Marita

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's 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. (Nov.)

Donna Seaman

What a story. Marita Lorenz is the daughter of a German father and an American mother; she met Fidel Castro at the tender age of 19 when he boarded her father's luxury ocean liner off the coast of Havana. The brand-new dictator and the virgin fell instantly in love, and Marita become his common-law wife amid the chaotic aftermath of the revolution. Enemies of Castro kidnapped Marita, induced labor two months early, abducted her baby, and left her for dead. Rescued just in time, Marita was brought to the States and promptly recruited by the CIA, who believed they could transform her grief into a lust for revenge. Marita became a CIA assassin and gunrunner, and very nearly took part in the murder of President Kennedy. Yes, that again. This astonishing confession seethes with firsthand accounts of the CIA's outlaw escapades and conspiracies during the 1960s, including the infamously absurd attempts on Castro's life and the tragically successful plot against JFK. Pretty and plucky, tough and stubborn, Lorenz has survived numerous attempts on her life; a calculated but dangerous affair with yet another dictator, Venezuela's Marcos Perez Jimenez (with whom she also had a child); and a bizarre eight-month exile among the Yanomamo Indians. This is almost too good to be true, but who are we to argue? First serial will appear in "Vanity Fair".