Laura Ramos: ‘África de las Heras used to give us afternoon tea in the same place where she poisoned her husband’

The Argentine writer and journalist Laura Ramos was eight years old in 1964, when the spy África de las Heras would wait for her outside the Francia school in Montevideo, Uruguay. At that point neither she nor her brother Víctor were aware 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 her code name in the KGB was Patria (Homeland). Nor that years earlier, in Mexico, she had infiltrated Leon Trotsky’s inner circle as María de la Sierra. To them she was simply María Luisa, the lady who took them to her house, two blocks from the school, and looked after them until their mother came to pick them up, and who occasionally sewed things for them.

When her brother asked her in 2018 if she remembered María Luisa, Ramos replied: “The seamstress!” In her mind, she saw “a very sober, completely unremarkable person with graying hair, wearing long skirts and carrying a package of pastries from the Oro del Rhin confectionery.” A woman, she continued, who was “very pleasant to be around, who treated you like an equal, but not warm or affectionate with us.”

Upon learning that she was neither a seamstress nor a nanny, and that this identity was merely a mask behind which she hid for two decades to direct the KGB’s spy network in South America, the image shattered. Memories began to mingle with what Ramos discovered over five years of investigation, which led to the book Mi niñera de la KGB (My KGB Nanny): “I would go on to discover that our nanny poisoned her husband, an Italian spy,” and “a chilling recording revealed a second crime: her involvement in [Leon] Trotsky’s assassination.”

Laura Ramos, 69, welcomes EL PAÍS to her home in Buenos Aires. Her dog Ramoncita, still a puppy, scampers around as the conversation delves into the secrets of a woman who participated in espionage operations on both sides of the Atlantic. África de las Heras was born in the Spanish exclave city of Ceuta in 1909 and died in Moscow in 1988, having lived six different lives in between. She was a textile worker in Madrid, a militia member 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 these were Ramos’ mother, the Argentine feminist Faby Carvallo — known as “La Maga” — and the circle of Uruguayan intellectuals she surrounded herself with in Montevideo.

“The Uruguayans who knew her were proud because she was an international heroine who saved the lives of dozens of Spaniards fleeing the war for France by helping them cross the border, and who even parachuted into Nazi-occupied territory in Ukraine to report from there. But they also felt foolish. Because in Montevideo, she was treated condescendingly, not as an equal, and she had to overcome those prejudices. Prejudices not only for being Spanish, but also for being older, for not having children…”

Married to Felisberto Hernández

They also struggled to accept that all of them had been nothing more than a cover. One that extended to many other people and that, in preparation for her time in Uruguay, began with the seduction of the musician and writer Felisberto Hernández in Paris. She pretended to be a dressmaker and arrived as such in Montevideo. They were 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 its spy network in South America, although she could well have been one of the characters created by his own exuberant imagination. “At nightfall I heard María’s footsteps, the gong to start the water, and the noise of the motors. But I was already bored and didn’t want to be surprised by anything,” the novelist wrote in his short story “The Flooded House.”

Following the atomic trail

De las Heras settled in Uruguay “because at that time Stalin wanted information about the atomic bomb,” the interviewee explains. “To go to the United States, she needed a foothold somewhere, and Montevideo was perfect because [Uruguay] was known as the Switzerland of America, a peaceful country with political stability and a very friendly atmosphere. Furthermore, it had Russian representation, which allowed them to have legal spies and facilitated setting up the entire illegal system. They decided it was the best option for establishing a center of radio operators who could communicate with Moscow. She was the head of Latin America. Her mission was to prepare the documents and all the cover for the Soviet spies who were going to the United States.”

Once she had obtained what she needed from Hernández — regularizing her legal status and building a network of friends — she abandoned him. She remarried, this time wedding the Italian citizen Valentino Marchetti, another Soviet spy whose real name was Giovanni Antonio Bertoni. Ramos suspects that Bertoni’s sudden death in 1964 was not natural, but a murder committed by his wife: “It happened sometime during the year when she would pick us up from school. She would give us our afternoon tea in the same place where she poisoned her husband.”

The bullet that was meant for Che

This is not the only murder that Laura Ramos attributes to her in the book. She believes that Trotsky’s assassin, Ramón Mercader, and De las Heras were lovers and that she may have infiltrated the exiled leader’s inner circle to copy the plans of the house where he lived in Mexico, thus facilitating the operation that ended his life. Ramos also considers it likely that she planned the assassination of the historian Arbelio Rodríguez, as his widow, Esther Dosil, accused her of doing.

For Uruguayans, Rodríguez is a hero who was hit by a bullet that wasn’t meant for him. That bullet was meant for Che Guevara as he was leaving the University of the Republic in Montevideo. Dosil’s version, accepted as true by Ramos, states that the real target was Ramírez, possibly because he had refused to collaborate with the KGB. “The same doctor who performed Arbelio Ramírez’s autopsy is the one who issued Valentino’s death certificate,” says Ramos regarding the latest evidence obtained that reinforces his suspicions.

Ramírez and Dosil’s children spoke with the writer, each separately: “They are like Cain and Abel, they hate each other, they haven’t spoken for years. And all because of what? Because of María Luisa. María Luisa is at the center of this family’s drama.”

A thorough investigation

As in her previous books, the author conducted rigorous research. She traveled to Ceuta, África de las Heras’ birthplace in 1909, where the conservative family with whom she severed ties still resides; to mainland Spain, where she worked as a textile worker and Republican militia member before disappearing without a trace in 1937 to begin living under a new identity; to the Mitrokhin Archive in Cambridge, where she found her nanny’s name among KGB intelligence operations; and also to Montevideo, where the search for information became intertwined with memories of a childhood she didn’t want to revisit: “I resisted it a lot. I didn’t want to go back to my parents’ world, their ideologies, their lovers, their revolution.”

The 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 of for her: “a modern girl in the style of those lesbian dolls, with a bobbed haircut and plaid overalls.” In contrast to the “living dangerously” that was her mother’s leitmotif—“beret, black cigarette, high-waisted pants, open shirt knotted under the bust, you could almost hear the jazz music” — she secretly read the moralizing saga of Little Women.

Those youthful readings sparked a love affair with the 19th century that grew with the writing of some of her own books, such as Las señoritas (The Young Ladies) and Infernales. La hermandad Brönte (Infernal: The Brontë Sisterhood). The living room of her house, decorated with a drawing by Norah Borges and a window that opens onto a peaceful community garden, also seems suspended in time.

Ramos denies that her new book has reconciled her with her childhood: “Instead of reconciling myself, I made a forced, completely artificial modification, romanticizing that past. I turned our childhood in the sixties into something magical. It really was a utopian community where we lived. Someone lent you this or that, looked after your children, cooked for you; you spent one Christmas in one house, another in a different house, and we all cleaned the building together. I added a bit of Jane Austen spirit to these proto-guerrillas, these Uruguayan leftists of the sixties.”

By delving into her past through the testimonies of others, the author also discovered a different image of her late mother, to whom she dedicates the book. “Suddenly, she took on a more historical dimension, because she was a feminist activist in Buenos Aires in the seventies, but even before that, from a very young age, she adopted those ways and ideas. And there was something about her that wasn’t just feminism, but rather her own way of living, so unique, so unconventional seen from the outside, but which made her a kind of embodiment of poetry when she took us to the beach to watch the storms. I suffered because I got cold and I hate the sea — yes, I still hate the sea and I’m very sensitive to the cold — but even so, I believe that poetry and that light with which she bathed me made me who I am, right? Someone who could write all this and enjoy it.”

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