She was at the center of assassination attempts, bungled

spy missions, and controversial global intrigue.

And she was in love with one of history's most

notorious figures.

Her name Marita Lorenz.

During her 25 years as a spy and informant,

Lorenz lived a Shocking life full of adventure that

would put James Bond to shame.

She came across dictators, gangsters, and killers.

And she had affairs with many of her targets,

including Cuban leader and beard club member Fidel Castro.

Are all of these stories fully accurate?

Can truth really be this much stranger than fiction?

See if you can figure out yourself

as we dive into the history of Marita Lorenz.

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Lorenz was born in Nazi occupied Germany

to a German father who worked as a U-boat captain,

and an American mother who was recruited by France and Britain

as a spy.

When the oppressive German government found out

about her parents' anti-Nazi sentiments,

they threw the family into a concentration camp.

In 1944, when Lorenz was five, her family

was placed in the Bergen Belsen concentration camp.

Lorenz' father was held as a prisoner of war,

and Lorenz and her siblings were moved to the children's ward.

Eventually, the allies liberated the camps, and Lorenz'

family relocated to America.

In 1959, at the age of 19, Lorenz

was working on one of her father's luxury boats

on a trip to Havana, Cuba.

Who met the boat at the harbor?

None other than the new leader of Cuba, Fidel Castro.

According to Lorenz, Castro announced

he wanted to come aboard.

When Lorenzo asked who he was, he simply said, "yo soy Cuba."

Lorenz estimated there were 27 men with Castro,

all sporting the same style of beard.

Castro, then 33, was immediately smitten with Lorenz.

And while Lorenz was intimidated by Castro's crew--

all armed and dangerous-- she fell for Castro

quickly thereafter.

Little did she know what actions this romance

would set into motion.

Later that year, Lorenz claimed she became pregnant by Castro.

In October, she was seven months pregnant,

ready to deliver her and Castro's first child.

But circumstances changed-- she was

slipped a drug in a glass of milk,

waking up hours later in a hospital bed.

When she awoke, the commander of the Cuban army

told her the baby had been taken away

because of Fidel's enemies.

Castro himself was nowhere to be found.

She was then given an injection and taken back

to a Havana hotel room.

While some historians doubt Lorenz was ever impregnated

by Castro, Lorenz believes this abortion attempt was

unsuccessful, and she eventually wound up

meeting the son she believes she had with Castro--

the son she had but didn't remember having.

The son she had but didn't have any physical evidence

of having.

That was the son she felt she met.

More on that chance encounter later.

The CIA eventually got to Lorenz,

encouraging her to flip on Castro and terminate him.

They flew her out to the USA, gave her poison pills

to give him, briefed her on the details,

then flew her back to Cuba.

When Lorenz got back to Cuba, she

realized she couldn't go through with it.

Her love for Castro was too entrenched,

and she discarded the poison pills

by placing them in a jar of cold cream.

Instead of killing Castro, Lorenz slept with Castro

that night.

What would have happened had Lorenz

gone through with her mission?

We'll never know for sure, but some historians

and former spies believe that, among other consequences,

the Bay of Pigs fiasco would have never occurred.

Lorenz seemed to have re-centered herself around

killing Castro, and she found herself training with Operation

40--

a CIA anti-Castro group located in Florida.

Among other trainees at the camp was Lee Harvey Oswald,

who you might have heard of as being

the guy who would eventually assassinate President John F

Kennedy.

According to Lorenz, Oswald had recruited

members of the camp for a secret road trip to Dallas.

Lorenz initially joined them, but when she found out

Oswald's intentions, she abandoned them and flew home

to Cuba.

She said she heard about Kennedy's assassination

on this very plane ride.

Frank Sturgis, a spy who was allegedly also in Oswald's car,

called Lorenz' claims into question,

saying she changed her story's details too

many times to count.

"I'm not saying that everything that Marita says is a lie,"

he told Vanity Fair.

"But she'll do anything for money."

Lorenz was set up with another mission--

this time, targeting deposed Venezuelan dictator

Marcos Perez Jimenez.

She was sent to Florida, where he had fled,

to collect money from him in exchange

for granting him US residency.

Instead, he collected her heart.

Perez Jimenez was already married with children,

but that didn't stop him from falling in love with Lorenz.

He pursued her, and she agreed to be his amante, or mistress.

One month into their relationship, Lorenz

became pregnant by him.

He put her up in Miami during this time.

Lorenz gave birth to their daughter, Monica,

and she and Perez Jimenez lived a relatively peaceful life

for a few years.

However, Perez Jimenez was then extradited back to Venezuela

to stand for his crimes.

He was arrested, and neither Lorenz nor Monica

saw a penny of his vast fortune.

In 1963, after Perez Jimenez' arrest,

Lorenz decided to travel to Venezuela

to visit her former love and father of her daughter Monica.

Upon arrival, Lorenz was immediately arrested and put

in a jail cell next to Perez Jimenez.

But she didn't stay long.

After she was released, two local intelligence agents

offered her and Monica a sightseeing tour.

They accepted, but quickly realized

it was not what it seemed.

The agents flew Lorenz and Monica

into the middle of the Amazon rainforest and abandoned them.

Lorenz claimed she and Monica stayed

in the rainforest for nine months,

alongside a native tribe.

And biographers and historians say

that, despite Lorenz' propensity for wild stories,

this one is likely true, and likely a plot of Lorenz'

former lover, Perez Jimenez.

Lorenz never said her relationship with Fidel Castro

was non-consensual.

But in May of 1963, her mother Alice

published a piece called "Fidel Castro Raped

My Teenage Daughter."

This title was also pitched as a film on the Lifetime network.

The piece, published in a pulp magazine Police Gazette,

was written by Alex Rourke--

a CIA colleague of Alice.

In the piece, they accused Castro of many inhuman crimes,

including kidnapping, drugging, and rape.

While many elements of Castro's relationship with Lorenz

are questionable, Alex and Rourke

did deliberately exaggerate and invent many parts of the piece.

The goals were twofold--

to turn Lorenz against Castro, and to turn America

at large against communism.

Lorenz wound up leaving the CIA, moving

to New York in the late '60s and working for the FBI

as an informant.

In 1969 she gave birth to a son named Mark,

saying that the father was a former New York police chief.

The truth was far more salacious.

In fact, Mark's father was Eddie Levy-- a small-time gangster

who had served prison time in Florida.

Lorenz never quite told Mark the truth.

As she said to biographer John Stockwell,

it was better to have a father who was a cop than one who

went to jail.

In 1981 Lorenz came to the realization

that she needed to protect her children from all

the dangerous men she had rendezvoused

with before informing on them.

She went to the Cuban embassy in New York,

communicating via handwritten notes out

of paranoia of surveillance.

Eventually, the embassy granted Lorenz'

request to return to Havana, for a more formal request

of protection.

And that's when Lorenz claims to have

met the child she had had with Castro,

named Andre-- whom she thought she had lost decades ago.

"The first thing I noticed was his white, white skin

and Fidel's curly hair," she said upon meeting him.

"I said, it's nice, Fidel.

You did a beautiful job."

When Lorenz' sister Valerie picked her up at the airport

to take her home, she claimed Lorenz

was in "a state of shock."

To examine Lorenz' life, one must

discern between fact and fiction, truth

and a good story.

In 1976 Tom Guinzburg, president of Viking Press,

decided he was up for the challenge.

He paid Lorenz and a ghost rider a $320,000 advance

for an official biography.

However, the project was shelved for many years, when

Penguin bought Viking Press.

Finally, her official autobiography--

The Spy Who Loved Castro-- was published in 2017.

She'll eventually be played by Jennifer Lawrence in a film

adaptation of her life.

Marita Lorenz' life story is wild, full of probable

exaggerations and unlikely truths.

She'll forever be known as one of the world's most

controversial figures in secret intelligence,

and forever known as the woman who loved Fidel Castro.

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