Subject: Castro plots public in '64
Date: 13 Feb 2000 08:47:11 GMT
From: atlasrecrd@aol.com (Atlasrecrd)
Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy.jfk

Parade Magazine
April 12, 1964

Three years after the Bay of Pigs, here is the first fully documented story
of
a key event in that disaster:
The Attempt to Assassinate Castro

by Andrew St. George

While Castro was making his revolution, Andrew St. George spent more time
with
him in the mountains than any other American journalist. They were close
friends - Castro once awarded him a medal, ordered him released when he was
arrested. Since Castro's open avowal of Communism, St. George has maintained
close contact with anti-Castro groups.
This week will mark the anniversary of the ill-fated disaster at the Bay of
Pigs. It is exactly three years since Fidel Castro's regime threw back an
exile-manned, U.S.-supported attempt to invade Cuba.
The story of that debacle has been repeatedly discussed since. It has been
the
subject of Congressional and executive investigations and of partisan
political
recrimination.
Yet one of the most important details of that Cuban defeat has not
previously
been revealed. It is an event that may have been the whole key to the Bay of
Pigs tragedy, and its occurrence-or failure to occur-had a profound effect
on
the invasion itself and on subsequent history. And although it has not
publicly
been acknowledged, long and painstaking investigation by this reporter has
documented this event.
Carried out on the highest levels of Cuba's revolutionary government, it was
an
attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro. And it came within a cat's whisker of
success.
This plot, of course, was not the first against Castro's life, nor has it
been
the last. One of the records of which the bearded revolutionary leader is
least
proud is the number of times he has been the target of nearly successful
assassination attempts.
Before detailing the most important plot, let's look at a few others. The
most
recent try came just before the celebrations in Havana last January
commemorating the victory over Batista. U.S. security boats intercepted two
speedboats crammed with anti-Castro conspirators and hundreds of petacas,
plastic bombs to blast Castro from his reviewing stand.
The U.S. government, worried about the Caribbean aftermath of a successful
assassination, is not happy about such attempts. But American nervousness
has
not been able to do too much about it. Some of the attempts have come so
close
to success that Castro has been left with the apprehensive wariness of a
lone
fox in a hunting preserve.
An early try at an ambush was engineered by the sinister Col. Johnny Abbes,
formerly intelligence chief of the Dominican Republic. Abbes, working on
orders
of Dominican strongman Rafael Trujillo-himself the victim of
assassination-hired a swashbuckling American adventurer, Alex Rorke,
son-in-law
of New York's famed restauranteur, Sherman Billingsley, to pilot a speedboat
that landed eight men before dawn in eastern Cuba. The plan was to ambush
Castro on his way to speak at a service at the Santiago cemetery.
Through a pouring rain, Trujillo's Tommy gun team spotted Castro's chief
bodyguard, Capt. Alfredo Gamonal, in the second jeep of a caravan.
The killers assumed Castro was in the back seat, and their bullets chewed up
Gamonal, the superintendent of cemeteries and the jeep driver. Castro,
riding
in the next-to-the-last jeep, was unhurt.
"He may have nine lives," Abess told Rorke, who returned to Ciudad Trujillo
complaining of Castro's charmed life. "But if so, I'll try a tenth time."
Abbes acquired an apartment in Havana overlooking the CMQ television
studios,
where Castro appeared frequently to deliver his nation-wide harangues.
Another
American adventurer, a one-time top competition sharpshooter, was retained
by
Trujillo on a down payment of $25,000 and the promise of a cool million if
he
managed to score a clean hit on his moving target.
The marksman said he could do it, but demanded a special weapon-a
bench-adjusted telescopic carbine with a nondeflecting muzzle silencer.
Saved By Trujillo
"Dominican ordnance experts immediately went to work to produce the rifle,"
former Dominican State Security Minister General Arturo Espaillat recalls.
"The
weapon was completed and en route to Cuba when Trujillo canceled the project
.
. . He was afraid of Washington's fury. I really think that Fidel would be
dead
today if the plot had not been called off."
Prior to that attempt, another American, Alan Robert Nye, a 31-year-old
Chicagoan, was convicted in Havana for conspiring to kill Castro. Fee:
$100,000. Although a Cuban court had signed, sealed and delivered the order
for
his execution, Nye was allowed to leave the country for the U.S.
There have been far too many of these attempts to detail here; although men
like Alex Rorke, and Paul Hughes, a former American Navy jet pilot, have
lost
their lives because of them, Castro cannot rest easy.
Before embarking on an airplane trip, he usually inspects the plane from tip
to
tail. During the warm-up, he once spotted flames belching from the engine
exhaust. Castro ordered the ignition cut and both pilots back into the
cabin,
where they explained for a half-hour that burning exhaust was normal and
that
it did not prove the plane booby-trapped.
During his visit to New York to attend the United Nations in 1960, Castro's
food problems were magnified by his methods of selecting restaurants. A
brace
of bodyguards was ordered to go out and buy food from a restaurant-but never
from the hotel kitchen or from the restaurant nearest the hotel. On each
occasion, Castro would call out a number, say, "Three!" or "Five!" which
meant
they had to count off three or five restaurants before they could enter the
next one, thus having presumably eluded the potential poisoners.
His security chief also carried sensitive white mice-"to detect
assassination
attempts by radiation or nerve gas," chief body guard Gamonal explained.
But the only security measure Castro really has faith in is the one he
learned
in his two years of guerrilla warfare: never let anyone know where you'll
show
up next. In the Sierra Maestra, when Castro and his little band were making
their revolution against Batista, no one but Fidel knew exactly where the
day's
march route would end.
The habit persists. When he made his first visit to Moscow, he left Havana
and
returned to it as secretly as an enemy infiltrator. No one in Cuba knew when
to
expect the Premier home. When his Russian airliner finally landed, there was
nobody to welcome him except some startled airplane mechanics. Grinning,
Castro
borrowed a coin, dropped it into the nearest pay phone to let Cuban
President
Osvaldo Dorticos know he was back.
But is was the assassination attempt just before the Bay of Pigs that was
the
most significant of all. It involved several senior commanders of the Cuban
Revolutionary Armed Forces as well as key civilian leaders.
The Central Intelligence Agency, which had received absolutely reliable
reports
that a conspiracy to assassinate Castro was developing among his top
lieutenants, decided to contact the plotters, because the U.S. was already
training its own anti-Castro force in Guatemala. CIA agents discovered the
conspiracy had a wealthy contact man in Miami, a former sugar cane grower,
Alberto Fernandez.
With CIA's tacit approval, Fernandez bought a converted subchaser, the
Texana
III, and had it outfitted with concealed deck armaments, 50-cal. machine
guns,
two 57 mm. recoilless rifles and a pair of small speedboats with muffled
interceptor engines.
Operations Begin
Now began one of the most daring and extraordinary secret intelligence
operations ever attempted. Shuttling in the dark of night between Marathon
Key
and the north coast of Cuba, the Texana III was the link between the Cuban
conspirators and the U.S.
Its two deck boats skimmered up to shore less than a dozen miles from Havana
to
pick up their unusual passengers: Cuban rebel comandantes in full uniform
and
governmental functionaries carrying brief cases.
Before the sun came up, the travelers were in U.S. waters, where they held
quick conferences with American agents, sped back to Cuba the next night.
The tricky and hazardous process went on for a couple of months, and the
U.S.
learned more and more about the murder conspiracy beaded by cool, brainy
Comandante Humberto Sori Marin, a hero of the Castro revolution. Other
top-level men involved astounded the Americans: Secret Police Chief Aldo
Vera;
Comandante Julio Rodriguez, deputy commandant of the San Antonio de los
Banos
air base; several Navy flag officers; the military superintendent of
Camagüey
Province; the president of the Cuban Sugar Institute; and the undersecretary
of
finance. They were determined to act early in 1961. The plot was to kill
both
Castros and touch off a general uprising.
Convinced that, regardless of what the U.S. did, the conspirators meant
business, the CIA decided to capitalize on the plot without actually
participating in it. Officials readied the landing forces to go ashore at
the
same time. Agents began a series of secret meetings in Havana with the
conspirators to coordinate their plans.
Then, just before the target date, there occurred one of those impossible
mistakes nobody ever believes. A crucially important secret conference was
being held with most of the top conspirators. They met in a house of known
safety in Havana's Miramar suburb on a tranquil street, Calle Once. It was a
large, yellow, somnolent building, lived in and owned by a respectable
retired
sugar engineer and his wife.
In the front patio, the engineer played gin rummy with his wife and led by
many
points. In the back of the house, the plotters gathered around a heavy
refectory table covered with street maps, pinpointing the massive incendiary
attack against the crowded downtown district of "Old Havana," which was to
touch off the uprising. The Texana III had already shipped in hundreds of
petacas.
Several blocks away, a militia security patrol stopped in front of another
house, then entered to search it. A nervous woman in a back room fled from a
rear door with her small daughter. She ran beneath garden walls and ducked
into
the rear entrance of the large yellow house of the engineer, an old friend.
The street was deserted. But one militiaman watched as she ran to the yellow
house. So, under the blazing sky of a spring afternoon, in Miramar, the
security unit walked down the street to that yellow house, that sleepy
yellow
house . . . .
The pity of it was that the nervous woman who ran did not have to. The
security
police were on a routine search. She was suspected of nothing; if she had
remained, nothing would have gone wrong.
The 11 key figures of the Sori Marin conspiracy were caught in a single
sweep.
The four men who had been sent in by the CIA might have gotten away; they
were
all Cubans and carried such perfectly forged papers that two were
subsequently
shot under their assumed names.
But Sori Marin had no chance whatever. As the milicianos burst into the
room,
his pistol leaped into his hand. But the security men's snub-nosed Czech
Tommy
guns chattered and Sori Martin crumpled as he tried to crash though a
window.
And it was all a mistake. The militia walked in by mistake. The woman ran
away
by mistake.
Too late to stop invasion
Washington working with fragmented information, decided it was too late to
halt
the invasion troops staging for departure in Guatemala. There was no way to
know just how badly the conspiracy had been crippled; there was a
possibility
that many of its members had not been identified and would thus be able to
carry out the plans.
It was a forlorn hope. April 17, at dawn, the first of the invasion troops
splashed through the surf onto Giron Beach. April 17, at dawn, the seven top
conspirators, led by Sori Martin, wounded and supported by his guards, but
still wearing his uniform, were executed in Havana. Within the next few
hours
they were followed to the wall by the captured CIA men. The rest, the
slaughter
at the Bay of Pigs, is history.
U.S. security and intelligence agencies are now more worried about the
possibility of a successful assassination. For Washington-which once gave
tacit
support to Sori Marin-now feels that a real explosion involving Castro could
trigger the most unpredictable chain reaction of the coming year, a chain
reaction that conceivably could turn into World War III.
The current approach was pointed up in a quiet sort of way the day Allen
Dulles-whose own job as head of the CIA ended a short time after that ill
starred invasion-appeared in public for the first time to talk about it on
Meet
the Press.
"Mr. Dulles," the moderator asked, "in launching the Bay of Pigs invasion,
you
were obviously expecting a popular uprising to support it. Yet none
occurred.
How could you have been so wrong?"
"A popular uprising?" Mr. Dulles puffed on his pipe. "That's a popular
misconception-but no, I wouldn't say we expected a popular uprising. We were
expecting something else to happen in Cuba... something that didn't
materialize."
As this is written, U.S. intelligence is still expecting it to happen, but
the
expectation has now turned to a nervous and gnawing worry.