As reported on Wired.
BY ROBERT MCMILLAN
John McAfee. Photo: Brian Finke
One of the reporters who snuck out of Belize with John McAfee earlier this month said the adventure was “dangerous, amazing, touching, and many other adjectives that I cannot remember right now.”
Turns out that the words that eluded him were “rainy” and “lucky.”
On the day after Christmas, McAfee posted a long blog post describing how he gave Belizean authorities the slip and snuck out of the country to avoid questioning (and in his estimation, wrongful prosecution) following the murder of his neighbor, Greg Faull.
“It’s visually interesting and it is mostly a happy story — in line with most Christmas stories,” he wrote.
The former software executive describes an operation that was heavy in advance planning and trickery. He says he planted a lookalike (“my double — a man I have known for over 30 years and who years ago legally changed his name to John McAfee”) and had him picked up by authorities in the northern Belize-Mexico border, while he and a group of friends and reporters loaded up a truck and headed in the opposite direction, to a southern town called Punta Gorda. With the news that he’d been arrested broadcasting on a local news station, McAfee figured that checkpoint security would relax.
McAfee followed another friend who was driving one of his pickup trucks to avoid checkpoints on the highway. This was another decoy, McAfee said. “If they stopped the truck, I knew the checkpoint officers would be swarming all over it. Subsequent traffic would be likely to be waved through.”
But then, he also had a secret weapon: the weather. McAfee made sure that his dash happened on a rainy day. “In Belize, no checkpoint officers will ever stop a car in the rain,” he wrote.
He says he blew through all three highway checkpoints on that early December day without ever being stopped.
From Punta Gorda, he and his 20-year-old girlfriend Samantha Vanegas and two Vice reporters sailed into Livingston, Guatemala.
A few days later, he was arrested in Guatemala, after the Vice reporters he was traveling withinadvertently disclosed his location. He was deported to Miami on December 12 and is now slowly driving west along back roads, his hair color changed, “staying at cut-rate motels and eating at Denny’s.”
He says he plans to tell his side of the story more completely — including, no doubt, a shot or two at his nemesis, the government of Belize — next Thursday. “People sometimes forget that I founded one of the largest computer security firms in the world, and I didn’t achieve that by not knowing how to access protected or secret information,” he wrote on Monday.
“I wear construction clothes one day, farmers clothes the next, and the next day dress like a traveling salesman,” he wrote on his blog. “I think my best friends would not recognize me.”
Or so he says.