He must have been right. We knew there could be no more raids on Cuba, or ships. We switched our emphasis back to Eloy’s original plan, to secret a core cadre of counterrevolutionary fighters into Cuba, to launch a guerrilla war. I continued to travel unhindered to meet with exiles from New York to Los Angeles, Chicago to San Juan.
And I traveled to meet Bishop wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted.
So, a few months after Eloy’s arrest, when Bishop sent the message that he wanted to see me, I boarded a plane for Dallas without hesitation.
He had summoned me to Dallas before. Several times. So often, in fact, that I came to believe Bishop was from Texas. It was only much later that I learned that David Atlee Phillips—the man I knew as Bishop—was, in fact, raised in Texas. In his memoir about his time with the CIA, Phillips wrote that he was born in Fort Worth and attended Texas Christian University before heading off to World War II … and then his espionage exploits in Chile, Havana, Miami, and elsewhere.
Bishop asked me to meet him downtown, in a hotel lobby in one of the tallest buildings I’d ever seen outside of New York City. There was nothing unusual in that. Bishop seemed to prefer conferring in public places, and office buildings and hotel lobbies stood right near the top of his list.
I don’t recall if he said the name of the building where he wanted to meet, or just gave me the address. But it’s hard to mistake the forty-two-story Southland Center for any other edifice. At the time, it was the tallest building west of the Mississippi, and it absolutely towered over everything else—in fact, it’s still the tallest building in Texas. It was known for the observation deck on the top floor, and for its unmistakable façade—curtains of glass walls and, what I noticed most, shimmering blue Italian glass mosaic tiles.
Bishop was already there. The lobby was busy, full of people, but I spotted him standing in a corner, talking to a young, pallid, insubstantial man. He didn’t speak when Bishop introduced him to me, or at all for the rest of the time we were together. He seemed shy, and awkward. Like he felt out of place. I noticed his receding manner even more because it was such a contrast to Bishop’s natural, self-assured presence. He attracted attention because he was trying so hard not to.
I don’t remember if Bishop introduced him by name. He might have said, “Tony, this is Lee. Lee, Tony.” But I am absolutely sure that “Lee” said nothing. Not a word. Not even “Hello.” We shook hands, but he didn’t talk.
We stayed together in the lobby for about five more minutes, “Lee” awkwardly quiet, while Bishop talked to me in vague, general terms about the situation in Cuba. I answered in a similarly conversational manner. I didn’t really expect Bishop to say anything more specific in the other man’s presence. I guessed he was just trying to not seem rude by having us turn and walk away immediately. But the minutes ticked by uncomfortably as it became painfully clear that “Lee” was not going to take any opportunity to join in the conversation.
Finally, Bishop said something like, “Well, don’t let us keep you, Lee. I’m sure you have other things to do. Tony, do you want to get a cup of coffee?”
I said I did, and the three of us headed for an exit.
A teenaged couple was coming in as we got to the glass doors.
The boy, Wynne Johnson, told me recently that he remembers it clearly.
He was fifteen that day in 1963 and had his sights on the girl he was with. He wanted to show her a good time, he said, so he invited her to the Southland Center. They had been there before, but he liked impressing her by taking her up to the observation deck for the best view in Dallas.
He’s pretty sure the day was September 7, 1963, eleven weeks before Kennedy’s assassination. He arrived at that conclusion because, he said, he knows it had to be on the weekend. He and the girl got there by bus, and there wouldn’t have been time to get there after school during the week. He figures it was Saturday and not Sunday, because the buses were running. The library was open. So was the Southland Center. He knows it was at the beginning of September, because school had just started.
That matches my recollection, too. I don’t recall the date, or the day of the week, but I do remember it was near the end of the week, and near the end of August or beginning of September.
Wynne said he and the girl came in through the Olive Street door. It led into a long hall and through to the ground floor lobby. It had glass doors at the end, and, as Wynne recalls, when he and the girl entered the lobby, there were three men walking toward them. The one who looked oldest and “in charge,” in Wynne’s words, spoke to the young couple.
“Excuse me,” he said, “can you tell me if there’s a coffee shop nearby?”
Wynne remembers that there was a young man next to the one who spoke. When Wynne finally told his story publicly, more than fifty years later, he said the young man matched the description I gave. He was “a pale, slight, and soft-featured young man.”
The girl answered. She said she’d seen a coffee shop outside, on her way in. The girl pointed the way to the diner, and the two groups went their separate ways.
Eleven weeks later, the girl thought she saw the youngest of the three men from the Southland Center again. On television. His name, the newscaster said, was Lee Harvey Oswald.
When the girl told her mother this, she asked Wynne to come over as soon as possible. Then she told him and her daughter, in no uncertain terms, not to tell anyone that they had seen a man who looked like Oswald with two other men that day. Never.
“They could kill you,” she said.
Wynne did as he was told. He wiped it from his memory, until he read Gaeton Fonzi’s The Last Investigation, which dealt with the House Select Committee on Assassinations’ probe of JFK’s murder. As Wynne read the book, the memory of that afternoon came flooding back, triggered by two tiny details Fonzi included—that the meeting had occurred at the Southland Center, and that Bishop and I went to a coffee shop after we said good-bye to the man named Lee.
I vaguely remember Bishop briefly speaking with a girl as we were leaving. I don’t remember Wynne Johnson. It doesn’t matter. He remembers me. And Bishop. And Oswald.
I remember meeting Oswald, too. Without a doubt. And I remember my shock when I later saw his face on television after Kennedy died and heard he was accused of being the assassin. I recognized him immediately. He was, without question, the same pallid, pasty-faced man I had seen eleven weeks before at the Southland Center, in the company of Bishop.
I knew I wasn’t mistaken. Bishop himself taught me how to notice and remember faces.
I also knew not to mention it to anyone. Definitely not to Bishop. The girl’s mother was right. I didn’t know if Lee Harvey Oswald killed the president. I still don’t. But I had no doubt that being an eyewitness who could connect him to someone in the CIA was extremely dangerous.
My foreboding intensified after I returned to Miami.
Just a few days after I got back, a customs agent from Key West came to see me at my home. I knew him. All the anti-Castro activists did. César Diosdado was sort of the unofficial gatekeeper. He patrolled the Keys in his squad car, monitoring the places where we launched our boats, looking for violations of the Neutrality Act. That was a U.S. Customs responsibility. That was his job. He wasn’t a bad guy, or mean about it. But people in the paramilitary community suspected that he really worked for the CIA.
If I’d run into him in the Keys, doing his job, it wouldn’t have been odd at all. But it was a long way from the Keys to my house. And for him to show up out of nowhere, after Kennedy had been killed, asking if I knew anything about the assassination or Lee Harvey Oswald, was beyond peculiar.
It wasn’t, he said, an “official” visit. “They just wanted me to ask around, to see if anybody knew anything, that’s all.”
“Of course. I understand,” I told him. “But, no, I don’t know anything about that.”
“You ever meet him, Oswald? Or know anybody who has?”
“No,” I lied, just l
ike I figured he was lying to me. “Never. Why? Had he been in Miami?”
“Just asking,” Diosdado said.
A few weeks later, in early 1964, Bishop came to Miami. He asked me to meet him at our usual spot, Parque de las Palomas, Bayfront Park, downtown. Bishop and I always met there. I didn’t mention Diosdado, or our meeting in Dallas, or Oswald. Bishop did.
He had a request, he said. There had been talk about Oswald visiting Mexico before the assassination, that he met with a Cuban couple there. Bishop said he remembered that my cousin, Guillermo Ruiz, worked for Cuban intelligence in Mexico City.
“I understand he likes money. He likes living the good life,” Bishop said. “Do you think he’d sign a statement saying that he met with Oswald in Mexico? For money?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think he would accept any payment. I think he’s really a Communist. He’s faithful to the party.”
“Well, I’d like you to ask him anyway,” Bishop said. “Ask him what it would take for him to tell us about Cuba’s involvement in Kennedy’s death.”
“OK.”
“And Tony,” he said. “Keep this confidential.”
Some time went by before I got the chance to ask Guillermo. Before I did, I went back to Bishop. I asked him if he still wanted me to look into that “confidential matter.”
I remember his answer because I’d never seen Bishop react the way he did. He jumped. “Forget about that,” he said. “Just act like it never happened. You make believe I never asked you to do that.”
We never talked about Oswald again. I focused on Cuba and Alpha 66. Prevented from making more raids by sea, we turned our attention back to Menoyo’s original plan to create a guerilla insurrection in Cuba.
We used a totally different approach than we had with the hit-and-run assaults.
“We’ll land in the south,” said Menoyo. “In Oriente. We’ll make our way up into the mountains to establish our base. Then we bring together our people on the island and begin our fight.”
He wanted to use small infiltration teams, he said. Separate ones, on separate days. That would make it easier to filter men up to the staging point undetected. If any of them did get caught, it wouldn’t jeopardize the entire operation. The trip would be too long if they started from the Bahamas, as we had in the past. There’d be too great a risk of being spotted by Cuban patrol boats on the journey south, then east around the fat tip of the island, and west along the southern coast to the chosen landing place. Plus, they’d have to avoid being seen by the Marines at the U.S. base at Guantanamo, or any of the Navy vessels traveling to and from its port.
“We need to make the run as short as possible, to avoid being seen,” Menoyo said. “We need a jumping-off point. As close as possible. In the Dominican Republic.”
The idea had other advantages, as well. It would be easy for the men to fly to Puerto Rico on commercial airlines, a few at a time, without arousing suspicion. From there, we arranged with fishermen to take them across the Mona Passage in groups just as small. The turbulent channel between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic was a notorious smuggling pass, but in the other direction. Dominicans trying to get to the United States paid exorbitant sums to be transported to the western beaches of Puerto Rico. Fishing boats heading west, toward the Dominican Republic, attracted much less notice.
In addition, once the men got to the Dominican Republic, it would be a relatively simple matter for them to acquire the boats and food and other supplies they would need before venturing to Cuba.
Plus, Dominican government officials were famously pliable. It wouldn’t be hard to get them to look the other way, or even help, as we established the Alpha 66 training base and made our preparations. We called the plan “Omega.” The beginning now had an end.
The military junta that ruled the Dominican Republic authorized us to set up our base and designated an Air Force colonel as our liaison. We chose Punta Presidente, an uninhabited tongue of land jutting into the sea on the country’s north shore. A part of what eventually became a national park, it was isolated, and easily cordoned off from prying eyes. It sat on an inlet that provided a sheltered natural harbor, with ready access to the sea. And it sat almost directly in line with the city of Santiago on Cuba’s southern shore.
By the end of 1964, the preparations were complete. Our men had spent months training. We had boats in place and ready to go, well stocked with ample supplies of fuel, food, and ammunition. The first team, Menoyo decided, would slip into Cuba at the end of the year. He insisted on being part of it.
“I can’t ask my men to do what I wouldn’t,” he told me. “I’ll lead the way.”
He took three men with him. Four weeks after they landed, on January 24, 1965, a Cuban patrol captured them as they rested on a mountain slope. The plan had been discovered almost immediately after they disembarked. They had been dodging ambushes ever since, desperately ducking into the thick brush to evade the helicopters and planes hunting them from above, and the thousands of troops combing through the tropical terrain for them.
With dozens of guns aimed at them, they surrendered. Menoyo spent twenty-two years in prison in Cuba. He was one of the original plantados, refusing to perform labor or wear a prison uniform, insisting he was a political prisoner, not a criminal. He was beaten so severely he lost his hearing in one ear and his sight in his left eye. Still he refused.
“I spent twenty-two years in prison,” he said when he was finally released. “Twenty of them in my underwear.”
Menoyo’s capture was a crushing defeat. Our plan for overthrowing Castro and freeing Cuba had been destroyed. I was devastated. I was exhausted. And, after five years of sacrifice and risk, I was disillusioned. I quit Alpha and moved to Puerto Rico.
For Bishop, too, it was clear that the anti-Castro cause was going through its worst moment. Nothing seemed to go right. But rather than just letting me quit, or take an extended break, Bishop suggested I focus on other targets. I was his sleeper agent. At some point, there might be other ways to defeat Fidel Castro, outside of Cuba.
Castro always maintained a special relationship with the leaders of the Puerto Rican independence movement. Puerto Rico enjoyed a special status as a U.S. territory since gaining its independence from Spain with the Americans’ help. That brought certain benefits but also kept it in an uncomfortable legal limbo—not fully a state, and not its own country. That status has been the cause of often-violent division between the factions supporting the status quo and those known as “nationalists,” seeking to sever the bonds with the United States and establish Puerto Rico as a fully free country. The nationalists have on more than one occasion turned to violence for their cause.
As far back as 1950, a pair of rabid nationalists attempted to assassinate President Harry S. Truman. Armed uprisings broke out the same year in multiple cities across the island, and nationalists intent on assassinating the governor attacked his residence in Old San Juan. It took the Puerto Rican police, National Guard, and U.S. Army troops to quell the revolt. Twenty-eight people died, forty-nine were wounded.
Four years later, another group of nationalists sneaked into the Capitol Building, unfurled a Puerto Rican flag from a gallery overlooking the 240 gathered representatives on the floor of the U.S. Congress, and opened fire with semiautomatic pistols. Five representatives were wounded, one seriously.
Other, much less publicized incidents of violence plagued the island at home, and the issue remained tendentious and volatile in 1965, around the time I gave up my paramilitary efforts and established myself as a sports and concert promoter in San Juan.
It was the end of my time with Alpha 66, but not with Bishop. Concerned about Castro’s influence leaking into Puerto Rico through its radical elements, he approached me with a new way of continuing my service to him. He asked me to use my abilities and contacts to infiltrate the Communists in Puerto Rico and to keep tabs on their activities. My work as a promoter for sporting and musical events would serve as t
he perfect cover, he said.
Bishop was aware that the heads of the Puerto Rican nationalist movement had a pact with Fidel. They received financial support and training from Cuba to help them convert part of the island’s youth into expert terrorists. Fidel gained a valuable toehold to extend his global ambitions. It was a long-term project. They proposed creating a climate of solidarity in countries throughout the Third World, using the rallying cry that Puerto Rico was a long-suffering colony held against its will, and that its people ardently desired independence.
Bishop told me not to try infiltrating the Communists myself. I should select a couple of youths to do it for me.
“You direct them and guide them,” he instructed. “There’s no one else I trust with this responsibility. Remember, Tony, this is a universal struggle. Every time you hurt the Communists here, you’re hurting the ones keeping your homeland from being free.”
It wasn’t hard to find two willing participants. As I built and extended my personal business, I ran them as my own “assets,” to use a term people like Bishop and the CIA like to use. They were my covert field operatives, gathering intelligence and reporting back their findings.
Through them, we learned the operations of multiple nationalist organizations, and how the Communist Party used them as fronts to further its own devious ends. In the contorted political environment on the island, the Communist wolf sometimes dressed as a nationalist sheep and sometimes played the part of a beneficent socialist. There was no hint of dictatorship mentioned; they offered delivery.
I found myself living a life much like the one David Phillips said he had in Havana. My work as a promoter allowed me to travel freely, and to keep my own hours. That allowed me to work as a part-time intelligence agent, and to meet as necessary with Bishop during his frequent trips to San Juan.
It also allowed me to make a pleasingly decent income, and provided the luxury of meeting a variety of sports legends including Roberto Clemente, Orlando Cepeda, Johnny Bench, and the then-future Hall of Famer Carl Yastrzemski.
Trained to Kill Page 14