Boehm and Chief Moss lashed the conquered fish to the side of the whaleboat, like Hemingway’s character did in The Old Man and the Sea. Boehm grinned happily, the curse lifted.
“Will you approve my transfer chit to UDT school?” he asked Moss.
“Roy, you’re on the borderline, age-wise.”
Boehm slapped the dead shark. “After this, you call me old?”
In November 1954, the twenty-one surviving members of UDTR Lucky 13 assembled in the auditorium at the Amphib School Building to graduate. Boehm limped in with them on the bad leg he brought back from World War II, limped back out, grinning. He was UDT, assigned to UDT-21.
A few weeks later, Captain Don Gaither, commander, Underwater Demolition Unit Two (COMUDU-Two), stopped Boehm at UDT-21 headquarters. The bos’n was on his way to New London, Connecticut, to test a two-man submersible called the Mine Hunter.
“Where do you think you’re going, Boats?”
“I have to be in New London in the morning, sir.”
“Negative. You’re staying here tonight. You are taking the exam tomorrow for Limited Duty Officer.”
Boehm stared. “Me, sir? An officer? I’m no gentleman, sir. I don’t know a salad fork from a chopstick. I don’t want a commission. I don’t have time for it.”
“The hell you say, Boats. What’s this I’ve heard about your sea warriors? There’s talk the Navy may implement and build up naval special operations. Unconventional warfare. You have a chance to become a part of it—especially if you’re an officer.”
Unconventional warfare? Boehm snapped a crisp salute. “Yes, sir. Get my ass in and take the exam.”
When I took over as skipper of UDT-21, Boehm was a UDT trainer with a field commission as a lieutenant. He was rough around the edges, foulmouthed as only a sailor could be, but a better man I couldn’t have selected for my second-in-command.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
EARLY IN 1960, ON the outskirts of Washington, D.C.’s government district, a cold winter’s rain at daybreak slashed against the weathered square-block buildings of what was formerly known as Quarters Eye, the largest Navy WAVE (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) base in the U.S. Some of the three- and four-story buildings had been converted to high-end apartments. Others were now either government buildings or private offices. Men dressed unobtrusively in overcoats and raincoats over slacks or jeans parked their cars at a plain, unmarked building and drifted through the back door to an office on the third floor. Windows whose shades were partially drawn oversaw wide expanses of drenched lawns, the grass withered and brown and as severe looking as the men called to the meeting by Richard Bissell, the CIA’s chief of clandestine services.
Bissell, President Eisenhower’s go-to man when he needed a dirty job done competently, was referred to as the “spook’s spook.” No minutes were kept of the meeting. The assembled men were all adept in establishing “plausible deniability” for intervention in hot spots around the globe. This was the same team Bissell had called up six years ago in 1954 for a covert operations known as PB Success to depose Guatemala’s president Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. Some used their actual names, others used aliases: David Atlee Phillips, “Rip” Robertson, Frank Bender, E. Howard Hunt, Grayston Lynch, and Troy Barnes.
Tonight, the spooks had a new target. It was called the “Cuban Project.” Boehm and I, along with UDT-21, would soon find ourselves tossed headfirst into the mix.
Bissell stood up. He was a lank, hawkish man, all business and to the point. He surveyed the room full of veteran CIA operatives.
“We’ve been given the go-ahead to get rid of the Castro regime and replace it,” he said, “but it has to be done without any appearance of U.S. intervention.”
Previous proposals for getting rid of Fidel Castro and his communist regime ranged from assassinating him clandestinely to dropping bombs on his ass. Bissell’s new plan had been approved and settled from the highest levels of government.
“What we’ll consider tonight is the feasibility of training and organizing a Cubans-in-exile invasion force. If it is able to establish a beachhead on Cuban soil, it could broadcast to the world as a government-in-arms. Under international law, the United States could then supply and reinforce the invaders and get rid of that communist bastard.”
The Cold War had fully bloomed, and in the prevailing “domino theory” one country after another would fall to communism, as Cuba had, until finally the United States stood alone and isolated in a hostile world. Castro’s overthrow of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959 provided another crisis to bring America closer to accepting the concept of limited unconventional warfare. It would also prove to be the United States’ first test of will against communism in the Western Hemisphere.
Born on August 13, 1926, Castro became radicalized by the writings of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin while studying at the University of Havana, where he obtained a law degree in 1950. On July 26, 1953, he and an “army” of 163 anti-Batista revolutionaries attacked Moncada Barracks outside Santiago de Cuba, his intent being to capture weapons and spark revolution among Oriente Province’s impoverished cane cutters. The attack turned into a rout, with six of his “soldiers” killed, fifteen wounded, and the rest rounded up to be tortured, imprisoned, or executed. His first venture into revolution ended with his being sentenced to fifteen years in prison.
While imprisoned with twenty-five of his comrades, Castro renamed his gang the 26th of July Movement, or MR-26-7, in memory of the date of the Moncada attack. He was released on May 15, 1955, as part of an amnesty agreement. He and his brother Raul fled to Mexico, where they met and befriended a Marxist Argentine doctor named Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who, as Fidel admitted, was “a more advanced revolutionary than I.”
On November 15, 1956, Fidel, brother Raul, Che Guevara, and eighty-one armed revolutionaries set sail from Veracruz to Cuba in a corroded old yacht named Granma. Other MR-26-7 fighters led by Frank País planned an uprising in Santiago and Manzanilla to correspond with Granma’s arrival.
Granma came in two days late and ran aground in a mangrove swamp at Playa Los Coloradas. By this time Batista had dispersed País and his rabble. The Castros, Guevara, and their raiders joined País in desperate flight into the Sierra Maestra Mountains of Oriente Province. Only nineteen made it; the rest were either killed or captured.
The survivors hid out in the mountains and bonded with local peasants. Like fish in the sea, as Mao Tse-tung put it in his Little Red Book. Little by little, the revolutionaries overran Batista’s outposts. Their success attracted more and more recruits.
During the summer and fall of 1958, using classical guerrilla strategies, the relatively small band of determined irregulars pushed Batista’s government forces all the way back to Havana. Batista capitulated on December 31 and fled into exile with an amassed fortune estimated at more than $300 million. The Castros and Guevara marched their ragtag column into Havana on January 2, 1959. Fidel swore himself in as Cuba’s prime minster the following month.
Castro soon acknowledged to the world that he was a communist and in bed with the Soviet Union. Recognizing the strategic value of the little island nation, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev declared dead the Monroe Doctrine that proclaimed United States hegemony in the Western Hemisphere.
As a developing dictator, Fidel proved more aggressive than the ruler he overthrew. Guevara led the way in executing thousands of resisters and imprisoning thousands more. Many escaped by fleeing to Florida, where Miami became a hotbed of counterrevolutionary activity. Dissidents funded by the CIA and various foreign sources plotted and planned, bided their time, and lobbied for support.
Relations between the U.S. and Cuba deteriorated to the point that the two nations dissolved diplomatic relations. At a meeting of the Organization of American States held in Costa Rica, U.S. secretary of state Christian Herter publically asserted that Cuba was being used as an operational base for the spread of international communism into the
Western Hemisphere.
Now, as Richard Bissell and the other CIA attendees at the Cuba Project meeting left Quarters Eye, Bissell paused outside in the cold sprinkle of diminishing rain and lifted his eyes to the disappearing cloud masses. A ray of morning sunshine broke through. He took it as a good sign. A balding man built like a whippet, with a long thin face and nose, stopped next to him.
“Will the new president be with us or against us?” E. Howard Hunt wondered.
John F. Kennedy had won the 1960 election and would be inaugurated in January.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
WHEN I ASSUMED COMMAND of UDT-21 at Little Creek, Virginia, in early 1961, with Lieutenant Roy Boehm as my operations officer, I found the outfit studded with Boehm’s old shipmates, who followed him over to UDT from the fleet. They were hard-muscled, tough bastards like Harry “Lump-Lump” Williams; Clements and Holloran, always referred to as “Heckle and Jeckle”; Eddie “Digger” O’Toole, with whom Boehm attended UDTR; “Hoss” Kacinsky; “Legs” Martin; Rudy Boesch; Lenny Waugh; and others. My first impression of them was of a gang of blackguard Caribbean pirates who would as soon slit your throat as shake hands.
“What did you expect, sir?” Boehm growled. He was the crustiest of the bunch. “You want men who can kick ass—or kiss ass?”
By the time I returned with them from winter training in the Virgin Islands, I knew I had raw material for the saltiest outfit in the Naval Amphibian command. Not only had these Frogs pissed off and embarrassed ship skippers by seizing or sabotaging their vessels right from underneath their noses, they had also kidnapped two fleet admirals and one cute WAVE administrative assistant and held a member of COMPHIBLANT’s staff for ransom. It was one hell of a war game; I was so proud of these ugly bastards I could have kissed them right on their butts.
“Don’t turn them loose on the citizens of this country unless they’re chained and have a zookeeper with them,” cautioned Vice Admiral G. C. Towner, Amphibious Commander of the Atlantic Fleet (COMPHIBLANT). I wasn’t sure if he was kidding or not.
Admiral Towner apparently placed great stock in me. He had personally selected me to command UDT-21 by noting on my fitness report that I was “undoubtedly the foremost expert on UDT matters in the U.S. Navy.” I found myself also wearing other hats he assigned to me: commander of UDU-2 (Underwater Demolitions Unit-2), which didn’t mean squat until I had more than one UDT assigned to my UDU; and as one of his Amphibious staff members.
Boehm and I were looking to Cuba as a proving ground for turning UDT into genuine behind-the-lines commandos. I approached Admiral Towner about the possibility of converting them. My overtures remained dry-docked, but I had sown seed into the Navy’s higher echelons.
“Skipper,” Boehm said, “all you gotta do is get them weenie-necks in the Pentagon to use us. Turn us loose on Castro and we’ll soon have that cocksucker begging to suck your dick.”
Something as big as the Cuban Project discussed by Richard Bissell and his CIA spooks at Quarters Eye last winter was bound to leak out sooner or later. Rumors spread as CIA procurement teams scouted the United States and Europe for airplanes, tanks, ships, and other weapons with which to arm an exile army while not implicating the United States. A CIA reception and debriefing center at Key West directed arriving Cuban refugees to Miami’s Dinner Key, where the Frente Revolucionari Democratico (FRD) had established a Cuban government-in-exile and a recruiting office. News soon broke in American and Mexican newspapers that a Cuban attack force known as Brigade 2506 was training at various sites in the hemisphere.
I knew where most of these sites were located, since the CIA expected to use Frogs from my UDT-21 as trainers and prospective guerrilla leaders. I coordinated with the CIA station chief in Miami to distribute my best trainers everywhere from a coffee plantation and refurbished airstrip in southern Guatemala to Fort Gulick in Panama and Vieques Island off Puerto Rico, and from Homestead Air Force Base in south Florida to Fort Benning’s Infantry School in Georgia.
CIA operatives were in charge of the entire operation, good men like Grayston Lynch and Rip Robertson, who I learned would personally accompany any invasion force, and Theodore Shackley and Rudy Enders, who had by now gone over to the CIA from the Navy.
Robertson had attended the Quarters Eye meeting and was closemouthed and secretive. Lynch said the man didn’t trust his own mother or wife, who still thought he was a traveling salesman. Lynch was the same, except a bit more talkative. He had been severely wounded at the Battle of the Bulge during World War II, with a wound that kept him hospitalized for five years.
Shackley was hard to get to know, a cold, calculating character, deliberate—the living epitome of Mad magazine’s Spy vs. Spy agent in white. Rudy Enders was charged with infiltrating commando teams into Cuba to carry out highly secret ops against Castro’s government—attacking military outposts, sabotaging critical superstructure like factories and railroads, and, in general, creating chaos.
I often traveled with spooks to inspect various sites or check in on my UDT trainers. One week I might be shuttling into Guatemala to observe aircraft bombing maneuvers, the next to a U.S. bombing range or diving grounds on the uninhabited island of Vieques. As operations officer, Boehm was even more on the move and heavily involved in day-to-day training matters.
While training continued, Bissell and E. Howard Hunt arranged with Eduardo Garcia of the Garcia Line Corporation, the only Cuban freighter line still running rice and sugar off Castro’s island, to lease six small freighters to transport an invasion force. The freighters were old, slow, and run-down and would never be suspected as a military armada.
But then I thought of Castro’s Granma and wasn’t so sure el Jefe might not remember what he had learned about UW and the advantage of going unnoticed.
I watched the sun setting over Vieques one afternoon from the quarter-deck of an LSD as it motored toward a number of figures that, from a distance, appeared to be frolicking tourists on a beach. The LSD anchored offshore, and I rode the rest of the way in on the ship’s launch. Boehm, in charge of training ashore, recognized me as soon as I got off the ship. He turned his class over to a former UDT-trained spook, Smarty Marty Martinez, and waded out toward me in the surf in his swim trunks.
“Are they ready?” I asked as Boehm approached and shook hands. His Cubans were working with SCUBA in the use of demolitions.
Boehm turned to look at his students. A practice detonation went off near mangroves in the shallows, erupting a geyser of water. I heard someone laugh.
“When do you need ’em, skipper?”
“Yesterday. I’ve spoken to Admiral Towner and with Bissell and Howard Hunt. The invasion’s not far off. They want us to insert more saboteurs to keep Castro off balance.”
Boehm shrugged and slung seawater from his hair. “That’s why we get paid the big bucks.”
“Maybe as early as next week,” I said.
I passed out cigarettes as the Cubans congregated among their camping tents on the beach to ask questions and be reassured that all their hard training was not in vain. Some of them seemed anxious. They were always asking when. When would the invasion be?
Eduardo Bazan, a slender, dark-haired man in his mid-twenties, nodded thanks when I handed him what was left of a pack of Camels. He tapped out a cig and offered the pack back to me.
“Keep it.”
“Gracias, jefe.”
When Castro took over, he confiscated Eduardo’s father’s farm, two houses, and a pair of shrimp boats. Eduardo joined the anti-Castro underground until he escaped to Miami in September 1960. There he met Tony de Varona, who told him Brigade 2506 needed swimmers. Eduardo was good in the water and immediately volunteered.
He had cut his dark hair short, military style. Water dropped from his mustache. I lit his cigarette for him. He inhaled smoke deep into his lungs. He looked worried.
“Caramba!” he exclaimed. “How can we win with one thousand men? Fidel he has thirty thousand, maybe more.”
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A recruit named Parada spoke up. He had supported Castro at first and was captured with him at the Moncada Army post and imprisoned. He turned against Fidel afterward and fled to Florida with the help of a CIA operative who coerced him into either joining the brigade or being deported back to Cuba.
“I am being told by Colonel Frank,” he said, meaning Frank Bender, “that our undertaking cannot fail in any case. I ask him, I ask, ‘How do we know this is so?’ Upon that, he answer me, ‘If the landing in Cuba should happen to fail, we will in all event intervene directly. And immediately too, no matter that the OAS might object.’ Is that for true?”
I had asked the same questions of Shackley and Bissell. I didn’t particularly trust the State Department.
“President Jack Kennedy said he will protect the invasion with an air umbrella,” Bissell told me. “The skies will belong to us.”
A lot of good Cubans were going to die if they went in trusting us and we failed to follow through.
“The president promises air cover by American combat aircraft and by U.S. Navy destroyers,” Bissell said. “An American Navy ship will bring landing boats to the Cuban invasion freighters to haul troops ashore. We have the president’s word that he will support.”
“Cuando?” the recruits kept asking. When?
Signs indicated it would be soon. Just yesterday, April 2, 1961, the State Department at JFK’s instructions issued a white paper declaring Cuba a Soviet satellite and warning Castro to either break all ties with Khrushchev or be considered “a clear and present danger to the authentic and autonomous revolution of the Americas.”
In Miami, CIA-created Radio SWAN had become especially active within past weeks. Propaganda twenty-four-seven urged the Cuban people to rise up and overthrow their corrupt and aggressive government.
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