Super-spy Gabriel Marquez practices his secret karate skills
Mexico’s secret intelligence service — the now defunct DFS — spied on Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez “for decades and considered him a Cuban agent,” according to this Guardian report about just-declassified government documents published in the El Universal newspaper.
They reveal that DFS “bugged the Nobel laureate’s phone and monitored his movements from 1967 after he moved to Mexico with his family. The authorities suspected the Colombian author of One Hundred Years of Solitude because of his leftist sympathies and friendship with Fidel Castro.” The result was “a bulging file at least up until 1985, after which documents remain secret.”
Included in the “bulging file” was a transcript of a tapped conversation in which Marquez tells a reporter that he planned to make over his publishing rights to his then-new book, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, to the Cuban government. After the transcript, a note says: “The above proves that Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez, besides being pro-Cuban and pro-Soviet, is a propaganda agent at the service of the intelligence agency of that country.” The call occurred in 1982, the year Marquez won the Nobel.