Authors: Edgard Telles Ribeiro
I couldn’t help but put in my two cents. “And both quagmires,” I suggested, “just like today in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
He seemed taken aback by my interruption, so caught up was he in his past. He closed his eyes for a moment, having been confronted with words that cut across time and projected him without warning into the challenges of the present — like a miner who can’t handle the blinding light after days of despair in a dark shaft.
“Maybe so,” he finally conceded, lowering his head. “Maybe so. Today’s world … today’s CIA …”
He fell silent. And cast a tired look over the contents of his garage. A look devoid of pride — and, who knows, perhaps even bewildered. A bit as though, as a result of our tour, he’d reappraised a legacy that had brought him only joy until then.
Suddenly I stopped short. I had just passed a box on which I’d hastily read
Nuclear Agreement
,
Brazil-Germany
. I was so nervous that I worked up the courage to excuse myself to use the washroom, promising I’d be right back.
“Don’t worry,” I heard Eric say behind me. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Is that the 1975 agreement?” I asked as casually as possible when I got back.
“In a way, yes. Better known among us as
‘Everything you always wanted to know about Westinghouse’s feelings toward the CIA but were afraid to ask.’ ”
Impossible not to laugh. But I soon added more seriously, “Right. You guys lost a boatload of money when the Germans signed the agreement with Brazil.”
“Billions and billions of dollars,” Eric confirmed. “And for years they accused us of having screwed up. Even though” — he pointed to the box in front of which we’d stopped — “even though this box contains not the final agreement from 1975, as you assumed a moment ago, but drafts of the original document we managed to copy in Montevideo
years before the agreement was signed
. And even though we sent
everything
to Langley.”
“And then what?” I asked in surprise.
“Then nothing. The CIA did nothing.
Not a thing
. They simply sat on the information. Maybe Westinghouse, which had already won the bid for the nuclear plant …”
“Angra 1.”
“Yes, the Angra 1 nuclear plant. Maybe Westinghouse was convinced that with this first victory, the rest of the deal was in the bag. It was in the bag, all right. But in the
Germans’
bag. And it was your friend Max, our very own
Sam Beckett
, who put us on the trail.”
“A double triumph. Or a single blunder?”
“I don’t even know anymore. It was a complex operation, involving smoke and mirrors, the unwitting participation of your former ambassador in Montevideo and his partner Carlos Câmara, not to mention the role played by the British agent who was working with us. Each had a part in the equation, which would earn me a medal of honor and a handshake from Richard Nixon a year later.”
“Despite Westinghouse’s failure?”
“Yes …,” he replied, “
and no
.”
Then he spilled the beans. “I ended up getting embroiled in the whole Brazil-Germany nuclear issue by mere chance. Courtesy of an indiscretion by your ambassador. The only one he committed in almost six years in Montevideo, poor guy. As I was listening to the recordings we routinely made, a comment of his on the phone caught my attention. I started to concentrate more on everything he said. And put together lines here and there. Until gradually discovering, to our utter bewilderment, that
he
was the bridge between Brazil and Germany on the nuclear subject. Who would have believed …”
“Really, it doesn’t make sense.”
“
Except for one detail
, which eluded our people at Langley, given how low Brazilian priorities are, and were, for us. The ambassador had served in Bonn before being transferred to Montevideo.”
“Yes. But … that in itself doesn’t …”
“Exactly. Yet this kind of detail would
never
have gone undetected if we’d been dealing with a Russian diplomat, for instance. Or an Eastern European. But since he was Brazilian, no one saw …”
Being a part of the third world had its advantages
, I couldn’t help but think.…
Meanwhile, Eric pressed onward. “How could we have imagined that the German-Brazilian nuclear connection would go through
Uruguay …
?” he asked.
To be honest, the possibility would never have occurred to me either. And I doubted that even today anyone would have connected such seemingly unrelated and disjointed facts.
“Once red flags had been raised, I went into the field. And quickly saw that the ambassador operated of his own accord. At least initially. I’m not saying he disobeyed ministry orders
but that he acted without its knowledge
. He counted solely on the support of a group of military officers, close to the president, with whom he exchanged messages we eventually decoded. And on Carlos Câmara. Even though we were friends, Carlos had never broached this subject with me in Rio. Nor did he in Montevideo. Unlike Max, he was a professional. And a true patriot.”
He took a deep breath, like someone paying tribute to a fallen comrade. He allowed himself to linger a bit longer on this digression. “The ambassador too. Only, he was a loose cannon. Vaz later told me some unbelievable stories about him.”
His eyes, laden with suggestions and malice, sought mine. Would I by any chance be interested in taking a break for a few spicy details?
No?
Too bad …
“The old man had studied in Germany, before World War II,” he went on. “He’d made friends, some of whom had survived the conflict, even come out quite well. Several found themselves at the head of their old industries. Washington asked my opinion: what should be done? It was my idea to bring the British secret service into the game. So we wouldn’t be exposed, should suspicions arise. The Brits owed us a few favors.”
Favors for what?
I wondered. Something relating to the future Falklands/Malvinas problem? Too late; Eric had already moved on.
“It was Max, then, who connected the dots for us,” he said, his eyes shining jubilantly. “
Not even realizing it!
That was the beauty of the whole thing.”
To my surprise, he grabbed my arm, as if celebrating a victory. A strange show of intimacy for a man like him.
“Max served us up the crucial information we needed to find the drafts of the agreement. We knew the ambassador had them, because we’d tried everything on the Bonn end, to no avail. The ambassador’s copies were our only hope. But no one could figure out just
where
that maniac had stashed the papers, or the microfilm. We put Ray on Max’s tail.”
“Ray?”
“Raymond Thurston. An agent from the British secret service. We partnered on a few projects. Nice guy. And an excellent agent. He ended up becoming friends with Max. Which would later cost him his job.”
Here Eric drummed his fingers on the box, as if to rekindle my interest in it. “It was a move worthy of James Bond,” he said affectionately.
So it was then, three hours and six sausages after having crossed the threshold of his home, by which time we’d already downed countless vodkas and beers, that I managed to return to the tragic Brazil of the 1970s. Not by way of familiar topics, as I’d envisioned. But by having been hurled behind the scenes of the nuclear negotiations between Germany and Brazil. In a certain sense, just as had happened to Eric forty years earlier.
Eric moved right into the topic, as though in a rush.
The State Department and the Pentagon were alarmed
, he told me, as if I could dispense with preliminaries in such a complex matter.
Although involving the peaceful use of nuclear energy, with no evident threat of danger, the issue had serious implications all around. On the German side, it demonstrated a kind of independence Washington found unacceptable since Westinghouse was known to have already won the bid for Brazil’s first nuclear plant and assumed the market was theirs. On the Brazilian side, it represented the first explicit rupture with Washington since the military takeover in 1964. An incomprehensible — and equally unacceptable — show of independence.
“But what was the difference?” I asked, trying to familiarize myself with the subject, which I’d known little about at the time and couldn’t quite recall. “What distinguished the two countries’ offers? In terms of the equipment?”
Eric looked at me as though sizing up a small child he didn’t particularly care for. “To make a long story short,” he said after a resigned sigh, “we wanted to sell Brazil what we called
turnkey nuclear plants
. In other words, facilities fully equipped for immediate use. But without any technology transfer whatsoever. You bought them, installed them, pushed a button, and presto! The plant was up and running. The rest of Latin America would be gnashing its teeth in envy and we’d then sell fifteen more plants just like it to whoever could pay.”
He winked at me. It was, in fact, an interesting proposition. For the Americans.
“On the other hand,” Eric continued, “the Germans proposed a whole
nuclear program
to Brazil, with several plants. Eight in all, which would operate based on a method they were in the process of testing. A method that would allow for the transfer of technical know-how.”
“What method was that?”
“Easy, my friend … That part came later. First there was a preamble.”
It was nice to note that Eric was treating me with the same bonhomie Colonel Vaz had shown in Vienna.
Take it easy
, my dinner companion had said one night in that same tone.
“Until the seventies, uranium was enriched by gaseous diffusion,” he continued. “A new, more efficient and less expensive method was being developed, though. Using ultracentrifuge.”
Ultracentrifuge … what a word
, I thought, looking around me and trying to imagine how many more mysteries those boxes might still yield one day.
“Only three countries in Europe had had access to that technology. And Germany was one of them. They’d formed a partnership with the other two. That was the technology Brazil was after.”
Step by step, we were approaching the core of the matter.
“But at the last minute, the State Department pressured one of the partners, and when I say pressured I mean with an arsenal of persuasive arguments …” A glance in my direction, to make sure I was able to appreciate the firepower a country like his could bring to bear. “It pressured one of the two other partners to prevent Germany from transferring the technology to Brazil. And the Germans reneged. They were forced to back out of the deal.”
The most important, however, was still to come.
“Here’s where things began to heat up. Instead, and in utter secrecy, the Germans offered the Brazilians what they presented
as ‘a promising alternative method’ they’d been developing on their own to separate out the uranium of interest. Because that was the issue: separating the wheat from the chaff. This method experimentally developed by the Germans was called
jet nozzle
.”
I must have looked lost, for Eric made a vague gesture that meant,
Don’t even try to follow
. But that didn’t keep him from giving me a short lesson. “There’s still no equivalent for the term in Portuguese,” he concluded at last. “What matters is what it represented: transfer of technology. In the field of uranium enrichment.”
“Washington must have loved it,” I joked.
“Indeed,” he concurred. “The agreement with Germany foresaw the construction of eight nuclear power plants in association with KVD, a subsidiary of Borgward-Stitz. German interest in the project was twofold. Financed largely by you (which was in itself pretty humorous), they were testing a uranium enrichment process that would raise their standing in the international community — if it worked. And they would still be guaranteed participation in the entire cycle of the project in Brazil, which meant they would ultimately be partners of the commercial plants. Beyond the exploitation of uranium and its enrichment process, these would involve construction of heavy equipment at an extremely high cost. Not bad, right?”
The first world certainly knew how to defend itself.
Eric picked up his pace. “The Germans weren’t unaware of what the Brazilian military wanted. They quickly realized that they’d pay whatever the price might be. So whether in good faith or bad, they ended up negotiating with your country something they were still testing — and that would never work for their clients’ top secret nuclear purposes.”
“Why? The Germans aren’t known to be irresponsible peo —”
“Because, as I said, they were still working on the technology. But since they were confident that they’d eventually get it
right, they felt they were acting ethically. Except that we were up to speed. We knew they had no way of getting there. And that, as a result, Brazil couldn’t benefit from the technology, despite all the German nods toward a breakthrough that would never occur.”
Eric let out another of his sarcastic laughs and said, “A friend of mine who’s an MIT professor asked me, completely incredulous, ‘Do the Brazilians actually believe that? Are they going to buy it?!’ ” Then he added, “The ones who ended up on top in the operation, besides the group employed at that firm you all created at the time to manage these projects …”
“Nuclebrás.”
“… that’s the one … were the banks. The banks made a killing on the operation. Mostly American banks, I might add. German ones too, of course. And even British. Not to mention the Brazilian ones that dealt with them. Huge loans were made to Brazil during those years. Don’t forget that back then everyone needed to get rid of their petrodollars.…”
Eric paused briefly before continuing. “It’s a shame this less visible side, the whole business of bank transactions, can’t always be monitored. And denounced. The side that always has shrewd operators behind the scenes. You wouldn’t believe the role our countries’ major banks played, two of them in particular, in these negotiations. And how much they raked in …”