively relaxed form of constitutional government. True, that expensive motorway is flanked on either side by ranchos, the tiny slum dwellings that a third of the population of Caracas inhabit; true, the student population is in constant clashes with police and the university is almost permanently closed; and yes, the residents of Caracas do have a reputation as a gun-toting, trigger-happy crowd, where at eighteen a young man is more likely to be given his first revolver than the key to the door, and staid, European diplomats drive to work with a gun at the ready on the passenger seat. A scrape in the town’s tortuous traffic is often resolved with gunfire and a nervous police force have been known to shoot drivers dead who inadvertently ignore checkpoints. Corruption and poverty are still rife, but things could be, and have been, much worse.

At any rate, I understood that Caracas at the very most could only offer an uneasy haven to Miguel Perez. Relationships between Venezuela and the Dominican Republic had been poor for many years and while Caracas has been willing to receive the more respectable political exiles - no commies please - Santo Domingo has countered by playing host to the occasional fleeing millionaire/dictator (only until, of course, they could arrange a more comfortable retirement in Madrid or Miami).

In more relaxed times I would have nosed out some little hotel tucked away somewhere but that night I made straight for the Caracas Hilton where a telex is a telex is a telex. And if I was going to spend time hiding under the bed I at least wanted to be able to reach for room service.

I called Perez in the pension he was living in with his wife and kids the moment I had checked in, and heard his voice for the first time. It was a nervous rattle that tended to catch with emotion in mid sentence. During the call I had the feeling that Perez saw me as his saviour. He was so grateful I had come to see him, he said, and hoped that through me there might be a way out of the trap he was in. He told me he would meet me the following morning in my room and added that it would be better if we avoided the use of the phone in all subsequent conversations. He said goodbye with a thousand thanks.

When he arrived outside of my room the next morning his knock was so soft I hardly heard it. The assistant chief of Presidential Intelligence turned out to be tiny and frail as a sparrow. He wore a blue blazer and brown trousers, and blinked from behind tinted pebble glasses. There was an exhaustion in his grey face which told of the nightmare his year in hiding had been. Later I discovered that he had once been a tubby, jowly figure but had lost pounds in exile. It was difficult to accept that almost all of his adult life had been spent working in an atmosphere of secrecy and murder.

I was soon to learn that his life in exile had been spent under constant threat of death, hounded by the agents of his old boss, Dr Manuel Sosa. Perez had worked as the doctor’s right-hand man for four years in an office similar to that of any other Latin-American bureaucrat; on his desk was a battered typewriter, stationery and the inevitable ‘In’ and ‘Out’ trays. But the reports that left his out-tray, neatly typewritten and occasionally misspelt, were a world away from the wordy officialese of other governmental departments.

Perez dealt with the paper work of corruption and death. It was as routine for him to issue a formally polite and officially stamped death warrant as it was to type out a requisition for paper clips. Over the years he prodded at his old-fashioned typewriter with two fingers and ordered robberies, blackmail and murder. And as he filed reports, moving methodically around his office, he was a silent witness to a continuous flow of devious conversation and brutal acts.

He began to keep a diary of the day-to-day goings-on of the Intelligence Department and also photostated certain compromising secret documents. The material became a form of life insurance. His hope was that one day he would finally break with the Department and this compromising data would keep him safe. When he fled the country in fear of his life to Venezuela, several attempts were made to recover the bureaucrat’s deadly cache.

It was that diary and those documents that Perez was offering to me. His story, backed up by the diary and stolen documents, paints an extraordinary and graphic picture of the demented world in which men like Dr Sosa and Carlos Evertsz went about their business.

At our first meeting Perez was accompanied by a smiling Venezuelan who had once lived in London for ten years and was to act as interpreter. (I never ever paid him much attention - which later proved to be a mistake - except to have a very dull dinner with him one night when he told me he liked to drink in the ‘intellectual’ beer parlours of Caracas and talk left-wing politics. Somehow I always imagined Judas Iscariot as a lean, clean-shaven man; this one was portly and had a beard).

Perez was very nervous. He had taken the precaution of leaving both the documents and the diary behind for the first meeting but had brought official identification, Dominican and Venezuelan newspaper reports and the names of people I could later refer to and check his validity.

But now that he was finally confronted with the reality of publishing his story internationally, together with documentation, he was in a sweat. His main fear was that members of his family who were left in the Dominican Republic might be killed if they were not smuggled out before publication of the material. He had received news only a month prior to my arrival that his aunt had been murdered in Santo Domingo. She was found washed up on a beach near her home with a caved-in skull. The Dominican authorities said that it was suicide, a claim which Perez dismissed as ludicrous.

His reasons for telling his story were that he needed money to smuggle out two elder sons, and that it also gave him the chance to prove to his children that their father was not a murderer. Finally, in a great show of emotion, he embraced me manfully and announced with tears in his eyes that he would go through with it.

I thought I might wrap up the proceedings with a celebratory drink and phoned room service. Perez was panic-stricken and hid in the bathroom when the waiter arrived. It was a procedure I was to get used to. If there was ever a knock on the door of my room he would disappear on to the balcony or lock himself in the lavatory.

At first I found Perez’s displays of paranoia comical. Our meetings always took the same form. We never met anywhere but my hotel room. Perez would arrive each morning and instead of using the conventional lifts in the lobby he would take the bather’s lift from the pool to the top floor, change back to the usual lifts which he then took back down to my floor. Even then he would only enter the room if the corridor was completely empty.

At our second meeting I recognized Perez’s soft knock and went to open the door. There was nobody in the corridor so, somewhat bemused, I closed the door. After a moment there was a frantic scratching. I opened the door and Perez dashed in.

‘Why did you close the door?’

‘There was nobody there,’ I said.

‘I was there,’ Perez said desperately, ‘hiding across the corridor.’

He brought the documents and the diary to each meeting but did not allow me ever to keep them overnight. Instead, he took them away stuffed in his shirt. He also refused to be photographed or have his voice recorded.

On top of everything he began to change his mind. One day he would be the brave exposer of thieves and assassins, the next a cringing weakling scared for his life. I began to get very fed up.

There was something so rat-like about Perez, so lacking in human dignity and spirit, that it was very difficult not to treat him with contempt and I found myself treating him in a very cavalier manner. I interrupted and contradicted him and even found myself pushing him out of the room one night as he stood dithering at the door.

Nine

The whole business was very depressing and I awoke one morning feeling very low and made my way down to the poolside bar to see what I could do about it. It was to be a lunchtime meeting with Perez and by the time he arrived I was awash with bullshots.

‘Let’s go somewhere wonderful for lunch,’ I said looking amiable.

Perez was clearly alarmed at my state. ‘Do you want to have us both killed?’ he shrieked. ‘I can’t entrust my diary and documents to a drunken man.’

‘Frankly, Miguel, you can keep your documents. I’ve had enough. I’m going back to New York and if you want to follow me there with the material you can. Otherwise, adios.’

My hard line was a result of Perez’s cringing personality and the bullshots, but I meant what I said. I did go back to New York and Perez did follow me up, complete with diary and documents. But if I had known the reality of his existence in Caracas I would not have been so hard on him although I think I would have launched myself even more heavily into the bullshots.

Perez was being followed both by Dominican agents of Dr Sosa and agents from the Venezuelan security service, I discovered much later on. The section of his diary recording his miserable day-to-day existence in Caracas was atrociously scrawled in a blunt pencil in his daughter’s school exercise books. The idea was that by writing in a child’s schoolbook the diary, which he jotted down in the comparative safety of the local post office, would not be found.

For the first month of his exile he had enjoyed a small measure of peace and, although well aware that his safety was precarious, no move was made against him. Then Manolo Santamaria, the head of Dr Sosa’s Cuban agents, contacted him with a proposition. If Perez returned the documents the doctor would procure him a diplomatic post anywhere in the world. Perez turned the offer down flat. Every day after that he received calls threatening his life and those of his family. They were short and gave him no time to reply.

The documents, together with the incriminating diary, were his life insurance. While they remained in his possession, officially stamped and personally signed by Dr Sosa, he was too dangerous to kill for they had been lodged with a friend in the church who had instructions to release them to the press if anything happened to him.

But his ex-chief was a master in the craft of fear. Perez was never allowed to relax for a moment and the threatening calls of the Department became a part of his daily life. Perez moved his family to another pension but it was not long before the calls began again. One from the Republic itself told him to lie low and keep his mouth shut or there would be no time for him to enjoy the fruits of his treason. ‘It was a worrying time,’ Perez recorded in his diary with typical lack of colour.

On top of everything he had trouble renewing his residence permit and was told that he would have to return to the Republic. It became clear that Dr Sosa had a long reach when Perez attempted to plead his case to a senior official at the Immigration Office, arguing that if he returned to the Republic he would face certain death. The official looked directly at Perez and replied smartly that if he returned the documents to the Dominican embassy everything would be arranged.

His passport was stamped ordering him to leave the country. Perez was faced with the impossible task of coming to grips with South American bureaucracy and traipsed from department to department in an attempt to have the decision repealed. He felt his self-control ebb away. ‘Everything is lost,’ he wrote in his diary.

It took the personal intervention of the Venezuelan ambassador in Santo Domingo, who had originally granted him political asylum, to arrange for him to stay on in the country.

Perez decided to put his wares on the market. He wrote to Colonel Nej Tejeda Alvarez, one-time police chief in the Republic who had been neatly removed from office by Dr Sosa and who had languished as an ambassador in the political backwater of Guatemala ever since. Perez told the Colonel that he could provide material to prove that he had been framed by the doctor.

Tejeda immediately flew to Caracas, took copious notes from the documents and diary and flew on to Santo Domingo where he intended to see the president and plead his case. He returned a fortnight later with an offer from Balaguer - if Perez handed over the documents he would receive $50,000 and a diplomatic post. Perez simply did not dare to believe that the deal was genuine and turned the colonel down.

Pressure continued to build up. One grim day followed another. The department threatened to kidnap his children, then he was arrested by the police on the orders of the Venezuelan security service and interrogated.

Immediately afterwards he was visited by Rafael Antonio Collodo, an agent from the Intelligence Department who brought another proposition from Dr Sosa with him. If Perez handed over the documents the chief would hand in his resignation. Wearily, Perez sent the agent away with a curt refusal.

It was at this stage in the proceedings that I arrived. I must have cut a ridiculously lightweight figure in my denims and t-shirt after the procession of professional heavies that Perez had been dealing with. But I was the last chance. Although I had arrived in Caracas apprehensive and ready for anything, I was blissfully unaware of the immediacy of the danger Perez was in.

It was only as I returned to New York that I experienced a little of the paranoia that was Perez’s daily lot. A customs official refused to let me leave the country, saying that my visa was not in order. It meant I would have to go back into Caracas and visit various offices to fill out the necessary forms - a process that would probably take days. I felt panic. Did Sosa’s long hand reach to me?

A comforting tweedy voice spoke gently into my ear. ‘If I were you, old boy, I’d slip 50 pesos into your passport and see if that does any good.’ I did what I was told and the official wielded his rubber stamp. If I had known what was really going on in Perez’s life I would have paid thousands to get out.

Perez joined me in New York a few days later. His natural leaning towards hysteria was not helped by Pan Am, who had overbooked the flight which involved him in a last minute attack of nerves when he had to jettison his luggage to get a place on the plane. He arrived in New York with only the clothes he stood up in. The documents he had stuffed beneath his shirt.

I found him checked into the Lexington Hotel, squatting uncomfortably on the bed in a drab provincial room watching television and clutching a Gideon Bible. As usual, his nerves were not carrying him through the situation and he explained that he had left his wife in a flood of tears convinced that he would never return alive.

The lack of luggage had added yet another worry on to Perez’s tiny frame and seemed to have taken away the last vestige of his confidence. He had the Latin American’s horror of looking scruffy or badly dressed, although he always looked both, and implored pathetically that the first thing on the agenda should be a shopping expedition. He drew himself up and made a formal statement of faith: He had decided I was to be the one to tell his story and have access to all of his material. But first, a change of underclothes.

Fresh underwear seemed a small enough down payment on a story other men were prepared to kill for. We spent the first day shopping. Perez bought a collection of cream coloured, short-sleeved nylon shirts, the crucial underwear and a couple of pairs of tiny shoes for his children. I shunted him around from shop to shop and spent most of the time in the car listening to the radio. It was humid and in the high eighties. Nevertheless, when Perez had completed his shopping, and returned to the car a new man, he presented me with an umbrella as a present. The only reason I could make out for this totally unsuitable gift for a steaming New York summer was that I was English.

Back at the Lexington Hotel the diminutive secret agent changed into his new clothes, shaved and smothered himself in cologne. After a long and elaborate toilet we had dinner together and then returned to the room to begin the long process of sorting out the material, translating the documents and taping lengthy interviews.

As the interview progressed, a high-pitched whine became noticeable. I ignored the noise but it soon worried Perez who thought the room was somehow bugged. He flung himself around in the grip of a horrible panic, pulled open drawers and ran his fingers under ledges, pulled the pictures down from the wall and even peered under the bed.

Meanwhile, I had been inspecting the cassette and saw that the whine had been made by the tape itself and not by a bugging device. Perez would not accept that explanation. The noise had really shaken him and he sat down unsteadily in a chair, put his head in his hands and in a pitiful voice said that he had to sleep. It was the end of the interview.

He stood up, went into the bathroom to splash cold water on his face, and spoke of the nightmare he was plagued with waking or sleeping. It was always the same - the death of his children and of himself. I lay on the bed and listened. After a while the water was turned off and the silence was broken only by the unmistakable sound of Perez sobbing.

I expected him to change his mind again and again during the next few days but he never did. When he left for Caracas he gave me the documents and the diary. He wanted some part in freeing his country from the thieves and killers who had it by the throat, he said. I never saw him again. By parting with his material Miguel Perez had cashed in his life insurance.

Ten

I now find it difficult to believe that I never met Dr Sosa and have to strain to remember that I have no clear idea of what he looks like, having never seen a photograph of him, and would not know his voice if I heard it over my shoulder.

I have to remind myself of this because I have collected so many folders full of notes and tapes about him, and he has grown so large a figure that I often catch myself imagining that I have met him. So fixed in my mind is the image of the doctor dining in the open air by the pool of the Hotel Embajador in Santo Domingo, or sitting out on the verandah of his villa in the evening drinking Scotch and soda, that it is only with an effort of will that I remember I do not really know the shape of that pool and the arrangement of its sun umbrellas, or how many chairs there are on his verandah.

I first heard of Dr Sosa from Carlos Evertsz. Evertsz had been contacted by the head of the CIA in the Dominican Republic and asked whether he could get close to Castro if he was sent to Cuba. ‘He asked me if I was willing to take a chance for big money and get into Cuba and loll Fidel Castro - just like that.’ The plan was outlined to him briefly and he was told that the details would be provided by Dr Manuel Perez Sosa, a Cuban who knew the country well. Evertsz said that he remembered Sosa from the old days when he had been in charge of SIM, the dictator Trujillo’s intelligence service. Evertsz heard no more about the plan and nothing ever came of it. At the time Sosa’s name was just one in a gallery of Latin-American villains and as it did not crop up again in the assassin’s story I paid it scant attention.

But it was through Miguel Perez that I really got to know the doctor. The bureaucrat’s account of events in the offices of Presidential Intelligence is dominated by his chief and there is hardly a page in the diary that does not mention him. Dr Sosa looms over every word and thought that Perez has and the bureaucrat shrinks into insignificance against him.

‘But for politics the island would be a paradise,’ an English journalist wrote of the blighted Caribbean Dominican Republic. It is a most unhappy paradise, where fear hangs over every Dominican.

But Dr Sosa is not merely an evil baron in some dark kingdom which history has left behind. He is archetypal of the army of anonymous gangsters, licensed to rob, torture and kill, who are behind the seats of power in every Latin-American country today. And his sad, insignificant island is a microcosm of Latin America and a symbol of everything that is wrong with it. Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it can also be considerably cruder; the world portrayed here of this modern-day Doctor Death is one where the backroom boys operate in cells awash with blood and human excrement.

Dr Sosa himself grows in the telling. His grandiose schemes, spectacular greed and lust for power transcend the scope of most political gangsters. He had banks robbed, businessmen blackmailed and opponents tortured and killed; he met with Haitian voodoo priests and had women raped in a room he had set aside as an espiritista temple in his villa. There are few characters in literature who can compete with this stage villain who stars in his own melodrama. And yet Sosa is alive today and goes about his business still.

But, as I say, I only know the doctor by reputation.

Eleven

The early history of Dr Sosa is sketchy as Perez’s diary only deals with the recent past. Occasionally it refers fleetingly to earlier days under the dictator Rafael Trujillo when Dr Sosa was in charge of intelligence. He is simply described by Perez as a ‘tall, middle-aged man, a ruthless and bloody murderer with a taste for torture, who liked to join in the brutal acts he ordered’. Perez does not give details but records one specific instance which haunted him. A 17-year-old girl called Margarita Gonzalez had been brought in for questioning to the gaol ‘Carcell de la 40’ which had a reputation as a torture centre. Sosa rushed to make the interrogation himself and finally ordered the collective rape of the girl which he stayed on to witness. The girl later died and a Dr Scott, a European, provided a bogus certificate giving the cause of death as haemorrhage (Scott also provided a service where ‘enemies of the régime’ were given injections which made it seem as if the victim had died from heart attacks).

Miguel Perez himself had grown up under the ogre Trujillo’s shadow and had been instilled with an immense admiration for the man by the father. So when he was offered a minor post in SIM, the dreaded Intelligence Department of the régime, after he left High School, both he and his family were honoured. He started work on 8th September 1952 and his job was to deal with reports brought in by informers.

But Perez calmed himself with the thought that while others plotted and murdered in the struggle for power, he pushed a pen as a simple clerk in the employ of the government. This attitude, though hardly courageous, was common enough under Trujillo.

The dictator had made fear almost palpable and every Dominican had learnt to live with it as a daily companion. The world of Trujillo was the only one the young Perez knew and it was a brutal enough place to blunt any man’s sensibilities. Those who strayed from the shelter of the violent man’s wing were put down like dogs.

It has been estimated that Trujillo eliminated half a million people during his rule, which in ratio to a population of just over three million puts him considerably further ahead of Hitler and in the same league as Stalin. His political opponents either died in the dungeons of his secret police or in mysterious and spectacular auto ‘accidents’ and faked ‘suicides’.

Political opponents apart, Trujillo also conducted a rigorous policy of suppression and wholesale butchery against the numerous Haitian immigrants in the country. It is not always easy to tell the difference between Haitians and Dominicans but one deficit the Haitians possess is an inability to pronounce the Spanish word for parsley.

So when Trujillo ordered his army to massacre Haitian squatters living on the North West border of the Republic they armed themselves not only with guns but also with sprigs of the plant. Careful not to make mistakes, the militia held them up before the uncomprehending peasants and killed those who answered incorrectly. The army massacred between fifteen and twenty thousand squatters in a 36-hour bloodbath.

Trujillo’s power was total and his perverted logic made it natural that he should expect his subjects to worship him as a god. He indulged himself in a policy of maniacal self-congratulation. The dictator’s titles included “Benefactor of Fatherland’, ‘Chief Protector of the Dominican Working Classes’, ‘Father of the New Fatherland’, ‘Rebuilder of the Financial Independence’ and ‘Genius of Peace’. Roadside placards carried the message ‘Thank you, Trujillo,’ while hospitals had signs reading ‘Trujillo Cures Us’. A ‘spontaneous petition’ from 600,000 citizens changed the name of Santo Domingo to Ciudad Trujillo and in the houses of the faithful - including that of Miguel Perez - a mass-produced plaque was hung on the wall which read, ‘In this house Trujillo is Boss’. The generalissimo began to compare himself favourably with Pegasus and Plato until eventually he put himself on a par with the Almighty himself. The populace of Ciudad Trujillo had a neon slogan flashed at them day and night, ‘Trujillo and God . . . Trujillo and God’.

The mad, chilling world of Trujillo was where Dr Sosa cut his teeth, and when the dictator was assassinated in 1961, it dissolved. For Miguel Perez it had been the only reality he had known. Anybody closely involved in the régime was in danger of his life and a revengeful population was not inclined to differentiate between clerks and torturers. He fled to New York in the wake of what he describes as the ‘communist persecution of ex-Trujillo men who were shot down in the street, in restaurants and in their homes’.

Dr Sosa went to earth as well, although Perez does not say where. It was most probably Miami where the doctor had many friends among the emigré Cubans. Perez stayed in New York for nine months and then judged it safe to return, but he was mistaken. The new government, a Military State Council, imprisoned him for a further 14 months.

Out of gaol it was difficult to find work but eventually he became a clerk once more - this time in a more prosaic government department which dealt with agrarian reform. ‘I had a very low salary but I was happy.’ He struggled along on 250 pesos a month for five years and for the first and last time of his life the pressure was off.

The years that Perez was out of politics were erratic for the country. Government had followed government. At the end of it all President Joaquin Balaguer, a lacklustre, unprepossessing man and one-time puppet vice-president of the dictator, headed a government as a result of elections which were widely held to be rigged.

The country slouched back into the ways of the dead dictator. One by one the exiled Trujillo men came out of exile and gaol and slowly took up their old positions of power. Dr Manuel Sosa was personally reinstated by the president himself as the head of a newly created Presidential Intelligence Department. And the doctor remembered the quiet obedient clerk who had worked for him in the old days.

Twelve

There was quite a party the night that Dr Sosa gathered his old cronies around him as the future core of Presidential Intelligence. The grim merrymakers met at the Hotel Embajador, in itself a monument to the Trujillo era. Built at great expense to the personal order of the dictator it was meant to house the flood of rich Americans who never came. It oozes a seedy, provincial luxury and no Dominican can claim to be among the country’s upper class unless he has money in the casino, spent ostentatiously in the restaurant and cha cha’d with Cuban whores by its poolside. It is the place where Dominicans show the world they have made it and give a heavy-handed display of their chic.

Dr Sosa gathered the rat pack around him. Perez had been summoned by a drunken agent and was warmly welcomed and embraced by his old chief. He was in an expansive mood and told Perez that he desperately needed him in his new operation which had been converted into a ‘completely technical affair’.

Perez glanced miserably about him. With sinking spirits he recognized the old crew: Manolo Santamaria, a brash Cuban with gold teeth and loud suits, whom Perez describes, bluntly as ‘Responsible for a lot of deaths’; Viterbo Alvarez, known as ‘Pechito’ - small chest - who was a master at murder; and an array of agents with similarly disquieting pasts.

Sosa named Perez as his personal assistant and immediately went into details of the appointment. A permanent leave of absence from his present job would be arranged, securing him two salaries: the 250 pesos he already earned plus the 1,500 pesos he was to be given by the department. Perez voiced a diplomatic objection, said he would have to think about it, and noted in his diary that he did not really intend to accept it at all.

The gathering of the rat pack was an affair full of bonhomie and Dr Sosa bellowed at the waiters for fresh glasses of Scotch, the chic drink of the Republic. To convince his new assistant further that they were all friends together Sosa took him to another room in the hotel where he was induced to join in an orgy with Cuban whores. He did not arrive home until 5.30 in the morning and dutifully jotted in his diary that the whores’ salaries were 750 pesos a month.

More than two weeks passed uneventfully after the meeting until Perez went to work one morning to find that he had been fired: ‘By direct orders of the Presidency’. He went to see Sosa to discuss the loss of his job and when confronted with the awesome doctor he realized that he had no choice but to work for him. Sosa faked delight at Perez’s decision and there was no doubt a sense of irony in his request to his assistant to celebrate. Perez refused glumly and told his chief that he needed a money-lender to help alleviate the problems caused by his dismissal from his previous job. Sosa was magnanimous and took four 100 pesos bills from his wallet and told Perez to sort out his personal affairs and buy himself some clothes. ‘You must look smart, Miguel, for you will be working in my office.’

The following morning Perez went to work. Pathetically, he was barred from entry to the Presidential Palace, where the department’s office was, by the guards on the gate and had to phone his new chief from a public call booth. Sosa ordered his admittance and issued him with an identity card.

The routine began. At first it really did seem as if the department had become a ‘purely technical affair’. Sosa was busy re-organizing the office’s administration and allocating group chiefs with twenty agents each to the various zones he had split the country up into. Perez left home at 7.30 each morning and drove to the palace where his first task was to pick up reports which arrived in the library and take them through to Sosa’s office. They were mostly tame stuff, giving details of communist movements and making the routine accusations of subversion against the opposition party (PRD).

Slowly, as the weeks went by, even Perez’s dull bureaucratic mind grasped what lay behind Dr Sosa’s elaborate plans. He aimed to control all information reaching the president which would put him in a position of tremendous power and was to come to mean that in many instances Balaguer became the unwitting puppet of his Intelligence Chief. It was his intention to replace the president’s trusted officers with his own men as the opportunities presented themselves.

There were also people who stood firmly in Dr Sosa’s path. The most dangerous was Colonel Luis Ney Tejeda, the chief of police, whose position carried immense power. The president was particularly careful to choose a man he trusted for this key job. Tejeda took a special interest in intelligence reports submitted to the president and also had serious misgivings about the calibre of Dr Sosa.

It was intensely uncomfortable for the doctor to have this sort of attention paid to him and at first he suffered the inconvenience in silence. But it was inevitable that the two men should clash. The police chief wandered at will into the intelligence offices in the palace and issued orders direct to agents which Sosa furiously cancelled as soon as his back was turned. The position deteriorated to such an extent that Sosa decided to move his offices from the palace to his own home. ‘Otherwise I would have to kill that dog and to avoid that I had better come to the palace as infrequently as I can,’ he explained to Perez, who approved of the move as he found the new offices quieter and more comfortable.

Life at Sosa’s villa was eccentric but less taxing than at the palace. The doctor was very casual and spent most of each morning in bed after which he would wander about his assistant’s office dressed in pyjamas, the tops and bottoms of which never matched. But vast political ambition and inordinate greed stalked behind the homely and amateur atmosphere.

In the days of the Trujillo régime the Intelligence Department had existed purely as a tool of the dictator himself but with Balaguer as president, Sosa intended to use it to his own ends. But he needed cash if his ambition was to bear fruit and the government only provided a modest allowance as there were a score of other Intelligence departments to finance. Dr Sosa turned to the Americans.

He decided to offer the services of his small outfit to the CIA. One afternoon three men came to the villa asking to see the chief. One of them, who spoke excellent Spanish but with an American accent, explained that his name was Link Stewart and that he had come on important business. As the doctor was confined to bed with a hangover, Perez tiptoed into his bedroom and told him of the men’s arrival.

‘Shit,’ Dr Sosa announced, nursing his head, ‘those Americans are here already.’

Stewart and Sosa met in the special room set aside for important meetings. This room had a door on to Perez’s office which he was always careful to leave ajar. In this way he was able to create the impression of knowing little of Sosa’s intimate plans, while learning almost everything. ‘The blessed door,’ as Perez refers to it, was to be the fount of his inside knowledge of the devious plots of his chief.

On the occasion of the Americans’ visit Perez’s eavesdropping stunned him. As the men spoke it became clear that Stewart was a member of the CIA and was attached to the U.S. embassy in the city and had come to tell Sosa that the Agency was willing to foot the bill for a squad of Cuban agents. In exchange they insisted on being informed of all the activities of the Presidential Intelligence Department 24 hours in advance. Sosa was to send them outline reports describing briefly their intentions and would later meet with a member of the CIA to talk things over.

Stewart stressed the importance of the strictest security on all written messages and the need for very secret information to be passed on verbally. In this way compromising data would not have to be put in writing. The CIA wanted this procedure established, Stewart continued, to protect their activities in the Republic. They also expected the support and co-operation of the department at all times.

Sosa replied that the arrangements suited him perfectly and told Stewart that he would discuss the details with his colleagues and meet him later the same night.

The implications of this agreement were enormous. It meant that the Dominican intelligence operation was geared to provide information to the CIA before the country’s own president. As things developed, and Sosa became increasingly powerful, it came to mean that the CIA and the department worked contrary to the knowledge and wishes of the president and without his authority.

Following the discussion with the Americans, Sosa ordered his assistant to organize an immediate meeting with his three cronies: Dr Jose A. Quezada, Administrative Secretary to the president; Colonel Arseno Regalado and General Melido Marter. (The unfortunate general, though partial to the liberal tumblers of Scotch handed out by Sosa, had to mix his drinks with medicine as he suffered acutely from a stomach ulcer.) When they arrived he repeated the conversation that he had held with Stewart. As usual Perez was in his office, sitting quietly at his desk and involved in typing out reports, while he cocked one ear in the direction of the open ‘blessed door’.

Sosa told his men that it was important that Stewart should be allowed to interrogate prisoners the department brought in, and generally advocated a close liaison. There was a violent reaction from Colonel Regalado who completely disagreed with the whole idea. He felt that the department could not possibly trust people who were ‘intellectually responsible’ for Trujillo’s assassination and that the whole plan should be dropped (a reference to the CIA being responsible for planning the assassination of Trujillo, something that was common knowledge among the informed, military hierarchy).

Dr Sosa knew his men and could handle them. He operated on the belief that every man had his price and that his own particular followers were eager to sell. He talked Regalado slowly round to his way of thinking and hammered home his argument by telling the colonel that at any moment he would be named chief of the Secret Police. Regalado dropped his objections and the men sealed their new agreement with large amounts of Scotch.

Thirteen

The first of the Cuban agents arrived within days. Several cars drew up outside of the villa and a motley gang, most of them carrying cardboard suitcases tied up with string, clambered out. These were the Cubans who were to form the ‘elite’ of Dr Sosa’s troops, a crew who would go anywhere and do anything if the price was right. Eventually, there were to be 64 Cuban agents working for the department and paid by the CIA. Every one of them had been in exile in Miami and had previously worked in various capacities for Batista’s intelligence outfit. After the men were issued with Dominican passports in false names - issued to the department by Eva de Cirano of Immigration - they were treated to a stirring speech from Dr Sosa, their fellow-countryman, while his assistant moved among them with glasses of sweet wine and wedges of sponge cake.

The doctor had a definite plan for his new force and it was impressively simple - the Cubans were to become bank robbers. The germ of this plan had originally been sown by Dr Quezada who needed a large amount of money to buy arms in Miami, and it was important that the sum involved did not appear on any government books.

‘I have an idea but it could be dangerous,’ Sosa told him. The Cubans were to carry out a series of armed commando raids on the capital’s major banks. They would be dressed in the olive-green combat gear that the communist guerrillas favoured, so that the press, the public and lie police would hold the left responsible for the robberies. The department could then arrest ‘suspects’ and gain credit in the eyes of the president for its competence and zeal.

Quezada was impressed and the chief lost no time in putting the plan into action. First he ordered Lt. Cedano, a member of the Presidential Escort, to provide olive green army fatigues and deliver them to Quezada’s home. Later in the week Perez had to send a written report to the head of the CIA in the Republic, Anthony Ruiz (coded as A1), outlining the department’s imminent plans. The report stated that the Cubans would be carrying out a series of actions designed to discredit the extreme left and ‘totally destroy it’ but failed to mention that the money was to be used to buy weapons.

Another report was prepared for President Balaguer. It said that the department had received information that the extreme left was planning a series of robberies and terrorist actions with the aim of raising money to finance guerrilla activity within the country. It was a memo which would later seem to explain events and earn the praise of the president for its precise information.

The plan was then outlined to the Cubans. The robbery was to take place near the Fortalaza Ozama, a military camp in the city. One group of agents was to cause confusion while another carried out the raid, which was planned for the day when money from the national lottery was carried to a bank near the military camp in an armoured vehicle. A map of the fortress had been drawn up and was given to each man who was also provided with an escape route and instructions on where the money was to be taken.

Perez was in the office when the first outside report of the raid came in: a lorry belonging to the National Lottery had been held up outside the fortress and robbed of its entire cash load. None of the men involved had been captured.

Dr Sosa immediately ordered the mobilization of all agents not involved in the robbery. It was a hard day and Perez worked into the night compiling the false information these agents reported back to him until it was turned into a memo for the president.

The report, which was also sent to the Secret Police, said that the robbery was the work of the ‘14th of June Party’ and the MPD - two communist movements. Dr Sosa called a meeting of his agents and gave them a list of members of these parties who were to be eliminated. Meanwhile, the newspapers carried stories of the robbery decrying it as a communist outrage. The National Police hunted down all known political extremists and displayed even more zeal than the department and arrested many of the men on Sosa’s list before the chiefs own men managed to get to them.

‘That is how Dr Sosa fooled the president of the Republic, the National Police and the press,’ Perez wrote, ‘and some of the people arrested then are still in prison.’

Perez really does seem to have been disgusted by the affair and deplores the injustice of persecuting men ‘whose only crime is to belong to an ideology which they believe is good and can save them.’ His troubled conscience kept him awake at night and he habitually swallowed a sleeping draught to forget.

The afternoon following the bank raid was a time of curious celebration. Dr Sosa, who was a firm believer in Haitian spiritualism to the extent that he had a room at his villa converted into a voodoo temple, told Perez to stop work and join him in the celebration of his ‘Being’ anniversary. In the days of Trujillo the doctor had made several espiritista pilgrimages to Haiti and it was to become a regular practice of his to drive 200 miles out of Santo Domingo to El Lago Extriquillo where he conferred with Haitian witch-doctors. On this particular afternoon three Haitians arrived to conduct the candlelit ‘Being’ ceremony which Perez sat through with a growing terror at the occult connection in Sosa’s evil bid for power.

The next day things were back to normal and the chief’s attention was fully devoted to money. The original idea behind the robbery was to supply Dr Quezada with cash to buy arms from Miami but in reality there was no intention of ever handing the money over. Quezada had been told that the money had been sent direct to Miami with an agent on the first available plane.

Later he was summoned to the department to be told that the agent had double-crossed them and absconded with the cash. The chief put on a good show, ranting and raving against the agent and calling for his death, but added sadly that the department could do nothing officially as the agent knew too much. Quezada was enraged but swore to get hold of more money through one government department or another. ‘What a poor bastard this Quezada is,’ Sosa said, letting out a belly laugh as his friend left.

It took him several months to arrange further funds, but he confided in Sosa at every stage of his activities and eventually told him that the weapons were to arrive from Miami at any time. There was one problem in that the police commander at the Punta Caucedo airport was defying national tradition and refusing to take bribes. Dr Sosa undertook to frame the man and replace him with somebody simpatico to the department.

Agents concocted reports that they had discovered him in a plot to smuggle arms into the country for General Wessin y Wessin, a deposed military leader who was known to want to overthrow the government. Lt. Cedano, the presidential escort, was induced to plant the incriminating weaponry. A final report giving the exact date and time that the arms would be at the airport was drawn up and delivered to the President by Dr Sosa himself.

In all of these manoeuvres the chief was diligent in keeping his patrons informed. He sent a note to Anthony Ruiz of the CIA informing that the police commander of the airport was to be replaced because the department had discovered him too ‘negativo’. It was in the interests of the CIA to have a good corrupt contact at the airport and they understood the sinister shorthand of the intelligence department. The term ‘negativo’ covered a multitude of sins.

On the date when the contraband arms were supposed to arrive at the airport, the president went personally, accompanied by Lt. Cedano, to look for the weapons. The lieutenant surpassed himself by discovering the arms in less than no time at all. The repeated pleas of innocence by the police commander put the president in a temper, and he was dismissed from his post on the spot while his brothers were later deprived of their government positions for good measure.

Three days later, at the recommendation of Dr Quezada, the president appointed one of Sosa’s men as the police commander at the airport. The new appointment was celebrated in a flood of whisky.

It was a period of high living. Sosa spent the morning nursing his hangovers while at night he gambled at the Embajador and bestowed his favours on a variety of expensive whores, and would disgust the slightly prudish Perez with his descriptions of the previous night’s pleasures. Apart from all this the doctor was acquiring land and generally spending money at a phenomenal rate.

‘We need some money in a hurry,’ Sosa told the Cuban Juan Aguiler one morning while Perez was filing papers. ‘We’re going to do a little job.’ He produced a large map of the capital which he had drawn on in crayon. ‘Look, I’ve got a map and all the instructions here. It’s a good plan, with inside information brought to me by someone I know and trust.’

Juan Aguiler studied the map and discussed the plan with his chief. ‘It seems easy enough,’ he said. ‘But the site is awkward because it’s on its own and isolated, which doesn’t really help. But anyway let’s have a go.’

‘Yes, it’s a bit of a gamble,’ Sosa agreed. ‘But the map is clear and we can carry it out in the same way as last time - a military operation with the men dressed in olive-green. I’ll have a word with Meneito and see if he can get us an army jeep. If any of your men are recognized you’ll have to bump them off because this job must be done without any risk of identification.’

The men were talking of a robbery on a branch office of the Royal Bank of Canada which was situated in the open ground called the Ensanche Naco. The raid was to be followed by yet another of Sosa’s relentless purges of the left. Perez inwardly groaned at the thought of another operation and records his usual qualms of conscience. This time, he says, he thought of going directly to the president and telling him everything. Inevitably, he managed to talk himself out of it.

The bank raid was carried out according to the plan and Perez settled down to his task of going through the phoney process of making mock enquiries. As only a small section of the department knew of the Cuban bank robbers, even their own agents were convinced it was a communist action. Agent Pullita was sent to the scene and returned to tell Perez, ‘It was the communists again. They were dressed like soldiers, in olive-green battle dress, and I heard they got away with 80,000 pesos.’

In fact, they had got away with 83,000 pesos. Later in the day Perez went to the scene of the crime himself, and talked to a policeman who was outraged by the robbery. ‘It was those bloody communists. They ought to shoot the lot of them. They are just raiding banks and shops to get money for their party. They’re thugs - they shot and beat up one of our men on duty here.’

‘After listening to the policeman’s entirely wrong interpretation of the raid, I went home,’ Perez writes in his diary. ‘I went to bed without any dinner I was in such a state of nerves - took two sleeping tablets and finally fell asleep.’

G-2 (Military Intelligence) brought charges against the left even before the department had time to trump them up. Major Gary of G-2 informed them that the instigator of the raid was Andres Ramos Peguero, a revolutionary who had been accused of terrorist attacks on shops before. This information suited Sosa well enough. He told Perez to draft out reports to the president and the Chief of Police. If others were willing to provide the scapegoats without the department lifting a finger it was all for the better.

But there had been a slip. The police had arrested Fernando Arias, the man who had provided the map and inside information for the raid. The arrest badly shook Dr Sosa’s complacency and he paced anxiously around his office. ‘We must get him out of gaol. He could be a real danger to us if he gets scared.’

Arias was told to keep quiet at all costs and that somehow the department would see that he was all right. The police had a good case against the man, who was an ex-inspector of a local government department and was employed at the Pearl of the Antilles racecourse, and had filed proper charges. It was only after he had spent three months in La Victoria prison that the department provided a police captain and two employees of the racecourse to give false testimony to an appeal court. Arias was released.

Bank raids were risky business and Dr Sosa turned the department’s talents to the comparatively easy livings of blackmail and protection. He spared his assistant’s sensitive feelings by explaining his carefully thought out system in a less sinister way. Sosa told him that the department needed to buy new radio transmitters and receivers for the staff cars but the equipment was so expensive that they simply could not afford it. The chief explained that he did not want to ask the government for a special allocation as the matter was urgent and there was not enough time. Instead, he was going to ask various businessmen in the capital for money and the favour would be returned in the form of special licences and dispensations. It was also clear, although not written or even suggested, that if they did not co-operate the department could not be held responsible for what might happen to them.

Dr Sosa mixed a drink for himself and told his assistant, ‘Get a telephone directory and pick out the names of any firms or people who you think might help us and we’ll compose a letter to them.’ It took Perez all the morning to draw up a suitable list and in the afternoon Dr Sosa sat down at the typewriter with him and together they worked on the letters.

Each letter was brief and to the point. It ‘kindly’ asked for ‘spontaneous co-operation’ stating a figure up to 10,000 pesos, saying the department needed to buy equipment. The request was made in the name of the honourable president and in the interest of the country. It added that the department expected an immediate answer and that the letter was to be returned with the carrier.

Immigrants, mostly Spanish or Italian, were especially vulnerable to the department’s attention. The threatened businessmen, well aware of what might be in store for those not spontaneously co-operative, were not tardy in their response and a flood of cash came into the office. It was certainly not used to buy equipment and Perez notes without humour that the cash went towards the doctor’s ‘expenses or for shopping expeditions by his wife’.

But even the large amounts that were pouring in did not cater for Dr Sosa’s spending and property investments. Sheer greed had taken him over. He was rushing around the town from one business deal to another and enthused about his plans to his assistant. ‘What a marvellous opportunity! A friend of mind is selling some property but he needs to be paid at once because it’s in a wonderful situation in Altagracia.’ Sosa turned to his assistant and asked quite seriously, ‘Do you know anybody who could lend me 23,000 pesos?’

The demands made on local businessmen were intensified. Larger businesses were approached for 20,000 pesos at a time, and Perez records that one unfortunate paid out 60,000 pesos before he was left alone. Those who paid out quickly were quickly asked for more; those who reacted sluggishly were asked for the earth.

Despite Perez’s constantly reiterated disgust over his chief’s low-handed schemes, his ruffled feelings were miraculously soothed by a share of the booty. As the collector of much of the blackmail money, some of the businessmen took trouble to ingratiate themselves with him. One gave him a cheque for 500 pesos. ‘It was rather handy for I was rather short of cash at the time,’ Perez says easily.

When one much-bled businessman paid 20,000 pesos in cash to the department Dr Sosa generously encouraged his assistant, ‘Take some for yourself.’ Perez said there was ‘really no need’ but his chief ‘insisted’. ‘Take 3,000 pesos’ the doctor told him. ‘It’s a present to you from me.’

It meant that he had made 3,500 pesos in a single day and he wrote without shame in his diary, ‘It seems that this was my lucky day. I hadn’t asked for anything but nevertheless had been given plenty.’

During these days when the department was involved in acts of terrorism, blackmail and robbery, Perez noted that many of the Cuban agents were often heavily drugged. They would stagger into his office stoned blind and, as far as the bureaucrat could make out, a hard core of them were addicted to either opium or heroin and seemed to have a constant supply. It was some time before he discovered that the pusher providing the numerous Cubans with their dope was none other than the department’s chief, Dr Sosa himself.

One day Juan Aguiler brought in a fairly large package to the chief. The two men opened it and inspected the contents and Sosa told the Cuban to go immediately to his friend. ‘Tell him that I have the package and from what I have seen it is pure opium - absolutely unadulterated.’

‘Okay—how much do you want for it?’ Aguiler asked.

‘You’re the expert in these things, but I think you could ask for 40,000 pesos or even more,’ Sosa replied.

Such packages arrived frequently, Perez says, and the good doctor would dish out some to his agents and sell the remainder to one of the illegal laboratories in the Republic which processed the raw opium into heroin and then smuggled it into the U.S.A..

Fourteen

Even in the Dominican Republic bank robbery, blackmail and dope dealing are not considered the natural province of an intelligence department. The excesses of Presidential Intelligence did not bear inspection and Dr Sosa knew that if his position was to remain secure he would not only have to keep his agents under a tight rein, but would also have to neutralize anyone within the government capable of pointing an accusing finger.

As the size and extent of the department’s operation had grown, so had the influence and power of Dr Sosa’s arch-enemy, Colonel Luis Ney Tejeda, the police chief. The colonel was trusted by the president and had compounded that trust when he arrested 33 people involved in a plot to overthrow the government.

Among his enemies in the palace was Dr Quezada, who informed Presidential Intelligence that the colonel’s own personal assistants would help in their master’s downfall.

Dr Sosa invited them to his villa. Dr Mario Jerez Cruz and Fermin Marte Polanco were old schemers from the Trujillo era. Mario Jerez had worked as a legal advisor in the intelligence department and had infiltrated the communist party which was not only legal under Trujillo, but had been founded by intelligence in order to unmask the unfaithful. Fermin Marte Polanco was notorious because he had reached his position by denouncing his own brother as a spy in the pay of Fidel Castro and he had subsequently been sentenced to 20 years’ hard labour.

The cold and treacherous assistants were perfect for the plot against their boss, particularly as they found his attempts to centralize the administration of the palace an inconvenient efficiency. Dr Sosa planned to discredit him by bombarding the president with reports damaging to Tejeda from all quarters.

Dr Sosa knew from his CIA contacts that the Americans would welcome a change in the leadership of the police and sent Anthony Ruiz a report the following day telling him of the meeting at the department, the people present and the decision that had been arrived at - Colonel Tejeda Alvarez needed to be dismissed from his post as he was considered ‘negativo’.

The colonel made occasional trips to Miami to visit relatives and Sosa and his colleagues decided to weave a sinister and devious meaning into these journeys. Reports arrived at the department, signed by Dr Jerez Cruz and Fermin Marte Polanco, charging the colonel with the old chestnut of smuggling arms into the country from Miami. He was also accused of making contact with leftists whom he was supposed to have met at 2 Second Street off the Barrio Santa Maria Auxiliadora. The department knew that when the police raided this house they would find a radio transmitter and equipment which could be used to tape telephone calls.

Further reports came in from agents accusing Tejeda of training personnel and being involved in a conspiracy with other military leaders. Meanwhile, Dr Sosa had gone to considerable trouble and expense to produce a tape with the faked voice of the police chief talking of conspiracy based in Miami.

The president was showered with reports which built up a damning case against the Chief of Police, and also implicated the head of the secret police who had accompanied him on several trips to Miami. Tejeda pleaded innocence and reminded Balaguer of his loyal service but there was little he could do to defend himself. He had been in Miami on the dates in question and the excuse that he had been visiting relatives sounded pathetically weak. The colonel was relieved of his post immediately, and so was the head of the secret service.

The night that the news of the dismissals was announced there was a riotous party at the villa for those who had been involved in the plot. With the police chief out of the way Dr Sosa could now move from strength to strength. In the meantime the post of Head of the Secret Service had been given to Colonel Arseno Regaldo, the close companion of the intelligence chief. ‘So another of Dr Sosa’s plots against honest officers succeeded,’ Perez wrote in his diary.

Loyalty to the department was no guarantee against the intrigues of Dr Sosa. Agents who fell on hard times found their chief outwardly sympathetic, while behind their backs he made arrangements to rid himself of them. One of the Cuban agents, Otilio Martinez, approached Sosa asking for compassionate leave and a loan. He explained that his wife was ill in Miami and urgently needed an operation. He needed to raise 3,000 pesos and wanted twenty days’ leave to enable him to take care of his three children while his wife was away. Sosa listened to the agent’s plea, put a comforting arm around his shoulder and promised to fix everything by nine the same night.

As soon as the agent had left Dr Sosa sent for Juan Aguiler and the two men closeted themselves in the study for half an hour. Perez could not hear what they said but when they emerged Sosa seemed to be in a good mood and offered his assistant a glass of Scotch. He sat out on the verandah and spoke to Aguiler of horse racing; it was a Friday and the superstitious doctor liked to gamble as he believed it was his lucky day.

The following day Perez went into the office and found the sentries reading a newspaper and talking of murder. Perez looked at the paper and saw a photograph of the victim. He was naked and, according to the report, the dead man’s hands had been mangled to make it impossible for him to be identified by his fingerprints. The newspaper thought that he was probably a communist but suggested that he could alternatively be a member of the armed forces, or a government official, assassinated by extreme leftists.

Perez read the report vaguely. It was just another murder. He looked again at the photograph and his heart stopped. The dead man was unmistakably Otilio Martinez.

In the office he skimmed over the documents which had come in during the night. His mind was overwhelmed by the murder and he found it impossible to concentrate. It was unbelievable that Sosa would have a man murdered merely for requesting 3,000 pesos and compassionate leave.

‘I thought about handing in my resignation to Dr Sosa and telling him that I was too ill to go on working. But then I thought of my children, my wife and my mother. What would be done to them if I took such a decision? What would become of them if anything happened to me? I was sure that by resigning I would be condemning not only myself but all of my family.’

Sosa came into the office and acted as if nothing had happened. When it was reported to him that the murdered man seemed to be Martinez he expressed surprise and ordered the mobilization of the department to look into the case. He told his men that the agent must be avenged, for not only was he a member of the department, but also a man whom he had regarded highly. They were to be discreet in their investigations as he did not want it known that the dead man had been an agent.

Perez listened to the speech and sat quietly at his desk. Later he wrote, employing his talent for understatement, ‘As well as being a murderer Dr Sosa was also a hypocrite.’

The department was thorough and swooped on the area where Martinez had been murdered and ‘shot several people’. Others were arrested, including a number of children and pregnant women, and were badly beaten up on their way to the interrogation centre. The most vile tortures were used on several men in an attempt to make them confess to the murder but Sosa was unable to find a credible scapegoat.

‘The death of Martinez was soon forgotten,’ Perez wrote. ‘But they eventually found some innocent person who was convicted of his murder whom I think is still in La Victoria prison - or maybe is already dead.’

Nothing more was heard about the Martinez murder for a considerable time. Perez’s routine at the office continued but his chief grew stranger and stranger. The usual flow of cronies and the intimate, private meetings had stopped altogether. Dr Sosa spoke to no one. ‘I began to think he was going mad,’ Perez says.

Then one day a woman arrived at the department and announced that she was Otilio Martinez’s sister. The doctor agreed to see her and the girl explained that normally she lived in Miami but she was worried as her brother had stopped writing to her. She knew that he was employed by President Balaguer’s Intelligence Service and wondered if anything had happened to him.

‘You’re right,’ Sosa told her. ‘Your brother does work for me, but at the moment he is on a mission in a foreign country.’

The girl was still baffled because she had not heard a word from her only relative, a brother whom she described as her ‘right arm’ and to whom she was very close. Sosa replied that Otilio was engaged in very secret work and was forbidden to write to anyone but that he would be back within two months.

When the girl had gone Sosa sent for Juan Aguiler and the Cuban arrived wearing a white suit and a red tie with wide, white stripes. ‘Otilio’s sister has been here looking for him,’ Sosa said. ‘She seems very intelligent. What do you think we should do?’

Aguiler knew the girl from Miami and told Sosa, ‘She’s a pretty girl all right but she’s got no money. She could work for us. I’ll think of something, but remember she’s well-liked by the Cubans in Miami and if anything were to happen to her it could mean worse problems for us. I’ll have to look for a way to put this over. We could compromise her in some way so that she couldn’t talk.’

Dr Sosa had murdered the brother and now prepared to seduce the sister. He was impressed by her chestnut hair and black eyes and was keen to add her to his stable. That night he invited her to dinner at the Embajador and Perez notes discreetly in his diary that he is not sure what happened. It soon became clear, however, that the girl had become one of Sosa’s mistresses. She started to work for the department and was put on the payroll.

‘We received two reports from her which were signed with the pseudonym ‘Rosa’, as she had not been allotted an identification number at that time. She obviously had no experience of this sort of work because in these two reports there was nothing of any value. I remember one of them was about three women in a café who were criticizing the president. The department didn’t take any notice of this sort of information but they accepted it to keep her happy. She could not have guessed that the people she was working for were those who had murdered her brother and were planning God only knows what for her.’

As time went by the girl grew uneasy. She asked Perez where her brother had been sent and he was forced to lie. He told her that Otilio was not far away and would soon return. ‘I could see from her face that she had been crying and her eyes were red,’ Perez recorded sadly.

Sosa began to treat the girl like a slave. On one afternoon he ordered her to go back to the house ‘where we were the other night,’ and said that he would join her there later. Perez felt trapped in the middle of the affair but dared not tell the girl what might be in store for her. ‘I got home with such a headache that I thought I was going out of my mind,’ he remembers of this day.

The daily round went on until a particular report on Perez’s desk caught his attention. It accused Martinez’s sister of bringing drugs into the country and selling them on the outskirts of the city. Copies of the report were to be sent to the president and also to the Secret Police with a note to say that the girl should be arrested, interrogated and held in prison until deportation could be arranged.

She was duly imprisoned. Perez felt sorry for her and decided he would try to help. One afternoon he had to exchange his 45mm pistol at the police arsenal and while the officials there were filling in the necessary forms he asked one of the guards to take him to the cell where they were holding the girl.

‘He checked my credentials and then saluted me and took me to where the poor girl was locked up. I very nearly cried when I saw her, her face was so badly beaten up. She begged me for help, swore she was innocent and asked me to take a note to Dr Sosa. I gave her a few pesos to enable her to buy something decent to eat because the food in prison was barely fit for dogs. When I got to the office and told Dr Sosa where I had been he said, ‘How could you do such a thing? It’s not nice to go and see this drug addict. As far as I’m concerned she can drop dead.’

Sosa tore up the girl’s letter without even reading it. ‘She’ll get ten years you know,’ he said laughing.

‘I should have liked to have shot him,’ Perez remembers, and adds lamely, ‘but it wouldn’t have achieved anything except to harm me and my family.’

He decided, in his whipped cur’s wisdom, that out of sight was out of mind. He made no more enquiries about her welfare and never mentions her again in the diary. When questioned about the episode he could not even recall the girl’s name.

Fifteen

Dr Sosa had a dream. It was a vision of the Republic returning to the ‘golden age’ it had enjoyed under Trujillo, whom the doctor had looked upon as a god. And, naturally, Sosa cast himself as the man who could bring about the transformation.

President Balaguer’s administration, while corrupt and inefficient, was half-hearted in its tyranny. In Sosa’s view it was ridiculously soft and ineffective when dealing with the left and allowed various revolutionary organizations to exist as a sop against growing opposition. Sosa dreamt of a power where the president was neither opposed nor threatened, but ruled absolutely with a grip that never relaxed. And he wanted to feel its raw strength in his grasp.

Dr Sosa was approached by the CIA with the suggestion that the Republic would benefit from an organization dedicated to the complete elimination of the country’s communists. It would need to be organized on similar lines to groups like MANO in Guatemala, the Falcons in Mexico and the Death Squadron in Brazil, which all operated under full police protection. The chief immediately grasped the advantages of using an unofficial, right-wing terrorist group which could be given the discreet support of the government and yet be publicly denounced at the same time.

For inspiration Dr Sosa turned to the methods of his dead hero Trujillo, who had been something of a poet in the language of fear. The dictator had been able to instill fear into men’s lives as a permanent emotion and his Horsemen of the East had created an almost supernatural terror when they rode out at night to slaughter their leader’s enemies. They were both real and symbolic reminders of the penalty for dissent; not only a merciless death squad but also an intense psychological weapon. The sound of their pounding hooves had the power to empty a village, and the time was ripe to resurrect them.

They were replaced with a group of young thugs and their mounts became white American automobiles in which they prowled the streets of Santo Domingo after dark. The group was given the support of the police and the tacit blessing of the president and soon eclipsed the memory of the horseman with its random brutality. Originally given the pompous title of the Democratic Anti-Communist Front, the population simply referred to it as La Banda - the gang.

The gang had been put into the competent hands of Constantino Felix, another old hand from Trujillo’s intelligence service. Felix in turn brought in ‘Tuto’, a man who had trained members of the Tonton Macoute in Haiti and had been personally congratulated by Papa Doc for his work. The gang’s brief was that they should wage war against the communists and their supporters and that the department would pay members a nominal salary of between 100 and 150 pesos a month and supply them with arms. The gang’s definition of communism was even vaguer than that of either the CIA or Dr Sosa and embraced the whole of the working class and student population. It soon lost all pretence of political direction and concentrated on stamping viciously on any form of unorthodoxy and became the home and delight of every yobbo in the city.

La Banda turned Santo Domingo into a ghost town. At sunset the beggars on El Conde Street scurried out of the downtown business section for fear of being attacked by members of the gang. The average Dominican began to feel it to be a feat of daring to set foot outside of his home after nightfall. Anybody who did was likely to fall under the unsavoury title of ‘suspicious person’; to be out and about at the same time as La Banda was to indulge in unorthodox behaviour which could be interpreted as sympathy for the communists. The penalty was likely to be death.

Often the victims were students and schoolchildren. One young student, Miguel Gerrero, was shot pointblank by La Banda when leaving his home, while another, Luis Lamouth Gonzalez, was shot down while standing in the doorway of his high school. Workers were also likely targets for the gang. One man driving innocently along a coastal road was riddled with bullets when two white cars belonging to La Banda overtook him and opened fire. On another occasion the dead bodies of five young men were found dumped in different parts of Santo Domingo after they had been kidnapped and murdered by the gang. No reason for any of these killings was discovered.

When La Banda carried out one of its raids it was often joined by members of the police. The raids were concentrated mostly on the seething slums of Santo Domingo and were carried out in the early morning when hundreds of suspects were rounded up. Fatalities were the norm. During one raid a stray bullet killed a seven-year-old girl asleep in her bed.

When a newspaper photographer snapped Police Lt. Oscar Nunez Peña together with members of La Banda in a raid, he was attacked. The gang, in common with the police, did not tolerate criticism and over-reacted in the most extreme manner. When pupils of the Juan Pablo Duarte secondary school - the largest in Santo Domingo with 1,200 pupils - were unwisely angered to the point of holding an open protest in the school grounds, the reprisals were immediate.

The school was attacked by armed members of the gang together with a force from the national police. The pupils themselves were locked into the school grounds as a routine precaution against petty thieves and were all present when the attack took place. The locked gates irritated La Banda and they opened fire without warning or provocation. Students outside the main building ran for whatever cover they could take. At the first shots a large force of police arrived and also started to fire into the building until the attack took on the aspect of a full scale military assault.

Police then shot off the lock on the gates of the steel mesh anti-cyclone fence surrounding the school buildings. They charged the front entrance of the school while members of La Banda stormed the rear. Pupils made a vain effort to keep their attackers at bay by hurling stones at them as they crossed the wide patio from the front gate to the school building. But they were not to be stopped and clubbed down students and teachers who stood in their way. One boy was shot in the head and had to be rushed to hospital while another had his skull broken with a blow from a rifle butt.

Pupils were dragged out screaming while others were trampled underfoot in the panic. Young children were herded on to the south side of the pavement while their seniors were bundled into prison vans which lined the north side of the street. Journalists who had been alerted by the shots rushed to the scene only to be turned away at gunpoint.

Even in the face of continued outrages by the gang, and repeated protests over the support given to it by the police, the president still blandly denied its existence, despite the fact that at the height of its activity it was held responsible for a death a day. He scoffed at people who spoke of police involvement and national panic. ‘What decent person has been a victim of this violence?’ he asked reporters at a press conference. ‘It cannot be conceived that an institution as respectable as the Dominican police can be charged with organizing and shielding terrorist activities.’

For his part the police chief gaily chirped: ‘The country is enjoying a period of unprecedented calm and tranquillity.’

The opposition hinted darkly at a ‘foreign power’ being behind La Banda and the Wall Street Journal went as far as to print the rumours and name the power as the U.S.: ‘Many Dominicans suspect that the large U.S. embassy here is behind La Banda. There isn’t any evidence to substantiate that, and individual embassy members are reportedly opposed to La Banda. But the embassy has done nothing to publicly disassociate itself from the terror.’

But throughout there was never any mention of Dr Sosa. His stooge, Constantino Felix, gave secret press conferences as the secretary-general of the Democratic Anti-Communist Front but the name of the Intelligence chief never passed his lips. The doctor remained the anonymous power behind the throne.

At the same time that La Banda was going about its business, the department was manipulating the various factions of the left into open warfare against one another. Dr Sosa’s intention was to play upon the hatred that already existed between them and agents were infiltrated into the Pro Castro and Maoist parties. The result was a series of attacks, killings and reprisals. The war alienated the general public and at the university, the hotbed of revolutionary activity, left-wing students demanded an end to the MPD/Pacredo banditry. The young left calling for the destruction of the two most militant parties was music to the doctor’s ears.

A similar policy was carried out against POUASI, the militant dockers’ union. Agents from the department took up position in a house near the union HQ and opened fire on a routine police patrol that was cruising by. The police reported that they had been shot at by the dockers and the war was on.

A whole battalion of armed police attacked the HQ while the secret police carried out a thorough manhunt of union members who were either beaten up and imprisoned or murdered and left without personal documents to identify them. The department kept things on the boil by cold-bloodedly shooting down a young police officer and then providing ‘proof’ that it was the work of the union.

But POUASI proved a tough nut to crack (it was the dockers’ union who had been the backbone of the armed uprising in 1965 which precipitated a U.S. invasion of the island) and they fought back until it seemed that a civil war was imminent. President Balaguer intervened and dealt directly with the union.

The peace move came as a shock to Dr Sosa who was relaxing with General Melido Marte on his verandah nursing his customary tumbler of Scotch when the news reached him. He leapt out of his chair and hurled his glass against the wall. ‘There’s no need for the president to approve of communists,’ he screamed. ‘How much longer are we going to have to put up with this man’s cowardice? You see what’s happened now? I’ve got a good mind to give up all this bother. Balaguer is behaving, as usual, like a terrified virgin.’

The general attempted to soothe his friend with proverbs. ‘Don’t worry, some things are worth waiting for; as the song says - nothing bad lasts a hundred years. Don’t throw everything away now when you know our time is coming.’

The doctor consoled himself with a campaign against the revolutionary section of the taxi drivers’ union which called itself UNAGHOSIN. He called a meeting with two taxi drivers, the Mendoza brothers, who were ex-servicemen and good friends of the department.

‘I wanted to see you because we need six Austin cars and they must be painted in the colours of those belonging to UNACHOSIN,’ Sosa told the brothers. ‘The drivers must be ex-servicemen whom you can trust.’

The brothers promised that everything would be carried out as ordered. Sosa turned to Perez and said, ‘I’m going to send a memo to the president to tell him that UNACHOSIN is planning a strike which will be accompanied by terrorism and attempts on the lives of members of the armed forces, the national police and government officials.’ The memo was marked ‘Urgent’ and delivered to the palace by hand.

The doctor kept the real motives of his actions a secret from the majority of his men. He liked them to believe in what they were doing, for if the chief displayed amorality, disloyalty and self-interest on every occasion his men might be tempted to indulge themselves similarly.

On this occasion he briefed two Cubans to circulate the rumour around the department that there was going to be trouble with the taxi-drivers. The Cubans did their job well and when Perez came into work the following day everybody was talking about the union trouble ahead. Agents were telling one another that there was to be a military coup which would be heralded with outbreaks of violence and a strike by UNACHOSIN which would later be backed up by other unions. The agents believed the rumours to such an extent that they started to file them as factual reports, packed with information to the effect that the union was holding secret meetings in different parts of the city and that members were being provided with arms by Casimiro Castro, a leading member of the PRD opposition party. So many reports were filed by so many agents that Perez would have been convinced of the proposed terrorism if he had not heard his own chief plan it. Perez was forced to join in the hypocrisy and turn the reports into memos. The situation of an intelligence department planning something and spreading rumours to its own men which are then repeated back as the truth is a cautionary tale that all intelligence services everywhere might heed.

Between mouthfuls of chicken Sosa told his assistant the plans concerning UNACHOSIN. ‘I’ll wipe them off the map,’ the chief said confidently. ‘The best thing to do when a dog has rabies is to kill it. Kill the dog and the rabies is exterminated. Those bastards worry me. Communism is taking a hold of the country again - thanks to the all-forgiving president. The reds are even assisted by the government these days.’

The six taxis, painted in the UNACHOSIN colours and with suitably dubious drivers, were subsequently put at the department’s disposal. In an erratic and ruthless campaign of random terror-tactics carried out over a period of days they bombed bars and shot pedestrians in the street. The union was discredited in the eyes of the public and the police killed and arrested many of its members.

In the midst of all this activity the life of Miguel Perez became more and more miserable and his diary became a record of sleepless nights and near despair. But his loyalty to the department was ensured when his chief made him a present of a somewhat beaten-up second-hand American car.

It came at the height of the department’s operations at the instigation of General Melido Marte. ‘Look here, Manuel, you ought to look for a car for your right-hand man,’ the General chided Dr Sosa. ‘Things are getting nasty and it isn’t a good idea for him to ride around in taxis.’ The new car sends a ripple of joy through Perez’s diary: ‘I don’t deny that I was thrilled and happy. I said that he really ought not to have spent so much money and that I would have waited,’ he wrote, once again the loyal assistant.

The gift of the car is recorded lovingly as one of a very few pleasant incidents in a bleak routine. It takes up pages in his diary while he is often skimpy and cryptic when cataloguing the grimmer aspects of his everyday life. In a document that often turns into a lament these few bright pages sparkle. Perez is so obviously delighted to be able to record something apart from his dirge of death that he cheerfully nudges aside the murder and corruption to give his yellow car the space that it deserves. It even seems to have temporarily cured his insomnia.

Death warrants were becoming daily correspondence and passed across the bureaucrat’s desk with monotony. Even Perez, who was certainly not in the least left-wing, realized that most of the department’s enemies were imaginary. But he did his work without asking too many awkward questions and accepted his chief’s more fantastical scheming with a weary mental shrug.

The most extraordinary plot of all, however, was the brainchild of Anthony Ruiz of the CIA. Ruiz staggered even the Machiavelian Dr Sosa by asking the department to kidnap a high-ranking officer at the U.S. embassy.

The CIA provided the department with a precise breakdown of the daily movements of Lt. Col. Donald J. Crowley, the U.S. embassy’s Air Attaché in Santo Domingo. The colonel was a man of habit and always exercised one of his ponies on the polo ground of the Embajador in the early morning before going to work at the embassy. It was a quiet time of the day when few of the hotel guests were up, and the colonel always arrived on his own and no doubt felt he had a right on the ground since the Dominican government had billed the U.S. army $176,389.79 for damages incurred during the 1965 uprising, when it was used as a helicopter pad. The idea behind the kidnapping was to put pressure on President Balaguer to stage a massive campaign against the left, one which would finally break its backbone.

Crowley was duly snatched from the polo ground at 7.30 in the morning, blindfolded and forced to lie on the back seat of his captor’s vehicle. In the afternoon of the same day responsibility for the kidnapping was claimed by an extreme left-wing group - the 14th of June movement - which offered to set the colonel free in exchange for the release of 21 political prisoners held on charges of terrorism, robbery and murder. The group threatened to kill the Air Attaché if any repressive measures were taken against the left.

The kidnapping had the hallmark of authenticity but at first the president was unwilling to bargain. He was eventually put under such pressure from the U.S. embassy that he was forced to accept the kidnapper’s demands. The political prisoners were put on a plane to Mexico and on their arrival Colonel Crowley was dropped off from an automobile unharmed and still blindfolded, in an upper-class residential neighbourhood of Santo Domingo.

The CIA wanted the political prisoners out of the way. Their continued imprisonment on political charges made them a focal point and constant provocation to the militant left. Deportation meant that an articulate and dangerous group of hardcore revolutionaries was rendered both harmless and vulnerable.

They were surrounded by newsmen on their arrival in Mexico City and one of them, Juan Pablo Gomez Zarate, tried to make the world aware of what was going on in his country. He accused plain-clothes agents of the Dominican police of staging a systematic campaign of assassination and said that most of the group had been tortured and beaten by police and that some prisoners had died as a result.

Back in Santo Domingo Dr Sosa heard there had been a hitch. Colonel Crowley - who had no idea that he was being kidnapped on CIA orders - had caught a glimpse of Rafael Gonzalez, whom he assumed to be a guerrilla, but who in a fact was Cuban agent R-125. If Crowley ever identified Gonzalez at a later date, and it was discovered that he was an agent of the department, the whole plan was in danger of being exposed.

An order was sent out to investigate Gonzalez and agents told to act according to previous instructions. These instructions were the same for every mission - a mistake was paid for with a life. A few days later the agent Gonzalez was found dead on the motorway.

The department now embarked on a systematic search-and-destroy operation which was intended to round up all political undesirables in the country. The CIA were quick to file their own list of certain individuals they were particularly keen should be eliminated for ‘impeding U.S. interests in the Republic’. The department immediately despatched its agents to hunt them down.

For days the newspapers were full of stories of arrests and left-wing sympathizers fleeing the country. The kidnapping resulted in the eventual arrest of numerous left-wing political figures, and of these twenty were machine-gunned before getting into court, while the rest were exiled or gaoled.

Sixteen

In the midst of these hysterical campaigns the mental and physical condition of Miguel Perez was declining rapidly. His insomnia had grown into such a constant companion that reference to it in his diary stops and he begins to mention periods of sleep instead. ‘Went to lunch 12.30. After that I went to the guardhouse and had a good sleep until 3.30,’ one entry says of a pleasant siesta.

His run-down state became a topic of conversation among the agents when they sat together making murderers’ small talk on the villa’s verandah. Manola Santamaria told him he needed a couple of weeks’ rest and that he should ask Dr Sosa to send him somewhere to relax, truly terrifying advice.

Even the chief seems to have been a little worried at Perez’s condition. The doctor was always careful to attend to details - the loyalty of his assistant, who was in the thick of things and knew the department’s innermost secrets, was especially important. One night, as Perez was tidying his desk and about to go home, his chief asked him to stay behind and have a drink.

‘Thank you, no,’ Perez replied. ‘I want to get home early because it is my eldest son’s birthday.’

His chief congratulated him and pulled out his wallet.

‘Take this,’ he said. ‘It’s my present to the boy. You should have told me earlier and I would have let you get away.’

Sosa handed his assistant 500 pesos which he tried to refuse, saying that his chief should merely drink his son’s health. ‘I really didn’t want to take it,’ Perez writes in his diary, ‘partly because I knew where it had come from and partly because it wasn’t really my son’s birthday. I had made up the excuse in order not to stay. But he insisted and in the end I took the money.’

This time the bribe did not rest so easily on his conscience and, almost insane with the need to talk to someone, he decided to tell his wife everything. But with characteristic weakness he changed his mind when faced by her and gave her 200 pesos to buy clothes for her family instead.

The following morning he changed the remaining 300 pesos into small notes and stopped off at the grandiose Altagracia Church on his way to the office. The church is in one of the smart parts of Santo Domingo but gathered around its entrance is a sad collection of the city’s beggars: crippled men, women and children beg pitifully for alms on the church steps.

Perez stood among them and tried to buy himself off. ‘Trying not to be noticed I looked for a suitable place and dropped the money. I thought that in this way the money would do more good to more people, people who, though they had awful lives, I almost envied because they didn’t have my particular problem - working for a department of killers and thieves. I thought they at least were happy in their way.

‘I wanted to wait and see the surprise on the faces of those unhappy creatures. So I hid about fifty yards away from where I had dropped the money. One of them, who was following a man he was soliciting for alms, noticed the money and began to gather it up. Others who saw what was happening hurried to the spot. So I spent ten or more minutes of the greatest joy and happiness watching the happiness of those unlucky people. As soon as they had picked up the money they all left the church, probably because they were afraid someone would come back to claim it from them. But I noticed that one of them - I think the eldest - wasn’t behaving like the others and I think he was so handicapped he hadn’t managed to get any of the money. So I went up to him and gave him twenty pesos of my own money whereupon his face took on the same look of happiness as the others.’

It was 300 pesos well spent and in a surge of confidence he decided to unburden himself and take the risk of sharing his secrets. He chose his uncle, Monsignor Perez Sanchez, who was a priest. The old priest listened to his nephew unmoved and when his reply came it was unsympathetic. ‘The best thing you can do is keep your mouth shut,’ the priest told him firmly. ‘That way you will avoid trouble for the family.’

Men of the cloth tend towards pragmatism in the Dominican Republic and the advice, although hardly Christian, was sound enough. But Perez had run out of excuses and after four years of telling himself he must leave the department he was finally moving towards action.

For some time Perez had been collecting damaging material as his ‘life insurance’. Matters of great importance were usually dealt with orally, but it was often necessary to send written messages to the CIA and agents of the department. The system for this was very strict. A message was sent with an agent, read by the other party and signed for. It was then returned to the department where Sosa locked the document in his personal safe. The idea was that nobody but the chief had access to anything really incriminating and in theory the system was foolproof.

Clever as Dr Sosa was, laziness held a privileged position among his vices. In practice most of the department’s messages were returned to Perez who took them to his chief. Sosa would indolently sling the keys at him and tell him to put the documents in the safe. If the chief had been over-indulging himself in Scotch, one of his other privileged vices, Perez would sometimes be obliged to keep the keys overnight. It meant that he was the only man with access to Sosa’s secret files and he had made good use of his unique position.

At the end of the day, if Sosa was absent and Perez had the keys of the safe, he would remove documents from the safe two at a time and slip them into his briefcase. On his way home he stopped at a friend’s office in the town to make photostats and then the following day he would wait for his chance to place the documents back in the safe. It was always done in his usual methodical, office-like manner, and his chief never suspected him.

It was through this that Perez came across the most ambitious of his chief’s plots. At first he was merely confused by a volley of reports between the department and Military Intelligence referring to parts one and two of a Plan A. Several days later he began to realize the extent of this plan. He had gone into the office as usual, dutifully pointing out in his diary that he was an hour late due to trouble in starting the car, to find a note on his desk from the chief telling him to get on immediately with dispatching orders to the Cuban agents.

Perez set about his task. The orders seemed to add up to one thing only - a mass extermination of all political opponents whom Sosa thought stood in his way. The list was made up mostly of left-wing figures but also included the doctor’s opponents on the extreme right and some high-ranking officers within the government. Perez also understood that the Cuban agents who were to carry out the assassinations were to be eliminated themselves afterwards. Of all the plots the department had hatched this was the most complete.

The first report that Perez methodically filed was a confidential memo to the commander of the twenty agents coded as Zone A. It ordered him to keep a close watch on a number of listed people and to start thinking carefully which agents were to be used for the assignment. The people on the list were of an importance that staggered Perez.

Topping the list was ex-president Juan Bosch, leader of the opposition, closely followed by a host of high-ranking military, newspaper editors and prominent left-wing personalities. Altogether they made up a total of 48 people.

‘I arrived home tired and nervy. I couldn’t go on putting up with such misery and torment but I didn’t have the courage to carry out what I had thought of doing, in spite of having the vital photostats of the documents from Dr Sosa’s personal files.’

A couple of days later Perez’s suspicions of the mass murder were finally confirmed beyond doubt. Sosa, in a state of panic over some news he had received, stated blatantly that the killing was to begin. The news that had upset him was that President Balaguer was planning another of his many reshuffles among the chiefs of department.

‘We all know how devious Balaguer can be,’ Sosa told Quezada, who brought him the news, ‘but we daren’t wait for his decision before starting our plan. We must all be ready.’ Then he dropped the bombshell which stunned his quiet assistant sitting invisibly at his desk. ‘Tonight I’ll send for the Cubans who will do the killing.’

‘We’ll start with Eliseo Andujar and Barahona - both of whom I consider dangerous. I can’t stand that bastard Barahona. Next we’ll make the final preparations concerning Braulio, Nivar and Checo.’ It was nothing new to Perez to hear his chief announce the assassination of certain people but this plan really startled him. It included officers whom he considered to be loyal to the president. The last three names that Sosa mentioned - General Braulio Alvarez Sanchez, General Ney Nivar Seijas and Colonel Checo - were all important members in the armed forces’ hierarchy.

That night on the radio the bureaucrat heard the news that Plan A had swung into operation. Barahona and his wife, the radio reported, had been attacked by two unidentified men and riddled with bullets. Miraculously they had not been killed.

In the office the following day Perez found his chief in a paroxysm of rage. Before him, pale and uneasy, stood Juan Aguiler, the head of the Cuban agents. ‘Your men behaved like children,’ Sosa screamed at him. ‘I want you to pack them off to Miami and I never want to see them again. What they did could have given the whole game away. It seems that Tomas was recognized and that’s one reason good enough to get them out of the country at once.’ He waved a threatening finger at Aguiler. ‘The only reason I’m not killing them is because they’re friends of yours. If they weren’t they’d be dead. Go and book their tickets.’

The Cuban agents’ mistake meant that Sosa was forced to shelve his plan for a couple of days and he spent the time in conference with his confederates ironing out details. Finally, a large group of Cubans arrived at the department to be given last minute instructions. It was a ferociously hot day so the meeting was held out on the patio, which made it easy for Perez to listen in.

Sosa was amused by his assistant’s sudden interest. ‘That’s what I like to see,’ he said, laughing. ‘You by my side when I am giving orders.’

‘Have a good look at the photos I’m about to show you,’ the chief told his men. ‘All of these people have to be got rid of at a certain specified time. On the back of these photos are details of where they sleep or spend the night. Commit these to memory, plus the face of the person in each photograph. Then destroy the picture.’ He handed the agents the photos of the people they were assigned to kill. ‘Anyone who makes a mistake will die for it,’ he told them. The doctor softened his stern warning by cheerfully handing round tumblers full of whisky.

Seventeen

Although Perez had decided to expose his chief, he was a long way short of the kind of courage needed to act on his decision. But a grotesque event created such revulsion for his tyrannical overlord that he was finally able to summon it.

Dr Sosa was drinking heavily throughout the preparatory stages of Plan A and was typically half-drunk when a woman arrived at the department making enquiries about her son. Perez heard her arguing loudly with the guard and went to see what was happening. He spoke curtly to the man on duty and told him that he should not shout and argue with people who came to the department as it was bad for their image. This extraordinary remark shows the level of unreality that Perez operated on; while the department murdered and tortured he was still removed enough to consider a public image of disciplined good manners.

Perez took the woman along to see Sosa and once in the chief’s office she immediately burst into tears and explained between sobs what had happened. Her son was Senora Sosa’s mechanic and had made the fatal mistake of making a pass at her.

‘I remember the incident,’ Perez says, ‘because I handled an order to the officer in charge of Group A telling him to arrest the boy and take him to the interrogation centre. The order continued that as soon as the boy was there Dr Sosa was to be informed and would carry out the interrogation personally.’

Perez felt sorry for the woman. ‘As I watched the pathetic tableau I saw that Dr Sosa had a mocking smile on his face. The poor woman’s eyes were red from crying. She was about 45 years old, really very pretty, with black hair and light brown skin the colour of cinnamon and she moved gracefully. But in spite of her beauty, she looked more dead than alive.’

Dr Sosa told the distraught mother that it was true that her son had been arrested and interrogated but that he had since been released and had returned to the provincial town of Santiago. Perez listened sceptically: ‘I remembered how I had heard that the woman’s son had been badly beaten up by Dr Sosa during his interrogation.’

But the woman seemed pacified by the news that her son had been set free. She mopped at her face with a handkerchief and then made the terrible mistake of asserting her motherly rights. ‘The boy is all I have in the world and if anything were to happen to him you’d have to deal with me as well.’

The veiled threat infuriated Sosa. He leapt out of his chair and struck her across the face. Then he shouted for the agent on duty to take her to the guardroom. ‘The woman started to cry loudly but she was silenced by another blow to the head with the butt-end of the gun which the agent carried, and was dragged away,’ Perez records.

Sosa poured himself a large Scotch and drank heavily for an hour and then ordered his maid up from the kitchen.

‘When she came he told her that the woman in the guardroom needed a bath and she was to see to it. While she was at it, he said, the maid ought to have a bath too. The doctor was a bit drunk but he was still speaking clearly, although what he had just said seemed nonsense to me. As the maid was leaving Dr Sosa pulled out his wallet and gave her 100 pesos, telling her to buy herself some new clothes.’

The maid went into the guardroom and soon returned to inform Sosa that the woman was taking a bath. She had not taken Sosa’s command seriously to have a bath as well and was still clothed. The chief said that he would order the guards to take the woman into his voodoo chapel and that the maid should accompany her.

‘Dr Sosa was about to go out and then turned to me and said, “Don’t stay here. Come with me so you can see what I do to people like that woman.” When we got to the chapel the woman was there naked and crying. Dr Sosa told the maid to undress which she did without ado. Then he said, “You know what I want you to do. Take this woman by force until she can’t stand any more or even talk.” The maid immediately threw herself on top of the woman who was quite unable to defend herself although she cried out in desperation. She implored Dr Sosa to kill her rather than make her suffer in such a way.

‘Dr Sosa replied that she could either put up with it and have her son free or she could refuse and he would die accidentally. The woman had no choice so I witnessed something absolutely terrible. Dr Sosa guffawed with laughter. It was all too immoral for me to describe in writing - I couldn’t take it, and praying that God would take note, I returned to my office where I could neither see nor hear what went on. I was very nervous and upset by what I had seen already but I set about doing the routine work. As I worked I wondered how it was possible that in a room where there was a large altar and statues of several saints such a disgraceful thing could be committed. I prayed to God that he would hasten the death of the scoundrel Dr Sosa. I calmed down and thought of the Almighty.

‘It must have been two hours later when the doctor came into my office. “Go and see what a state those two are in now,” he said. I had no idea that lesbian had so much experience. If you had stayed you would have sampled a real marvel. But you, with your humanitarian sentiments,

had to go.’

When Sosa was drunk he enjoyed frightening his assistant. Perez’s humanitarianism really did annoy him. ‘One of these days it’ll get the better of you,’ he said, ‘and I don’t know where you’ll end up.’

‘I told him that the spectacle had really nauseated me and I hadn’t enjoyed it at all,’ Perez says. Some time later he saw Manolo Santamaria come out of the chapel carrying the woman. He thought that she had passed out or was asleep but when he went over to ask if she was ill he noticed a strong smell of chloroform. He was told not to worry. ‘She won’t play any tricks on us again,’ one of the agents called out cheerily.

Upset beyond caution he went straight to Sosa and asked what had happened.

‘That woman gave me a lot of headaches,’ the chief said sternly. ‘She knew the department had imprisoned her son so it’s best to have her out of the way for a time.’ Sosa looked his assistant in the eye. ‘And I’ll tell you something else - people who could make trouble are best eliminated because the dead never talk.’

‘Too true,’ Perez replied. ‘I honestly couldn’t think what else to say that he couldn’t take the wrong way.’

But despite his timidity in the face of his chief Perez had been pushed even beyond his very elastic limits. That night he sat down and wrote a long letter to President Balaguer. He explained everything that had happened in the Presidential Intelligence department while he had been there and gave details of the plot underway which was intent on overthrowing the government.

The letter was an act of contrition and Perez wrote way into the night. It was impossible to deliver it personally as the president was attended constantly by Dr Quezado, his personal aide, and Lt. Cedano of the presidential escort - both cronies of Dr Sosa. He entrusted the delivery of the letter to a friend.

It was only a matter of time before his chief discovered his action and then the order would go out for his death. He needed every minute he had left to make good his escape so it was necessary not to stir up Dr Sosa’s suspicions prematurely. He telephoned his chief to say that he was ill and would not be able to go into the office for a few days. Sosa replied casually that it would be all right.

A few hours later he received a frantic call from an agent who had befriended him over the years. The letter he had written to the president had fallen into Dr Sosa’s hands. The order had just been issued to have him eliminated. The agent wished him luck, advised him to flee the country and rang off.

The dull fear that Perez had felt over the four years in the department suddenly swamped him in its reality. He says that he does not know how he managed to remain sane over the next 48 hours. In the streets he would stop dead, overcome by a sudden wave of terror, and would wrestle for self-control.

He knew that he could be shot dead at any moment and that there was nowhere he was safe. He contacted a lawyer who had access to the president and told him of the contents of the documents. The lawyer promised help but told him flatly that his position was one of extreme danger.

The impossibility of his situation seems to have turned Perez temporarily into a man of steel. He made personal contact with several of the men on Sosa’s list and warned them of the danger they were in. He saw Jose Francisco Pefia Gomez, the Secretary General of the opposition party (PRD) and Norge Botello, head of the Students’ Federation, and also managed to get a message to Barahona telling him who was responsible for the attempt on his life. Then he sent details of the death lists carrying the names of Juan Bosch, the opposition leader, Casimiro Castro, a revolutionary leader, General Elias Wessin y Wessin and Rafael Morrillo to the men concerned.

Finally he wedged himself into a telephone box at the back of a small restaurant off the main street of Santo Domingo and systematically phoned every man remaining on Sosa’s list. He remembers that as he stood ringing the numbers he was rigid with fear, prepared at any moment for a burst of machine gun fire to cut him down as he dialled.

The avenues of escape were thoroughly blocked. An enraged Dr Sosa had organized a hawk-like watch on the airport and docks of Santo Domingo while every agent of both Presidential and Military Intelligence had orders to shoot Perez down on sight. It seemed as if his decision to save the lives of the 48 men on the death list meant that he had sacrificed his own. His only hope was political asylum and with that in mind he climbed into his canary yellow car and raced to the Venezuelan embassy.

Eighteen

‘The Ambassador behaved like a father to me and it is thanks to him that I am alive today,’ Perez recalls. The Venezuelans granted asylum to himself, his two youngest children and his wife. They were driven to the airport accompanied by the ambassador himself, Rafael Ignacio Sanchez Tirado, and a military attaché, where they boarded a Venezuelan aircraft and flew to Caracas (Travel document).

A week later the story hit the headlines of the Dominican press which ran detailed accounts of Perez’s claims, mentioned the stolen documents and printed the names of the men on Dr Sosa’s death list. The Secretary General of the opposition party, Peña Gomez, who was on the list, later gave a press conference to confirm the story and also disclosed the names of the Cuban agents.

It was the first time that Dr Sosa had ever been exposed in this way. He told both the president and the press that he was completely ignorant of any assassination plot. Perez was an employee with political ambitions of his own and as for the so-called secret documents - well, where were they?

President Balaguer himself finally called a press conference to say that after a thorough investigation he could happily announce that he still had every faith in his intelligence chief. The whole story of a wholesale assassination was a concoction of the opposition designed to create panic among the population.

And so it became necessary for Dr Sosa to ensure that his traitorous assistant maintained a total silence. Venezuela was to become an extension of the nightmare he had lived through back in the Republic. He was a penniless exile on the threshold of another era of terror in a strange land where he knew no one.

I have recorded the events of Perez’s exile up to my arrival in Caracas, when he was under surveillance by both Venezuelan and Dominican agents, and his subsequent trip to New York. He arrived back in Caracas happy that he had gained his objective of ‘revealing the deeds of the assassins to the world’. He intended eventually to visit the Dutch island of Curaçao to make arrangements with the captain of a molasses boat to smuggle his family out of the Republic.

‘Everybody living outside of their country has an uncertain future,’ he had told me in New York, shrugging miserably. The events of the past years were part of his destiny, he said, but added that he was uncertain what that destiny was. In his conversation, as in his diary, it was clear that he was a committed Catholic, profoundly superstitious and a convinced believer in miracles. He spoke of the Virgin of the Sorrows, his aptly named but unreliable protectress, and gave instances of miracles she had wrought which had saved his life. He was hopeful that she would come to his aid once again.

The day after his arrival back in Caracas he was visited by Mauricio Coro, a fellow Dominican exile, who told him that he had spent three months in political asylum in the Venezuelan embassy in Santo Domingo and desperately needed somewhere to stay.

‘In fact the man was a terrorist and a torturer who had infiltrated the police, but when he was found out he had to go into exile,’ Perez says. Despite the man’s previous background Perez seems to have felt some responsibility for a fellow exile. He apologized to Coro for being unable to put him up, as his own place was much too small, but he did find him somewhere to stay.

“The next morning I got up but when I went downstairs I found three men at die door who asked me to identify myself. They then took me to DISIP’ (a special branch of the Venezuelan police). ‘I had no idea why, and when I asked I got no reply. The men wouldn’t talk. When we got to DISIP a man called Sr Rhodes said to me, “Ah, you’re the kidnapper!” My mind spun and I didn’t know what to think.’

The police were pulling in Dominican exiles because it had been reported that the Dominican consul had been kidnapped. After Perez’s initial interrogation three men took a statement from him and made it quite clear that they believed him to be involved in the kidnapping. They told him that they knew he had worked for Intelligence in the Republic and that if anything happened to the consul he would be held responsible. ‘I was in such a bad state of nerves that I couldn’t even answer. I couldn’t believe what was happening to me.’

That evening they brought his wife and son to DISIP to confirm his statement. It was nine o’clock before they were finally allowed to leave but Perez was ordered to return the following day. ‘That night I couldn’t sleep,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I wanted to run away and disappear. But I knew that they would come after me and put the blame on me for something I knew nothing about.’

The following day when he returned to DISIP he found several other Dominicans whom the police had brought in. One of them was Mauricio Coro. The police had read a great deal into Perez’s meeting with Coro, who was known as a political activist. They thought the two men made strange bedfellows and suspected a plot. ‘They wanted to know why Mauricio Coro had come to my house at eleven at night. I explained why but they obviously didn’t believe me and kept on with questions and more questions.’

He was allowed to go home that night but was again ordered to return the following day. This time Perez felt a change of atmosphere and he had the impression that the situation had somehow developed. Once again interest was focused on to Perez’s secret documents. ‘We know that you have documents belonging to the Dominican Intelligence Department,’ his interrogators shot at him, ‘and we want you to tell us where they are. If you don’t we have the power to send you back to Santo Domingo.’

He was told that the police believed the kidnapping to be associated with the documents. This made no sense to Perez but he wrote philosophically, ‘Anything was possible where the experts of the intelligence department were concerned.’

He told the police that the material he possessed was not the property of the Dominican government but private information from the personal files of his ex-chief, which concerned crimes the department had been involved in. In order to keep the documents safe he had handed them over to a representative of the church in Caracas, he said, with a note saying they were to be published if anything happened to him. It was a good answer, which put his interrogators into stalemate, and he was allowed to leave.

Subsequent events made the whole incident seem like a deliberate plot on the part of the Dominicans to force Perez into handing over the documents. The day after he was released it was discovered that the kidnapping had been a hoax. The Dominicans had merely been putting the pressure on the Venezuelan government to arrest Perez as a criminal. The consul suddenly appeared with the lame explanation that he had just taken a few days’ holiday and that his staff had been over-zealous in their concern for his safety.

Perez had braved another storm. ‘I began to live again,’ he wrote. ‘Everything was once more back to normal after several days of despair.’

Not that being ‘back to normal’ meant quiet days and tranquil evenings. Perez was subject to the same pressures as before; it was just that he was not held by the police in an interrogation cell. But he had made the mistake of falling out with the interpreter we had used who reacted by going to the newspapers. A Caracas daily, El Mundo, published an article on ‘communist’ intrigues in Caracas and mentioned Perez’s meetings in the town with Colonel Tejeda and later myself to discuss certain secret documents in his possession. Although the reference to Perez was vague and inconclusive it sowed new fears in his mind and jeopardized his already shaky status in the country.

The news that Perez had been talking to a journalist alerted the Americans. ‘The first secretary of the U.S. Embassy (George Raymond Phelan, Jr) sent his chauffeur to my house with his card and asked me to phone the embassy. I didn’t want to phone, but the next day the chauffeur returned, so in the evening I did phone and made an appointment to meet him at 9 a.m. the next day at a house in the eastern part of Caracas.

‘When I got there a man told me that he knew I had something which did not please them - and that I was going to publish it. They didn’t mind my publishing the rest provided I left out the documents which dealt with the U.S.A.. I answered that I could not do as he asked.’

Meanwhile back in Bloomsbury I was sifting through the material and bombarding Perez with letters asking him to clarify various points and occasionally talking to him on the telephone. I received a telegram: ‘Situation delicate. Do not ring.’

After two weeks without any news at all I became worried and did telephone. The call was avoided and the next thing I knew Perez had flown to New York to tell my agent that I was not to ring him as his phone was tapped. Paranoia was most expensive, I thought, safe in London.

There were a couple more letters and then . . . nothing. I asked a fellow journalist visiting Caracas to go and see him and he reported back that the family had moved from the address. I wrote letters to poste restante addresses and received no replies. Perez had disappeared.

I have never heard of him since.

Nineteen

During the period that I was back in London attempting to coax letters out of Perez I searched hopefully through the mail each morning for word. But as our correspondence became less and less frequent I felt his world slip away from me and grow remote. Then one day a postcard arrived out of the blue from an earlier acquaintance. The message, inscribed on the back of a circular card of Michelangelo’s statue of Moses posted from Rome, sent the blood rushing to my head: I’m not looking for an excuse because there is no-one. Just to let you know that I have no forgotten what big favor yo did to me in Berlin. Please trust me that I will make it up. Love, Carlos.

The assassin was announcing his return to my life and was apparently remorseful for not paying me for the air tickets I had bought him. But, love Carlos? Talk about the swings! I had been removed from the top of the death list and given the status of best buddy. I was rather touched.

Later another card arrived from Lisbon: Hi Criss, Don think that I have forgotten about you, please always remember that the Carlos Evertsz of this world never forget friends. Love, Carlos.

This sudden lurch into love was worrying. Evertsz was changing, laying all this love-between-men stuff on me, and the extent of the change was spread before me when two young Australian girls turned up on my doorstep as a sort of present from Evertsz. They were a pleasant enough, dumpy pair and very much the sort Evertsz worked on.

He had a power over certain women and it was not one that he exerted through fear. His women, far from being frightened of him, remarked on his charm. One thing about Carlos Evertsz, they said, he is certainly a gentleman. They were mostly unspectacular in themselves and included nurses and student teachers, the sort of girl who lived bedsitting-room existences, bought romance magazines and desperately believed in the short stories and heroes in them. Evertsz was larger than life, a big spender, good looking and above all he was a man who had killed. He had glamour. He did not bother to conceal his past, which seemed to add to his sex appeal.

The Australian girls talked about him endlessly with wide eyes as if he were a god. They accepted his murderous past as part of his mysterious ways, but were unable to understand why he had left them one day to cash $500 of their travellers’ cheques at an especially favourable rate and had never returned.

Evertsz really had changed his image for Lisbon. Instead of the straight grey suits and highly polished shoes, which had worked so well in London he took to sporting black silk shirts, tight black trousers and an extravagant black sombrero. And in place of the rigid, policeman-like figure with the glass of milk in the London disco, there was this funky, supersexy-snake who danced through the night. He became a well-known boulevard character, a conspicuous figure at the pavement cafés where he sat in his sombrero reading Peanuts books translated into Spanish.

The Australian girls would have pared his toenails with their teeth, but as it was he was content to have them rub baby oil into his body after he showered. While the girls busied themselves with the oil Evertsz would look down admiringly at his torso and exclaim, ‘God, I’m in good shape.’

He liked to talk to them about his own brand of philosophy and used to show them letters which he wrote to his French girl. One of the girls was so moved that she stole one, written by Evertsz while he was staying in a two-star hotel on the Rodrigues Sampaio in Lisbon. It makes extraordinary reading:

Introspection, observation and the records of human behaviour in the past and at the present time make it very clear that an urge to self-transcendence is almost as widespread, and, at times, quite as forceful as the urge to self-assertion. You must be aware, that Men desire to intensify their consciousness of being what they have come to regard as themselves but we also desire - and desire very often, with irresistible violence - the consciousness of being someone else.

In other words: I have a longing to get out of myself, to pass beyond the limits of this tiny island we call universe, within which every individual finds himself confined.

Any man or woman, the most happy, no less the most wretched, may come suddenly or gradually to the naked knowing and feeling of their own being, this immediate awareness of selfhood begets an agonizing desire to go beyond the insulated ego.

When I was near you my happiness at that time seemed to have passed the limits of the possible and was a kind of enduring paroxysm, an exquisite frenzy which I could renew at will.

When one needs - as I need you - one needs a complete existence and just need it w. one’s whole being, w. the soul and every fibre of the body.

I have never admited have need enyone, in fact I never had need enyone - untill I cross my way into your life.

You must be aware of the fact, and it is that I need you in order to make my life a life.

Also I would like to be very honest w. you. As I stand now on life, I have nothing at all, but my will to work for a decen an normal life. Please let me no if you feel that you could share w. me strugle for life.

Thru time and space

Always w. you.

It rings true, although I feel that only the last three paragraphs were written by Evertsz and that for the rest he has used the words of another writer to express his ideas - essentially that he would like to be somebody else, preferably the normal ordinary being of his dreams. The early syntax is beyond Evertsz’s grasp of English, and it is unlikely that he would use a word like ‘beget’, but the final paragraphs are certainly his own, from the spelling of ‘enyone’ with an ‘e’ to the passionate desire to have a ‘decen and normal life.’

In Colin Wilson’s book Order of Assassins he used Evertsz as a case history - alongside Charles Manson and Jack the Ripper - to explore the psychology of the assassin. Much of what he writes is extraordinarily relevant to Evertsz, altogether forming a brilliant insight into the man. After summarizing his life in the Dominican Republic Wilson concludes: ‘. . . there is no sadism in Krafft-Ebing’s sense of the word. All the atrocities described by Evertsz seem to have been committed with a certain indifference, as if it were sheep who were being butchered. Dictators who run a régime of this type are not motivated by sadism; but they are motivated by a fierce will to power. Such pleasure as is involved - for example, in burning Cuban prisoners - seems to spring out of the satisfaction of anger rather than some “erotic nerve”.’

Wilson makes a distinction between the murderer and the assassin, arguing that most murderers would prefer not to kill, while assassins commit murder for its own sake. ‘The assassin is a man for whom murder is not only an ultimate purpose, but a means of self-fulfilment, a creative act . . . The ordinary murderer commits his crime looking over his shoulder. He hopes not to be caught; if he is caught, he will hang his head and acknowledge his sense of guilt by saying, “It’s a fair cop.” The assassin peers down his rifle with the sense of justification felt by a headmaster as he canes an insolent pupil or a hangman as he releases the trap . . . He feels he is in the right.’

Wilson takes a pre-Freudian stand to understand the mind of the assassin in general and comes up with Evertsz’s favourite author, Nietzsche, whose philosophy recognized the will to power as the fundamental drive of all living creatures and saw it as an expression of man’s struggle to become a god. Wilson quotes a passage from Nietzsche which would make Evertsz’s dead eyes burn with excitement.

Nietzsche writes in Antichrist: ‘What is Good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself.

‘What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness.

‘The weak and the failures shall perish; first principle of our love of man. And they shall be given every possible assistance.’

‘The vital key to the psychology of the assassin, Wilson says, is that the true role of his violence is to prevent the disintegration of his self-image.

Interesting stuff, I thought, as I flicked through the pages of Wilson’s book. My life had become so tranquil without Evertsz that I was even able to take a detached, intellectual interest in his existence. The bastard was no longer breaking into my flat, wandering through my life at will and invading my sleep until it seemed that every dream I had during the latter months with Evertsz was a nightmare crammed with symbols of death. Wilson might well have discovered the key to the assassin’s psychology, but in Evertsz’s case it would only open the door into a maze in which there were many more doors, some opening on to dead ends and others not opening at all.

Finally, of course, he just doesn’t add up. My own personal view of him may be unbalanced in the extreme but he never kept any of his personalities long enough for me to come properly to grips with one. He slipped in and out of them, as easily as a mannequin changing outfits at a fashion show. All have been equally improbable - the young boy from the happy loving family who blows out a peasant’s brains to keep the favour of a wicked uncle . . . the émigré in fear of his life who became the playboys’ friend but was eventually reduced to kidnapping attempts and cheap con tricks . . . the milk-drinking bouncer, rigid as a board, dealing with drunks in his conservative grey suit . . . the big-spending man-about-town with a gangster car to drive and a student teacher on his arm . . . the swinging Latin lover in the black sombrero reading Peanuts books on café terraces. . .

And then, that most unlikely cri de coeur expressing his passionate desire to be normal, ordinary and dull; the need to shelter from his loneliness in the mundane. Inside the assassin’s cage, a Norman Normal trying to get out.

Unconvincing? Probably, but the images clash and grate and never merge into something as definite as a single personality; the sum total of his personal traits do not add up to a real person. He is a complete and, in many ways, a highly intelligent animal who somehow does not understand that the world and people around him are real and only relates to them as a flowing series of abstract problems to be dealt with, one way or another.

If I were a novelist, and this was fiction, I could make Evertsz abandon his more unlikely characteristics and contradictory roles. But it would be misleading of me to draw an outline around him and put my finger on his heart; Evertsz has a way of remaining perpetually out of focus, a disturbing blur on the edge of one’s understanding.

Perhaps the best way to conceive of him is as a force rather than a personality. Whatever the guise, the energy remains the same. The power of his presence is unavoidable. I used to know if he was in a room before I saw him, and even when he was in the best of moods I never felt comfortable in his presence. In the worst of moods he was capable of silencing an entire room full of people if they did not regard him as the centre of interest.

But all my theories on Evertsz have been exercises which I have indulged myself in only when he was not around. The tranquillity of my life without him continued with only an occasional postcard to disturb it.

It was difficult to convince myself that he was real, difficult to imagine that he had ever existed at all. It was Miguel Perez, the bureaucrat, who brought him back to me when he told me he remembered the assassin well. He recalled an incident when the young Evertsz drove a lorry into the Department’s HQ in the dark of the night and his orders were to load up and dispose of a batch of freshly slaughtered corpses. The story conjured up the assassin well enough and sent a shiver through me. I imagined him going about his task, humping the bodies over the truck’s tailgate, his black eyes hidden in the dark. A chilling image. ‘Cold as the dead they load on a low lorry by night.’

Twenty

Just before Christmas ‘74 Evertsz ceased to be of merely armchair interest. On 12th December I flew to Madrid to start work on a film assignment which meant I would be in Spain for three months. A short time after I arrived I discovered that the assassin was playing out a new role - that of model prisoner.

My first reaction to the news that he was locked up in the city gaol was one of relief - at least he was out of circulation. But there we were again, both back in Madrid. It struck me that we had travelled the full circle of the wheel. A five-year cycle of Carlos Evertsz had ended and another was about to begin. Slowly I began to develop an obsession to see him again and ended up on the drive out to Carabanchel described at the beginning of the book.

The letter from Evertsz, which must have arrived in London as I was in the taxi travelling out to see him - another ridiculous coincidence which would have to be scotched in fiction - gave me the background to his situation: Dear Criss, I have been in prison 13 months 24 to go. Well Criss, what are you up to, are you getting married or what, hear you have a child by a VIP bird and wraping about birds has enyone ask for me if so please send their address and I’ll contact them, BUT DON’T let enyone know where I am, so I could try and get some money out of them. I guess this is it for now, apart of asking you for as the many paperbacks book as you could spare and few dozens magazines, since it is very hard for me to get enything to read, this is a most dear friend, even better than bread and I have none of that as well. Look here send some Penthouse and Playboy. Well Partner looking forward to hear from you and hoping you are doing fine, and a very happy Navidades and all the best for ‘75. Sincerely, Carlos.

Evertsz spent ‘75 in gaol with at least another year to go. It was not murder which put him behind bars but petty crime, just as overstaying his visa put him inside in England.

And, of course, once in gaol Evertsz became top prisoner. At first he attempted to get on with the prisoners and tried to organize them into using their influence, but when they failed to respond he went over to the side of the prison authorities. He ended up with so many special privileges that he was virtually a warder. The cop instinct had worked for him again.

In Spanish prisons trusties undertake many of the duties that warders perform in other countries. Evertsz carried a card, authorizing him as Jefe de periodo, which meant that he was in charge of all new prisoners during the initial three-day observation ‘period’ when they first arrived in gaol. Evertsz’s position gave him power and very definite advantages.

It was Evertsz who marched down the corridors during the day taking the count, and it was Evertsz who shouted ‘Everybody in the cells’ last thing at night. Privileges included his own cell - the best kitted-out in the entire place with a bookshelf, table and chair, a comfortable mattress and sheets! He also controlled one of the gaol’s most profitable sidelines, the Nescafé racket. Evertsz had a catering size tin and sold coffee at 10 pesetas a cup. Ordinary prisoners are allowed two glasses of wine a day with their meals - Evertsz had four. And at night he was allowed down to the warders’ section to sit and talk with them.

He was also responsible for meting out punishment in his gallery. The bad boys - men who, say, were found with a knife from the dining-room in their cell, or who had failed to turn out quickly enough for a count - are taken down to the lower cells and put into solitary confinement for a period up to 30 days. They carry their beds down and are interrogated and often slapped around. Evertsz excelled in both departments.

A young Spaniard who knew Evertsz both in Madrid, before he was sent to prison, and then served time with him in Carabanchel, told me how the assassin had reacted to gaol. Evertsz greeted the Spaniard like an old friend when he turned up in periodo and they became close.

‘He was good company,’ the Spaniard told me. ‘He’s got a missing link somewhere, and it doesn’t all quite fit, but 90 per cent of it is perfect. Intelligent, faithful, considerate —he has all those things going for him and then he can turn around and do something which just isn’t logical that doesn’t fit at all.

‘I don’t remember well when I first met him but he was around long enough that I saw him from time to time. The vibration is so intense from Carlos that he’s unforgettable.’ The Spaniard spent much of his time in gaol writing spiritual tracts and used to talk them over with Evertsz.

‘He showed me a lot of letters he wrote to his girl in Paris. He would always write out a rough and then copy them out and they were long and detailed letters. They were sophisticated and very, very philosophical, but so intense and driving that reading them doesn’t make you feel philosophical at all - it makes you feel up against the wall. He can be very, very intense. It’s not a tone or a vocabulary, it’s just an energy thing.

‘One day the warders wouldn’t let me go up or down, or something, and Carlos thought it was unfair. He threw in his badge right there, his whole position. They gave it back to him and I was allowed down. They wanted him. He’s good.

‘One guy climbed to the top of the bars inside the gallery - 60 feet high - and was going to jump and was threatening to freak out. Carlos was the one they chose out of a thousand people to bring him down. He part talked him down, part dragged him down, but he got him down all right.

‘Most of the other prisoners think he’s a maniac and some of them think he’s full of shit - I set them straight on that. I mean in a way he is, but they don’t realize he’s a heavy number. When he carried out the interrogations and slapped people around he was perfect, cool as a cucumber. He’d see the guy next day and say “Hi!”

‘When I was getting out - which is something you never know — I kissed the guy who told me. I ran upstairs and put my stuff together and Carlos burst into tears, out of gladness. He said, “I’m not ashamed to cry” and tears were running down his face. I said, “Man, anything I can do for you I’ll do.” And I meant it.

‘He used to show me this picture of his child and say that all he wanted to do was to get back and have a normal life and straighten things out with Conchita. That was the last thing he said to me.’

Conchita, his wife, is a sad, smiling, gap-toothed girl, extraordinary only in the fact that she is married to an assassin. She is certainly no gangster’s moll, but behind her ordinariness she is tougher than she looks. She lives with her mother now, a woman made forever bitter by the fate that has befallen her daughter.

Despite everything, Conchita remains loyal to Evertsz and still makes the long haul out to Carabanchel to visit him and take him food. Some days he receives her fondly; on others he shouts at her in a caged fury, jealous of the outside world she lives in, and tells her that he never wants to see her again.

We met often in Madrid and would sit over coffee and talk about Evertsz. The conversation would usually slow down until I shook my head hopelessly, while she would smile in a way that suggested that she knew the impossibility of her situation but loved Evertsz still.

When she told him that I was in Madrid and wanted to see him he began to send me regular notes through her: Dear Criss, Hope you are having a great time in Madrid, like to tell you how sorry I am for not been able to speak with you. I beg of you to understand my position I do need money and fast but whatever please understand that I remaind you truly and gratefully friend.

I sent in enough cash to keep Evertsz’s Nescafé racket bankrolled and Conchita returned with an effusive note of thanks. Evertsz overflowed with sentiment: I am just truly in love with my wife and in need of a clean honest life with her, she has gone frue hell cause me, and I intent to make her the happier woman within my power, so you could let her know the way I feel about her. By for now and drop a line via my beloved woman. Carlos.

‘He says he loves you,’ I told Conchita, folding the letter. She smiled, shrugged and read a passage from a note he had written to her. In the brief interval between finishing the letter to me and penning the one to her he had swung from sentiments of love and loyalty to a feeling of enraged jealousy. ‘Who are you fucking now?’ the letter demanded. ‘You fucking round the town?’

I tried to envisage the sort of sex freak so ruled by his cock that he would be crazy enough to pull Evertsz’s wife. An image repeated itself before my eyes like a film loop: I kept seeing the Dominican pilot, just after his penis had been sliced off.

But now the game has been reversed on Evertsz and it is he who has been marked as a victim. At the beginning of this year a young Dominican, also named Carlos, was sent to Carabanchel on a minor charge. The moment Evertsz saw him he knew he was there for a reason.

Evertsz took the young man down to the lower cells and worked on him. Interrogation, using God knows what techniques, disclosed that the man had been sent to kill the assassin. He had been offered $5,000 in advance and $5,000 on completion, by one of Evertsz’s many enemies, to go into the prison and arrange an accident. What the Dominican had not bargained on was that Evertsz would be in charge of all new prisoners. The Jefe de periodo extracted a long and detailed confession from him which he has put before the prison authorities.

Twenty-one

The last I heard of Carlos Evertsz was that he had temporarily lost his position as Jefe de periodo and had to serve 30 days in solitary as a result of a letter he smuggled out to the U.S. embassy in Madrid. In it he explained his situation, complained about the food and appealed for money. The letter ended up in the hands of the prison authorities.

His decline is almost complete. He has degenerated from a government assassin to a small-time con man and today he is just another gaol-bird doing time. Worse, he is a prisoner without cigarettes, wine, Nescafé or company.

He has alienated himself from almost every group he has ever had dealings with. The Dominicans don’t want him back, the CIA must wish they had never dealt with him at all and even the prison authorities of Carabanchel have dropped him. A string of countries are either closed to him entirely or dangerous to visit.

The future seems as bleak as the prison cell he now inhabits. Maybe he will ‘quieten it all down’ and lead a ‘clean and honest life’, but I am as sceptical of his chances as I would be of a hardened alcoholic or a junkie on his fifth cure. He may try - he did run a grocery store in New York for a year - but a pattern has evolved and it seems inevitable that he will return to his old ways and that the whole insane process will continue.

Evertsz holds no terror for me now. In fact after so long and so much I feel an affinity with him, almost a kind of affection, coupled with an animal respect that he has survived so long against such odds. But the moment he is loose again I will wait uneasily for the phone to ring. And, like everybody else, I’ve had enough.

The fate of Miguel Perez would seem to have been decided. Certainly he was a witness to murder and spent years in the role of an apologist because of his tacit acceptance of the activities of the department that he worked for. But, finally, he did carry out one heroic act by alerting the 48 men on Dr Sosa’s death list to the danger they were in and I would like to think that his prayers to the Virgin of the Sorrows were answered, and that he had managed to smuggle his family to safety in Curaçao, but it is more realistic to assume that he has met the same end as other Dominican exiles living abroad. The world of political murder recognizes no boundaries and exiles have been found dead in mysterious circumstances here in Europe.

One grisly example is the death of Maximilian Gomez, one of the revolutionary leaders exiled to Mexico after the Crowley affair. Gomez left Mexico for Europe and settled in Belgium where he was eventually found gassed in his bedroom. Lying beside him was Miriam Piñedo, the widow of another revolutionary leader murdered in the Republic by police. Piñedo was still alive when found and survived a critical illness caused by the gas. At the time the Belgian police regarded the incident as an accident.

A grotesque discovery re-opened the case six months later when the dismembered parts of a woman’s body were found in suitcases scattered throughout Brussels. It took the Belgian police two months to identify the remains but when they did it was found that they were those of Miriam Piñedo.

The responsibility for the murders has been the subject of heated exchanges between the various factions of the exiled Dominicans in Europe and has been discussed in the press.

The Brussels newspaper Special claimed that the murders were the result of bitter rivalry between the Dominican pro-Castro party (MPD) and the pro-Chinese party (Movimiento 24 de Abril). In Britain the Daily Telegraph came up with the view that Piñedo had been murdered on Soviet orders to prevent Chinese infiltration among Latin American exiles in Western Europe. The paper reported that Piñedo was murdered as a result of her refusal to travel to Russia to restore her health after the gassing.

The French periodical L’Express suggested that the business was much more complex and accused Hector Aristy - the exiled Dominican leader of the Movimiento 24 de Abril - of being the CIA mastermind behind both murders. The exiled Secretary General of the main Dominican opposition party (PRD), Jose Francisco Peña Gomez, the man who backed Perez in his original exposé of intelligence methods, believes that both Gomez and Piñedo were murdered by the Dominican secret police.

One thing is certain: the only beneficiaries of the murder of these two Dominicans, so far from their native land, are the present régime in the Republic and those parties interested in retaining it.

Inside the country opponents of the régime continue to be dealt with ruthlessly. Even journalists have been murdered. Gregorio Garcia Castro of Ultima Hora was shot down near his home and last year Orlando Martinez, executive editor of the moderate left-wing weekly Ahora and a columnist of El National, was killed. Nobody has been punished for either murder. Police investigation has meant the harassment of opposition political parties rather than the discovery of the assassins.

A suspiciously convenient landing by a handful of guerrillas in June 1975 gave the government an excuse for a timely round of arrests of opposition and trade union leaders. Later three Puerto Rican fishermen were accused of bringing guerrillas into the country on the orders of the Puerto Rican socialist party. They confessed, after 20 days of imprisonment, isolation and torture and were sentenced to 30 years hard labour.

President Balaguer governs in the style of Trujillo without the provocative excesses of the dictator. The international press have been able to describe him as a small, meek-mannered, softly spoken man who is more like an ageing choirboy or timid grandfather than an autocratic ruler. But beneath that deceptive exterior is a man adept at keeping his enemies permanently off balance. He operates behind a paper democracy that boasts a cabinet, congress and judiciary. In fact none of them functions at all and Balaguer runs the country alone, trusting no one.

An attempted coup by the military last year was adroitly side-stepped by the wily president. His unswerving, pro-U.S. government has made him impregnable. The Americans are assured of everything they want as long as Balaguer is in power for life.

U.S. ambassador Robert A. Hurwitch said that in 25 years of diplomatic experience, mainly in Latin America, ‘I have never been in a more pro-American country’. This brought the response from opposition leader and former president Juan Bosch, ‘This country is not pro-American, it is American. It is United States property.’

The next elections are in 1978 and although Balaguer does not have enough popular support to win cleanly, win he will. It will be his fourth term of office and he will be 70, but as the invaluable friend of the U.S. he is destined to rule until he dies.

The huge New York-based conglomerate Gulf and Western has been accused of openly backing Balaguer to secure its $200 million stake in the sugar, cattle, cement and tourist business. There have also been allegations that the Republic is fast becoming the home of the Mafia. Well-known figures with connections with the U.S. underworld have been frequent visitors recently and it is alleged that they have interests in gambling rackets, hotel-keeping and narcotics.

But there is still room for those Dominicans loyal to the president. Senior officers are openly allowed to enrich themselves; Trujillo’s colonels have become Balaguer’s generals.

This unsatisfactory structure is oiled along its way with American money. U.S. aid to the country comes to some $50 million a year and includes a $10 million food distribution programme. One in every four Dominicans is fed by U.S. surplus food. The reason that the Dominicans are unable to produce enough of their own in their fertile, semi-tropical nation stems from bad husbandry and unequal food distribution. The land is being used at one third of its potential.

Life is dismal for most Dominicans. More than half of the population are dangerously undernourished and children with swollen bellies wander the streets of Santo Domingo as visual evidence of malnutrition. Out of a job force of 1.2 million Balaguer has admitted an unemployed population of 400,000. The Republic has one of the world’s highest population growth rates while food production is stagnant and the country becomes increasingly unable to feed itself. Land control is feudal, agrarian reform gets no further than the debating point and the wages of the urban masses have been held down since 1966 despite inflation.

But the island is a Caribbean paradise and the government is coaxing more tourists to its sandy, sun-kissed beaches each year. It is possible to avoid the grisly spectacle of the country’s daily life by hugging the hotel pool-side and visiting the prosperous section of Santo Domingo where new houses, offices and boulevards have sprung up. But 95 per cent of the country’s population is guaranteed to derive no benefit at all from the boom.

The Dominicans have also introduced new laws to push the divorce business. This most catholic country is now the best place in the world for a swift and easy divorce which only requires one party of the marriage to spend a week in the country as a resident.

Symbolically, there could be no better place to finalize the total breakdown of a relationship. To move further afield from the luxury hotels, or to seek advantages of the national life apart from divorce, is to court the fear that the average Dominican has grown to accept.

And there is no reason to suppose that Dr Sosa is not still running the Presidential Intelligence Department together with his band of ghouls and all his deadly skill.

THE END

Postscript

On 3 July 2002, the National Drug Control Department (DNCD) acknowledged in a press release that Everstz was on their payroll as an informant, according to a report in El Caribe newspaper.

A little over a year later, on 29 September 2003, the Dominican Republic’s Daily News carried the headline: Carlos Evertsz silenced

“Senator Celeste Gomez (Santiago Rodriguez-PRD) says that Friday’s murder of 61-year-old Carlos Enrique Everstz Fournier clearly indicates there were sinister forces at play in the death of her brother, the late senator Dario Gomez,” it said.

Senator Gomez was reported as suggesting that the death of Carlos Everstz was evidence that behind the killing of her brother there were ‘intellectual authors’ and that the information Evertsz held was key to solving the crime. “If this were not true, he would not have been killed,” said Gomez.

It turned out that on 28 June 2002, Carlos Everstz appeared on a TV programme and alleged the complicity of high-ranking military officers in the murder of the senator.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jvlF_2phNY

He named former police chief of homicide, General Rafael Oscar Bencosme Candelier, who he said offered him RD$1 million and a job with the police force as a major if he accepted the mission of murdering Dario Gomez. Everstz said that Bencosme was chief of the paramilitary group, Grupo Cobra, created to carry out covert work for the police.

During the TV interview, Everstz alleged that his life was being threatened, and that several others with key information were also in danger of being ‘silenced’. Evertsz claimed the Grupo Cobra was the brainchild of five people: an army soldier; a nephew of Colonel Espiritusanto; a university student called Carlos Rodriguez, and two other civilians he identified as Raul Martinez Acosta and a woman named only as Elizabeth.

The newspaper article suggested that so far, his predictions had been coming true. The first victim was the student Rodriguez, who was shot in the head, although authorities claimed it was suicide.

One of those arrested by the police and accused of murdering Senator Dario Gomez, Carlos Manuel Geronimo Alfonseca (AKA Collares), was killed during an apparent fight in the gaol where he was being held. His killer was Liborio Hernandez, a man serving a 30-year sentence for killing his pregnant wife. Alfonseca’s death happened soon after another of the five the police had accused of the murder, Domingo Daniel Minaya, claimed his life was under threat.

“The government sent Collares, Minaya, Ernesto Melendez Vasquez (El Chino), Ramon Antonio Rosario Taveras (El Gringo) and Pedro Urbano Pina (Kelly) to jail for Gomez’s murder,” said the Daily News. “After having been released from jail less than a year ago, Everstz was shot to death by a passing motorcycle rider in Santiago, as he waited for the bus on his way to his security job in a Puerto Plata free zone.”

One week before the Daily News piece ran, El Nacional newspaper published an account that Everstz had repeated on a TV programme that he would be murdered and that he had plans to seek asylum at a foreign embassy.

“Everstz worked for many years as an intelligence agent for the army,” it said, “and had bragged of killing 30 to 40 men and women during his career as a secret agent. The son of a Dutch father and a mother of US citizenship, he is also linked to the Servicio de Inteligencia Militar during the Trujillo dictatorship and the Central Intelligence Agency of the USA and trained in Virginia and Panama.”

Copyright

PUBLISHED BY APOSTROPHE BOOKS LTD

www.apostrophebooks.com

ISBN: 978-1-908556-59-2

First published in Great Britain in 1977 by Star Publishing

Digital edition 2013 by Apostrophe Books Ltd

Copyright © Christopher Robbins 1977 & 2013

The author has asserted his ownership of the electronic rights and his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologise for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Apostrophe Book Ltd Reg. No. 7612239

Cover photograph copyright © Christopher Robbins

Cover design and eBook development by Jamie Downham

About the author

Christopher Robbins is the author of six non-fiction books: The Test of Courage is the biography of Michel Thomas, concentration camp survivor, French Resistance fighter, and Nazi hunter; The Empress of Ireland is a memoir of his friendship with the Irish film director Brian Desmond Hurst, and won the Saga Aware for Wit; the travelogue, In Search of Kazakhstan, was short-listed for the Author’s Club Travel Award in the UK, and the Geographica award in the US.

The Ravens, a companion to Air America, charts the history of the men who flew in the secret air war in Laos.

We are sad to report that Christopher Robbins died on 24 December 2012. Speaking of him in The Spectator, friend and author William Shawcross wrote: ‘Chris was a man of infinite wit, style and charm, beloved by his many friends... He adored life and lived it as if he were a guest at a banquet, his curiosity always making someone else the guest of honour.’

Table of Contents

Preface

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Postscript

Copyright

About the author

Table of Contents

Preface

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Postscript

Copyright

About the author