Matthew Palmer - Enemy of the Good

Charlie DelBarco was in over his head, Kate thought. He was a perfectly competent management officer with no meaningful policy experience who had found himself elevated to the position of chargé d’affaires of the American embassy in Havana when the deputy chief of mission had been medevaced ten days ago with appendicitis. The DCM was actually the top dog in the mission. The position of ambassador was vacant because one of Florida’s two Republican senators had put an indefinite hold on the nominee’s confirmation. The United States and Cuba had restored diplomatic relations after an estrangement lasting more than half a century, but not everyone had gotten the memo.

Temporarily at least, it was DelBarco’s embassy, and what happened next was up to him.

The Tank, a secure room in the basement of the embassy, about the size and shape of a shipping container, was the only place in the country where the American staff could hold sensitive conversations. The Cuban services were aggressive and technically competent. The air inside the Tank was pressurized and oppressive. The air conditioners were cranked up high enough to give Kate goose pimples.

In addition to Kate and Charlie, the group in the Tank included the embassy’s regional security officer and Kate’s boss in the political section, Barry Kriegler. One of the RSO’s contacts in the Cuban police had let slip that there would be a raid on a meeting of pro-democracy dissidents at an abandoned cigar factory on the outskirts of Havana that same evening. As ties with America improved, the Cuban government had grown more paranoid about the aspirations of its own citizens. Tonight the police were targeting three of the leading lights in the Cuban democracy movement, including Reuben Morales, who had become popular enough to represent a threat to the regime.

Kate was the embassy’s human rights officer. It was her job to network with Cuba’s political dissidents, to report on government abuses, and to do what she could to advance the goal of democratic reforms in what was still very much an authoritarian state. Morales was an important contact—and a friend.

“What good is the source if we can’t do anything with the information?” Kate said carefully. “Isn’t that the point of intelligence? Morales isn’t just another activist; he’s a symbol of hope. If the authorities lock him up, they’d be taking a chance that he’d become like Nelson Mandela on Robben Island. They won’t do that. They’ll just kill him and dump his body in the sea.”

“And what about my guy?” the RSO asked. “What about the risk to him if the Cubans go looking for who blew the op and they find my guy sitting there when they turn over the rock?”

“This is a big operation,” Kate explained for what felt to her like the tenth time. “There are bound to be a lot of people in a position to tip off the dissidents. If we move fast enough, there’s no reason the government needs to know it came from the Americans.”

“They would assume it was us. When we sneeze, the G2 says bless you. The Cuban services know more about me than my wife does.” The G2 was the Dirección General de Inteligencia, the widely reviled and universally feared foreign intelligence arm of the Cuban state.

“I could get Morales a message through cutouts,” Kate insisted. “The dissidents know how to get information to one another under the radar of the G2 and without tripping any alarms. They do it all the time.”

“It’s too risky,” DelBarco said. “I can’t authorize it without instructions from Washington. We’ve asked for guidance. We need to be patient.”

“It’ll take a week for D.C. to make up its mind,” Kate protested. “We have four hours.”

Kate looked over at Barry Kriegler. He was a good boss. Smart, experienced, and supportive. Although Kate was only a first-tour officer, he had given her considerable responsibility and backed her up when she had pressed the front office and Washington for more open support of Cuba’s embattled democrats. Now Kriegler could only shrug.

“You’re tilting at windmills, Kate. I know Reuben’s important. But we have to play the long game on this island, and that means protecting sources and methods at all cost.”

“Five decades isn’t long enough for you?” Kate asked, incredulous. “We’re on the cusp of real change in Cuba. Finally. And Morales could be the catalyst. But only if he’s alive and free.”

“If they miss him tonight, they’ll just pick him up next week,” the station chief said. “Or the week after that. It’s an island. There’s nowhere to go.”

“He could go underground,” Kate said. “There’s a system in place to move dissidents house to house. They could keep him safe. If it came to it, they could smuggle him out to Dominica or even Miami. We just need to warn him.”

“I’m sorry,” DelBarco said again. “The answer is the same. No.”

Wordlessly, Kate stood up and left. She needed two hands to operate the lever that locked the door to the Tank tight.

Kriegler followed her.

He put a hand on her shoulder and forced her to slow down.

“Kate…”

“Yes.”

“Don’t do anything stupid.”

“Don’t worry about me, Barry.”

There was no ambiguity in her instructions. There was no way, however, that Kate was going to allow her superiors to feed Morales to the sharks. She understood what she was risking. Kate was only on her first tour as a foreign service officer, but she had grown up in and around embassies as a diplomatic brat and she had absorbed many of the State Department’s rules and norms by osmosis. What she was about to do was the very definition of insubordination. As an untenured officer, she could be dismissed from the service for cause easily. But there was such a thing as right and wrong. And while it was not always easy to tell the difference between the two, when it was clear, there was no excuse for inaction. She would take the risk.

Despite what Kate had argued in the Tank, getting a message to her dissident friends proved harder than she had anticipated. None of her contacts had cell phones or regular e-mail access, and even if they had, all telephone and electronic communications were monitored obsessively by the security services. Kate knocked on a few doors and tried a couple of the cafés the dissident and activist community would frequent, but she was not able to find anyone in a position to help.

The sky turned from blue to purple and then indigo as twilight fell on Havana. Kate checked the time obsessively, but she knew that a meeting of Cuban dissidents was not run like a meeting of South Korean engineers. The start time for the meeting was notional and there was no official agenda and no chairman. It would start when there were enough people there to begin, and it would last for as long as they had something to say. The debate would be freewheeling and passionately intense. It was Cuba. And Kate had grown to love it. There was no way to know just how much time she had to work with, but she knew that it was not much. Likely not enough.

Finally, at a secondhand bookstore run out of the back of a private house in a residential part of town, she found Paco, a middle-aged man who wrote terrible poetry and cultivated a bohemian air that he used to hit on Scandinavian tourists half his age. Kate thought he was a little skeevy and really only a fringe player on the dissident scene, but he was the best she could find. In hushed tones, she asked Paco to get a message to Morales that the meeting later that evening would be the target of a police raid. In typically florid language, Paco swore a blood oath that he would get the message to Morales. Kate’s level of confidence in the third-rate poet was low.

Night had fallen and Havana was a city that only really stirred itself from its tropical torpor after dark. The scattered sodium-vapor lamps cast an ugly yellow-orange glow over Centro Habana. It was still too early for the streets to be crowded, and Kate found herself standing alone in front of a crumbling Batista-era villa now boarded up and abandoned. She checked her watch again. It was almost eight p.m., the time that had been set, in principle, for Morales’s meeting.