Marita: One Woman's Extraordinary Tale of Love and Espionage in the CIA - Hardcover

Marita Lorenz

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0747515719 ISBN 13: 9780747515715

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 1993

Synopsis

The daughter of the German captain of a luxury cruise liner and an American actress, Marita Lorenz became Fidel Castro's mistress in 1959 when she was 18. She bore Castro's son and was recruited by the CIA to assassinate the Cuban dictator, a task from which she drew back at the very last moment. By then firmly enmeshed in the American intelligence network, she worked for the CIA, often reluctantly, for the next 25 years; among her bosses were E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis. With Sturgis in Dallas on the evening before Jack Kennedy was murdered, she met Jack Ruby and a man she later realized was Lee Harvey Oswald. Now aged 53, Marita tells her story, portraying with passion and candour her relationship with the Venezuelan dictator, Marcos Peres Jiminez, her testimony at the Watergate hearings and her return to Cuba, Castro and her son.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

Move over, Mata Hari: Here are the wild--if nearly incredible- -adventures of a new Jane Bond, told with the help of Schwarz (Walking with the Damned, 1991, etc.). ``He held my face in his hands and kissed me--my first kiss....`Be with me,' he whispered.'' The amorous ``he'' is none other than Fidel Castro, flush from conquering Cuba seven weeks earlier but not too busy to notice the pretty 19-year-old visiting Havana with her father. Days later, Lorenz beds the Cuban leader (``We were in bliss for five hours''), beginning the affair that was to alter her life--a life, she tells us, that began badly in Germany as her American-born mom was arrested for spying and sent to Belsen; after V-E Day, Lorenz herself, ten, was raped by an American soldier. Fourteen years later, she's betrayed by Castro as her unborn son is ripped from her womb; moving to the States, she's contacted by sinister intelligence agents, including future Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis, and is trained as an assassin. Target: Castro. Lorenz's escapades come fast and furious here: stealing boats; robbing armories; returning to Cuba to kill Castro but ending up ``naked and making love'' with him; driving on November 20, 1963, with Sturgis and a cache of guns to Dallas, where she meets Oswald and E. Howard Hunt; taking up with a former Venezuelan strongman; being exiled to the Amazon, where she's adopted by Yanomano Indians; returning to New York and joining the NYPD; flying one last time, in 1981, to Cuba, where Fidel's charisma again stays her assassin's hand and where she gives him a Polaroid camera. Cynics may snicker as Lorenz cavorts on the jungle floor with her ``pure man'' of a Yanomano, ``blow gun, spear, and poison arrows'' at his side--but, as the saying goes, life can be as thrilling as (and even stranger than) fiction...and sometimes, maybe, even the same thing. (Photographs--not seen) (Film rights sold to Oliver Stone) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

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.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0747515719
• ISBN 13: 9780747515715
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224