Playboy Magazine South Africa November 2013 November 2013 | Page 37

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who was quick to judge, Tim was an easy guy
to write off. But as I would soon learn, underestimating Tim’s capabilities, or his courage,
would be unwise.
We became Facebook friends, and a few
months later I was back in New York, thinking I
would never see Tim Tracy again.

26 April 2013
The email arrived as I was walking across
Central Park. It was from Alanna Sampietro,
an actress friend from LA who ran in Tim’s
circle, with the subject heading: “Sign please!
My filmmaker friend arrested in Venezuela.”
I opened the email, a form letter generated
through the website Change.org. “My friend
Tim Tracy has been arrested in Venezuela,” it
began.
Tim Tracy from Laurel Canyon? I clicked
through to discover that Tim had been arrested
two days earlier at the Caracas airport on
his way out of the country. When I read that
Tim was in the custody of SEBIN, Venezuela’s
national intelligence service, on terrorism
charges, I stopped in my tracks.
I began scouring the net on my phone.
Tim hadn’t been formally charged yet. Still,
Venezuela’s newly elected president, Nicolás
Maduro (who had recently taken office after
Hugo Chávez’s death from cancer), and his
interior minister, Miguel Rodríguez Torres, had
held news conferences that were carried live
by every major TV network in Venezuela. The
interior minister announced that the country’s
new presidential regime had t aken down a
major threat to national security: the April
Connection, a secret plot whose objective was
to destabilize the country through acts of vio-

lence, with the ultimate goal of starting a civil
war. And though the members of this terrorist
cell were right-wing ultra-capitalists who had
been recruited from the ranks of Venezuela’s
antigovernment opposition, the man in charge
was an American: CIA field agent Timothy
Hallet Tracy, an ingenious master of deception
who oversaw everything from laundering cash
to masterminding acts of terror, all while maintaining a cover identity as a filmmaker at work
on a documentary. The reports also mentioned
that he’d been arrested twice before, in October and February, for suspicious activities.
“He is trained and he knows how to infiltrate
and how to handle sources and security
information,” said Rodríguez Torres. “Those big

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powers who do this type of spying, they often
use the facade of a filmmaker, documentarymaker, photographer or journalist. Because
with that facade they can go anywhere, penetrate any place.”
President Maduro wasted no time in casting
himself as the noble proletarian hero when he
addressed the press. “The gringo who financed
the violent groups has been captured,” said
Maduro. “I gave the order that he be detained
immediately and passed over to the attorney
general’s office. Nobody can be destabilizing
this country, whatever they believe, because
they’re on the side of the bourgeoisie.”
The flurry of news reports about Tim included
a handful of quotes from his friends and family,
all of whom proclaimed his innocence. Aengus
James, a producer-director who had worked
with Tim, told the Associated Press, “They don’t
have CIA in custody. They don’t have a journalist in custody. They have a kid with a camera.”
On 27 April Tim was formally charged with
criminal conspiracy, making false statements
and using a false document. He was denied
bail. According to Venezuelan law, the government would be granted 45 days to prepare its
case before a hearing on 11 June, when the
judge would rule whether to move forward
with a criminal trial. No one with any knowledge of Venezuelan criminal law expected Tim
to have a chance of winning a court battle, so
the upcoming hearing would almost certainly