'No, in 1971, after the Chilean thing failed, we… no longer trusted each other too much,' said Veroa. It seemed to sadden him.
'How did that happen?'
'I had set up an organization in Caracas to run the operation. We had, the Cuban resistance, I mean, many assets in Venezuela, in the police and so forth. And we had a good deal of money too. The plan was that after Castro was killed in Valparaiso, the Chilean army would arrest the two assassins and allow them to escape. But the assassins didn't trust that plan; they thought they would be killed instead.' He paused. 'Actually, it was because of Caballo.'
'Caballo? The man in the film?'
'Yes, he was in charge of the escape, in Chile. The assassins, they didn't trust him, so they arranged their own getaway plan. Which they kept secret from me. But somehow this other plan was betrayed to the DGI-'
'That's the Cuban counterintelligence agency,' said Ziller.
'Yes, and then the assassins refused to go through with it.'
'Who betrayed the new plan, do you have any idea?'
Veroa shrugged. 'It was-how can I say-a cloudy situation. The Cubans on both sides, the Venezuelans, the Chileans, all penetrating one another, and the CIA penetrating them all. I have heard, although I cannot vouch for the report, that it was Caballo himself who sold them to the DGI, and then let it be known to them that they were sold.'
'Why would he do that? Why should he care how they escaped? Didn't he want Castro killed?'
Veroa shrugged again. 'Fidel is still alive, yes? And many other people are dead.'
Karp glanced at Fulton and Ziller, who both looked blank. 'Mr. Veroa… ah… help me out here. I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. Are you trying to tell us that all these plots against Castro that you were involved in were in some way phony? That the CIA guys you were working with, Bishop and Caballo and the others, were running some other kind of game?'
Veroa spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness and shook his head slowly from side to side. 'It would be hard for me to believe that. Bishop I worked with closely for over ten years. He made it possible for us, for the Brigada, to do much damage to the Fidelistas. On the other hand… there were times when he did things that I did not comprehend.'
'Like what?'
'Oh, once we were asked to deliver a briefcase to a couple of men sitting in a bar in Caracas. As our man left the meeting he heard them talking in a language he did not know. Later we learned that these were both Russian agents. Another time we were on a raid at night on the Cuban coast. We were involved in a firefight with the militia. Many of our people were wounded and several were killed, but we drove them off. We destroyed a power plant and left. Later, back in Miami, I heard rumors that another Cuban anticommunist group had been in a raid that same night on the same part of the coast, and had been badly hurt. I thought it was possible that these were the people we had fought. When I asked Bishop about it, he laughed and told me not to worry. He said that all this was coordinated at a level above him and they would not make such a stupid mistake.'
'Did he ever identify this level above him?' Karp asked.
'No. We never talked about it.'
'And you never worked with any other CIA contact?'
Veroa looked at Karp quizzically. 'No, and I am not entirely sure that Bishop was a CIA contact. He certainly never said so. He always presented himself as an agent of private business interests.'
'What about Caballo? The same?'
Veroa shrugged dismissively. 'Caballo I always thought was Bishop's dog. He was a man with no conversation, a blank, a technician. Bishop was very different, a man of a certain quality, a thinker. But he was certainly getting orders from someplace, you understand. We knew this because often, when we had planned an action, he would say he needed a go-ahead. Then there would be a delay, and we would either do it or not.'
'Do you still have contact with him, with Bishop?'
A shake of the head, and Veroa answered in a slow, reflective voice, like that of a wife abandoned for no reason. 'No. He began to distance himself from us, from me personally, after the failure in Chile. He contacted me in the summer of 1973. We met in Hialeah, at the racetrack parking lot. He told me that the people he worked for no longer wished him to continue his relationship with me. He was sorry but this is the way it had to be. Then he handed me a briefcase and drove off.'
'What was in the briefcase?'
'About a quarter of a million dollars,' said Veroa.
Twenty minutes later, Karp and Ziller were still talking in the file room, by the light of the small blank screen, when V.T. Newbury strode in, his cheeks bright pink from the brisk outdoors. He held up a thick manila envelope.
'Our stills. Want to take a look?'
V.T. spread two dozen or so eight-by-ten glossies across a table. Consulting the notes Ziller had made during the recent viewing of the film, they were able to put names to most of the portraits. V.T. examined the picture of Bill Caballo with interest and they filled him in on what Veroa had said.
'So it's not Oswald after all,' said V.T. 'Fascinating! So now we have a guy who looks like Oswald, who's an operative with the anti-Castro movement, connected to the infamous Bishop, and is apparently an expert shot. My stomach is tingling.'
'Yeah, this is a break,' agreed Ziller. 'I'll tell you one thing I'd like to do with these pictures. Take them out to Miami and let Sylvia Odio look at them. It'd be interesting as hell if she was able to identify the guys who showed up at her place as one of them.' He looked at Karp as he said this, expecting some response, but Karp was staring fixedly at one of the photographs.
He said to V.T., 'A couple of weeks ago, when we were talking about getting testimony from Paul David, you showed me a picture of him that they took when he appeared before Warren. Could you get that for me?'
V.T. went to the filing cabinet and brought back a folder. Karp pulled out a yellowed clipping and placed it beside the photograph Veroa had identified as Bishop.
'What do you think? David is Bishop, right?'
V.T. and Ziller studied the two portraits. 'It's hard to say,' said Ziller. 'The one from the paper is a full face and the one from the film is a side view, and it's dark and blurry too.'
'But I saw the guy in the flesh today,' replied Karp. 'It's the same guy. It has to be.' He took the folder V.T. had given him, shuffled through it, and drew out a sheet of paper. 'Look at his record,' he continued, excitement starting to show in his voice. 'David was a major player in the Bay of Pigs. He was a covert agent in Havana at the same time that Bishop contacted Veroa. He spent his whole career, practically, doing covert work in Latin America, and, of course, he was in charge in Mexico City when the fuckup about the tapes of Oswald's supposed visit happened.'
'Yeah, the only thing missing is a link between David and this guy Caballo. If it turned out Paul Ashton David just happened to have a faithful Indian companion who just happened to look like Lee Harvey Oswald…'
He didn't need to finish the thought. They all rolled their eyes and made other gestures indicative of astonishment.
'I think this is what the poet meant by looking at each other with a wild surmise,' said V.T. 'This could be the road out of the swamp. It seems to me that the next steps are, one, getting Veroa close to David in the flesh to see if he'll make a positive ID of him as Bishop, and, two, putting the hounds out on Caballo.'
'And three,' added Karp, 'getting that fucker back in front of the committee with a contempt citation ready if he tries the trick he pulled today. Charlie, why don't you get that started with Flores and his people, and get Clay to set up the ID run with Veroa.'
When Ziller was gone, V.T. said, 'Something else interesting in this Depuy material from Georgetown. Let's go into my office.'
'This is the last notebook that concerns David Ferrie,' said V.T., bringing out a tattered steno pad from the recesses of his desk. 'Depuy interviewed him on February 12, 1967, about two weeks before he was found dead, apparently of a drug overdose. Ferrie was drunk or doped up-he usually was, toward the end-but Depuy wrote down everything he said, whether it made sense or not. Ferrie was complaining about being broke and abandoned by all his friends. He says, 'I was supposed to get ten grand on that PXK thing. It wasn't my fault. I could've… what the
