Trained to Kill

by Antonio Veciana

  That realization led me to questions that have haunted me ever since: What was Maurice Bishop’s assigned role in all of this? Was he merely a supervisor in charge of my recruitment and training? Was he working for the government—or for some force above it? For that matter, was the CIA serving America’s elected leadership—or some higher authority?

  I never knew. Over the years, I learned that Bishop was a very important person, with considerable connections. But I came to wonder if the ends that justified his means were ones the United States government truly knew about and approved.

  “The only advantage of playing with fire,” Bishop said, “is learning not to get burned.”

  As we neared the one-year anniversary of the regime’s coming to power, Bishop made me an unexpected proposal. He asked me if I was willing to infiltrate the ranks of Castro’s regime. He thought that my personal and professional history, combined with my knowledge of banking and economics, would make me an ideal candidate for an important position. I had existing relationships with people who were now key government figures. And, as president of the accountants’ association, which now had been taken over by the July 26 Movement, I developed more. With my professional credentials and connections like those, Bishop said, it shouldn’t be difficult to climb to key positions of the Communist government.

  The objective was obvious. Becoming a part of the government would permit me to inform the CIA in advance of Castro’s plans and intentions. Bishop clarified that the purpose would not be to burn me at some point, but rather to keep me infiltrated indefinitely within the orbit of the Cuban regime’s leaders. Success would depend on my ability to feign loyalty to the government’s doctrines. Convincingly. I would have to appear to be one of them for an indeterminate time. My acting skills and composure would be my only protections against being discovered. Bishop promised not to pressure me for information. My role would not be to ferret out military secrets or perform any sort of skulduggery. All I would need to do was keep my eyes and ears open and report the goings-on around me. The real benefit would be long-term. Presumably, the higher I would go, the more valuable the information I would be exposed to.

  My mission would be known as “Operation Eagle.”

  I won’t deny that the proposition was enticing. But it was also extremely risky. It came accompanied by a formal promise of a hefty financial reward and, if anything happened to me, the assurance that my family would be well taken care of.

  On the other hand, I would be, in John le Carré’s terms, “out in the cold.” I couldn’t count on protection of any sort. If possible, I would be warned of impending danger. But Bishop could promise nothing more. If I were captured, there would be no hope of rescue.

  “Commando teams and submarines are the stuff of Hollywood films,” Bishop said. “You need to be aware that your only shields are your own intelligence and your ability to deceive.”

  He also made it clear that under no circumstances could I reveal my secret, not even to my own family. There could be no exceptions, no matter how grave the danger. I had to take my secret to my death, even if that meant facing a firing squad.

  “There’s no question it would be dangerous,” Bishop said, “but you would be doing a great service for your country, and your countrymen. Think about it.”

  I didn’t have to.

  I immediately began exploring ways to insinuate myself in the government. As president of the accountants’ association I was, technically, a member of the July 26 Movement. That entitled me to enroll in the political school maintained by the government to instruct leaders of the militia. I went to a few meetings. I also made contact with some government officials. Using the pretext of building a rural school in the name of my dear friend Boris Luis Santa Coloma, I met with Haydée Santamaría and her husband, Armando Hart. They had both been close to Boris, as well. In fact, according to the official account of the attack on the Moncada Barracks, Boris had been captured while trying to help them escape. Now they were both members of Castro’s inner circle.

  My charade might’ve been more successful than I suspected. Later, an internal CIA memorandum surfaced. Unbeknownst to me, Julio Lobo had been supplying information to the agency, as well. Apparently, they valued his opinion regarding a variety of matters, including me.

  The communiqué “To: Havana” “From: Director” states:

  JULIO LOBO PERSONAL OPINION OF VECIANA FAVORABLE DESPITE FEELING ON PART SOME IN CUBAN BANKING CIRCLES THAT VECIANA MAY BE IN SERVICE OF G 2. LOBO FEELS VECIANA NECESSARILY WALKED VERY NARROW CHALK LINE WHICH MADE HIM SUSPECT. VECIANA WAS CHOSEN ADMINISTER FUND FOR UNDERGROUND WHICH BANKERS AGREED TO ESTABLISH BUT BANK TAKEN OVER BEFORE IT SET UP.

  As I moved forward, however, I became increasingly uneasy with the path I had chosen. I spent hours and hours with my agitated thoughts roiling in my brain. It wasn’t fear. Not for me, anyway. I feared for my children. I feared for what my decision would do to them. One afternoon as I played with them, my wife said something that pierced me like a stake through the heart.

  “I never want to see them enslaved by a totalitarian and atheist philosophy,” she said.

  I spent many sleepless nights agonizing over my promise to Bishop and my desire to help Cuba, and my duty to them. It was one thing to maintain a double personality to hide my intelligence work against the government, but quite another to pass myself off as one of them. I would have to hide the truth from everyone, including my children. I was terrified to think that my children would not know the difference, that they would come to identify with the Communist ideology because they were convinced that that was how their father thought.

  I decided I had no option. I was willing to risk myself, but I didn’t have the right to gamble with my children’s future.

  It had been easy to accept Bishop’s proposal; telling him I had changed my mind was not. He paled when I told him of my decision, and it took a visible effort for him to gather himself.

  “I understand,” he finally said. I could hear the disappointment in his voice. “We’ll stick with psychological warfare.”

  In that moment, neither he nor I could anticipate just how successful those efforts would be.

  “An operative must be creative,” Bishop had told me. “An undercover agent who lacks a fertile imagination is like a soldier without a gun.”

  Looking back on what was accomplished, I surprised even myself with how I seized upon opportunities to wreak havoc on Castro’s regime.

  I didn’t know about Bishop’s public relations and propaganda background then, but his emphasis on the power of rumors, messages, and “official” disseminations was unmistakable.

  Psychological warfare, he had said, can take many forms and have many objectives. Mine aimed at economic sabotage. I knew that a carefully crafted campaign of gossip and falsehoods about the country’s economic policies could have an impact significantly greater than bombs.

  The destruction of the public’s confidence is a science. When conditions are favorable, the magnitude of the damage that can be done is incredible. I understood the workings of economics far beyond its basic elements. It was my forte. It helped my ascent through the ranks of the banks where I had worked, and elevated me to the trusted and relatively prestigious position I now held. Now it gave me an advantage, and a weapon.

  There is nothing more sensitive than capital. The consequences of its flight from a country can cause losses greater than those from an armed invasion. People may not understand economics, but they fear the disastrous fallout from the devaluation of their currency. A frightened business community would spread panic through the country at large. The multiplier effect would turn the ripple into a tidal wave. The result: chaos. Soldiers use guns and grenades. Devaluation and inflation can be even more devastating weapons of mass destruction.

  Exactly how to do it remained a question. It’s one thing to understand the rules of the game and how it’s played, and a totally different one to actually step onto the field. Especial
ly if I intended to be more than a simple player moving at the direction of others, and instead purported to take control.

  I spent months analyzing financial statistics, market movements, business trends, foreign trade, exchange rates, and all of the minutiae that comprise the functioning of a nation’s economy. Time was of the essence, but I also knew the truth of Bishop’s dictum that “patience and time do more than violence.” I also had to deepen and expand my knowledge of “applied psychology” and look for ways to better adapt its methods for my needs.

  An effective campaign of rumors, apocryphal circulars, and false information must be planned in accordance with the idiosyncrasies of its audience. There’s no magic formula. It takes an understanding of the people, their character, and their circumstances, and then targeting the weaknesses that would chip away at their confidence.

  Turbulence and change gave us an advantage. The country had just gone through rebellion, fighting, and the ousting of a dictator. The new government was still finding its way. We had been through five presidents in almost as many months, and cabinet ministers seemed caught in a revolving door. Castro introduced a host of new institutions and, almost daily it seemed, new laws.

  The result was a climate of pervasive uncertainty. Since no one knew what new mandate the day would bring, no one knew what to believe. Thus, in an Orwellian twist, they would believe anything.

  Then, in 1960, the government’s pretenses fell away, and it tilted openly toward Communism. A stunned middle class began to accept any information emanating from opposition sources as good and, more important, credible.

  The time, I realized, was ripe. The first campaign in the psychological war became obvious. Everyone expected some sort of currency devaluation, or an outright confiscation of their money. That made it feasible to spark a run on banks, eroding the people’s confidence in the money in circulation and causing a financial panic.

  A similar outbreak of economic anxiety, brought on by the stock markets’ plummet on Black Tuesday, spurred the run on banks that marked the start of the Great Depression in the United States. I might not hope for such a calamitous impact, but at the very least I did anticipate a thundering domino effect. As people lost faith that their money would hold its value, they’d rush to buy goods while their pesos still could. That, in turn, would fuel runaway inflation.

  The economy would hemorrhage.

  People kept coming to me at the bank, business people, the wealthy, asking how they could get American dollars, or how they could get their money out of the country. They were nervous. They told me so. They expected an economic crisis. They didn’t know if it would come because of the government’s ineptitude or because of the government’s deliberate actions, but they expected some kind of financial bombshell.

  That gave me the idea.

  I turned to people I knew, two attorneys who worked for the finance ministry. Both had participated in the drafting of the regime’s laws and regulations during the first months of Castro’s government. One was an uncle, who lived next door to me in La Víbora, Jorge Lamas. The other, I can’t name.

  I knew they could do it. They were high-level insiders. Lamas had proven it to me before.

  As James O’Connor later noted: “Few people outside of Castro’s immediate circle could have known the exact provisions of the first Agrarian Reform Law before it was announced on May 17, 1959. Public debate was avoided and the decree was drafted by men who did not have Cabinet positions.”

  Lamas knew. He told me before Castro announced it. So, as I hit upon my plan in the fall of 1960, I went to him.

  “I need you to create a law that says that the government is going to confiscate the people’s money,” I told him. “And that the money that’s on the street is going to be exchanged.”

  I wasn’t disappointed. Lamas and his colleague worked diligently and enthusiastically for a period of two weeks. They came back with a document that looked so perfect that if I hadn’t been the one who came up with the idea, I would’ve believed it myself. They had typed it up on the government’s official letterhead, with the carefully crafted wording that was the hallmark of legislation. The only things missing were a signature and official seal. Their absence, however, actually served to further the deception—it appeared to be a draft of a new law, obtained on its way for review.

  That’s what I told people as we passed it out: “It was stolen from the National Bank just before it was signed.”

  Another trusted friend printed thousands of copies, and we handed them out to various counterrevolutionary groups to distribute.

  People believed it, all over the country. Long lines formed at the banks as people demanded their money. They withdrew millions. The government was forced to respond. The very next day, President Dorticós went on television to tell the people it was a hoax. Cruel stooges of the previous administration, Batistianos, had inflicted this harm upon the Cuban people, he insisted. No such law existed, he said. No such law was being contemplated.

  He was right about its existence, and possibly about whether such an idea was under consideration. At the moment. In the increasingly surreal reality that was Cuba under its new leaders, the government did almost exactly what my fake law proposed ten months later. In August 1961, Castro announced that bank accounts were being frozen and a new currency was being introduced. The existing currency was now worthless.

  The change, the authorities said, was necessary “to impede that national monetary resources in the hands of the external counterrevolution be utilized to conspire against the Revolutionary Government of the people of Cuba.”

  Money had always been a challenge for the opposition groups, even before the “monetary reform.” We needed automobiles to move around. We needed houses where people could hide.

  I asked Bishop for one million pesos.

  “I can’t help you,” he said. “You have to get it yourself.”

  I couldn’t believe it. A million pesos—about $50,000 at the time—sounds like a lot, and it was to us, but not to Bishop. We knew that the Americans were infiltrating people onto the island and handing them that kind of money and more all the time.

  Luckily for us, another member of the underground, Antonio García Álvarez, came up with a way to get it that not only helped us, but hurt the government, as well.

  Some of the clandestine groups had already begun audacious assaults on banks as a means of getting the funds they needed. They staged boldly executed armed robberies, in full daylight, during regular banking hours. And, while an individual theft might not yield significant amounts, it had an oversized impact. The idea that armed guerrilla fighters could charge into any bank at any time, waving guns and screaming orders, caused a disquieting tension for anyone who had to do business in one—employees, guards, and customers. The fact that the government seemed incapable of preventing the robberies eroded the public’s faith in the regime’s ability to perform one of the basic functions of any government, to protect its people.

  As beneficial as that was for us, we needed substantially greater sums of hard cash. García Álvarez came up with a plan to get the government to, quite literally, hand it to us. He worked at the National Institute for Agrarian Reform, which was headed by Che Guevara. With the help of Rafael Dalmau, García Álvarez fixed it so that a six-figure check made out to one of the newly nationalized companies wound up on Guevara’s desk. Che dutifully stamped it with his signature. Presumably, the funds were necessary to avoid a shutdown. In reality, the enterprise didn’t exist. It never had. They made up the name, manufactured the necessary documentation, and got Guevara to sign off on the check.

  Another member of the underground, Roberto Vale, facilitated the rest of the con. Vale worked at a bank. He authorized the opening of an account at one of the branches he was in charge of, in the names of two fake “militants.”

  Every week, the two went to the bank, presented their fake IDs, and withdrew large sums of cash. To help further the charade, they carried a list
of amounts that needed to be tallied, supposedly in order to pay the salaries of the company’s nonexistent workers.

  El Che had been named head of the Banco Nacional in November 1959. It seemed a clear signal that the government was preparing to make giant changes. Putting its most openly avowed Communist at the head of the banking system surely meant Castro’s regime intended to convert its capitalist institutions to a controlled, state-run form. Since that Communist also happened to have no background in economics, the shift would most certainly be worse than wrenching. It was like putting a chemist at the controls of a plane. As capable, even brilliant, as Che Guevara might be as a revolutionary, he had no idea how to manage a system as complex as a nation’s economy.

  Some months after his appointment, I received a call. His secretary said El Che wanted to see me.

  We met in his office at the Banco Nacional. I had only seen him in photographs and on TV before. He had a penetrating look and seemed intent on discovering my innermost thoughts. Unlike Fidel, who was a loquacious whirlwind, Che spoke softly, appearing to weigh each word carefully. He noted that he had information about me, perhaps not every detail, but certainly the principal points. After a few minutes of chitchat, he put his feet up on the desk, took his gun from his holster, and set it on the desk as well, close at hand, where I could see it.

  He tactfully verified my personal information—where I came from, the functions I carried out in the civic institutions that opposed Batista’s dictatorship, my position within Julio Lobo’s organization, my studies and specialties, my position as a practicing Catholic.

  “I understand that you, too, suffer from asthma,” he said. “Have you found any medicines that give you relief? That help you breathe?”

  “It was worse when I was younger,” I told him. “But I found tremendous success with a French product, Lancerot.”