Henning van Aswegen
Allure of the Cuban Revolution
While the Russian KGB has never been regarded as romantic or heroic by anyone, Cubans and their La Luta Continua revolution are heroes to numerous aeolistic idealists around the world. Demonstrators in democratic countries would often strut around with placards and T-shirts of Che Guevara, not Leonid Brezhnev and Vladimir Putin. Girls swoon over Fidel Castro and the 1959 Cuban revolution, wearing T-shirts and sporting ill-fitting red berets at peace rallies. This story of a lovely young South African girl from Kimberley demonstrates how valuable and alluring this appeal of the Cuban revolution can be in the world of subversion and espionage.
Jennifer Miles was 26 years old, tall, blonde and decidedly beautiful. When she chose to do so, she could make her blue eyes and shy smile combine to convey an unspoken invitation no man could mistake or be resistant to. She could evaluate a man quickly and intuitively, then fashion a personal approach that suggested she was powerless to resist him. Demurely, she often left her paramours with the impression that he was the most wonderful and attractive man in the world.
For all her romantic liaisons, her words and manners were ladylike, and she created about herself an aura of innocent vulnerability. No one felt threatened by her outgoing personality, and everyone wished to help her and protect her good name. Women liked her almost as much as men did, and those who thought they knew her best, liked her the most. Next to “beautiful,” the words most frequently used to characterize Jennifer Miles, were “sweet” and “considerate.” She was a superb and punctilious worker, endowed with enormous reserves of energy. Though she might have been up until four, she invariably arrived at her office in the South African Embassy in Washington before nine o’clock, fresh and flawlessly groomed. She shunned expensive clothes and cosmetics, needing neither. Everything about her seemed natural and healthy.
By the summer of 1970 she had become a rising and dazzling star in the social firmament of official Washington. Government limousines called on her in the evening. Senators, congressmen, ambassadors, and government officials greeted her at diplomatic parties and State Department receptions. Still, she was dissatisfied with her social status, because her ultimate goal was to gain entry into the inner society of the White House, that “special circle” as she called it. She was prepared to do anything, make any sacrifice, sleep with any man, to achieve her goals and objectives. For she was a spy who devoted her whole life to succeeding in her mission.
Jennifer Miles had grown up in the diamond-mining city of Kimberley in the North Cape Province of South Africa, the third child of a happy middle-class family. Influences at home and the vestiges of South Africa’s pioneer culture imbued her with a work ethic, frugality, self-reliance, daring, and a spirit of adventure. After graduating from secondary school, she worked as a clerk, and at night often performed as a chorus girl in local theatrical productions. In July 1964, at twenty, she set off with her savings and two girlfriends to explore as much of the world as she could. They travelled by ship from Cape Town to England, then toured Europe. In January 1965 Jennifer and another girl went to Canada, where she found a job as a secretary with a Toronto stock brokerage firm. Efficient and popular, she attended night school and qualified as a stockbroker. Soon the director of the brokerage firm selected her as his private secretary. For a while she lived with a young South African immigrant to Canada, insisting on paying her share of the housekeeping expenses.
In April 1977, Jennifer Miles contracted a severe case of hepatitis, requiring prolonged convalescence during which she had little to do but read. Articles in the Canadian press about Cuba and Che Guevara’s exploits in Bolivia fascinated her and inspired her to undertake a serious study of the subject. Through books, bought and borrowed, she saw Cuba as a romantic, sunny island being transformed into a utopia by dashing, brave men of vision. In her fantasies, she imagined herself at Che’s side in the jungle, comforting and caring for him, sharing his dangers and ideals. With the capture, execution, and martyrdom of Che in October 1967, her fascination turned to obsession. Her destiny now was clear. She had to become a revolutionary and give herself wholly to building the new ideal world for which Fidel Castro lived and Che Guevara died. Filled with romantic notions of life as a revolutionary, the impressionable Miss Miles decided to go to Cuba.
To convince the Cubans of her earnestness and fervour, Miles volunteered to work for the ‘Fair Play for Cuba Committee in Canada.’ Her enthusiastic efforts on Cuba’s behalf were such that she had no difficulty in obtaining an entry visa to Cuba in December 1967. This application and her membership of the ‘Fair Play for Cuba Committee, brought Miles to the attention of the Canadian Intelligence Service, when a personal file was opened on her in late 1967. From this moment Miles was on the radar of both the Canadians and the Americans, with whom Canada shared intelligence information.
Because of American sanctions, the only route to Cuba from Canada was through Mexico. The Mexicans, disturbed by Cuban terrorism in South America, refused to issue her with an entry visa into Mexico, which she would need in her return from Cuba via Mexico back to Canada. As happened often, Jennifer Miles used her good looks to find a man to help her. An Italian she met at her Mexico City hotel recommended that she pretends to be an anthropologist studying Indian tribes in Central and South America. The Italian taught Miles enough terminology to help her pose as an anthropologist and the duly impressed Mexicans granted her visa to and from Cuba.
After booking into the Veradero Hotel in Havana, Miles took to the streets of the Cuban capital to explore the communist paradise, no more than ninety miles from the shores of Miami. On 1 January 1968, she stood with the Cuban multitude, enthralled and enthusiastic, listening to Castro deliver his public address on the ninth anniversary of the 1959 revolution. Due to her lack of Spanish, most of Castro’s speech was incomprehensible to Miles, but she thought Castro was manly and marvelous. Television cameras at the event found the blond Miles amongst the thousands of supporters and zeroed in on her – her light skin and hair distinguished her from the rest of the crowd. Her predisposition and commitment to Cuba was so strong, that it allowed her to assimilate whatever she observed and experienced, adding to her belief in the wonderful communist doctrine of the island state. Public transport, elevators and hotel ventilation that did not function, lines in front of sparsely stocked stores, the peeling paint and physical deterioration of buildings, were all evidence not of the deficiencies of the Cuban economy, but of popular concern with higher philosophical values.
To prove her revolutionary fidelity, Miles went to farm fields to harvest crops, working twelve hours a day and sleeping in dormitory barns. The hard work and Spartan conditions gave her a gratifying sense of identifying with the cause of the Cuban revolution and the people of Cuba. Touring the island with a government escort, Miles proclaimed to anyone who would listen her love for Cuba and her determination to become an authentic revolutionary in its service. The Cuban intelligence service, the DGI, was watching Miles closely and with trepidation, for she was a walk-in and almost too good to be true. Had she been a lesser girl, the Cubans probably would have expelled her summarily because in her eagerness she resembled a foreign agent sent to Cuba to be recruited. But her potential was so obvious that the DGI played along on the off chance that she may be the genuine article.
When Miles returned to Havana from a trip to the Isle of Pines in late January, her government escort, whom she knew as Bernardo, informed her that she was being moved to the posh Hotel Riviera as a guest of the government. The hotel rooms in the Riviera Hotel in Havana were equipped with microphones, one-way mirrors, and hidden cameras for surveillance of the guests. After settling in, Bernardo introduced Jennifer Miles to a DGI officer using the false name George Sánchez. Assigned to be her guide and nightly escort, after only a few hours the Cuban also became her lover. During her recruitment in Cuba, Bernardo and George Sánchez instructed Miles to return to Canada and erase all traces of her support and contact with anybody Cuban, because her destination and mission on behalf of the revolution is now Washington DC, USA. “Break off all contact and communication with Fair Play for Cuba and your friends and destroy your passport that shows that you have visited Cuba. You are no longer a supporter of the Cuban revolution, you are now a revolutionary soldier!”
Before returning to Canada via Mexico City, Jennifer Miles was instructed by the DGI to leave messages in a dead drop (DLB), in an alley next to McGill University in Montreal. By December 1968 Miles managed to secure a temporary job at the South African Embassy at 3051 Massachusetts Avenue NW in Washington DC. The Embassy is well placed diagonally across from the British Embassy and adjacent to the Iranian Embassy. Here the striking Miss Miles quickly endeared herself to staff members by offering to babysit for free. When an administrative-typist job developed in August 1969, the embassy gladly appointed the beautiful and clever Ms. Miles to its permanent staff.
The vivacious blonde from South Africa quickly became a favourite and popular figure on the Washington DC cocktail circuit, meeting a variety of American government officials, diplomats, journalists, military attachès and administrative personnel working for Congress. She met lobbyists and members of different political parties – fertile terrain for identifying and recruiting spies for the Cuban DGI.
On a rainy Saturday in April 1969, Miles travelled to New York by train to deposit a report for the DGI in a dead letter box, located on Eighty-second Street in Jackson Heights. On 5 July 1969 Miles repeated the exercise of depositing a letter in the same DLB, naively and amateurishly writing her letter in legible English. The superintendent of the building noticed the attractive blonde girl hovering around the garden wall of his apartment complex and once Miles had left, decided to investigate. Reading the letter signed “Mary” and realising something untoward, the superintendent promptly called the New York Field Office of the FBI. Without realising it, Jennifer Miles’ spying career was over almost before it properly started. Intelligence services do not arrest suspected spies, but rather let operations run their course to identify everybody involved and the clandestine communications systems being used.
It took the FBI less than 48 hours to identify “Mary” as Jennifer Miles, a secretary working at the South African Embassy in Washington DC. Miles had not bothered to wipe her fingerprints off the letter to the DGI and the FBI quickly and quietly entered her one-bedroom apartment on upper Wisconsin Avenue to verify her fingerprints and identity. Setting up surveillance both inside and outside Miles’ apartment, the FBI allowed her to continue entertaining a variety of politicians and government officials with access to documents and secrets that could be valuable to the DGI. One young member of the House of Representatives was so infatuated with the lovely Jennifer, that he gave her whatever information she requested.
Approximately one year after starting operations, on 26 September 1969, Miles was followed to a personal meeting with her DGI handler in New York. Her handler did not show up, but he appeared at the back-up rendezvous one week later, on Saturday 4 October 1969 in the person of Rogelio Rodriguez López, Counsellor at the Cuban Consulate to the United Nations, using the pseudonym ‘Josè.’ “Jose” and Miles discussed the missing letter from the DLB and Jose instructed Miles to fly to Spain for their next meeting, perhaps sensing that something was wrong with their clandestine communication system in New York. Miles dutifully arrived at the Avenida Hotel in Madrid on 28 December 1969, but was instructed by Jose to fly to Paris, France immediately, “because you are in danger.” In a classic brush meeting on her Iberian Airways flight to Paris, a fellow passenger handed Miles a note, instructing her to be at the Eiffel Tower brasserie on 30 December at noon. Ignoring Miles’ protests that she was feeling frightened, Jose instructed her to return to Washington DC and continue with what she was doing. She should rest assured that the DGI would re-establish contact with her there.
In Washington, Miles struck a friendship with Saeed Khan, a State Department deputy protocol officer of Pakistani descent. Accompanying Khan to diplomatic functions, Miles continued to meet and mingle with ambassadors, diplomats, congressmen, US government officials, and visiting dignitaries, including West German Chancellor Willy Brandt. The meeting with Brandt was a red flag for the FBI who informed the CIA, who had official intelligence liaison with South Africa’s Bureau of State Security (BFSS) in Pretoria. The day after being notified, on 4 October 1970, the South African ambassador in Washington instructed Miles to hand-deliver a letter to a hotel room in Washington DC. In the room, the FBI was waiting for her. Under questioning, she at denied that she was a DGI agent and said that she had lots of friends, and that some of the are Cubans.
Carefully placing her missing New York DLB letter and an array of photographs on the table, the FBI asked Miles if she knew Rogelio Rodriguez López. The FBI added photos of her loading and unloading the DLB’s in New York and her visits to Spain and France. Realising that the game was up, Miles sagged into a chair and asked the FBI agents for a glass of water. In return for her written confession, Miles was allowed to return to South Africa, perhaps a little disenchanted with her short-lived spying career as a glamorous agent for the Cuban revolution. Rogelio Rodriguez López and Orlando Prendez Gutierrez and four Cuban DGI operators were suspended from their cover jobs at the United Nations and expelled from the United States.
In South Africa, Jennifer Miles publicly denied that she ever was a Cuban spy, repeating the assertions that she had made many friends in Canada and the United States, and that some of them were Cubans.
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