The Midnight Swimmer (17 page)

‘
U
no, dos, tres, cuatro, Cuba sí, Yanquis no, Cuba sí, Yanquis no
.’
The chanting of the Pioneers flowed through the open windows of the British Embassy as they marched down Avenida Séptimo.
The
Pioneers
were boys and girls of twelve or thirteen.
They wore red berets, red neckerchiefs and white shirts.

The military attaché was standing in front of a map of Cuba with a pointer in his hand aimed at the airfield nearest the embassy.
‘The nearest bombs will, I expect, fall here at St.
Tony’s.’
He indicated a Havana suburb called San Antonio de los Baños which was about eight miles south of the embassy.
‘Yes, Ambassador?’

‘Don’t you suppose, Tommie, there’s a chance that they may have a pop at some of the ministries in Havana in the chance of bagging Fidel or Raúl or Che?’

‘Their chances of getting a senior member of the government with an air strike are next to zero.
In any case, the Brigade have at most only sixteen operational B-26s.
They need to concentrate everything on neutralising Castro’s air force.
Otherwise, the invasion will be a certain failure.’

‘
Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, Cuba sí, Yanquis no, Cuba sí, Yanquis no
.’
The Pioneers were now marching up Calle 34.
‘
Fidel, seguro, a los Yanquis dale duro
.’
Fidel, unyielding, hit those Yankees hard.

The Head of Trade looked up from her notepad.
‘Do you think all that chanting and marching by is on purpose, because we’re British?’

The Head of Chancery smiled benignly.
‘They’re doing it to all the embassies.’

The Ambassador looked at Neville, the new SIS Station Head.
‘Anything to add, Bob?
Are we still expecting D-Day on the 17th?’

‘Yes, Ambassador, their security is truly appalling.
It’s certain that the Cuban exile brigade has been heavily infiltrated by DGI.’
Neville was referring to
Dirección General de Inteligencia
, Castro’s spies.

Catesby looked around the table at his colleagues.
It was the first time he had been assigned to an embassy where he liked everyone.
The Ambassador, Herbert Marchant, was rock solid and had a sense of humour.
Neville was an old SIS chum.
Mickey Blakeney, Head of
Chancery, was one of the warmest and most civilised diplomats the FO had ever produced.
He had an endearing obsession with water towers and sketched and photographed them wherever he went.
There wasn’t a backstabber in sight.
At least, thought Catesby, if the worst case did come true – as seemed increasingly likely – he would be vaporised among friends.

Catesby loved the lizards.
He liked lying in bed and watching them race across the ceiling.
They were light green, three to four inches long and had a top speed of about 400 miles per hour.
The Cubans called them
chipojos
.

It had just gone six in the morning.
It was already light and Catesby was lying on his back in bed staring at a
chipojo
poised for a sprint.
He suspected that the lizard was going to launch himself at a mosquito that was straddling a crack in the ceiling plaster.
But the
chipojo
was one very badly informed lizard.
He didn’t know what was going to happen and waited too long.
The mosquito disappeared in a cloud of plaster dust as the ceiling crack suddenly yawned into an inch-wide gap.
The first bombs had begun to fall.
The ceiling shook.
The lizard’s head twitched as if he were confused.
He finally did a pirouette and disappeared down the nearest wall.

Catesby decided it was time to get up.
The bomb explosions were now joined by the clatter of heavy-calibre anti-aircraft guns.
He put on his dressing gown and opened the shutters of the French windows that led on to the balcony.
It was a beautiful clear morning.
The sun was just rising over the
Castillo de los Tres Reyes Magos
del Morro
, a magnificent sixteenth-century fortress at the entrance to Havana Bay built to ward off pirates.
Catesby felt a wan sense of irony as he looked at the fortress.
The British had finally taken it during a war with Spain in the eighteenth century and then lost half their garrison to yellow fever.

Catesby caught a glimpse of an attacking B-26 as it circled for another bombing run.
It was now apparent that the military attaché had been mistaken when he predicted the nearest attack would be at ‘St.
Tony’s’ eight miles to the south.
The bombs sounded like they were landing less than a mile away.
It must, Catesby thought, be the airfield at Ciudad Libertad.
It was in military jargon, D-minus-2.
The actual landing with troops was still forty-eight hours away.

Despite the walls shaking each time a 500-pound bomb exploded,
it didn’t seem a particularly ferocious air attack.
Catesby wasn’t sure there were more than two bombers involved – and then there was one.
He watched the stricken plane as it glided over the city.
The silence was eerie.
One engine was on fire and the propeller on the other wing was slowly turning by force of wind rather than engine.
It was fascinating to watch in a ghoulish sort of way.
The plane was flying lower and lower as if it were aiming at the old Morro Castle.
Catesby mouthed a plea: ‘Please, please don’t crash in the city.’
A moment later the plane seemed to elevate, like a hawk soaring on a thermal, before plunging into the harbour entrance.
It was as if the old castle had seen off another pirate.

‘Well,’ said the Ambassador, ‘that was a bit exciting.’

‘And I’m sure it’s going to happen again this evening,’ said the military attaché, ‘and the next day too.’

The morning briefing was two hours later than normal so that staff had time to decode cables and make evaluations.
The most interesting cable that Catesby dealt with hadn’t come from
Washington
or London, but from the SIS man in Nicaragua.

‘What have you got to tell us, William?’

Catesby looked at the Ambassador.
He wasn’t supposed to brief colleagues who hadn’t been security cleared.

‘If you can tell us.’

Catesby made a snap decision to declassify.
It would soon be common knowledge in any case.
‘As you know, today’s air strikes originated from a secret base in Puerto Cabezas.’
He looked around at surprised expressions.
‘Well, you know now.
Our man in Managua has confirmed reports that only eight of the seventeen B-26 bombers available to the rebels took off.’

‘Maintenance problems?’
said the military attaché.

‘No,’ said Catesby, ‘pilot problems.
There were never enough trained Cuban exile pilots to fly all seventeen planes.’
Catesby paused.
He was starting to skate on limited-access security ice.

The Ambassador smiled and said, ‘The other nine planes were supposed to be flown by American pilots, but it looks like Kennedy got cold feet at the last moment.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Catesby.

Mickey Blakeney joined in.
‘It means, essentially, that Kennedy is signalling that there will be no US military support for the invasion.
I’m not a military expert, but it seems then that this operation is doomed to fail.’

The military attaché looked perplexed.
‘Surely then, the invasion ought to be cancelled.’

‘There’s too much momentum,’ said Catesby, ‘and the green light is flashing.
I bet it’s still going to happen.’

‘Unless Castro’s air force is destroyed,’ said the attaché, ‘the
invasion
fleet will be sunk and any soldiers that get ashore will be
slaughtered
on the beaches.’

It seemed, thought Catesby, a sound prediction.
It wasn’t a
military
operation: it was a ritualised dance of death.

‘Round two,’ said Mickey, ‘will be the blame game.’

The Ambassador was twirling his reading glasses and looking off into space.
‘We could,’ he said, ‘be witnessing the beginning of the end of Jack Kennedy.’

The events of the next few days rolled out with dreary predictability.
The SIS man in Nicaragua later told Catesby that he was in Puerto Cabeza the night that the 1,511 men of the Assault Brigade boarded the ships that would take them to the Bay of Pigs.
The Nicaraguan dictator, Generalissimo Luis Anastasio Somoza, was on hand to see them off.
Somoza was in a white military uniform clanking with medals and carrying a Thompson submachine gun.
He waved the Thompson above his head and shouted to the men as they embarked, ‘Bring me some hairs from Fidel’s beard!’

Three days after the invasion 114 of the 1,511 invasion force had been killed and 1,179 captured.
A handful of survivors had escaped by sea.
It hadn’t been a good week for Western prestige.
On 12 April, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had orbited the earth as the first man in space.
On the following Wednesday the ragged remnants of an American-sponsored invasion force were being hunted down in a Cuban swamp.
The coincidence left Catesby feeling uneasy.
A humiliated superpower can be a dangerous superpower.

The first time Catesby saw Fidel Castro in person was a week later.
Members of the diplomatic corps and the press had been invited to see the Bay of Pigs prisoners at the Havana Sports Palace.
Catesby thought the men had been scrubbed up for the occasion.
They were all wearing clean white T-shirts, military trousers and shined boots.
They then had to listen to a speech by Fidel Castro that lasted from midnight to three thirty a.m.
in which they were berated as
criminals
and pawns of US imperialism.
Catesby was impressed by
Castro’s
utter self-confidence and energy.
At the end of the speech he told the prisoners that they all deserved to be shot, but he wasn’t going to shoot them.
Castro reminded the prisoners that
Fulgen-cio
Batista’s regime, the one he overthrew, had murdered 20,000 Cubans in its seven-year rule – and that even Kennedy admitted that.
Catesby later checked the facts.
Castro was right.

The next day Catesby had a lie-in.
He lay naked and exposed in bed, for the stultifying and humid heat made even a covering sheet too clammy.
The ceiling lizard was back and staring down at him with disdain.
He knew it was time to get up, but first he checked the inside of his brain to see if the rum
mojitos
had left the machinery intact.
He opened one eye and closed the other, then vice versa.
No serious damage.

After El Supremo’s speech to the prisoners, a group of diplos and journos had ended up in O’Reilly’s Bar in Calle O’Reilly.
The bar and the street were named after Alejandro O’Reilly, one of the ‘Wild Geese’ who left Ireland to fight in foreign Catholic armies against the British.
It was in fact O’Reilly, by then a Spanish general, who received Havana back from the British at the end of the Seven Years War.
But the history imp still had strange twists to play out.
O’Reilly decided that Havana had fallen because there wasn’t a strong enough fort guarding the harbour entrance.
He directed the construction of
Fortaleza San Carlos de la Cabaña
.
Two centuries later another man of Irish descent, Ernesto Guevara Lynch, commanded
La Cabaña
fortress.

Catesby drew the curtains and felt the warmth of the mid-
morning
sun on his body.
His bedroom window looked over a flat
cityscape
of red roofs punctuated by embassy flags fluttering in the sea breeze: the nearest was the red flag of Turkey with its crescent moon and a star in the centre.
In fact, he had got a lift back from O’Reilly’s with a Turkish diplomat whose name, Mustapha Something Rude, was a constant source of amusement to Brits with immature senses of humour.