During the 70s and 80s Ms Lorenz made headlines around the world after revelations naming her as America's woman superspy and during her testimony to commissions probing the assassination of President Kennedy.

In Marita, Ms Lorenz, now 53, gives a startling and graphic insight into the workings of the CIA, describing the manipulation, coercion and dirty tricks employed by agents whom she charges with planning failed assassination attempts on the life of Castroand complicity in the shooting of President Kennedy.

Her story is a web of CIA plots and counterplots, revealing details of the CIA's secret training camp in the Florida Everglades, and of gun-running in fast cruising boats stolen by agents to fund a host of nefarious missions.

Ms Lorenz became the mistress of Cuban President Fidel Castro when she was 19, falling pregnant and being abducted from their Havana hotel apartment late in her pregnancy by shadowy figures in the Castro headquarters.

Drugged by her unknown abductors, she was induced into early delivery and forced to flee Havana - straight into the arms of the American Central Intelligence Agency in Miami. Not knowing whether her child had lived or died, though CIA agents assured her the infant had died, she was coerced into an anti-Castro unit dedicated to removing the new president.

In a ruthlessly efficient Everglades training camp she was trained as an assassin and ultimately returned to Havana where, instead of killing Castro, she returned to his bed, flushing her death pills down the toilet.

Back in the United States she became embroiled in clandestine CIA operations, working with agents furious at her for wrecking the Castro assassination operation.

In 1961 Ms Lorenz met ousted Venezuelan president Marcos Perez Jimenez and became his mistress, giving birth to his daughter. But the union was to be shortlived, culminating in Perez being extradited to Venezuela to answer charges of fleeing the country with more than US$13 million (HK$100.4 million) in state funds.

Now it was Ms Lorenz's turn to run from the CIA whom she was convinced had her marked for execution.

Foiled in the attempt and finding new ways to dominate Ms Lorenz, she was once again coerced back into the CIA's most covert assassination unit and headed off to Dallas late in November 1963 in the company of a group of agents bristling with rifles, shotguns and handguns; and in the company of ''a thin, gaunt man'' called Ozzie.

Knowing an assassination was being planned but, according to her memoirs, only vaguely aware that Kennedy was to be in Dallas at the same time, she abandoned the group after a Mafia-connected nightclub owner, Jack Ruby, joined the agents in their hotel room and objected violently to the presence ''of this broad''.

On her return to Miami she heard Kennedy had been killed and fled in terror with her daughter to Venezuela in a bid to reunite with her incarcerated lover, Jimenez.

Thrown into a Caracas jail, secluded in a mountain village then dumped in the jungle by Venezuelan authorities, the adventures continued at Indiana Jones pace.

A year later she was rescued from her jungle isolation and returned to the US where the FBI recruited her to help in monitoring the movements of Soviet diplomats and suspected spies.

A woman who lived for the day, Ms Lorenz recounts how, while mistress of one FBI agent, she conducted affairs with his partner and a policeman.

Perhaps the most poignant part of the book is her account of her duties in the Florida refugee camp, where she reveals murder, rape, beatings and drugging of inmates was a common practice among camp guards.

Ms Lorenz's story is told without passion, but depicts a woman whose life seems never to have been her own.