RAFAEL “Chi Chi” QUINTERO
Felix Rodriguez – Shadow Warrior (Simon & Schuster, 1989)
(p. 100)
…The problems Shackley, Clines, and the other CIA officers based in Miami would face were considerable. The MRR leader Francisco was dead, executed by Castro on April 17. His replacements, handpicked by the Americans, were Manuel Guillot Castellanos and Rafael Quintero. Their task was to infiltrate and rebuild the shattered MRR organization inside Cuba.
But it would not be easy….there was resentment towards Guillot and Quintero from many MRR resistance fighters still active. Those resistance fighters operating inside Cuba felt that those who stayed there, not a pair who fled after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, should set the priorities. Still, Guillot and Quintero had Agency money and resources behind them – and the CIA operation based in Miami, code named JMWAVE, was huge. ….
Indeed, within two weeks of my return from Venezuela I was on my way back to Cuba. My job ws to reactivate an infiltration route, which would later serve to move Guillot and Quintero into Cuba…..
Like me, Jose Basulto became an infiltration-team member. And because he was a radio operator, he got to spend a few weeks at the CIA’s “farm” at Fort Peary, Virginia. The Cubans nicknamed it “The Icebox,” because they went there in the winter (many saw snow for the first time courtesy of the CIA.}
Basulto was one of five men sent to the city of Santiago de Cuba in Oriente province before the invasion. He was an architecture student, and, unlike me, he didn’t go in surreptitiously by boat. Instead, he posed as a student from Boston College coming home on vacation, and he flew straight into Havana airport. Later, when things fell apart, Basulto managed to jump the fence at the Guantanamo U.S. Naval Base, and was flown back to Miami immediately. The other members of his team weren’t so lucky – all were killed or captured…..
I was happy to be working with the Agency in 1962. Basulto was not. He felt – and still feels – that the CIA was more interested in promoting the U.S. national interests than it was in seeing a free and democratic Cuba. Basulto has always felt that the Agency’s dealings with Cubans reflected a dangerous mixture of cynicism and naivete…..
So Basulto quit working with the CIA and decided to strike out on his own. Like many Cubans in Miami, he was outraged by what he perceived as the Kennedy administration’s public softness on Fidel. During the first halfl of 1962, Kennedy’s tone on Cuba was indeed much less strident than it had been prior to the Bay of Pigs. The Agency was pushing fewer paramilitary operations and more straight intelligence gathering.
In March, for example, they tasked Rafael Quintero, to find out the number of checkpoints between Moron and Havana; to evaluate the efficiency of neighborhood defense committees; to report on any changes in documents and identity cards; and to look closely at military operations in the Keys. He was asked to “give us the general psychological situation of the people in respect to the communist government,” and was also queried about Castro’s success in indoctrinating the Cuban people…..
Another, less publicized vow was made by President Kennedy….It gave 2506 Brigade officers the opportunity to become commissioned as regular U.S. Army officers, even though we were not citizens…..So I accepted the President Kennedy’s offer, was commissioned as a second lieutenant, and in March, 1963 I reported for my basic training at the infantry school in Fort Benning, Georgia.
But even before the basic course was completed, I had a visit from Manuel Artime and Rafael “Chi Chi” Quintero, which changed the direction of my life once again.
“We’re going to overthrow Castro – this time we’re really going to do it,” they said, explaining that the President of the United States himself was sponsoring a liberation movement. Even better, this force would be entirely Cuban-run and Cuban-led. ….
[BK Notes - This would be Operation AMWORLD, that Carl Jenkins was affiliated with as well.]
The operation would be run out of Central America, utilizing hit-and-run tactics against Castro, stinging him like a boxer with repeated jabs until he becomes weak and could mount a major military attack.
They guaranteed the U.S. Government was behind the plan; that it was sponsored by Robert Kennedy and the President himself. They asked me to become a high-ranking officers in the endeavor, heading up the communications division. The only hitch was that I’d have to resign my army commission. The operation was to be covert…..
Still, I’d know them both for awhile. I’d met Chi Chi Quintero in 1956. There were three good-looking sisters from Camaguey who were spending the summer in Veradero Beach that year. I dated the eldest, Chi Chi the youngest, and his brother dated the middle sister….
After Francisco’s death, Chi was one of the resistance leaders I infiltrated back inside Cuba – there is a picture taken of us together on one of those missions.
Now he was Artime’s deputy. Manuel Artime was one of those charismatic people you get to meet only once or twice in a lifetime. I’d known him since 1960, when he was political leader of MRR….
Artime was in his early thirties, with dark wavy hair and a husky voice that served him well as a public speaker. He was one of those people who, if he showed up at your home, would give your mother a kiss and within five minutes she’d be cooking his favorite dish for him.
“What assurance do you have it’s a U.S. operation?” I asked Artime.
“What assurance do you need?” he answered.
I thought for a minute. “All right,” I said. “You say you want to give me special communications training. Give it to me here, in U.S. Army uniform.”
“If that’s what you want, OK.”
A short time afterward, two civilians who said their names were Mr. Moose and Mr. Flannigan showed up at Fort Benning to give me and two others communications training, on the base and in uniform. That convinced me that Artime was planning a bona fide U.S. Government-sponsored operation, and I took steps to resign my commission. …
The fact of the matter was that the fight for Cuba was and remains the central focus of my life. Such is the case for many of my generation.
The summer of 1963, for example, marked the end of an era for many Americans – although they didn’t realize it at the time….The summer of 1963 was the last of America’s innocent summers, the summer before JFK was assassinated in Dallas; the last summer before the name Vietnam insinuated itself into our national consciousness.
For us, veterans of Castro’s prisons, fighters since our teens (I was only still twenty-two that summer), virtually none of these things mattered or existed. We lived outside the mainstream of American culture – societal orphans, whose one goal was Castro’s overthrow and the reestablishment of a democratic republic on our homeland.
For me, the summer of 1963 was infantry training at Fort Benning, followed by Mr. Moose and Mr. Flannigan’s tutorials in the fine arts of clandestine communications. ….
…. I made my plans, and just around the time President Kennedy was assassinated, I left for Central America.
I spent almost two years in Nicaragua, running the communications network for Artime. The scope of the operation was considerable – more than three hundred people in all, based in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Miami. Our three main bases were in Nicaragua, the operations headquarters, my communications base, and the commando’s base. Artime was in Miami, and our arms cache was in Costa Rica. The funding for the project came from the CIA, but the money’s origin was hidden through the use of a cover corporation, a company called Maritima BAM, which Artime’s initials are spelled backwards. Periodically, deposits would be made in Maritime BAM’s accounts, and disbursed by Cuban corporation officers. The U.S. Government had the deniability it wanted; we got the money we needed.
The funds were spent well. We had two mother ships, each 250 feet long; two 50-foot aluminum-frame Swift boats for our commando forces, plus assorted smaller craft for silent landings and special operations. There was one C-47 aircraft plus a couple of Cessnas and smaller Beaver aircraft that were capable of water landings. Our weapons came from Germany on a huge barge that we hid up a Costa Rican river. There were more than 200 tons of arms – all American-made – including a pair of 20mm anti-aircraft cannons in case Castro decided to stage an air raid on the communications headquarters, which was under my command. In all the operation ended up costing the Americans somewhere in the area of $6 million over two and a half years.
We staged fourteen missions in that time, of which four achieved their objectives. While the success rate was low, it was not. The first year and a half was spent getting the project organized. We were running an entirely self-sufficient operation, put together from scratch. In fact, what we did in Nicaragua twenty-five years ago has some pretty close parallels to the Contra operation today……
For example, patience is an essential requirement. Resistance operations take time and do not become successful overnight. Each element must be built slowly to insure success. My area of responsibility was communications. I held the rank of major and commanded ninety men. The problems we faced were not insurmountable, but they required time to solve. I had to come up with methods that allowed us to communicate securely with infiltration teams and commando units many miles from their home base. I had to rig communications systems between each of our bases and our political headquarters in Miami. and mobile systems for our boats. These are tremendously complicated procedures because radio frequencies vary greatly according to the time of day, atmospheric conditions, and weather, as anybody who is a ham radio operator knows.
I had to train operators to work with high-frequency radios, telegraphy devices, encoders, decoders, one-time cipher pads and the like – the whole tradecraft of communications – and have them ready to go operational within a few months. I had to design and oversee the construction of our communication sheds….
The most vital thing I had to do was create a signal plan for the operation, something that took me weeks to complete. The signal plan is the centerpiece of all secure communications operations. It tells you what frequencies to use and when to use them; what call signs to use and when to use them. WE, for example, transmitted and received on two frequencies to make enemy interception more difficult. The signal plan also tells you in what sequence the frequencies are used, when they change – and how often. In addition, it determines what ciphers will be employed. We use an Agency five-letter cipher code that is even today almost impossible to break because it is based on random groupings of letters, each of which is used only once.
This was just my own area of responsibility; there was much more involved in the total operational scheme. Boat captains and crews had to be hired and trained. Commando units had to learn to work together as teams. Intelligence networks had to be set up and intelligence gathered, evaluated and passed on. Up-to-date documents, everything from identity cards and drivers licenses to the sorts of detritus normally found in an old coat and trouser pockets, had to be designed and fabricated. Forward operational bases had to be scoped out and our long supply lines designed.
Each of these elements takes time. Each takes planning. And once they are complete,.... it takes sustained effort to equip and train a sharp fighting force, no matter how good its motivation may be (and ours was very, very high)…..
[BK Notes- See Carl Jenkins reports on this operation: https://www.maryferrell.org/
(After shooting up a ship they thought was the Cuban Granma)….We subsequently discovered that the ship was carrying a boiler for a Cuban sugarcane facility as well as some Christmas foodstuffs. We felt terrible. Soon after the incident, our operations were rolled up. Our fast boats were taken by the Agency and sent to Africa, where they saw service in the Congo. Some of the people who served with me in Nicaragua volunteered to fight in Africa too….
[BK- End of AMWORLD]
(Years later)….I watched, for example, as my friend Tom Clines and my fellow infiltrator Rafael Chi Chi Quintero became more and more allied with Edwin Wilson, who had become a renegade CIA agent.
By late 1979, while I didn’t know the whole picture – like the fact that Wilson had sol Quaddafi tons of C-4 plastic explosives, which would be used against Americans and other Western nations by radical and communist guerilla movements…..
I decided not to have anything more to do with Wilson or any of his associates, and cooled my friendships with Cline and Chi Chi Quintero. …..
Late in July. Rafael Quintero told me that Secord and North were going to close everything down – no further money was available for salaries, fuel, housing, or other expenses, he said. I now what was happening. Secord and Company didn’t want to spend another dime until they sold the whole operation to the CIA, or whoever was going to take over the resupply duties for the U.S. Government. Meanwhile the Nicaraguan Freedom Fighters were getting screwed. I talked with the pilots and crews, who all volunteered to keep going without getting paid…For the moment we didn’t need Secord’s people. ….
[BK Notes: Not long after that Eugene Hasenfas’ supply plane was shot down by Sandinistas and he was captured with business cards for both Felix Rodriguez and Rafael Chi Chi Quintero, and the whole Iran-Contra
affair became public and a major media story.
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