July 15, 2017
"I was stupid and haughty then, a rebel. I sleep alone now": Lorenz delivers a tale of espionage and deceit, told with rueful candor."I didn't have a happy childhood," writes the author early on in this update of her 1993 book. That much is already obvious, for a couple of pages earlier, we find her rescued from a German concentration camp, weighing scarcely 45 pounds and unable to stand on her own, one of just a handful of survivors. A year later, an American soldier raped her. Moving with her mother to the U.S. but already certain that she was destined to live a lonely life, Lorenz traveled to Cuba on a ship in the German line where her father was a captain; among her shipmates were a couple of kids from Bremerhaven who would later sneak a tiger cub aboard and who would grow up to become Las Vegas magicians Siegfried and Roy. Not yet 20, Lorenz became one of Fidel Castro's lovers, his alemanita, "little German girl." The relationship did not last long, and apparently it was a didactic one, inasmuch as Castro "loved to explain his ideas about agrarian reform" and strike heroic poses. He was capable of flying off the handle, though, outraged when Dwight Eisenhower dispatched Richard Nixon to meet with him so that Eisenhower could sneak in a round of golf. The relationship ended with a pregnant Lorenz suffering a mysterious blackout and waking up without child, treated by a cardiologist and not a gynecologist whom Castro then ordered to be shot--or, at any rate, so she believes. Recruited to assassinate Castro, who blustered, "no one can kill me. No one. Ever," she took up with Venezuelan strongman Marcos Perez, got involved with mobsters (including the one who recruited her to kill Castro), and wound up hearing tales about the assassination of JFK and the Watergate burglary. The congeries of stories has its interest, but Lorenz is an indifferent writer. One hopes that the movie version, to which this ties in, has a little more zing.
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November 1, 1993
This tale relates how a failure of nerve at the last minute foiled CIA operative Lorenz's assignment to poison Fidel Castro--her lover and the father of her son. Writing with Schwartz ( DeLorean ), she describes her affair with the deposed Venezuelan dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez, whose daughter she bore, and a year she spent in a Venezuelan jungle with a lusty Yanomano Indian. She was also, she tells us, trained at a secret camp in the Everglades, along with CIA contract workers, mercenaries and counterrevolutionaries planning the overthrow of Castro. Almost casually, she relates how in mid-November of 1963 she drove from Miami to Dallas in a gun-laden two-car caravan whose occupants included Lee Harvey Oswald. But she left that band before she learned what their mission was. Although she was willing to try to murder Castro and lived among his enemies, Lorenz presents him as the only sympathetic--even noble--character in this chilling tale. She believes he was forced into his alliance with Russia by CIA-promoted U.S. hostility and false intelligence. And she contends that the losses incurred by the Mafia and CIA operatives when he shut down the gambling houses, and a Mafia vendetta against Joseph Kennedy, among other factors, may have motivated the JFK assassination. Lorenz testified before congressional committees investigating the Kennedy assassination, and tabloids of the time featured Mata Hari stories about her, but the tale in its entirety remained untold until now. Like other sensational conspiracy stories, this one presses the limits of credibility, but its very outrageousness gives it weight.