HI all, and Dave, Speaking of Marita Lorenz, just recieved this from spynews list. Peace, Preston Sunday 8 October 2000 The teenager, Castro and the CIA poison plot http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et?ac=003100565149417&rtmo=V6fkssrK&atmo=99999999 &pg=/et/00/10/8/wcast08.html By Tony Paterson in Berlin and James Langton in New York IT was a moment that might have changed the course of history. Fidel Castro, the communist leader of Cuba, in a secret tryst with a former lover who was now a CIA agent and under orders to kill him. The dictator and his lover: Fidel Castro with the young Marita at the time of their illicit affair According to Marita Lorenz, it was only her re-ignited love for Castro that stopped her administering poison, falling instead into his arms for a night of passion. Had she followed her orders, the fiasco that was the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis would never have happened. Perhaps even President Kennedy might have lived. That is the version of events related in a new documentary about Miss Lorenz. Wilfried Huismann, a Germany documentary film maker, who releases Dear Fidel - Marita's Story this week in Berlin, believes her. He said: "At first I thought the Marita Lorenz tale was a bit of a sailor's yarn, it was only after I had interviewed countless former CIA people and Castro aides and then got to know Marita herself that I became convinced that her story was true." Fate has not favoured Miss Lorenz. Now 61, she recently suffered a heart attack. Impoverished and forgotten, she lives in a run-down apartment in the Queens district of New York. She survives on $411 (�290) a month social security and a diet of doughnuts from the deli next door. It is another world from the one she was born into. Her father was a German sea captain and her British-born mother a political activist whose anti-Nazi sympathies condemned the family to a concentration camp. Liberated at the end of the war, the family moved to America. By 1959 the young Marita had joined her father, now captain of the liner, Berlin, which one winter's day anchored in Havana harbour. The revolution that had swept Castro to power was barely six weeks old. The young dictator came on board the ship and found a 19-year-old girl. "He looked very nervous and was chewing a cigar," she recalls. "I had never had a boyfriend. I was always something of a tomboy. That night changed everything." Castro became her first lover. The relationship lasted several months. The couple met at a suite in the Hilton hotel, she said: "He would put a sheet from the bed over my hair and hand me a spray of parsley from the room service tray, saying 'Now you are Mrs Castro'." Several weeks later she found she was pregnant. Concerned that her parents would be scandalised, she was reassured by Castro that he would take care of her, promising a house and a life in the fledgling communist state. What happened next is still unclear. Factions among Castro's entourage became suspicious of his teenage lover, especially as her mother was now working for US intelligence. In the autumn of 1959 Miss Lorenz was kidnapped, drugged and forced to undergo an abortion. Un- attended, she was left bleeding for three days in a Havana hotel room. To this day she is unsure whether Castro or the CIA ordered the operation, but suspects that it was the latter. Broken by the experience, she fled back to America, where she says a concerted attempt was made to recruit her into American counter-intelligence. One of her handlers was a man she met in Cuba, a mercenary with both US intelligence and Mafia links who had fallen out with Castro. More than 10 years later the same man, Frank Sturgis, was arrested for breaking into the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate building on June 18 1972. Sturgis presented her with a photograph of a dead and mutilated foetus on a bedspread that looked like those in the former Havana Hilton, now the Habana Libre. "He did that to you," she recalls him saying. Whether it was the Mafia or the CIA who ordered an assassination attempt on Castro in 1960 remains unclear. Mr Huismann's documentary, however, suggests that Sturgis was a central figure in the plot.The film has also traced a former liaison officer between the CIA and Mafia who recalls handing over poison pills distilled from shellfish toxins at a CIA laboratory. Now 90, Robert Maheu, a former aide of Howard Hughes, says that they were meant for Castro. Miss Lorenz says she was brainwashed into going back to Cuba to carry out the assassination attempt. On the aircraft she began to have serious doubts, and after having arranged an assignation with Castro she flushed the pills down a bidet instead of secreting them in his food, as planned. The couple made love, fuelled by her guilt and repressed passions. Afterwards she returned to America, uncertain how she would be received. According to her account, she remained involved with the CIA for nearly 20 years. In the early Sixties she claims to have joined Sturgis on a gun-running expedition to Texas that also involved Howard Hunt, another of the Watergate conspirators. Depositing the weapons at Hunt's apartment, she was introduced to a man she now knows to be Lee Harvey Oswald and believes that the Kennedy assassination was ordered by the Mafia, angry that they had lost their powerful gambling interests in Cuba and that Kennedy had allowed Castro to survive. She later had a son by a CIA agent and a daughter by a former president of Venezuela, Marcos Perez Jimenez. "Don't think I collect dictators," she says. "I had no idea who he was. He was just a nice middle-aged South American man who got me drunk on German wine." Her links with the CIA ended in 1976, when she was granted immunity from prosecution. She claims to have met Castro twice since the end of their affair. Miss Lorenz agreed to travel to New York for the documentary, the last frame of which shows her being told by the Cuban authorities: "Fidel sends his regards, but unfortunately he has no time for a meeting." ============================================== SPY NEWS is OSINT newsletter and discussion list associated to Mario's Cyberspace Station http://mprofaca.cro.net/mainmenu.html
