Mistresses: Marita Lorenz | 98

Before we get started, a quick heads up that this episode will have adult content throughout. The woman we'll be looking at went through some extraordinary but also very dark events in her life. And on top of that, there will be some strong language as well. From the bedrooms of powerful men, we're bringing you the secret. Of their mistresses, concubines. I'm Jamila Jamil. I'm an actor, a writer, and a broadcaster. And I'm Dr. Kate Lister, a historian with a penchant for scandalous. This is

Picture the scene, Jamila. It's January 1960 in Cuba. The country is one year into a new political regime led by none other than Fidel Castro. Marita Lorenz, a 21-year-old German. and girlfriend of Fidel is at the Havana Libre Hotel, standing alone in the bathroom of the penthouse suite and she's panicking. The bathroom sink is covered in thick white goop. Cheers. But she Uh I might I might just have to sidestep this. Okay, right. This is gonna be juiz free, right? Is it? Yeah.

Marita is panicking, scrambling around in the sink. A few minutes earlier she's opened a pot of face cream and plunged her hand inside to try and retrieve two pills that she's hidden. Inside the moisturizer. botulism toxin, a tasteless and deadly poison that she has been instructed to give to Fidel. Now the bathroom is a complete mess and she knows Fidel is going to be back any moment. When all of a sudden she hears it. The door opens.

She goes out to greet Fidel and she can see a grave look on his face. Marita, he says. Have you come here to kill me? Oh fuck me, this is like a fucking veaa So we are looking at Marita Lorenz in this episode, but just to be clear, technically, she's not Castro's mistress. No, she is his girlfriend in between marriages. Possibly he was seeing other women while he was seeing Marita. Who knows?

But Marita does become a mistress to another powerful man in her lifetime, and we'll dig into all those details in this episode. Absolutely. And Marita is our most modern story because she only died recently, right? In twenty nineteen. She was eighty years old. Twenty nineteen. Missed the pandemic. But in those eighty years she seems to have lived about three hundred lives. Her story is unbelievable, and her involvement with Fidel Castro was truly just the tip of the iceberg.

Absolutely. According to Marita She's said to have taken part in numerous FBI and CIA operations, to have survived being kidnapped and dropped in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, and even to have been unwittingly involved in the assassination of President Kennedy. She's been very busy. Very busy. Very her calendar is a nightmare.

She's written two autobiographies, one of which we'll be referring to today. There was also a huge article in Vanity Fair in nineteen ninety three, written by journalist Anne Bardak. Anne interviewed Marita and lots of people connected to her story, so there's a lot that's been written. But there is a catch here. Marita hasn't always been straightforward. in her retellings, the details change as she adds things, removes things. And I imagine that has then cast doubt on anything she says.

Exactly. And people become very quick to judge her for the change. Well, women don't people don't believe women uh at the best of times. Yeah. There is a very large possibility that she has embellished parts of it, perhaps got carried away with her own narrative, or the whole thing could be completely gospel true. And we're all wrong, judging her for it. I'm on the side of that. I love that. Yeah. I'm a bit more skeptical. No, that's fine. But you don't um live for gossip.

Okay. So as I mentioned, Marita is German. She's born in the city of Bremen in August nineteen thirty-nine. And this is a moment that perhaps we would normally turn to our historical gossip correspondent Katie Kennedy to a better scene setting. But I think that everybody is quite familiar with what was going on in Germany in nineteen thirty nine. Yeah. This is the outbreak of World War Two. Yeah, it was taking up a lot of people's attention at the time.

Marita is born just two weeks before Germany invades Poland on September 1st, 1939. So, right from the get-go, she is off to a very, very turbulent start. And can I quickly mention at this juncture that Marita's accounts of her early life do include some very dark topics, including experiences in a concentration camp and an incident of sexual assault. If these topics are going to be difficult for you, listener, please skip forward a few minutes. Right, yes.

Okay, so let's start with our parents. They are Heinrich, a German navy captain, and Alice, an American actress, and they get married and build a life together in Germany where they have four children Joe, Philip, Valerie and Marita. Correct. In that order. And then when World War Two breaks out, Marita's father starts working on warships and her mother Alice tries to leave Germany with the children, but she's not allowed.

No, that's exactly right. She's not allowed to leave. And it's at this juncture that things begin to take a turn for the terrifying but also for the extraordinary. having been forced to stay in Germany, Alice Lorenz starts to work as an operative for the Allied resistance. So in other words, she becomes a spy working against Germany. Whilst her husband works within the German navy. Was that not incredibly awkward?

Well, reports suggest that he changes side at some point during the war, but we don't know all the details there. What we do know, because most journalists and historians seem to agree on this part, is that her mother Alice was working as a spy not only during the war, but after it too. They'll believe anything about a woman being duplicitous. Absolutely. Yeah. No, yeah, that probably happened. Yeah, she probably lied and deceived.

They also seem to agree on the fact that Alice was arrested for her espionage work and was sent to Bergen Belsen concentration camp. And that her five year old daughter Marita was sent there with her and held in the children's detainment facility. The other siblings had been uh spirited away to safety before that. So why was Marita kept and taken?

Probably because she's the youngest. The others are slightly older and they've been sent to live with various friends and relatives. Maybe she just wanted to keep Marita closest to her. According to Marita, she was only released from that detainment facility when it was liberated by the British, and that was on the fifteenth of april nineteen forty five.

By that point her mother had already escaped and managed to find a way out. Wow. She actually writes about it in her autobiography, and we've got an extract of that here if you wanted to read it. It is pretty horrible stuff as you would expect. Yeah, okay, so Marita writes, I was hiding under a rickety old wooden bed, the place where I usually secreted myself for fear of being beaten.

but my feet were sticking out, an ambulance driver saw them and pulled me out. I was full of worms and covered in lice and bruises. I weighed twenty kilos, so I couldn't stand up by myself. I was almost dead almost I was one of two hundred surviving children. jesus yeah And in the Vanity Fair article it speaks about another deeply traumatic experience that she went through just a couple of years later. So still such a baby. Yeah, still so young.

After the war, the Lorenz family is reunited in Germany, but at the age of seven, Marita is raped by a US Army sergeant at the father of one of her friends. In her book, Marita talks about the sergeant eventually going on trial, accused not only of raping her, but other children as well. And she says he's convicted. My god! Going through so much at such a young age. Like, how do you carry on? How do you even make it to 80? That's so mad.

Anyway, I I know that four years later in nineteen fifty Marita leaves Germany with her mother and siblings. Her parents get divorced by this point, and uh the mother and kids relocate to Florida. Yes, they do, but they don't stay there for very long. Uh it's just a short time. And by this point, as you might understand, Marita's lost all interest in school. She just doesn't want to go.

It's not exactly surprising given the massive. Exactly. Her mum's trying to get her to go, but she barely does. Then her dad comes over to New York City, I believe, so Marita goes to stay with him and when he takes a job as the captain on a luxury ocean liner, she asks if she could help out on the ship and he agrees. Yeah, and for several years she's travelling round the Americas with him on this boat. Which then takes us to the Fidelias. The Fidelias, exactly.

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So now we're fast-forwarding to 1959, but before we talk about the first meeting between Marita and Fidel, we're going to turn to Katie Kennedy for a moment. So she's going to give us the rundown on what was happening in Cuba that led up to this point. Hi yeah, you're right, it's Katie. Right, let's start in 1952. There's a guy called Carlos Prio Socoras and he is in charge, but not for

He's lost all support from the Cuban people because corruption is everywhere. Country's economy is tits up and it's about as stable as a year-nine couple who've been together five days and they're already calling each other baby cakes on what? water. So a guy called Valencio Batista stages this military coup to overthrow Carlos.

And he actually pulls it off. Valhensio's been president before, and there's some hope he might bring stability. But it's not long before he starts facing accusations of corruption. And on top of that, he's also accused of getting cosy with the American government and a few American mobsters as well. Gangster-run nightclubs, casinos and brothels start popping up all over Cuba and as you can imagine this does not go down well. Protests break out.

Invalgencio responds with violence. Then Fidel Castro comes along in July nineteen fifty-three and not a beat around the bush or anything, but he is fucked off, mega style. He has a cracker overthrown for hencio. But then he fails. However, in nineteen fifty eight, he has another go and this time he manages to take over. So Fidel's now calling all the shots in Cuba. At first he tries to act chill and he tells the American government, Don't worry, lads.

Yeah, I am a communist, but I'm not that kind of communist. Do you know what I mean? But as soon as you know it, Friday Night Karaoke's gone from battling out the beach boys. block called chay during a dramatic reading of the Communist Manifesto over a backing track of revolutionary flu. The USA, the absolutely fuman, because not only does he throw out all the gangsters, but he nationalises American businesses on the island.

It's a big commie slave from Fidel, but also it means he ends up with some pretty powerful ops. Alright, back to Kate and Jamila.

Right, so now we're in early nineteen fifty nine. Marita decides to join her father on a luxury ship called The Berlin, and the ship is going on a cruise with the West Indies, setting sail from New York on the fourteenth of February, and Havana is their last stop.

Yes. Fidel has been the leader of Cuba for just over a month and he's one of the most talked about men in the world at this point. Mm-hmm. And Marisa Lorenz, on the other hand, is a nineteen year old girl with an eighth grade education, which is uh I think like n year nine for us Brits.

And by her own admission, she isn't particularly clued up when it comes to world politics. In fact, her sister Valerie says that at this time she was nineteen going on twelve, which isn't very charitable of Valerie. But when the cruise ship docks in Havana, Marita doesn't really have a clue of who Fidel Castro is, but she will do soon, because we know for a fact that he visits the Berlin on Saturday, the twenty eighth of February.

In her autobiography, Marita describes how she's standing on the bow of the ship with some passengers when she sees two boats approaching the Berlin and the boats are full of men and they've all got guns. But she apparently notices Fidel. straight away and she talks about his penetrating stare and his wicked, seductive smile. Is there anything more teenage girl than watching an like an incoming of men with guns and being like

So funny, that's exactly what I was like as a teenager. That's ridiculously horny. Yeah, I got mugged once by someone who was really fit and I was just like smiling while She's fresh me Ah Oh, I love this one. Okay, and remind me of what the age gap is. Oh, right, okay, so she's nineteen. And he's thirty two when he comes aboard this ship. And apparently he says, I'm Doctor Castro, Fidel. I'm Cuba and I've come to visit your large ship. I mean red flag, red flag. What a knob. What a knob.

Intro. It's it's red flags popping off all over the place. Yeah, but she's loving it, isn't she? She's absolutely loving it. Oh my god, he's Cuba. She's all she's all of a quiver. Underneath her bodies. And what does she say back to this? She says, Welcome, you are in Germany. And then he says, These are Cuban waters, Cuba is mine. I don't know. Fidel for many reasons, um, is giving me the ick.

Yeah. And apparently they start flirting because obviously when a ship's being boarded by men with guns, this is the perfect time for romance to blossom. Mm. Fidel decides that he's gonna stay on the ship and meet her father, who is below decks having a nap at this point, and he stays on and even has dinner with them, and we This is true. Like it sounds bonkers, right? This story sounds mad, but this is true, and we have a photograph of it.

And the picture of that meeting appeared in Marita's obituary in the New York Times and here it is. So if you can describe what you're seeing and by the way, it that her dad is the one second from the right with the insane eyebrows. Yeah, okay. So we've got Everyone crowded around Fidel. Uh Marita's there, she looks cute. Fidel looks exactly like Shia LaBeouf, weirdly. Um and her dad looks totally enthralled in whatever it is that Fidel is.

Marita's account of exactly what happened between her and Fidel on that ship has changed slightly over the years. Not dramatically, but certain details have changed, but she has remained consistent in saying that they kissed. And that he asked for a way to contact her and that she gave him the phone number of her brother's apartment in New York because that's where she was staying. I mean, given the proclivity people have towards the bad boy.

And the fact that he's getting so much attention and everyone on the ship is so excited to see him and they're lapping it up and he's got his focus on her. I can imagine this is so intoxicating for a teenage girl. Yeah, I mean she didn't stand a chance. No. And he's trying to get hold of her, he's calling up New York. And he wants t c he wants her to come and see him and and according to some accounts, Marita's accounts, he sends a private plane and flies her back over to Cuba.

All heavily, heavily seductive. Mm-hmm. I would have put out long before now, unfortunately. You'd have wanked him off on the ship. I would. I wouldn't have it got anywhere close to a private plane.

Okay. She flies out to Cuba, allegedly on one of his private jets. And at this point he's living out of the Havana Libre Hotel. they actually begin living together. So this is all happening incredibly quickly. Mm and according to Marita's autobiography, after they sleep together for the first time, they go out on the balcony of the hotel room and look over the city and Fidel says to her

He's getting a bit repetitive now. Everything you see is my Cuba. I am Cuba. You are now the first lady of Cuba. Oh my god, this man has got some sort of a psychosis. He likes Cuba, doesn't mean he's all about Cuba. I am cough. You are now calm down, Fidel. Take it, JS. It's a job. So deeply unattractive. Very cringe. But not to Marita. She says that this is all absolutely amazing. And in the first few weeks.

Loved up and rainbows and kittens and all the types of love bombing. Love yeah, it is love bombing. I love you so much. This is Cuba. I love Cuba. You're the first lady of Cuba at nineteen. Marita says that in the first few weeks she's kept pretty isolated in the hotel room, only occasionally leaving under the watch of Fidel's bodyguard.

In April, so this is only one month after she's moved to Cuba, she actually accompanies Fidel on his first trip to the US, where he meets none other than Vice President Richard Nixon. Wow. So things are moving very fast. And just to confirm, uh Fidel is not married at this point, right? He isn't no. He and his first wife, Murta Diaz Balart, divorced in nineteen fifty-five.

However, it is believed that he was involved in numerous relationships with other women at this time. So all of his you are mother, Cuba, uh I reckon he's saying that to a few other people. It's crazy that that's his line that works. good line. Things do seem to get quite serious between them though, and inevitably Marita finds out that she's pregnant with Fidel's baby. Oh

Oh shit. Oh shit. And how old is she at this point? She's nineteen. So she's still nineteen? Still nineteen. Christ, it's all happened so fast. But she's dead excited about it. And she would say later that Fidel was really excited about this too. This is this is not a oh shit moment for them. Well he's got now a baby cuba coming, doesn't he? He has a cubelet. Mm-hmm.

Okay, so before I tell you about this next bit, I want to mention that it might be difficult to listen to if you've had any traumatic experiences around pregnancy and birth. If that's the case, you might want to skip forward around three minutes. I'm gonna tell you the next part as it's recorded in Marita's autobiography. And according to that account, this event happens sometime in the autumn of 1959 when Fidel is away on business.

She is about seven months pregnant at this time. So she's quite far along. Marita is having breakfast one morning in the hotel and she takes a sip of her drink and starts to feel very groggy before losing consciousness. Her memory of what happens next is very hazy, it's very fuzzy, it's pieced together. She says that she remembers lying on a stretcher and

that she remembers hearing sirens, she remembers seeing a drip in her arm and hearing voices around her. She remembers hearing crying, which she describes as being like a mewing kitten. The next thing she remembers is waking up in the Havana Libre Hotel. She's bleeding and she's no longer pregnant.

What? I know. Trying to work this out is very difficult. The facts are she was pregnant and now she's not pregnant. Something happens. She's sent back to New York pretty quickly after this to recover in hospital. She's very poorly. What happened? Was was she forced to have an abortion? Was she forced to give birth? To this baby.

That is Isn't it wild? That's one of the worst things I've ever heard in my life, ever. We've really covered some horrific things on this series, but that is that is so unimaginable. Isn't it? She is all as you can imagine, spends the rest of her life being incredibly traumatised and confused about what the hell has happened here.

She actually has an account later in life where she says she believes that she gave birth to a baby and that later on she's saying that she thinks she even met this baby as an adult when she's in Cuba. But there's no w we just don't know, we don't know. She was pregnant and now she's not. And this is what she remembers. Okay.

So she goes back to New York, where she's recovering in hospital. Whatever happened to her was serious enough for her to be hospitalized for a while after this. And after she's out of hospital, she starts living with her mother, Alice, who has moved to the city. And we know that at this point

And again, this sounds extreme, but you have to remember like Cuba and Fidel was a huge threat to the US at this point. But the FBI and the CIA start taking a real interest in Marita. And according to her, they start trying to turn her against Fidel, who she's still deeply in love with and clearly very confused and traumatized and and no idea what the hell is going on, she says that the American agent

try to convince her, tell her that it was Fidel that was responsible for the forced abortion, forced birth, whatever that was, for losing the baby. Oh, I think the CIA did it. Do you recommend I think the CIA did it to turn her against Fidel. It wouldn't be the weirdest thing that they've done. No, it wouldn't be the weirdest thing that they've done. No. Holy shit. They spent hours interviewing her, trying I mean you can

You can understand why they'd be interested in her. She's incredibly close to Fidel Castro and they want access to him. They want information. They tell her that she's key to bringing Fidel down, that uh she's the only one that can help them rid the world of the menace that is Cuba and that if she helps them she'll be viewed as a hero. Once this pressure is reaching breaking point.

Then the FBI start talking to Marita about killing Fidel. They don't say that outright to begin with, they use euphemisms like we need to neutralise him. As opposed to just coming out and saying, We need somebody to bump this man off. It's so manipulative and unfair to put such a young girl in this position to take on someone that dangerous. It is so cruel, isn't it? But in the end, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Marita agrees

So in january nineteen sixty a man gives her poison pills to spike Fidel with, and according to Marita, this man is called Frank Sturgis. And he's a CIA agent. That's a question with a lot of possible answers. I think that if we asked the CIA they'd say no, we absolutely don't know. The CIA never lies, so they're definitely no, they I trust them with my life. Absolutely. Never seen him before. Mm-hmm. Goes to a different school.

What we do know is that Frank Sturgis was ex military and he would go on to be one of the burglars who stole the tapes in the infamous Watergate scandal. And he's gonna become quite important to this story, so you are gonna want to remember his name. Okay. Frank allegedly gives Marita two pills and then she's put on a plane to Cuba. On the plane ride over, she starts to panic, as you fucking would do if you were twenty years old by this point, she's twenty, and you've got two

Poisoned pills with you, and you're on a mission to kill the man that you love. She worries that she's gonna get stopped at customs. So in a moment of Aga yeah, it's panic. She takes a pot of face cream out of a bag and she shoves the two pills into it. So she lands in Cuba, she goes to the hotel, she goes up to the penthouse suite.

And this is where the plan starts to fall apart. She tries to dig the pills out, but now they're covered in face cream. Yeah. Which does have a detectable taste. Yes. Smell. Exactly. So like now what's she gonna do? She runs the things, she tries to wash them off. That's not gonna work either. They're gonna dissolve.

So what I didn't tell you is that she actually decides that she's gonna flush the pills. Get rid of them. Get rid of'em. Can't do it. Uh can't can't go through with this. She flushes them, they're gone. So why did she back out? From her account it seems that it was a combination of realising that she's kind of fucked it up anyway, because the pills were n no good. And she would also say that she realised that she loved him.

Yeah. She still loves Fidel. And she doesn't want to kill anybody, let alone him. That's so horrifying. And so then he comes home. Yes. And he walks into the hotel room. Marita's account and the exact words have changed over the years. Sometimes she says that he walks in and he says, Are you here to kill me?

Sometimes he walks in and starts questioning her about where she's been and in response she says, I've been to v visit my family and I've just come back for a visit and then he says, Not to kill me. And then he allegedly hands his gun over to her, basically goading her, saying, No one can kill me, no one ever and of course she doesn't no kill him.

But the one thing that is consistent in all of her accounts is that there's some back and forth, there's some variation on are you here to kill me? And then they end up shagging. Is there any more intense makeup sex ever than when you've just decided not to murder someone? Or it's a release. Okay, so they're back together then? They don't get back together a few hours

later, uh, Fidel buggers off and leaves her to make a speech and then she gets on a plane and goes back home to America. Where the men that she's been working with in the FBI are all waiting for the news that she's Done the deed and bumped off Castro, and she emerges from the plane with a postcoital glow and

And Castro's still very much alive. Oh, I bet they didn't um take that very well. No they didn't. They were absolutely furious and they repeatedly tell her that that she's a failure and Marita would later claim that one of them said, We've now got to go to war because of you. I don't think it's because of her specifically, but very classic to pin it all on a woman. Could it have anything to do with all the men that are gonna go to war that have made these decisions?

That extraordinary story is sort of the Fidel chapter close. Okay. But there is still plenty more in the story to come. Oh so much more.

Okay, so after the incident with the poison in nineteen sixty, Marita says that after that she wanted to just go home, she wanted to live a normal life, possibly work as a waitress. That was what she wanted to do at this point. But the FBI had other plans for her, despite the fact that they're they must have been quite pissed off with her. I mean they they they told her that she was going to be responsible for a war. They couldn't have fucking laid it on her any thicker. No. But I guess

There's a certain amount of pragmatism to this in that she's still a useful asset for them. She still knows a lot about Fidel stuff. Q the FBI hiring her as a contract agent, which is basically like being an FBI freelancer. Yeah, that is. Sounds mad again, but there is evidence that she does help out. with anti Castro operations at this point in her life. She will say that she's doing things like stopping boats that are loaded with weapons going to Cuba, flying over Cuba in a light aircraft.

To drop anti Castro propaganda leaflets in the hope of encouraging people to rise up against him. What she's in the plane? Yeah. I've dropped leaflets all over an ex's house before encouraging people to rise up against him. We also need to remember that despite the fact it sounds like this woman must be about seventy by now, she's barely twenty-one years old. Christ.

So she's very young, she's very confused, she's very lost at this point. And she will write about it later saying that at this stage in life she's just looking for somewhere to belong. And the FBI seem like they might be able to give her somewhere where she belongs. What she needs is love. And that brings us up neatly to the next person we need to introduce, a man by the name of Marcos Perez Jimenez. Let me pause and hand over to Katie, who is gonna give us the lowdown on this guy.

So it's my job to introduce you to a fellow called Marcos Pérez Jimenez. Where to begin? Let's start in november nineteen forty eight. Venezuela is in crisis. The military decides that democracy is not really connecting with them on a personal or spiritual level. So they boot out the guy in charge, Ramlo Gallegos, and he was the country's first ever freely elected president.

We lasted two minutes, blessings. For five years, our Marcos was doing bits and bobs in the military junta that's now in power. In case you're unfamiliar, a military junta is basically this group chat of generals running the country like it's their own person. Career mode. But then Marcos decides this boy band setup is really holding back his potential, so he launches a solo career and crowns himself.

Next thing you know, the press is being silenced, the secret police running about, and the universities are being shut down, left, right and centre. And this isn't a situation where it's like, oh no, how are the lads meant to drink each other's piss and rugby initiations?

It's Marcos trying to shut down freedom of speech by any means necessary. Into top it off, he starts acting all cash money by commissioning public work projects that he receives profit from, making him one of the richest men in the world. But he's eventually overthrown in nineteen fifty eight, and when he is, he flees to the US with a casual two hundred million dollars in his back pocket. Anyway, that's all you need to know on Marcus for the first time.

I will say that it has been fully verified that Marita and Marcos did have a relationship. We can't say for certain how they first met, but According to Marita, it happens in May nineteen sixty one. So that's about four years after Marcos flees Venezuela for the US. Marita says that they first meet at Marcos's mansion in Miami.

She's part of Anticastro operations at this point and she's been sent to pick up money from Marcos as he's Anticastro himself and he wants to donate some money to the cause. Oh the drama of him being super anti Castro. I know, right. And so therefore probably loving that that's his former love. Oh it's nasty. It's filthy. Oh it's dirty. According to Marita, right from their first meeting, Marcos is absolutely enamoured with her, obsessed.

And he starts pursuing her romantically, even though he is married and has several other girlfriends on the go. He is really love bombing her, gifts money, expensive jewellery, and he even pays for a year of rent at the apartment that she'd been living at with a friend. From Marita's accounts it's clear She isn't particularly attracted to Marcos, but he is kind to her and has fuckloads of money. Okay.

So not gonna say anything. She's been through a lot. She's been through a lot, yeah. We're gonna cut her some slack. But she does become his mistress. And we we do have to emphasize here that Marcos was a really brutal dictator in Venezuelan history. He was an absolute n unrepentant asshole. His rule was filled with violence and censorship and torture. Samarita

is now involved with a really, really dangerous man indeed. But one who's being very kind to her, so I guess she's either doesn't know quite the brutality or She's just I don't know, thinking I'm safe. Yeah, yeah, or maybe maybe a bit of both. Mm-hmm. Not long after things become a official, as official as they're gonna be for them. Marita becomes pregnant again. Mm-hmm. And at this point she's living almost entirely off this man's money. In fact, he actually sets up a trust fund for her.

But he's already facing extradition charges, right? Yeah, yeah, he is. In August nineteen fifty nine, so even before he's met Marita, the Venezuelan authorities have charged him with murder and with embezzlement. And they're demanding that he's returned to Venezuela to stand trial. So the situation for Marita, as it always seems to be, is incredibly precarious. My God. I know. By the time Marita's daughter Monica is born in nineteen sixty two, Marcos' days are numbered.

a solution presents itself While Marcos is sitting in jail, Morita says that she's approached by one of his lawyers. David Walters, and the lawyer tells her that the way she's gonna keep Marcos in the country is if she files a paternity lawsuit against him. Because of course he has to be there for all the legal proceedings.

But from what I can gather, yes. No, that makes total sense. I think that still is upheld now. Marita is resistant to this plan at first, but she says the lawyers work really hard to try and convince her and they actually file the paperwork on her behalf.

demanding five million dollars from Marcos. And we know for certain that this happened. This must be documented. It is actually this is one of the things that is documented. There are contemporary news articles that speak about Marita having filed this paternity suit against him. In the end, the paternity ploy fails to work.

And Marcos is extradited in August nineteen sixty three. And worst of all, by filing this paternity suit, Marita has now broken the contractual terms of her trust fund with Marcos. No. Yes. Disaster. No. Do you reckon that's what the lawyers were going for? She says that she was worried that this would happen.

later on, but was reassured by the lawyer, David, that this wouldn't be a problem. Oh, we hate David. She hates David, I imagine. She bloody hates David and she writes about it in her autobiography, saying I was a pawn once again, a piece in a game played by others, a puppet whose strings moved at the whim of somebody else.

But we should say here that David has always maintained that it was Marita's decision to file the lawsuit and it was nothing whatsoever to do with him. But anyway, she's now cut off without a penny, all of that money vanishes, poof, overnight, gone.

Now it this sounds ridiculous to say, we're now coming to one of the more controversial parts of Marita's story. This is the part that led Vanity Fair to name her a patron saint of conspiracy buffs. I'm gonna start by laying it out as it's told in Marita's autobiography. So we're in November 1963. This is right after Marita has been left absolutely penniless. She is desperate for cash.

as you would be at this point, and decides to go back to her old FBI mates to see if there are any jobs that she could help out with. And those friends include Frank Sturgis. You'll remember that he's the man who allegedly handed her the poisoned pills. So, according to Marita, she begins working with Frank and a small group of men who are preparing for a mission that is going to take place in Dallas, Texas.

According to Marita, she is under the impression that this is gonna be just a regular run of the mill, everyday gun running operation. Oh, classic. Right? Just chill. Just chill. She says that along with Frank, the group includes a former Marine turned CIA agent and a couple of anti-Castro Cuban exiles. But I should say at this point that Frank Sturgis and all of the other men that she's ever mentioned have always vehemently denied her claims.

There's also a guy there, Marita says, called Lee Harvey Oswald. I recognise that name. Yeah. This isn't the first time that Marita is said to have met Lee Harvey Oswald. In fact She even says that she has a nickname for him, Ozzie. She claims that she met him a couple of times while she was training with the FBI. To Vanity Fair, Marita described Ozzie as looking like pneumonia warmed over. In other words, he seemed weedy and she didn't think very much of him when they first met.

Sometime around November the 18th, 1963, Marita and this group begin driving through the night from Miami to Dallas. This journey will take them two days and apparently they only stop to get petrol, gas if you're American, and to pee. Yeah. But you can shit in the car. I was thinking that. Like what happened anyway. That's my rule as well. We we we we're gonna stay focused. So just to reiterate

The men have always denied these claims. Yeah, but it's an FBI or CIA job. Like these things are supposed to be classified. They're gonna deny it, aren't they? I mean they would say that. They would. Frank Sturgis goes on the record as calling her a quote, lying bitch. Okay. Yeah, so heavy stuff. According to Marita, when they arrive, they check into a hotel on the outskirts of the city where they get a visit from a man that Marita later identifies as none other than

Jack Ruby. He's the man who would kill Lee Harvey Oswald after he had killed JFK. Correct. And according to Marita, Jack turns up and one of the first questions he says is, Who's the fucking broad? Oh lovely. Lovely. Nice man. After hearing that, Marita absolutely loses it and the two of them have a huge row. The argument is so bad, apparently, that Marita decides she's out. That's it. I'm not being spoken to you like that.

She leaves Dallas. And lucky for her, she goes back to Miami that very night. On the twenty second of November, that's the day that J F K is shot, Marita boards a plane to New Jersey, where her mother is now living. And it's during the flight that she learns about the assassination. Apparently the pilot comes out to tell the passengers. Mm-hmm. According to her, news of the assassination came as a total shock.

Up to that point she thought that she was just on a regular gun running expedition. She quickly connects the dots and realizes that she is an unwitting accessory to one of the greatest crimes of the twentieth century. She has since said that all the men that she used to hang around with from the FBI, Frank Sturgis chief among them, hated JFK. She said that they all thought he was too weak in the fight against Castro, and that they blamed Kennedy for the failure of the Bay of Pigs.

Which was a disastrous US invasion of Cuba. So according to her account, does she tell anyone what she knows? Yes, she does. Okay. When she lands in New Jersey, she calls the FBI. Two agents visit her and she tells them everything she knows, but then nothing.

Absolute crickets. She doesn't hear a word about it again until fifteen years later, in nineteen seventy eight, when she's called to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, who are investigating the JFK shooting. And what did she say to them? Well, according to her, she tells them the story that I just told you. And as you can imagine, it's pretty hard to get a definitive answer about exactly how that testimony went over in the select committee's hearing.

that they were very, very skeptical of what Marita was telling them. One investigator for the committee told Anne that, quote, Marita Lorenz has a lot of credible information regarding anti-castro activities and other things, but I don't believe her Dallas story.

One thing that makes him question her is the fact that she's changed her story in terms of who was involved with what. In some accounts she says that there are two additional anti Castro militants who are part of the operation. In other accounts she cuts them out completely. Here's how Anne puts it in the Vanity Fair article. The investigator believes Marita's story is sophisticated disinformation, which always has some verifiable elements.

What do you think? Do you think she was loosely involved in all of that? I personally don't. Right. Why? Unlike other parts of her story, there's we've just got nothing to back this up at all. And and for this to be true, that would have to mean that Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby were all working with the FBI to assassinate JFK. Like the story becomes bigger than just her

Be in there like a lot of other stuff would have to be true. I just listen, I don't know. I'm not gonna get into the conspiracy theory of JFK, but it just again, you can sense that I have a deep distrust of authority. It's not the sort of thing they'd want to be like, Ah fuck, yeah, you got me. No, it's true. They wouldn't they wouldn't go, Oh well yeah, we can confirm that. And actually at the moment they're releasing files, classified files on JSK so

We might see some of those and we'll have to go Wouldn't that be amazing? We'd all have to eat our words there. Wouldn't I feel stupid? Yeah. She was there the whole day. I'll make sh I'll make sure to call you. Yeah. Just rub it in.

Right. We have one final stop on this journey, and that is the Amazon rainforest. Now I can't make heads or tails of this, so I I want you to explain it to me. No, this is a bizarre story in a monk. a whole longer bizarre story. But according to Marita, about six or seven months after this alleged trip to Dallas,

She tries to visit Marcos Perez Jimenez in prison in Venezuela. And during that trip, she's captured by an anti-Marcos group and she and her two-year-old daughter Monica are literally dumped, just dropped in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. Marita explains that they stay in the rainforest for nine months and that they only survive because they're looked after by an indigenous tribe, the Yanamami. Okay.

She manages to get out of the rainforest though, and apparently this is because of her mother, Alice. who apparently is able to figure out that Marita and her granddaughter are lost in an Amazonian rainforest and she sends a Red Cross plane to retrieve them. Um was this verified or not? Well, her daughter Monica says that she has a very vague recollection of it.

She says that she's got memories of being surrounded by lots of green, but remember she was only two years old when this Amazon rainforest thing is said to have happened. And there's a biographer who once worked with Marita. He says that he interviewed her for hours about the rainforest and that the conversations were, and I'm quoting here, chock full of convincing detail. Wow. But that's it. That's all we've got to verify this.

Alright, we are finally rounding the corner and nearing the end of our episode. It's been such an emotional roller coaster. This thing's been intense, hasn't it?

After the alleged incidents that took place in Dallas and the rainforest and Cuba and Venezuela and all of it. Marita says that she continues doing odd jobs for the FBI to make some cash, but slowly her life becomes quieter and quieter. By the time she does the Vanity Fair interview in nineteen ninety three, she's living in a studio apartment in Queens, New York, which apparently it was a very small apartment. Well, that just means a normal apartment in New York. It does, doesn't it? Yeah.

The article points out that she has a pistol and a dagger by the front door, as well as two hyperactive dogs. In fact She has a menagerie of animals. She has a rat, a guinea pig, a cat, seven birds, a tortoise, and even a piranha. In her tiny flat in New York. And she also this may be quite sweet, she has several portraits of Castro around the apartment. Oh, that's quite sad. I know, isn't it? She's still hanging on to him.

She eventually travels back to Germany where she dies from cardiac arrest at the age of eighty. I mean what an innings. Wow. What an innings. Imagine going through all of that, all of that stress and turmoil and making it to Such an aid is the She's really something. I I don't understand why I haven't heard about her. I'm amazed like we haven't got Angelina Jolie playing her in a film or something.

There is one final quote from her autobiography that I think helps bring us to the end of this. Would you please read it out for us? Sure. She says, I have been a woman in a man's world, I have lied to protect myself and my children, and I have told the truth when it suited me.

Now I want to leave things clear. Perhaps make a certain person who works in the shadows for the US government realize that it isn't worth letting other people make decisions for you. Mm. But when she says I haven't always been truthful because I couldn't be. I don't think she's referring to having made up entire chunks of her life.

I think she's probably lied to the US government saying she's not in love with Castro. I think she's probably lied to Castro about the fact that she turned up with two pills to poison him. You know, I'm sure she's told little white lies to survive all of this insanity. And and she owns that.

But I don't think she's referring to the massive life moments that she endured. She said what she had to do to survive, but I I don't think the things she's reported are likely to have been completely fabricated. I just also think we don't believe I mean, the obviously the J F K is one of the most controversial moments in history, it's one of the most debated conspiracy, you know, laden subjects ever, but

But we don't believe a woman could actually have this much resilience. We don't believe a woman could withstand this. We don't believe a woman with no education could outsmart so many people. There's so much to just underestimate her for. uh because we we underestimate women at large. So I don't know. I'm on her side. I like her very much. And the thing is, even if you took out the episodes that are disputed, this is still an absolutely insane, wild, unbelievable story. 100%.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Next episode we're traveling back to sixteenth century Mexico to tell you about Spanish conquistador, Hernando Corte. We'll tell you her life story. Субтитры сделал DimaTorzok