The Betrayal Game - [Mikhal Lammeck 02]
Page 35
Some confusion exists in the record as to the location of the house. Some say the meeting was held in a home on Calle 11 in the Mendares neighborhood of Havana; others mention an address in the far western Siboney neighborhood. (Author’s Note—For the purposes of this novel, the Mendares address was used.)
Also, several Cuban authors, particularly former security officers, insist that Castro’s G-2 knew in advance of Sorí Marin’s Unidad meeting and broke it up as a result of their good intelligence work. That, too, is disputed by American historians, who claim the meeting was happened upon by chance (see the annotation above: The Sorí Marín plot of March 18). (Author’s Note—Due to Castro’s infiltration of almost the entire underground network, I have chosen to believe the Cubans.)
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Page 230—Castro’s reluctance to state publicly that the Cuban revolution was socialist
According to one of Castro’s principal biographers, Tad Szulc, Fidel had long dreamed of creating a socialist culture in Cuba. But in the early stages of the revolt, he did not believe that socialism should have been the immediate objective, not when his movement was fighting to remove Batista and supplant American dominion on the island. In Castro’s words, he held back announcing his real intentions for the revolution, considering “the realities of our country, the level of political culture in our country, the level of preparation of our people, and the enormous objective difficulties if we tried to push ahead with this type of revolution.”
Szulc also supposes that Castro, wisely, kept his Communist intentions under wraps to avoid undue and premature confrontation with his massive neighbor to the north, the United States. Nonetheless, Castro had spent a great deal of 1960 and 1961 quietly fusing his revolutionary movement with Soviet Communism. The impending exiles’ invasion, plus sharpened American political rhetoric, increased pressure on Fidel to declare the true nature of his revolution. Still, he held back, waiting for what he considered a well-chosen moment.
In Fidel, A Critical Portrait (William Morrow, 1986), Szulc observes that this would imply that socialism was being created, in effect, behind the backs of most of the population—which was true. It would be an admission that Castro had been misleading the Cuban people, especially when he fulminated against the “lies about communism.”
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Page 255—the abandonment of El Capitolio
The Cuban capitol building was left vacant for the first four years of Castro’s government. In 1962, the Cuban Academy of Science located its headquarters at El Capitolio. Today, the capitol remains well restored and utilized in the heart of old Havana. Habaneros of all ages can be seen playing sports and picnicking on the wide lawns.
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Page 291—the Peking restaurant and the plot to poison Castro
Fabian Escalante, a former high-ranking Cuban security official and noted historian, notes in The Cuba Project (Ocean Press, 2004), that botulinum pills were delivered to a restaurant frequented by Castro, the Peking, at the corner of Twenty-third and Fourteenth in the Vedado neighborhood of Havana. According to Escalante, the contacts provided to the CIA by Tony Varona were Cruz Caso and María Leopoldina Grau Alsina.
According to Escalante, the Peking plot was known in advance to Cuban G-2. Because of this, he claims, the attempt on Fidel’s life would never have been put into action. Other observers dispute this, noting either that Fidel simply stopped eating at the Peking, or that the pills were put inside a freezer in the restaurant and became stuck to the coils and ruined, or other, equally protean, explanations. Another frequently cited account is noted above in the Tony Varona annotation, that Varona, sequestered in Florida by the CIA, was unable to give the signal to initiate Castro’s poisoning at the Peking. (Author’s Note—The truth of how Fidel escaped this assassination plot remains unknown and is likely to be far less intriguing than the fictionalized account in this novel.)
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Page 310—the disappearance of Juan Orta Córdova
The 1967 CIA Inspector General’s Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro reports that Orta “took refuge in the Venezuelan Embassy on 11 April 1961 and became the responsibility of the Mexican Embassy when Venezuela broke relations with Cuba in November 1961. Castro refused to give him a safe conduct pass until October 1964 when he was allowed to leave for Mexico City. He arrived in Miami in early February 1965.”
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Page 350—Cuban B-26 pilots land in Miami, claiming to be defectors
While on the ground at Happy Valley in Guatemala (the CIA’s secret base that served as a staging ground for the air support of the Bay of Pigs invasion), the pair of B-26’s that landed in Miami on the morning of April 15, 1961, were machine-gunned by CIA agents to make them appear to have been in combat. Soon after the Cuban crews landed in Miami, claiming to have been defectors from the Cuban air force (FAR), local Miami reporters observed a cascade of discrepancies in that story. In addition to having solid metal noses where the FAR B-26’s had Plexiglas, the pair of bullet-riddled planes had eight nose-mounted .50 caliber guns, instead of the six .50 caliber guns set in the wings of the FAR’s B-26’s. Also, none of the guns had been fired; tape covered the muzzles. The bomb racks were corroded and had clearly been long out of use.
The American ambassador to the U.N., Adlai Stevenson, had been assured by the Kennedys that all combat taking place on the island was between Cuban forces, with no support or intervention from the United States. The afternoon of April 15, following the appearance of the defecting B-26’s, Ambassador Stevenson held aloft at the U.N. a wirephoto of one of the B-26’s. He pointed to the FAR insignia on the plane and pronounced, “These two planes, to the best of our knowledge, were Castro’s own air force planes, and according to the pilots, they took off from Castro’s own air force fields.”
After learning that he’d been sent unwittingly to the U.N. by the Kennedys to spread this disinformation, Stevenson became incensed. He later was informed that Kennedy had referred to him as “my official liar.” In retrospect, Stevenson referred to the episode as the most humiliating moment of his public career.
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Page 304—Fidel’s first public statement of a socialist revolution in Cuba
On April 16, 1961, the day after the initial bombing raids on the Cuban airfields, Fidel Castro attended the funerals of seven military personnel killed during the attacks. At this service, he announced for the first time publicly that the Cuban revolution was socialist.
Again according to Tad Szulc (ibid.), Castro has commented that he had no choice but to unveil the true socialist nature of the revolution on what he believed was the eve of the exiles’ invasion. Castro explained that his people, specifically the tens of thousands of soldiers who would face the invading rebel force, had a right to know what they might be dying for. For this reason, Castro said, “I proclaimed the socialist character of the Revolution before the battles of Giron.”
Early the following morning, the exiles landed, and the Bay of Pigs invasion began. Castro’s relationship with the Soviet Union became open and strong, and remained that way until the fall of Communism.
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(Please do not read until you’ve completed The Betrayal Game)
II. ANNOTATIONS
Page 113—the name Alek Hidell
During his two-year-plus stay in the Soviet Union as a defector, Lee Harvey Oswald went by the Russified version of his name, Alek. In 1963, Lee used the identity Alek Hidell to purchase the Italian-made 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano bolt-action rifle soon linked to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Some historians have supposed that the false last name, Hidell, was a rhyming homage to one of Lee’s heroes, Fidel.
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Page 113—the arrival of Alek Hidell and Rina in Havana
In Minsk, on March 30, 1961, Lee checked into an ear, nose, and throat hospital, complaining of a sinus headache. He stayed in the hospital until April 11. During this time, Lee was essentially out of public sight, visited frequently
by his fiancée, Marina Prusakova. (Author’s Note—It is this time frame, where no record of Lee’s whereabouts exists other than as a patient in a Soviet hospital for treatment of what some commentators have called “the mother of all sinus headaches,” that I have utilized for his presence, with Marina, in Havana.)
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Page 115—Alek Hidell as a CIA asset
There continues to be intense speculation that Lee Oswald was, in fact, a recruit of the CIA, even before he defected to the Soviet Union. There is not room here to enumerate all the inconsistencies in Lee’s military and personal records that point in this direction, or his many contacts with the intelligence community.
One of the most compelling summations of this theory came from Senator Richard Schweicker, a member of the Church Committee in 1975, which specifically delved into the connections between Lee Oswald and JFK’s assassination. Schweicker had access to many classified files and concluded, according to one historian, that he considered it a serious possibility that “we trained and sent Oswald to Russia.”
(Author’s Note—For an excellent analysis of this issue, I recommend Ultimate Sacrifice, John and Robert Kennedy, the Plan for a Coup in Cuba, and the Murder of JFK, Waldron and Hartmann, Carrol &c Graf, 2005.)
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Page 228—Rina Prusakova as KGB agent
As there is with Lee Oswald, a school of conjecture has cropped up around the question of whether Marina Prusakova was, herself, an asset of Soviet intelligence. Several facts lead to this conclusion, among them:
1. Marina, part of the Soviet upper-middle class, reasonably educated, and an attractive young woman, met Lee Harvey Oswald and was so smitten by him that she agreed to marry him after knowing him a little over a month—two weeks of which he spent courting her from a hospital bed.
2. The Soviet government granted Marina permission to marry Lee in the span of ten days, despite the fact that she was an MVD colonel’s niece marrying a U.S. defector.
3. One month after marrying Marina, Lee informed her he’d decided to return to the United States. In spite of any security objections her uncle had reason to make—and Colonel Prusakov, a ranking figure in the Soviet equivalent of the American FBI, could have easily stopped this, if he wanted—Marina was granted permission to leave the Soviet Union in the company of an American defector. The time between her formal request and receiving permission was a matter of weeks, an unheard-of time frame in a Soviet republic.
If the Warren Commission had the facts right, then it is clear that the Soviet government wanted Marina and Oswald to marry, and they wanted them to go together to the United States. Now, a leap is necessary, but a reasonable one: The only agency in the Soviet Union with the ability and interest to get this done in the fashion it was accomplished was the KGB.
(Author’s Note—The above was adapted significantly from “The Mystery of Marina Oswald” by Dr. George Friedman, published in The Stratfor Weekly, 24 November 2003.