CONSPIRACIES, INTELLIGENCE GATHERING, spying, sabotage, infiltration, and all the other aspects of what I was taught have existed since time immemorial. So, too, political assassinations. Medieval kings and queens sent their agents into the courts of their enemies, and their friends, to spy, to learn of plots and battle plans. Enemies were poisoned, kidnapped, lured into ambushes, or had their throats slit in the night by a lover.
Methods had changed, become more advanced, but the underlying principles and goals remained the same. Machiavelli had first described it: the ends justify the means. And I knew that there was nothing that we would do against him that Castro had not, and would not, do against his enemies. Against us.
He already had. Castro knew not to make the mistake that Batista had. He knew that if the opposition was allowed to grow, it could become unstoppable. He knew that if he showed his enemies the same kind of mercy that Batista had shown him when he released Castro from prison, he could face a similar result. He also knew that the United States saw him as a threat, and while the yanquis might not be prepared to risk the public outcry that would surely follow if they sent their armies to remove him, that hardly meant they would stand idly by while he consolidated his power. Fidel was well aware that the colossus to the north supported his enemies. He knew the U.S. government was training and supplying people like me. He knew that while the war was not officially declared, it was still a war.
So Castro took advice and training from the Soviets. He learned their KGB tactics and used them against his people. The repression didn’t come all at once. It came in slowly, like the rising tide, until all Cuba was drowning. But even in those early days, I could see it coming.
Soon enough, the surveillance network of undercover agents and informers would grow and began summarily detaining—often for extended periods—anyone even suspected of opposing him. Labor “unions” would begin reporting on the loyalty of their members, and those found to be questionable would be removed. A climate of fear would spread across the island until no one dared trust anyone, even members of their own family. With enough fear would come paralysis. People wouldn’t dare to resist.
But not yet.
Not all of us, anyway.
MELTON AND BISHOP contended that the fundamental purpose of a clandestine operative was to cause psychological or economic sabotage. Sometimes, that required bombs.
By the time Pedro Pan began, the reports of sabotage and attacks had become common. They came by ground, on the water, from the air.
The Cuban government documented the first aerial bombing assault of 1960 when the year was barely twelve days old. According to the state-run Center for American Studies, a plane dropped incendiary bombs in the areas of Bainoa, Caraballo, and San Antonio de Río Blanco. Another made a similar assault on cane fields adjacent to the Hershey factory about thirty miles east of Havana.
More followed. The center reported air attacks against cane fields in Güines, Las Villas, Cojímar, and Regla, at five locations in Camagüey and three more in Oriente, another in Matanzas, and at the Central Toledo in Havana. In January alone.
The attacks continued in February, destroying more than ten million pounds of sugar cane. Fires set by clandestine members of the resistance on the ground caused the loss of another ten million pounds of cane the following month.
By the end of the year, the fight moved into the cities. Warehouses, factories, and department stores became the targets of counterrevolutionary fighters. I was one of them.
I abandoned the propaganda tactics Bishop had taught me in favor of more direct, and violent, means. I was never what we in Cuba call a “man of action.” Not direct action, anyway. I remained behind the scenes, using my administrative skills to organize and plan these violent disruptions. I built small cells of resistance fighters and discovered a talent for strategizing I never knew I had.
I became a terrorist.
Using the skills Bishop and Melton taught me, I became the chief of sabotage for the newly formed Movimiento Revolucionario del Pueblo (the People’s Revolutionary Movement, known by its initials, MRP). The CIA supplied us with plastic explosives and other incendiary materials. I used them to launch bombing attacks against a series of urban targets. The goal now was to spread fear, and cause irrevocable economic damage.
I was hardly alone.
In December, bombs went off at the Cantabria bar, in the America Theater, and in the cafeteria of the Flogar department store in mid-Havana, injuring fifteen people.
On New Year’s Eve, an arson fire at La Época, one of Havana’s biggest and best-known department stores, set a blaze that took firefighters twenty-two hours to put out. Damage was estimated at more than ten million pesos.
On January 8, fire destroyed a mattress store in downtown Havana. Six days later, the Rothschild Samuell Duiga tobacco warehouse was set ablaze, causing 3.4 million pesos in damage. The following month, a white phosphorus device went off at the El Encanto department store in Santiago, causing extensive fire damage. A week later, a car bomb exploded in the garage of the Hotel Habana Libre, and two days after that an explosive device destroyed a fuel tanker-truck and damaged five more vehicles at the Belot oil refinery in the Port of Havana. One of our bombs at the central aqueduct knocked out water throughout most of the capital for two full days. Two explosions caused nearly one and a half million pesos’ worth of damage at a pair of Woolworth’s in the capital.
I was the organizer. The strategist. The brain. But I didn’t plant the bombs. I couldn’t. I couldn’t run the risk of being caught. I knew all the secrets.
I relied heavily on what are known as petacas incendiarias, easily concealed firebombs packed the size of a cigarette pack or a hip flask. Armed with a time-delayed fuse, they could be smuggled into a building and hidden inside without attracting attention and spread fierce, hard-to-extinguish flames when they detonated hours later.
I made them, I set them, and I gave them to my people. And I told them, don’t forget to try to put it in a place where there won’t be any dead. In a garbage can. Late at night. In a parked car.
One of my devices was discovered before it went off at Fin de Siglo, and state security agents surprised and arrested one of our members as she placed one of the petacas at Sears. Several members of the group worried that she might talk.
“You know,” one of them said to me, “she knows everybody in the group. If they get it out of her, we all get to make the firing squad.”
I don’t know what the authorities did to her. I don’t know how they might have tried to make her talk. Apparently, she did. A month after she was arrested, Cuban security rushed in one morning and arrested seven more members of the MRP.
The final and most devastating of the firebombings I coordinated came on April 13, 1960. El Encanto was the Manhattan Macy’s of Cuba, the most important store in the country. The fire there shook the regime to its very foundations. El Encanto stood in the very heart of Havana’s retail district, on a street lined with shops, boutiques, and novelty stores, just steps from the La Moda furrier and the Casa Quintana jewelry store.
One of our MRP members, Carlos González Vidal, worked as a salesman in the records department on the second floor. He lingered a while after the store closed and made his way to the fabrics department. Once he found himself alone, he pulled out the small incendiary device loaded with C-4 explosive that I had prepared for him. His instructions were simple, and he carried them out perfectly. The timer was already set. He slipped the device between two rolls of fabric and left. The placement was crucial. Not only would the cloth conceal the device, it would also provide fuel when the powerful plastique detonated and ignited everything in close proximity.
Carlos stepped into a waiting car two blocks from the store, and by the time the blast sparked the initial blaze at close to 7:00 p.m., he was nearly twenty miles away at a safe house in Playa Baracoa, waiting for the boat that would take him to the United States.
The blast went according to plan, exc
ept for one thing. The fire that followed spread quickly, feeding off the bolts of fabric, growing in intensity as it raced through the department, shot through the air conditioning ducts into other sections and onto other floors, and began consuming the seven-story structure from the inside. Within an hour, the interior walls begin to collapse. Giant tongues of flame burst through the windows and licked at the sky.
Firefighters and volunteers surrounded the building, pouring tons of water on the blaze. They fought hour after hour through the night but could do little more than hope to keep the fire from spreading to neighboring stores packed tightly on the block.
The sun came up and still they fought. Then, somewhere during the heat of the day, the building groaned and gave way. It collapsed in a thundering mass of ash and rubble, sending a great column of smoke up toward the sky. And still it burned.
The fire that began with a single petaca raged for twenty-two hours before it finally died. When it was over, only the scarred skeleton of what had once been Cuba’s most significant store remained.
Then the horrible tragedy we had tried so carefully to avoid came to light. The blast had been timed to go off after the store had emptied, when all the customers and every employee were gone for the day. But in an effort to thwart the rash of arsons and bombings that proved the existence of a strong resistance movement, the government had begun placing militia members as security guards to stand watch. One sentry, a forty-three-year-old mother of two named Fe del Valle Ramos, was trapped inside as the inferno sped through the building.
Firemen sifted through the debris for nearly two days before they found her charred remains. The authorities found Carlos much sooner. The lights playing out from the house on the beach where he had fled, and the flurry of late-night activity, aroused their suspicion.
He didn’t crumble during the interrogation. Instead, he proudly took responsibility for the destruction and defiantly proclaimed it a blow for freedom in the name of the counterrevolution. He went valiantly to his death, shouting, “Long live free Cuba,” just before the roar of the firing squad silenced him forever. He was twenty-one.
The revolution turned Fe del Valle into a heroic martyr who died at the hands of terrorists while bravely doing her duty for her country.
Four days later, the entire nation’s attention turned elsewhere. The long-anticipated U.S.-backed invasion had finally begun. Everyone knew it was coming. Even Castro. The only surprise was where and when.
On April 17, all of Cuba learned both.
I was as surprised as anyone when the brigade of CIA-trained Cuban exiles came crashing ashore at the Bay of Pigs. The CIA had kept all of its operatives and counterrevolutionary contacts as much in the dark as everyone else. The excuse they gave us, later, was that there were too many groups, with too many tongues. With so many organizations, they said, they knew Castro had to have infiltrated some. They just didn’t know which ones. So they didn’t tell anyone.
That was their excuse. But I had already come to realize that their conception of Cubans in general was that we talked too much and that we liked intrigue. Melton and Bishop both made that clear.
They told me that I couldn’t involve anyone else in my activities unless I had absolute confidence in them. The risk was too great. I had to know them. I had to trust them. Even then, I should keep my contacts to a small circle. I shouldn’t involve too many people. More people meant more mouths, and more chance that someone in the group would talk. Either because they were with the government, because they slipped, or because they just had big mouths and big egos and wanted the world to know they were big men.
They were right. A lot of people ended up in prison in Cuba because of that.
I was once invited to a meeting of counterrevolutionaries who wanted me to help them with a plot they were hatching. A couple of them knew me and invited me to come along. I knew them, so I went. But when I got to the house, there must have been twenty people inside. Bishop and Melton had already taught me to steer clear of big groups in general, and to avoid gatherings of big groups like the plague.
I listened. I never organized a cell that had more than five people in it, including me. It was safer. For me, and them. They were connected to me, but not to one another. It was like a firewall. I knew that members of separate cells that both worked with me could come together and never know they both knew me. And none of them knew I worked with the CIA.
So when I showed up at the meeting and saw enough people to fill a party bus, I turned around and left. I never stepped inside. I looked past the person who opened the door, saw the packed room, and immediately started backing away before anyone inside could see me. I acted like I’d knocked on the wrong door.
“Oh, my god!” I said. “I’m so stupid. This isn’t the fourth floor. It’s the third. Please forgive me. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”
I was gone before he even finished telling me it was all right, “anybody can make a mistake.”
The next day I heard that the police had raided the meeting and arrested everyone. Someone inside was with the government, or told somebody who was.
Fidel was good at that kind of thing, infiltrating movements, even before taking over the government. Even back when he was opposing Batista, he would infiltrate people into other opposition movements, so that he could know what his “allies” were up to. It was a small step for him to turn the same kind of tactics against the people of Cuba after he became prime minister.
So I understood the CIA’s caution. But they were wrong about so many things concerning the Bay of Pigs.
Agency officials told Kennedy that the people would rise up once the invasion began. That wasn’t true. It wasn’t close to true. The Pentagon knew it wasn’t. They told the president that. They didn’t expect the Cubans to do anything. Not even the ones the CIA had been supplying with weapons. And there were a lot of those.
The CIA encouraged, trained, and financed the best of the Cuban youth that opposed Communism. And they made sure they had what they needed for terrorism. They supplied C3 and C-4 military explosives. They provided them with M3 fully automatic machine guns. They provided the incendiary petacas that facilitated spectacular acts of sabotage against businesses, industries, and important state property.
The CIA delivered tons of weapons. A savage number of weapons. They dropped them offshore, just threw them in the water in special sealed bags. Our boats would go out later and retrieve them from the bottom of the sea. Then they’d unload them at different places around the island. One of the places where I picked up ours was at the Club Náutico, right in Havana—right under the government’s nose.
When we had to move them, we put them in burlap bags. Big, heavy ones. We’d put something else in the bag with them, a chair or something, so it would disguise the shape. We’d also put a pillow or something in, too, so the weapons didn’t clatter too much and attract attention. Then we’d just carry them out and put them in the trunks of our cars.
It was always best, Bishop taught me, to do it somewhere in the middle of the day. Not at night. At night it seems more suspicious, like you’re sneaking around. People ask questions. It seems more natural in broad daylight, when there are lots of people out and about. Then no one would imagine what you’re really doing. I mean, who would transport weapons when there’s a crowd around? That would be crazy, right?
I remember one shipment that just seemed obscenely large: incendiary bombs, smoke bombs, petacas, C3, C-4, a machine gun, hand guns, and ammunition. There was enough for fifty men. Easily.
Of course, it didn’t always go well.
The first weapons drop was a disaster. As writer Evan Thomas described it, the CIA made its first attempt on September 28, 1960. An airplane carrying enough weapons for one hundred men tried making a drop to an agent waiting on the ground. “The air crew missed the drop zone by seven miles and landed the weapons on top of a dam, where Castro’s forces scooped them up. The agent was caught and shot.”
Maybe
that’s why they turned to boats.
But the CIA still overestimated what we were capable of doing once the Bay of Pigs invasion actually began. It’s one thing to burn a store, but to arm and activate a grassroots army and help take over a country … that’s a different challenge.
Even if any of the opposition groups had considered joining forces with the Bay of Pigs invaders, they couldn’t. The moment the troops started rushing the shore at Playa Girón, Cuban security forces started rounding up everyone connected to the opposition. They took them to the giant sports stadium east of Havana and held them there, under arrest, until well after the invasion had been repelled and the attackers mopped up.
The invasion itself was a fiasco. The preparations were shoddy. The CIA-trained exile fighters were outnumbered and outgunned. Then they were cut loose, left to fight until their ammunition was gone, with no support and no chance to retreat. There was nowhere for them to go.
Twelve hundred men landed. Castro had two hundred thousand. The CIA knew that beforehand. The CIA was well aware that the twelve hundred idealistic Cuban exiles thrown against the heavily defended remote beachhead couldn’t win. Nor did the agency believe that the invasion would spark a successful uprising. What CIA Director Allen Dulles was counting on was his ability to pressure young President John F. Kennedy into launching an all-out U.S. military invasion of the island after the Bay of Pigs brigade got bogged down on the beaches. But Kennedy shocked Dulles and the other gray-haired military and intelligence advisors by refusing to buckle. JFK had told them all along that he didn’t want a “noisy” invasion, and he refused to expand the CIA operation into an all-out war, even if it meant sacrificing the brave brigadistas.
The new president had inherited the CIA’s duplicitous invasion plan from the Eisenhower administration. Now he was blamed for its failure. It earned him the hatred of Cubans and the CIA alike.
It also earned him Che Guevara’s mocking praise. In August, El Che sent Kennedy a note. “Thanks for Playa Girón,” he wrote. “Before the invasion, the revolution was weak. Now it’s stronger than ever.”
Trained to Kill Page 11