The Argentine writer and journalist Laura Ramos was eight years old when, in the afternoons of 1964, the spy África de las Heras was waiting for her at the door of the Francia school in Montevideo. Neither she nor her brother Víctor knew the true identity of this Spanish woman who was one of the most valuable Soviet agents of the 20th century. They also didn’t know that his code name in the KGB was Patria. Nor that years earlier, in Mexico, she had infiltrated Leon Trotsky’s circle as María de la Sierra. For them it was María Luisa, the woman who took them to her house, two blocks from the school, and took care of them until their mother came to pick them up, and from time to time they asked her to make a dress.
When his brother asked him in 2018 if he remembered María Luisa, Ramos replied: The seamstress! In his memory there appeared “a grey-haired person, very sober, completely anonymous, with long skirts carrying a package of pastries from the Rhine Gold pastry shop”. A woman, he continues, “with a very pleasant manner, as an equal to an equal, but not warm or affectionate towards us”.
After learning that she was neither a seamstress nor a nanny, that that identity had been the mask behind which she had hidden for two decades to run the KGB’s spy network in South America, his image of her was shattered. Memories began to mix with what he discovered in five years of research until his image was transformed into that of the implacable agent who opens the book. My KGB nanny (Lumen): “I will find out that our nanny poisoned her husband, an Italian spy”, “a disturbing recording will reveal to me a second crime: her participation in the assassination of Trotsky.”
Laura Ramos (Buenos Aires, 69 years old) receives EL PAÍS in her home in Buenos Aires. Her dog Ramoncita, still a puppy, runs around as the conversation delves into the secrets of a woman who participated in espionage operations on both sides of the Atlantic. He was born in Ceuta in 1909 and died in Moscow in 1988, with six different lives in between. She was a textile worker in Madrid, a militiaman in republican Barcelona, a secretary in Mexico, a radio operator in Ukraine, a seamstress in Paris and a nanny in Uruguay.
De las Heras deceived everyone who knew her. Among them is Ramos’ mother, the Argentine feminist Faby Carvallo, known as The Magician– and to the circle of Uruguayan intellectuals with whom he surrounded himself in Montevideo.
“The Uruguayans who treated her were proud because she is an international heroine, who saved the lives of dozens of Spaniards who were fleeing the war to France by helping them cross the border and who parachuted into the territory occupied by Nazi troops in Ukraine to report from there, but they also felt stupid. Because in Montevideo they treated her with condescension, not as an equal, and she had to overcome those prejudices to be accepted. Prejudices not only for being Spanish, but to be older, to not have children…”
Married to Felisberto Hernández
It was also difficult for them to accept that all this had been nothing more than an alibi. A period that extended to many other people and that for her the Uruguayan period began with the seduction of the musician and writer Felisberto Hernández in Paris. She pretended to be a seamstress and with that profession she arrived in Montevideo. They married in 1948 and were unhappy for two years.
Hernández, a fervent anti-Communist, never discovered that his wife was transmitting coded messages to Moscow or that she was the head of his spy network in South America, although she could well have been one of the characters created by his exuberant imagination. “At dusk I could hear María’s footsteps, the gong that made the water flow and the noise of the engines. But I was already bored and I didn’t want to be surprised by anything”, wrote the novelist in his story. The flooded house.
On the atomic trail
De las Heras settled in Uruguay “because at that time what Stalin wanted was data on the atomic bomb,” the interviewee says. “To go to the United States I had to set foot somewhere and Montevideo was perfect because it was known as the Switzerland of America, a quiet country, with political stability and very friendly. On the other hand it had a Russian representation, which allowed it to have legal spies and made it easier to install the whole illegal system. They decided that it was the best solution to have a radiotelegraph center that could communicate with Moscow. She was in charge of Latin America. Her mission was to prepare the documents and all the cover for the Soviet spies who were leaving go to the United States.”
When he had gotten what he needed from Hernández, regularizing his legal situation and building a network of friends, he abandoned him. She remarried, this time to the Italian Valentino Marchetti, another Soviet spy whose name was actually Giovanni Antonio Bertoni. Ramos suspects that Bertoni’s sudden death in 1964 was not natural, but rather a murder perpetrated by his wife: “It happened at some point in the year while she was looking for us at school. She gave us snacks in the same place where she poisoned her husband.”
The bullet that was for Che
It’s not the only murder attributed to him in the book. She believes that Trotsky’s assassin, Ramón Mercader, and she were lovers and that he managed to infiltrate the circle of exiles to copy the plans of the house where he lived in Mexico and facilitate the operation that ended his life. It is also likely that he planned the murder of the historian Arbelio Rodríguez, as his widow Esther Dosil accuses him.
For Uruguayans, Rodríguez is a hero who took a bullet that wasn’t for him. That bullet was aimed at Che Guevara as he left the University of the Republic of Montevideo. Dosil’s version, taken as true by Ramos, says that the real target was Ramírez, perhaps because he refused to collaborate with the KGB. “The same doctor who performed the autopsy on Arbelio Ramírez is the one who prepared Valentino’s death certificate,” Ramos says of the latest evidence obtained that strengthens his suspicions.
The children of Ramírez and Dosil spoke to the writer, each separately: “They are like Cain and Abel, they hate each other, they haven’t spoken to each other for years. And all for what? Because of María Luisa. María Luisa is at the center of this family’s drama.”
An exhaustive investigation
As in previous books, the author conducted rigorous research. He went to Ceuta, the birthplace of Africa de las Heras, in 1909, and where the conservative family with whom he broke ties still resides; in Spain, where she was a textile worker and republican militiaman and disappeared without a trace in 1937 to begin living under another identity; to the Mitrokhin Archive, Cambridge, where he found his nanny’s name among KGB intelligence operations; and also in Montevideo, where the search for information was mixed with memories of a childhood that I did not want to revisit: “I resisted a lot. I didn’t want to return to the world of my parents, to their ideologies, to their lovers, to their revolution.”
Daughter of the influential politician and writer Jorge Abelardo Ramos and Carvallo, both Trotskyists, Ramos grew up among intellectuals and tried to escape the ideal they dreamed for her, that of “a modern girl in the style of those lesbian dolls, with short hair. a la garçon and checkered gardeners.” Faced with the “living dangerously” that was her mother’s leitmotif — “cap, black tobacco cigarette, high-waisted cigarette trousers, open shirt knotted under the chest, you could almost hear the jazz music” — she secretly read the moralizing saga of Little Women.
Those youthful readings led her to an idyll with the nineteenth century which grew with the writing of some of her books, such as The ladies (Lumen, 2021) AND Infernal. The Brontë Brotherhood (Toro, 2018). Even the living room of her home, decorated with a Norah Borges drawing and a window that opens onto a peaceful community garden, seems suspended in time.
Ramos denies it My KGB nanny he reconciled her with her childhood: “Instead of reconciling myself, I made a forced, entirely artificial change, romanticizing that past. I turned our childhood in the 1960s into something magical. It was really a utopian community where we lived. They lent you this, they lent you that, they took care of your children, they cooked for you, you spent one Christmas in one house, another in another, we all cleaned the place together. I put a little bit of the spirit of Jane Austen into these proto-guerrillas, in these “The Uruguayan left of the sixties”.
Digging into her past through the testimonies of others, the author also discovered a different image of her mother, now deceased, to whom she dedicates the book. “Suddenly it took on a more historical dimension, because she was a feminist activist in Buenos Aires in the seventies, but before that, from a very young age, she had adopted those ways and those ideas. And there was something that was not just feminism, but it was her way of life, so unique, so extravagant seen from the outside, but which made her embody a sort of poetry when she took us to the beach to see the storms. I suffered from it because I was cold and I hate the sea, yes, I still hate the sea and I very cold, but I still think that that poem and that light it bathed me in made me who I am, right? A writer and that I could write all this and enjoy it.
