BK NOTES: I don't usually post other's work here, and post them at JFKCountercoup2 - as sources and links to footnotes. But This is an exception as it is necessary to read this to understand who killed JFK, how and why they did it.
I originally went looking for this original quote of Watergate burglar Eugenio Martinez, that I actually recall reading from the August 1975 issue of Harpers Magazine:
“There was
an attempt by this country to overthrow Castro, and it was not to be by
elections,” he says. “It was to be by war. The papers now want to say there
were plots. Well, I can tell you there were plots. I took a lot of weapons to
Cuba. Some of them were very special weapons for special purposes –
Springfields with bolt actions, rifles only used by snipers. They were not sent
to shoot pigeons or kill rabbits. Everyone in the underground was plotting to
kill Castro, and the CIA was helping the
underground. I was with the underground, as well as with the CIA, so you could
say I was involved in the plots, too, but that is all so obvious.”
I also make note of the fact that former CIA Chief of Station in Moscow - Rolf Larson - recently remarked at a major international conference that if the CIA was involved in the assassination of President Kennedy - it probably came out of the JMWAVE station. That's a heavy duty remark from a former high-level CIA official, and I concur.
Which requires a very close look a the CIA's JMWAVE station in Florida - beginning with The Kennedy Vendetta by George Crile III and Taylor Branch
The Kennedy Vendetta – How the CIA Waged a silent war against Cuba -
Harpers Magazine - August 1975
By George
Crile III and Taylor Branch
NARA
Record Number: 104-10310-10203
During the
last days of the Eisenhower Administration the assassination of Fidel Castro
presented itself as an engaging possibility to various people in Washington who
had reason to mistrust a successful revolution so close to the coast of
Florida. Some of those people discussed the possibility with the CIA, which had
arranged sudden changes of government in Guatemala and Iran, and it has been said
that a few agents left for the Caribbean with instructions to bring about a
coup d’etat. Little more was heard from them until the debacle at the Bay of
Pigs.
The
invasion, otherwise known as “the glorious march on Havana,” had been
sponsored by the Kennedy Administration, and the new President apparently
perceived the defeat as an affront to his ride. Within a matter of weeks he
committed the United States to a secret war against Cuba that eventually
required the services of several thousand men and cost as much as $100 million a year. The war continued for four years. Kennedy entrusted its direction to
the CIA, which, depending on the testimony of the witnesses telling the story,
conducted an operation that could be described either as a large-scale vendetta
or a small crusade.
The Agency launched a succession of commando raids on the
Cuban coast and encouraged a number of assassins to make attempts on Castro’s
life. As late as 1964 the Agency was landing weapons in Cuba every week and
sending up to fifty agents on missions to destroy oil refineries, railroad
bridges, and sugar mills.
The
secret war failed in all of its objectives. Instead of overthrowing Castro, it
identified his revolution with the cause of Cuban nationalism and forced him
into an alliance with the Soviet Union. The way in which the war was conducted,
of necessity by means of stealth and criminal violence, established unfortunate
precedents. Always in the name of a higher truth (More often than not the
defense of “free and democratic societies” against an alien tyranny), a great
many people in the American government were persuaded to violate their own
laws, to tell convenient lies, and to admire the methods of organized crime. It
is impossible to say whether these precedents had anything to do with the history
of the subsequent monplace, as did the discovery of official conspiracy and
concealment, and what began as another secret war in Vietnam also came to depend
upon a hit man’s body count.
This
article derives from the year-long investigations of two contributing editors
to Harper’s. Their forthcoming book, which will contain the complete result of
their investigations, and which will be published by Harper’s Magazine Press,
deals with the experience of the men recruited to fight the secret war in Cuba.
Two of the principal figures in the book, Bernard Barker and Rolando Martinez,
were employed by the CIA in 1961 as agents. When they were arrested at
Watergate in 1972, they still thought of themselves as servants of the moral
law.
The
following narrative begins with the embarrassment of the Kennedy Administration
after the Bay of Pigs.
IN
WASHINGTON, President Kennedy struggled to comprehend how so total a disaster
could have been produced by so many people who were supposed to know what they
were doing, who had wrecked governments other than Castro’s without mishap or
detection. They had promised him a secret success but delivered a public
fiasco…….
….(Ted)
Shackley and his colleagues shaped a plan to exploit Castro’s weaknesses. And
in February of 1962 he left for Miami to organize the secret war.
THE
SECRET COMMAND
A SMALL
CIA OFFICE had existed in Miami since the mid-1950s as a routine outpost where
a few aging agents interviewed travelers returning from abroad. Scores of agents
had descended on Miami during the preparation for the Bay of Pigs invasion, but
they left soon after the debacle. With the beginning of the secret war, a new
station sprang up to serve as the command post for all of the CIA’s world-wide
anti-Castro operations. Shackley’s arrival amounted to a blank check from the
Kennedy White House and the already large station quickly became the largest
CIA station in the world.
The
station, known by its CIA code name as JM WAVE,* was unique in the Agency’s
history. “It was a real anomaly,” said Ray Cline. “It was run as if it were a
foreign country, yet most of our agents were in the state of Florida. People
just overlooked the fact that it was a domestic operation.”
The
station operated with an annual budget well in excess of $50 million. It
fielded a permanent staff of more than 300 American employees, mostly case
officers, who, in turn employed and controlled a few thousand more Cuban
agents. The average JM WAVE case officer would be responsible for between four
and ten Cuban agents of intermediate statute known as “principal agents,”
or “PAs” – and each PA would be
responsible for between ten and thirty regular agents. In addition to the case
officer-agent network, there were hundreds of support people and American
military officers under contract to the Agency. The headquarters for JM WAVE
were located at the former Navy blimp center on the south campus of the
University of Miami. The cover name given to the well-secured building was
Zenith Technical Enterprises, ** a front corporation, or “proprietary,”
organization by the CIA to conceal its operations. In addition to Zenith
the Agency operated another fifty-four dummy corporations – boat shops,
real-estate firms, detective agencies, travel companies, gun shops – as
proprietary fronts to give cover employment for the case officers and agents
outside Zenith headquarters. A former high official in the JM WAVE command
described the size of the CIA presence in Florida:
“We had
more than 100 vehicles under permanent lease for the case officers. The
lower-level types got Chevies and Plymouths, and the higher-ups got Pontiacs.
Ted Shackley, the station chief, drove a Cadillac. We had our own goddamn gas
station to supply the fleet of cars. There was a tremendous logistics warehouse
that included everything from machine guns to caskets. We had our own medical
station, our own polygraph teams, our own psychologists.
** In
later years newspaper reports alleged that Zenith was a CIA front. JM WAVE
dealt with the inconvenience by changing the name to Melmar.
“Then we
had a couple of little airlines, hundreds of boats, safe houses all over the
area and paramilitary bases throughout the Florida Keys.”
“There
were several staffs in the station. One was subsidizing just about everything in
the exile community. If an anti-Castro guy started up a weekly paper, we’d give
him some money and help him get the rag on the street. The end result of this
was that you had the whole community monitored. We had another staff, a big one
that was debriefing a couple hundred refugees a day. There was a large staff of
analysts, and a technical staff to read mail or send letters in secret writing
to contacts in Cuba, with instructions for them to first spill lemon juice on
them or run a hot iron over a letter to get the writing to come out.”
Just as
JM WAVE was the apex of a pyramid spreading out over South Florida, it was also
the center for international coordination of the secret war. Every major CIA
station in the world had at least one case officer assigned to Cuban
operations, reporting directly or indirectly to the Miami station. In Europe,
for example, all Cuban matters were routed through a regional headquarters in
the Frankfurt station, which reported to JM WAVE. All Latin American stations
had Cuban specialists, with standing orders to implement a three-pronged
operational plan: (1) gather all possible intelligence on Castro’s intentions
and capabilities in the country; (2) influence the host country to break
diplomatic and trade relations with Cuba; and (3) stimulate anti-Castro
propaganda in the host country.
JM WAVE
wanted to know in advance about all travelers to and out of Cuba so that the
travelers could be asked for information about Cuba, or so that their
conversations could be bugged if the person were knowledgeable enough. And if,
say, the Tokyo station reported that a high official of the Castro government
was preparing to visit Tokyo to make a “recruitment pitch” to the official – i.e.,
try to persuade, bribe, or blackmail the official to defect and provide JM WAVE
with intelligence.
A
STRATEGY OF SABOTAGE
THE
STRATEGY OF THE SECRET WAR was based on the conviction that the masses of Cuban
people didn’t believe in Castro and would revolt if life became sufficiently
sour. As in all previous Cuban revolutions, the chief tactical aim of the
strategy was to promote disaffection by sabotaging the Cuban economy.
In the
overt aspect of the campaign, the United States placed a total embargo on all
trade with Cuba; it moved to persuade and, when necessary, to blackjack allies
to join the embargo. For its part, the CIA was to hasten the decline of the
Cuban economy by initiating what Ray Cline described as “punitive economic
sabotage operations.” Years later the former CIA deputy director for
intelligence seemed to have second thoughts about those considerations: “Looking
back on it, you might think all it accomplished was to make Castro beholden to
the U.S.S.R.,, but the CIA actively pursued this [policy]. We were sending
agents to Europe to get in touch with shippers to discourage them from going
to Cuba, and there were some actions to sabotage cargoes – to contaminate them,
things like that.”
One of
the CIA officers who helped direct the worldwide sabotage efforts offered this
description of the Agency’s efforts:
“There
was a special technical staff in Langley [Virginia] working on these problems.
They were economically oriented and they would come up with all kinds of grand
plans for disrupting the Cuban economy – everything from preventing the Cubans
from getting credit to figuring out how to disrupt sugar sales. There was lots
of sugar being sent out from Cuba, and we were putting a lot of contaminants in
it. We would even open up boxes and chip off a gear lock on a machine.
“There
were all kinds of sabotage acts. We would have our people pour invisible,
untraceable chemicals into lubricating fluids that were being shipped to Cuba.
It was all planned economic retrogression. Those fluids were going to be used
for diesel engines, and that meant the parts would wear out faster than they
could get replacements. Before we sabotaged a product like that we would go to
the manufacturer and see if we could convince him to do it: if that wouldn’t
work, then we would just put the science-fiction crap in ourselves when the
shipment was en route.
“We were really doing almost anything you could dream up. One of our more sophisticated operations was convincing a ball-bearing manufacturer in Frankfurt, Germany, to produce a shipment of ball bearings off center. Another was to get a manufacturer to go along with you on that kind of project because he has to rest his whole mold. And he is probably going to worry about the effect on future business. You might have to pay him several hundred thousand dollars or more.
“We were really doing almost anything you could dream up. One of our more sophisticated operations was convincing a ball-bearing manufacturer in Frankfurt, Germany, to produce a shipment of ball bearings off center. Another was to get a manufacturer to go along with you on that kind of project because he has to rest his whole mold. And he is probably going to worry about the effect on future business. You might have to pay him several hundred thousand dollars or more.
“I know
Jack Anderson wrote about us paying off a Japanese freighter captain to ram a
shipload of buses in the Thames on its way to Cuba. Anderson claims it sunk
them. But I’m rather skeptical about that story – I would have known about it
if it were true. But it is true that we were sabotaging the Leland buses going
to Cuba from England, and that was pretty sensitive business.”
SOME OF
THE SABOTAGE OPERATIONS were so minor that the case officers considered them
nothing more than harassment. For example, the Agency helped wealthy Cuban
exiles file suit to seize Cuban property in compensation for their property in
Cuba that had been confiscated by Castro. As a result, a Cuban airplane landing
in Mexico City or Toronto might be attacked and tied up in legal proceedings.
Such impoundments rarely worked, but they tied up some Cuban resources.
So did
the commando raids. In the summer of 1961, JM WAVE began running paramilitary
missions against targets inside Cuba – small ones at first, and then larger
ones, such as sugar mills and oil refineries. These raids damaged the Cuban
economy directly, and they also forced Castro to divert money and manpower into
coastal defenses. In 1961 he had 200,000 men under arms, plus a large
administrative bureaucracy and a whole industry at work on civil-defense
installations. For JM WAVE, the commando raids required huge expenditures for
boats, weapons, secret naval bases along the Florida Keys, logistics support, training
facilities and salaries for the Cuban commandos and their commanders. The
Agency had to maintain a clandestine navy – in which Rolando Martinez was one
of the most efficient boat captains – as well as a paramilitary army.
It was
an enormous task for JM WAVE to hide its vast apparatus for the secret war.
Since most of its agents and assets were in Florida, there was no American
Embassy to provide the official cover or the diplomatic immunity under which
the Agency normally works. One problem with running a secret war out of a CIA
station in an American city is that the very nature of the work constantly
forces violations of local, state, and federal laws. All the boat missions to
Cuba were technically illegal under the Neutrality Act, the maritime laws, and
immigration statutes, so the station had to work out special arrangements
with Customs, Immigration, and the Coast Guard.
It was
illegal for agents to drive around with machine guns and plastic explosives in
their cars, as they often did, and the station had to establish liaison with
seventeen police jurisdictions down the Florida coast and into the Keys. The
result was that any agent who was arrested for anything from drunken driving to
illegal possession of firearms would be quickly released. It was often illegal
for case officers and agents to file corporate papers, bank statements, and
income-tax returns using cover names and false sources of income. This required
the cooperation of judges, the Justice Department, the Internal Revenue Service,
and numerous local institutions in Florida.
Perhaps
only in a city like Miami could the clandestine empire of JM WAVE escape public
attention. In the early years of the secret war, Miami already resembled
wartime Casablanca. It swarmed with spies, counterspies, exiled dictators,
Mafia executives, refugees, entertainers, countesses, smugglers, gamblers,
fortune tellers, gun runners, soldiers of fortune, fugitives, and loudly
dressed tourists – many pursuing possibly criminal ends against the garish
backdrop of Miami Beach. Nothing seemed to stand out in the crowd, and that
helped the CIA protect its cover. SO did the bewildering variety of anti-Castro
movements, most of which had been transplanted south to Florida – with names
like Monticristi, the 4th of November, Alpha 66, the Revolutionary
Student Directorate, the Movement of Revolutionary Recovery, the 30th
of May – and dozens of small groups that consisted only of a leader and a few
ardent followers.
But not
even in Miami could JM WAVE have survived without the full scale collaboration
of virtually every significant sector of the city’s community – with newspapers,
civic organizations, and political leaders. In effect, they all had to joint
the conspiracy. For example, every time an agent went to get a drivers’s
license or passpoart, he would perjure himself; but as one former JM WAVE
official observed: “We all were perjuring ourselves at the time. All of the
Cubans regularly provided erroneous information to federal agencies at the CIA’s
direction. The same was true when they went to take out bank loans. We set up
relations with the banks because we had to give them phony information.”
The same
relations applied to the news media. As the former agent went on to explain: “We
didn’t have any trouble with the Miami papers. A paper like the Miami Herald
would have one or two reporters with jurisdiction for Cuba, and we would give
them access to the station. So we would feed them information and give them a
career out of handouts. The guys learned not to hurt you. Only occasionally do
you give them a big lie, and then only for a good reason. The paper was always
willing to keep things quiet for us.
“The
problems keeping a cover were endless, but you have to do all of this simply
to clear the way for your operation officers to be able to work without
interruption.”
CUBAN
RECRUITS
THE
AGENCY HAD LITTLE TROUBLE recruiting Cubans to risk their lives in the secret
war. For although the CIA had recently sent many of the exile community to
death or imprisonment in the Bay of Pigs invasion, there were still numerous
Cuban agents and new volunteers who believed that Castro could be overthrown
only with the assistance of the United States. There were bankers, doctors, and
businessmen among the Cuban agents of JM WAVE, as well as laborers and lifelong
revolutionaries, and they all welcomed another chance to strike out at Castro.
The Agency gave them the best training available, transporting them to its bases
in Central America and elsewhere for lessons in explosives, weapons, survival,
ambushes, logistics, and communications.
Although
Rolando Martinez was in many ways typical of the Agency’s Cuban volunteers, he
was more accomplished and experienced that most. When he surfaced in 1972 as one
of the Cuban-Americans captured in the Watergate break-in, Martinez was still
on the CIA payroll and had 354 missions recorded in Agency files. As a boat
captain in the clandestine navy of JM WAVE, he completed fifty missions before
the Bay of Pigs and would complete some seventy-five more during the first two
years of the secret war.
The main
difference in the paramilitary raids after the Bay of Pigs was that the American
supervisors often accompanied their Cuban agents to Cuba. The men dressed in
green fatigues, like those worn by Castro’s militia, and they carried machine
guns with silencers, recoilless rifles, and C-4, the plastic explosive. Their
secret bases ranged from lavish estates with indoor swimming pools and tennis
courts in Coral Gables to remote compounds in the Keys. In his early missions
after the Bay of Pigs, Martinez’s cargo usually consisted of weapons for the
underground’s caches or agents to be infiltrated into Cuba; a modest
infiltration could involve as many as sixty CIA agents.
All of
these operations were carried out with extraordinary attention to detail.
Briefings covered everything from analysis of the latest U2 photographs of the
target area to weather reports giving the exact time the sun would rise and set
on the Cuban coast. All operational plans were mapped out to account for every
minute of the landings, and there were contingency plans for possible
disasters. If captured, Martinez was instructed to say he was on a maritime
research project and that the information he was gathering was a privileged
nature. Like the other Cuban agents, he carried Cuban money and false papers.
Sometimes
Martinez captained his boat all the way from Florida to Cuba, but usually a
large mother ship would tow him to within fifty miles of the coast. He would
then take the commando team close to the shore in his “intermediary” craft, and
from a distance of a few hundred yards the agents landed in rubber lifeboats,
which had special electric motors fitted with silencers. Once they had landed,
Martinez communicated with them with a high-powered walkie-talkie. He carried
his own recoilless rifle, and in some instances he provided fire support for
the men when they met resistance on land or when a Castro gunboat pursued them.
More than once, he was given personal charge of weapons drops, in which
special rifles with silencers and telescopic sights were left in designated
inland spots. As always, there were some special twists to CIA secrecy: some of
the men being infiltrated into Cuba wore hoods on the whole trip so that the
boat crews could not see their faces.
THE
MISSION BECAME more ambitious in the late summer months of 1961, and in the
following years Martinez found himself working in large-scale raids aimed at
blowing up oil refinaries and chemical plants. Sometimes Martinez would drop of
a team and come back several days later to pick them up; at other times the
team would stay in Cuba for several weeks or months. The pick ups - or, in
Agency parlance – “exfiltration” missions – were the most nerve-wracking
assignments: there was always the chance that the agents had been captured and
forced to reveal the time and place of their rendezvous, in which event a trap
wold be waiting for the boat crew. The worst moments came during the long waits
for the agents who never arrived. Aboard ship on their way back to Florida, the
commandos would clean their weapons and talk of the targets they hit and the
Castro milita men they had killed.
There
were mission to Cuba almost every week, and the Cuban agents had to trust
entirely to the power and good intentions of the CIA. They didn’t know the
last names of their case officers; as a rule, they didn’t even know if the
agent’s first names were noms de guerre. Everything about the Company was
shrouded in mystery. The principle of “compartmentation,” or keeping
information in strictly limited compartments, was drilled into all employees.
To make sure that no one talked or listened outside his compartment, the Agency
employed hundreds of Cuban agents to watch other Cuban agents, and they, in
turn, were checked, as was everyone else, including the American case officers,
by periodic polygraph tests.
All of
these security precautions tended to leave the Cubans with little overall
knowledge of what the Company was doing, although everyone knew that the JM
WAVE station somehow could violate the laws of the land at will. There wold be
times when an agent would get drunk and be thrown in jail. Their case officers
would always get them out without any questions. Agents could get divorces
without having to go into open court, and they could carry all kinds of guns
around. Many times the Coast Guard would stop their boats on the way to Cuba,
and the captain merely had to say a code word to be waved on. The extralegal
powers of the Company added to the agents’ dependence on their case officers,
which, as Martinez recalls, was a strong one:
“Let me
tell you what it was really like. Your CO was for you like the priest. You had
to rely on him, because he was the one who could solve your problems. You
learned to tell him everything, your complete life. The important thing was
that you knew they would take care of you, and you knew they would take care of
your family if you were captured or killed on a mission. They supported all of
the families of the Brigade members, and they did the same for the families of
the men who were lost on our operations. They are still supporting them.
“Once a
Castro gunboat came after my boat on a mission off the north coast of Cuba, and
I radioed for help. Before we cold even decode the return message from the
base, we looked up and there were two Phantom jets and a Neptune flying over
us. It’s a trademark of the American forces in general. You have seen how in
Vietnam if a helicopter goes down, ten other helicopters will fly in to get the
pilot out. That was the same spirit that prevailed in our operations. I still
believe today that the Company might be able to do something for me about the
Watergate someday.”
THE
COWBOYS OF JM WAVE
ANOTHER
KIND OF VOLUNTEER prominent in the secret war was perhaps best exemplified by
the late William (Rip) Robertson. Robertson represented a special breed of CIA
operative – men with names like Boy Scout, and Rudy and Mike – who led the
military side of the secret war. They were not case officers – the bureaucrats
and diplomats who comprise the Agency’s permanent staff. Instead, they were
independent specialists under renewable contract to the CIA, known as “paramilitaries,” “PMs,” or “cowboys.” Ray Cline explained
their role in the Agency’s work: “You need to understand the national consensus
of the 1950s and ‘60s, when we believed the world was a tough place filled with
actual threats of subversion by other countries. The Russians had cowboys
around everywhere, and that meant we had to get ourselves a lot of cowboys if
we waned to play the game. You’ve got to have cowboys – the only thing is you
don’t let them make policy. You keep them in the ranch house when you don’t
have a specific project for them.”
At the
time of his arrival in Miami in the summer of 1961, Robertson had already become
a figure of romance. He had fought behind the lines in Korea for the CIA, and
he had endeared himself to the CIA’s Cuban agents by his performance at the Bay
of Pigs. Despite President Kennedy’s orders that no Americans land in the
invasion, Robertson was the first man ashore on one of the beaches. Later, when
Castro’s forces started routing the invaders, he went back in voluntarily to
rescue survivors. In Washington, during the investigation into the CIA’s
handling of the invasion, Robertson appeared as a witness and talked at length
with Robert Kennedy. He told his Cuban-commandos that Kennedy was all right,
which they took as a high compliment, since Robertson hated all politicians.
Rip
Robertson was close to fifty by the time he started running paramilitary
operations against Castro. He was a big man, about six foot two, with a
perpetual slouch and wrinkled clothes. Everything about him was unconventional.
He wore
a baseball cap and glasses tied behind his head with a string, and always had a
pulp novel stuffed into his back pocket. From the military point of view, nothing
looked right about his appearnece, but to the Cubans he was an idol who
represented the best part of the American spirit and the hope of the secret
war. Ramon Orozco, one of his commandos, remembers what the paramilitary
operations were like:
“After
the Bay of Pigs is when the great heroic deeds of Rip really began. I was on
one of his teams, but he controlled many teams and many operations. And
everything was good through 1963. Our team made more than seven big war missions.
Some of them were huge: the attacks on the Texaco refinery, the Russian ships
in Oriente Province, a big lumber yard, the Patrice Lumumba sulfuric acid plant
at Santa Lucia, and the diesel plant at Casilda. But they never let us fight as
much as we wanted to, and most of the operations were infiltraions and weapons
drops.
“We
would go on missions to Cuba almost every week. When we didn’t go, Rip would
feel sick and get very mad. He was always blowing off his steam, but then he
wold call us his boys, and he would hug us and hit us in the stomach. He was
always trying to crank us up for the missions. Once he told me, “I’ll give you $50
if you bring me back an ear.’ I brought him two, and he laughed and said, ‘You’re
crazy,’ but he gave me $100, and he took us to his house for a turkey dinner.
Rip was a patriot, an American patriot. Really, I think he was a fanatic. He
fought with the Company in Korea, in Cuba, and then he went to Vietnam. He
never stopped, but he also went to church and he practiced democracy.”
At the
end of December, 1961, Orozco went on a ten-day operation with a seven-man
team. The commandos blew up a railroad bridge and watched a train run off the
ruptured tracks. Then they burned down a sugar warehouse, and on Christmas Day,
with a detachment of militia apparently in pursuit, they sought to escape in
their rubber boat to an intermediary ship on which Rip and Martinez waited for
them. But this time, the American officers were not supposed to be going into
Cuban waters, much less to the shore, and Rip had already been reprimanded for
his previous adventures. Nevertheless, when his commandos missed their first
rendezvous, Rip loaded a rubber boat with rockets and recoilless rifles,
ordered another commando, Nester Izquierdo, to get in with him, and then
motored up and down the coast looking for signs of his men. He was back on
Martinez’s ship when Orozco called him from the shore.
“We had
a problem with the motor when we finally got in the boat. I had just shot some
guy with an M-3 silencer, and we had to get out, so we radioed Rip with the
distress signal: ‘Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh.’ Well, Rip came right into the bay. When
we saw him, we said, ‘That is the old man for you.’ We called him the old man.
And then he called out, ‘Come on, my boys!’ Later he told me why he had come in
for us. “I couldn’t lose the crazy guy,’ he said. He always called me the crazy
guy.”
Despite orders,
Rip continued to go on operations with his commandos. His superiors became so
angry that they resorted to ordering the Cuban boat captains not to allow him on
board the intermediary ships that took the teams to the shore. One of the boat
captains from those days, now a Washington lawyer, recalled the futility of
this restraint:
“Rip was
not supposed to get on the intermediary boat ‘not under any conditions.’ One
time, he was on my mothership, and his boys were about to go on an operation.
Rip said he felt sick, very sick, and then he goes down in the ship as if he is
going to lie down. The next minutes there’s Rip with his face all black with
charcoal, and he is wearing the uniform of the commandos – the hat and
everything – and he is all slouched down in the boat in the middle of the men
pretending he is not Rip. People knew it was him, but what could we do?”
“I loved
Rip, but oh, my God! He was not the kind of man you want as your enemy. If the
United States had just 200 Rips, it wouldn’t have any problems in the world. He
loved war, but it was very difficult for him to adjust to the kind of warfare we
were making. He wanted an open war, and were waging a silent one.”
UNDER
THE BEST OF CIRCUMSTANCES, the paramilitaries were a hard group to control, but
the problem was particularly intense during the secret war because they came to
identify so closely with their Cuban agents and with the cause of wrestling
Cuba from Castro, whom they saw as a simple tool of the Russians. They were
creatures of the Cold War, responding to the new call from the tough young
President who was not about to tolerate a Communist menace just ninety miles
from Florida. It was a time of high winds and strong feelings in politics. As
the case officer who worked with Robertson remarked: “It’s almost impossible
today to put your self back in those times when idealism ran so high, and we
felt we were on a crusade against evil, but that was what we felt.”
“People
think of the CIA’s paramilitary officers as thugs. But you would be amazed to
meet them. In Miami there was every conceivalbe kind of person represented in
the paramilitary units. Some had Ph.D.s, and some had gone to Ivy League
schools. There were a few who had lots of money, and of course there were some
adventure types. All of them were very emotional about their work. I’ve seen
lots of them cry at their failures, and there were many failures because of the
high casualties on these operations.”
The
difficulties of control were so great that the Agency often didn’t know which
missions were leaving in which directions. The various Cuban movements often
wanted independent raids to build their stature and reputation among the
anti-Castro Cubans. Some wanted to impress the Company with their skills in the
hope of obtaining jobs and financial support, while others went on their own in
order to escape CIA restrictions and control. JM WAVE gave some of these raids
the green light of encouragement, some the yellow light of toleration, and
others the red light of disapproval – in which even the FBI or Immigration or
Coast Guard wold be alerted to enforce the law.
The
confused maze of anti-Castro activity in South Florida during the secret war
included everything from officially organized, elaborate CIA teams to
impromptu groups of zealous students seeking to make a name for them selves.
This vagueness was well suited to the purposes of JM WAVE. To the extent that
an attack on Cuba was independent, it cut down on the station’s enormous
budget. And the existence of the independent movements helped mask the station’s
own activities; even an official commando raid could be passed off as the work
of uncontrollable Cuban groups. The Cuban agents themselves would not know the
status of a raid carried out by people outside their compartment, and there
would be endless speculation in Miami about how much support the Company had
given a commando raid here or an offshore mortar shelling there. Newspaper
reports – “Alpha 66 Hits Castro Sugar Mill” – settled nothing, of course, for
the agents knew they could mean anything.
Perhaps the
most famous of the quasi-independent attacks took place on August 24, 1952,
when six young Cubans piloted a boat to within 200 yards of the shore near
Havana and shelled the Blanquita Hotel. All six of the commandos had been
trained by the Company and worked for both JM WAVE and for the Revolutionary
Student Directorate. The boat they used, a thirty-one-foot Bertram named the
Juanin, belonged to the Directorate, as did the weapons for the attack – a recoilless
rifle, two fifty-caliber machine guns, and a twenty-millimeter cannon, all
purchased from Mafia gun dealers in Miami. The idea for the Blanquita Hotel
attack originated shortly after one of the commandos, Carlos (“Batea”)
Hernandez, returned from an official JM WAVE mission to disrupt that year’s
International Socialilst Youth Conference in
Helsinki.
When Batea landed at Miami Airport, one of his friends in the Directorate met him with word that an underworld contact was offering a twenty-millimeter cannon for sale at a bargain price of $300. Batea bought the cannon, and planned an attack based on intelligence that Czech and Russian military advisors, then coming into Cuba in large numbers, gathered for parties every Friday night at the Blanquita.
Helsinki.
When Batea landed at Miami Airport, one of his friends in the Directorate met him with word that an underworld contact was offering a twenty-millimeter cannon for sale at a bargain price of $300. Batea bought the cannon, and planned an attack based on intelligence that Czech and Russian military advisors, then coming into Cuba in large numbers, gathered for parties every Friday night at the Blanquita.
The
Juanin sailed into the harbor at Miramar, a suburb of Havana, and got so close
that Batea remembers seeing the lights in the ballroom and the uniforms of the
soldiers. His companions opened up with a five minute barrage at point-blank
range, inflicting heavy damages on the hotel before returning to Miami at
reckless speed.
Castro
denounced the Blanquita attack so loudly that it was banner news in the world
press. The Justice Department announced that the perpetrators of the attack had
been identified, and that further acts of that nature would be prosecuted as
violations of the Neutrality Act. JM WAVE announced nothing.
THE
SEMANTICS OF ASSASSINATION
DURING
THE EARLY YEARS of the secret war, the authorization for the overall policies
and for potentially embarrasing operations emanted from the 303 Committee (now
known as the 40 Committee), through which the President controlled missions
related to national security. Many of the men who sat on those committees now
acknowledge that the commando raids and sabotage operations were approved at the
highest levels of the U.S. government, but it is hard to find anyone who
remembers supporting them.
Marine
Gen. Victor (“Brute”) Krulak and his assistant, Col. Jack L. Hawkins, were in
charge of coordinating the Pentagon’s counterinsurgency forces. Krulak sat on
the committee that authorized Cuban raids, and Hawkins represented him on a
lower-level committee that met to consider other acts of sabotage against Cuban
targets. Both of them say they were skeptical of the tactics….best.
“The object
in Cuba was not to put down an insurgency,” said Hawkins, “but to develop one….
The….was done by the Agency. I remember them blowing up a refinery and making
efforts to burn up sugar fields – things like that – but none of them was very
successful. I don’t know whey they were doing it. What happens in these things
is that the bureaucrats fall in love with their operations and rational
thought just flies out the window.”
General
Maxwell Taylor, President Kennedy’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
offered the staunchest defense of the paramilitary side of the secret war. “Just
bear in mind,” he said recently, “that this was a period of general frustration
afer the Bay of Pigs over what to do about Castro. After all, Castro was
setting up training facilities and inviting Latin American Communists to comet
to Cuba to learn how to spread the revolution, and there were …. A lot of those
people. When you have an unpleasant neighbor who is kicking you in the shins,
you ask yourself, ‘Cant’t I just retaliate a bit and remind him that we’re
still around?’ They [the raids] weren’t completely rash, however. Otherwise we
would have discouraged them. But in a strategic sense they weren’t anything
more than just pin-pricks.”
CIA
officials now admit disarmingly that the pinpricks were part of the general
strategy of the secret war, but they point out that they were merely following
the direction set forth by the White House. And insofar as Cuban operations were
concerned, the White House tended to mean Robert F. Kennedy. Both Krulak and
Hawkins saw him as the moving force behind the policy, as did Under Secretary
of State George Ball. “Bobby was always for that kind of thing,” Ball said. “He
always used to go to the 303 Committee; he was fascinated by all that covert
stuff, counter-insurgency and all the garbage that went with it.”
THERE
WAS A CERTAIN CHARM about the way in which Robert Kennedy pursued his enemies.
His infectious idealism transformed the dry world of government memos into a
crusade against the devil, whether it was James Hoffa, organized crime, Fidel
Castro, or the Vietnam War. Like Nixon, he was ruthless. But, unlike Nixon, he
was convinced that the world would be on his side. The world most bandied about
inside the Kennedy Administration was tough, while outside everyone spoke of
Camelot.
Kennedy
and the CIA waged a secret war against Castro partly out of the combatants’
vindictiveness and partly out of a commitment to the democratic crusade. “I
remember that period so vividly,” said Ray Cline. “We were so wrapped up in
what the President wanted. Bobby was as emotional as he could be [about Cuba],
and he always talked like he was the President, and he really was in a way. He
was always bugging the Agency about the Cubans. I don’t doubt that talk of
assassinating Castro was part of Bobby’s discussion with some Agency people.”
There
were a number of high-level discussions about assassinating Castro, even before
the Cuban missile crisis mostly arising out of frustration with Castro’s
success as a Cold War adversary. It was an era when, as former national
security advisor McGeorge Bundy recently remarked, “We used to sit around the
White House all the time thinking how nice it would be if such and such a
leader did not exist. General Lansdale says that he chaired one meeting at
which an assassination proposal was made. Richard Goodwin, who chaired a White
House task force on Cuba, said that at one of the meetings Secretary of Defense
Robert McNamara advocated killing Castro. “I was surprised and appalled to hear
McNamara propose this,” said Goodwin. “It was at the close of a Cuba task force session, and he said that
Castro’s assassination was the only productive way of dealing with Cuba.”
Goodwin believes that Robert Kennedy might have stimulated such methods only
indirectly, perhaps unaware of the knight’s compulsion to fulfill the king’s
every wish. “To the extent that Bobby was involved in anything, it would have
been like Henry II asking rhetorically, ‘Who will free me of this turbulent
priest?’ and then the zealots going out and doing it.”
WHETHER
OR NOT THE ZEALOTS received direct orders from the President or the Attorney
General, they did receive orders to eliminate Castro from power in Cuba. The
secret war was the result of that policy, and Castro’s assassination, if not
specified, was a logical objective of that war.
Acting
on the President’s authority, JM WAVE trained several thousand Cubans in
guerrilla tactics, armed them with weapons and explosives, and sent them down
to the Caribbean with hopes of glory. All of them sought to end Castro’s hold
on Cuba, and many of them made their own attempts on Castro’s life, in the
impromptu tradition of the attack on the Blanquita Hotel.
By the
end of 1961, several men affiliated with the CIA had already been foiled in
attempts to kill him, among them Luis Toroella (executied), Eloy Guitierrez
Menoys (still imprisoned), William Morgan (executed), and Antonio Veciana
(escaped to the United States). Had these men succeeded, their efforts would
have been tied to the U.S. only
indirectly, if at all. Certainly their failures did not cause embarrassments of
the Bay of Pigs, and been a successful assassination by any one of them would
have ben impossible to trace to the Oval Office.
To the
CIA’s Cuban agents who fought in the secret war the search for proof of officially
sanctioned plots seems somewhat absurd. Martinez described it as largely a
question of semantics: “There was an attempt by this country to overthrow
Castro, and it was not to be by elections,” he says. “It was to be by war. The
papers now want to say there were plots. Well, I can tell you there were plots.
I took a lot of weapons to Cuba. Some of them were very special weapons for
special purposes – Springfields with bolt actions, rifles only used by snipers.
They were not sent to shoot pigeons or kill rabbits. Everyone in the
underground was plotting to kill Castro, and the CIA was helping the underground. I was with the underground,
as well as with the CIA, so you could say I was involved in the plots, too, but
that is all so obvious.”
Ray
Cline made a similar point: “I’m almost positive that there was no serious
CIA-controlled effort to assassinate anybody,” he said, “but I think the
intention of some infiltration teams was to do it. It was the spriit of lots of
Cubans and lots of the CIA case officers.”
THE
SECRET WAR SURFACES
IN
AUGUST OF 1961, just as the secret war was beginning to take shape. White House
advisor Richard Goodwin found himself at a party in Uruguay with Ernesto (Che)
Guevara. The chance encounter led to a conversation which seemed to sum up the
contradictions inherent in all of the American efforts to overthrow Castro.
Guevara
began by asking Goodwin to thank Kennedy for the Bay of Pigs invasion. Before
then, he said, Castro held a tenuous grip on the Cuban revolution, with the
economy in chaos and numerous internal factions plotting against him. But the
invasion, Guevara said jovially, had assured Castro’s hold on the country. It
had made him even more of a hero, as the man who had defended Cuba against the
greatest power in the world, Goodwin, by his own account, acknowledged the
backhanded compliment and asked Guevara to return the favor by invading the
U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo, Cuba. This would give Kennedy a pretext for
openly using America’s overwhelming military force, releasing him from the
clandestine restrictions of the secret war. Guevara smiled and said that Castro
would never be so stupid.
Neither
Castro nor John Kennedy was politically stupid, but they acted against each
other in an atmosphere of mutual paranoia and vengeance that eventually came
to the world’s attention as the Cuban missile crisis. To Fidel Castro, who was
attempting to become the first Cuban leader in history with a power base independent
of the United States, Kennedy was a necessary but dangerous enemy. In a sense,
Castro needed both the Bay of Pigs and the secret war to help him turn Cuba’s
revolutionary tradition into a war of independence against the United States,
and he made constant speeches to his people about the new American threat. “Imperialism
was shocked by the Bay of Pigs,” he said, “but now they are at it again. Their strategy
includes forming mercenary groups, sabotage groups, fifth columnists,
terrorists, and bands of counterrevolutionaries.” While Castro found U.S.
hostility helpful to the task of maintaining national unity within Cuba, he was
uncertain of Kennedy’s intentions, and he knew that the very survival of his
regime depended upon his holding the balance between useful little wars and a
fatal big one.
By the
summer of 1962 the economic warfare had a real effect on Castro, more than
offsetting the political gain he had achieved within Cuba. The Cuban economy
was deteriorating and had become more dependent on the Soviet Union than it had
been on the United States. In addition, the people were afraid that the
commando raids and paramilitary missions prefigured a new invasion. Castro had
triumphed at the Bay of Pigs, but, sooner or later, his luck would run out.
Castro turned to the Soviet Union for military protection as well as for
economic support, and he began receiving Russian missiles in the summer. For
all practical purposes, it was an act tantamount to invading Guantanamo, and so
Castro tried to do it secretly.
From
President Kennedy’s perspective, the events of mid-1962 were as alarming and
fateful as they were to Castro. Signs of the Communist advance filled the news.
Castro loudly proclaimed his goal of spreading the revolution across Latin
America, and at the same time the number of new refugees from Communist Cuba
had remained constant at about 3,000 a week. Some came on the Pan American
flights from Havana, some on commandeered yachts, and others on home made
rafts. All of them brought horror stories about life under the Cuban
dictatorship and only those personnel possessions they could carry in a single
suitcase. When the refugees landed at Opa-Locka Air Force Base, where the CIA maintained
a massive debriefing facility, at least one of them would bend down and kiss
the earth. In the debriefing sessions, many of the refugees told of the growing
Russian presence in Cuba, which was not difficult to see. By the fall, there
were 20,000 Russian soldiers and teams of Russian laborers there, working secretly to assemble the nuclear missiles. This word filtered up through the
CIA to President Kennedy, for whom the Russian presence carried the electric
political meaning of the Berlin Wall.
ON
OCTOBER 15, the day Kennedy was told that the U-2 photographs confirmed the
existence of Russian missiles in Cuba, Martinez and his boat crew were called
to their base at Summer Land Key and told that they would leave immediately on
a mission. For several months, they had been preparing for one of their biggest
operations – the destruction of the Matahambre copper mines in Pinar del Rio
Province. The ore from the mines, which accounted for 1 percent of Cuba’s gross
national product, was carried to the port of Santa Lucia along a twelve-kilometer elevated cable-car
system, supported by giant towers. CIA planners had determined that production
could be halted for a full year if the
towers were knocked out.
Twice
before, JM WAVE had sent teams to Cuba to blow up the mines. The first time, in
late 1961, two of the American paramilitary commanders had gone along to direct
the operation. In preparation for the mission, CIA technicians constructed a
full-scale model of one of the cable-car towers, and the commandos practiced
their demolition tactics for weeks. Everything appeared to have been taken into
account. But halfway to Cuba the mother ship’s motor conked out, the radio
battery went dead, and the team was left floating helplessly in the Caribbean.
The
mission was typical of many CIA operations – everyhing would be planned down to
the last second, and then some quirk or accident would throw the mission awry.
In the summer of 1962 Martinez took the commandos back for a second try, but
the team met a patrol of Castro militia and retreated to the ships.
As the
agents listened to the October 15 briefing, they realized that there was a
special urgency attached to the mission. “You do it,” they were told, “or don’t
bother to come back alive.” The next day,
Martinez, his boat crew, and all eight commandos left base on the Agency’s
150 foot mother ship. By the time they left the mother ship for Martinez’s
intermediary boat on the night of October 18, one of the largest amphibious
invasion forces since World War II was beginning to assemble in Florida and
neighboring states.
The Army’s
82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions were ordered ready for
immediate deployment, and 40,000 Marines stood ready as part of an amphibious
task force in the Caribbean, with another 5,000 Marines on alert at Guantanamo.
In all, the Army gathered 100,000 troops in the southern United States.
WHEN THE
COMMANDOS LANDED on the coast of Pinar del Rio Provinnce, they split up to set
the C4 charges around the cable-car towers. Before they could do so, some of
them were seen by a Cuban patrol, and Martinez saw militia search flares light
up the night skies. He waited in his boat near the shore, and six of the
commandos made it out to him after a brief fire fight. Martinez waited an hour
for the other two to return, and then went out to sea. He returned the next
nigh, and again the night after that.
On
October 22, Martinez took the boat in close to shore at dusk, with an infrared
light serving as a beacon for the two lost commandos The boat was within
shouting range of the coast when the radio operator said that the President was
about to make an address to the nation. The men turned the radio on low,
expecting Kennedy to announce a new crisis in Berlin or a new stance on rising
steel prices. Instead, the subject was Cuba, and the President was saying
everything the Cubans wanted to hear about the Russians and the missiles and the (reasons) for the United States to act. It was all too much for the ship’s
navagator, who grabbed the radio and put it on full volume. “He was so happy,”
Martinez later recalled, “that he didn’t care if anyone could hear the speech
from the coast. We had to make him turn it down.”
Back at
the base, Martinez was approached by a high ranking JM WAVE official who said
the U.S. was about to invade Cuba and asked Martinez if he would be willing to
parachute into Pinar del Rio, his old province, in advanace of the American
troops. Hundreds of the CIA’s other Cuban agents were ordered to stand by for
landings in which they would mark the beaches and serve as guides for paratroop
units.
A SECOND
WAVE
WHEN THE
CRISIS PASSED and most of the world felt relieved to have survived it, the
Cuban agents were disappointed but not disparing. They believed that Kennedy,
having stared “eyeball to eyeball” at Nikita Khrushchev and won, had acquired
renewed confidence in his capacity to overthrow Castro. They felt the momentum
swinging their way, and their spirits were buoyed still higher when they
learned that Kennedy was pressing his advantage in the negotiations for the
release of the 1,179 Bay of Pigs survivors still in Cuban jails. Castro’s
ransom price was $53 million in drugs, medical supplies, and cash. “Both of the
Kennedys felt a real sense of obligation to get those people out of jail,” said
Ray Cline. “They felt guilty and ashamed in the face of the refugees still down
there in Dade County; they couldn’t stay away from them, but they also couldn’t
face them. Both of them, particularly Bobby, spent countless hours getting the
drug manufacturers to get those guys out. There’s kind of a historical parallel
here. They must have felt like the Plumbers when they counted out the Cubans were
in (fallout) over Watergate. The question was how to get them out. Who’s going to do
it, will John Mitchell do it? It was pure bribery, what they did with the drug
manufacturers. They razed almost $60 million from them, and it was simply a
matter of twisting arms.”
On
December 29, 1962, exactly a week after the return of the soldiers, President
Kennedy and his wife flew to Miami to welcome them back. Forty thousand Cubans –
including virtually all of JM WAVE’s Cuban agents – turned out for the
ceremonies in the Orange Bowl, and there was a wild celebration of tears and
shouts when the President inspected the troops. The brigade members stood
proudly at attention even though several were on crutches. In a gesture of
gratitude, one of the commanders gave Kennedy the brigade’s flag for his
safekeeping, and Kennedy unfurled the flag as he stepped up to the microphone
at the fifty-yard line. “I want to express my great appreciation to the brigade
for making the United States the custodian of this flag,” he said , in a voice
rising with obvious emotion. “I can assure you that this flag will be returned
to this brigade in a free Havana.”
Sheer
bedlam reigned for a few minutes before Kennnedy could continue his speech: “Your
conduct and valor are proof that although Castro and his fellow dictators may
rule nations, they do not rule people; that they may imprison bodies, but they
do not imprison spirits; that they may
destroy the exercise of liberty, but they cannot eliminate the determination to
be free.”
The
Cubans were overjoyed. The President of the United States had joined them not
only with his presence and his authority but also with his feelings. Within two
months the second and by far the most intense phase of the secret war against
Castro had begun. Instead of calling previous Cuban policies into question, the
missile crisis seemed to provide further justification for the conduct of the
secret war. Hardly anybody in Washington allowed for the possibility that the
secret war may have persuaded Castro to welcome Russian nuclear weapons in Cuba
as a means of guaranteeing his own survival. The lesson drawn was that Communist
influence must be snuffed out quickly – preferably by covert means – else dominoes
fall and new threats of nuclear exchange ensue.
American
policy in this era came to resemble a terrible Rube Goldberg machine fashioning
ever more menacing confrontations out of the humiliation of past defeats. It is
impossible to know to what extent the secret war, with its hundreds of American
case officers and its thousands of Cuban agents, shaped succeeding events. But
the men who directed the war and the tactics they employed were to be seen
enroaching on the news of the next ten years.
Ted
Shackley, the station chief of JM WAVE, packed his bags and took his aides with
him to orchestrate a new war in Vietnam. Rip Robertson and his fellow
paramilitary cowboys also joined in the effort and helped run the Phoenix
program.
And the CIA’s Cuban agents began the confusing trick that would change
them from trusted government agents into common criminals.
During the same
period the two Kennedys would be assassinated, and President Nixon, employing
both the tactics and the veterans of the secret war, would attempt a covert
attack against the American system itself.
[ BK
NOTES: MANY THANKS TO THE AARC for providing this article]
PLEASE
SUPPORT JFKCOUNTERCOUP IF YOU CAN:
