Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
Whether or not Che had negotiated additional military assistance for Cuba on his mission wasn’t known, but the report deemed it highly likely. “It may be assumed that the subject was discussed and delivery of new weapons agreed upon. According to one report, Guevara, early in his tour, asked Khrushchev for missiles and the Soviet Premier flatly refused, promising instead some automatic weapons from World War II.”
The pros and cons of assassinating Che, Raúl, and Fidel had been discussed by the CIA for some time. In January 1960, Allen Dulles had rejected an assassination program in favor of the “exile army” scheme, but eventually
Dulles would come around to the view that whatever would get the job done in the most efficient manner was best. If killing Cuba’s top leaders helped ensure the success of the invasion plan, then it was an option that had to be pursued. In the intervening months, he had allowed his covert operations director, Richard Bissell, to explore possibilities for assassinations. Already some plots had been hatched, including a bizarre attempt to poison Fidel’s favorite brand of cigars. Many more scenarios for killing Fidel and his top comrades would be planned or attempted over the coming months and years, including some in collusion with the American Mafia.
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Assassination was also explored as a remedy for political problems in other areas of the world. In August 1960, with Eisenhower’s approval, Dulles had cabled the CIA station chief in Leopoldville, the capital of the Congo, authorizing him to “remove” Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba “as an urgent and prime objective ... of high priority.” Lumumba, the founder of the Mouvement National Congolais, had won the most votes in the first elections held after Belgium agreed to grant the Congo independence, but he had to form a government that included his chief rivals. Joseph Kasavubu became president and Moise Tshombe was appointed head of the provincial government of Katanga, an area rich in copper, uranium, and cobalt. Almost immediately after the independence ceremony at the end of June, the Congo fell into chaos. The army mutinied, the killing of whites was widespread, and Tshombe—backed by Belgian mining interests—declared that Katanga was seceding and would become an independent state. Lumumba severed relations with Belgium, which had flown in reinforcements, and the UN sent in troops from other African countries. The Soviet Union responded to a plea from Lumumba for aid, including arms and military advisers.
Early in September, Kasavubu dismissed Lumumba as prime minister, and a week later Joseph Mobutu, the army chief of staff, who was receiving funds from the CIA, carried out his coup d’état. Lumumba was placed under house arrest, but Allen Dulles reiterated that he must be “eliminated from any possibility [of] resuming governmental position.” President Eisenhower was convinced that Lumumba intended to turn the Congo into a Soviet satellite. The CIA station chief in Leopoldville soon received a visitor from headquarters, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who had brought a syringe, rubber gloves, a mask, and a vial of poison that was designed to bring on a fatal illness common to the region. A practical solution had been found to
“remove” Lumumba. Another idea was that his toothpaste would be poisoned. Before the CIA could get close to him, however, he had escaped from house arrest and was captured by Mobutu’s troops. With the support, tacit and otherwise, of the CIA, the UN, and the Belgians, Lumumba was sent to Katanga, where he faced certain death at Tshombe’s hands. He was tortured and then murdered on January 17, 1961, although this was not widely known for nearly a month.
When Lumumba’s death was finally announced, in mid-February—shortly before the apparently botched attempt to kill Che on his way to work—Khrushchev accused Secretary-General Hammarsjköld of being an accomplice to the murder. Cuba sent a note of protest to the UN and announced three days of official mourning.
By March, preparations for the CIA’s Cuban invasion force were well under way. Manuel Ray had been subsumed into the Cuban exile alliance, and the former prime minister, Míro Cardona, had been named to head the Cuban Revolutionary Council as Cuba’s future provisional president. The anti-Castro activity had caused major problems, however. The previous November, about 600 Cuban exile fighters of Brigade 2506 had completed a three-month training course in Guatemala, but by then their presence—and the CIA’s sponsorship—had been splashed all over the press. The scandal that ensued made life difficult for the Guatemalan president, Ydigoras Fuentes. A sizable group of Guatemalan military officers, angered over the presence of foreign troops on their soil, had staged an uprising. They seized a military garrison in the capital, the Zacapa barracks in eastern Guatemala, and the Caribbean port of Puerto Barrios. But the rebel officers didn’t know what to do next, and they turned away hundreds of peasants in Zacapa who asked for weapons to join the fight. The Eisenhower administration had been quicker off the mark. A U.S. naval flotilla was dispatched to stand off the coast, and the CIA’s Cuban guerrilla force was deployed to help suppress the revolt. B-26 bombers supplied by the CIA and piloted by exiled Cubans dislodged the rebels from their positions. The show of force worked, and the rebels quickly surrendered.
What looked like a minor sideshow at the time was to have important consequences. Marco Aurelio Yon Sosa and Luis Turcios Lima, two young Guatemalan officers who had been trained by the United States, did not return to their barracks. They went underground, and within fifteen months they would be making their presence felt as the leaders of a left-wing guerrilla insurgency. In time, Turcios Lima would become one of Che’s favorite revolutionary protégés.
There had also been trouble in Venezuela that November, with the pro-Cuban
miristas
and Venezuelan Communists launching a violent insurrection
in Caracas against Betancourt’s regime. The left-of-center URD party of Venezuela’s former president, Admiral Wolfgang Larrazábal, which had formed part of the ruling government coalition, deserted Betancourt to join a coalition with MIR and the Communists. They formed the National Liberation Council to overthrow the government. Student demonstrations and street battles with police followed, but the revolt eventually was quashed. By the year’s end, constitutional guarantees would be suspended indefinitely, the universities closed, left-wing newpapers banned, and the country’s oilfields occupied by troops. The Venezuelan stage was becoming propitious for an armed guerrilla struggle, and, with Cuban backing, it would come before long.
The graduation of the brigade of Cuban exiles in Guatemala coincided with a shift in the CIA’s strategy regarding its future role in Cuba. The agency’s original idea that the force could fight and survive as a guerrilla army looked increasingly doubtful. While the main force was training in Guatemala, the CIA had run a smaller covert program, dispatching teams of rebels and saboteurs to Cuba. Most of them had been quickly put out of action by Castro’s forces. The CIA’s airdrops had similarly failed to sustain the rebels in the mountains. A rather more ambitious plan seemed to be in order, and Richard Bissell replaced the guerrilla warfare instruction in Guatemala with conventional training. Under the new plan, the anti-Castro exile brigade would make an amphibious landing on Cuba’s coast, supported by air strikes. It would establish a foothold and proclaim a provisional Cuban government, which would be instantly recognized by Washington and friendly Latin American governments. The United States could then, theoretically, intervene to assist the new government. By that time, it was hoped, Fidel, Che, and Raúl would be dead, since the CIA had several schemes under consideration to assassinate the Cuban leaders on the eve of the landing.
Seven separate five-man infiltration groups called Gray Teams had been selected from the Guatemala brigade. They were to meet up with the underground resistance movement on the island and help coordinate the CIA’s airdrops of weaponry. The main invasion force was to hit specific targets and lead armed uprisings throughout Cuba. Nineteen-year-old Felix Rodríguez was among those selected for a Gray Team. He and the other team members were moved to a new jungle camp in Guatemala, where they were taught espionage tactics by war-hardened Eastern European anticommunist exiles. A few days after Christmas, his Gray Team was ushered onto an American military transport plane with blacked-out windows and flown to Fort Clayton, one of the American military bases in the Panama Canal Zone. Their training continued, but now they were taught how to handle advanced weaponry of Soviet and Eastern European origin.
In early January, 1961, Rodríguez came up with a plan to assassinate Fidel that was approved by his American handlers. He and a comrade were flown to Miami, where he was given a German-made sniper’s rifle with a telescopic sight. The CIA selected the assassination site, a house in Havana that Fidel was known to frequent. Rodríguez was taken to the Cuban coast three times in fast boats traveling at night, but each time he failed to rendezvous with his on-ground contacts. After the third failure, the rifle was taken away, and the CIA told Rodríguez they had changed their minds about the operation.
The other Gray Teams had been brought to a base camp on the outskirts of Miami. On February 14, the first infiltration team was smuggled into Cuba. A week later, Rodríguez and his four comrades, with a load of weapons, explosives, and ammunition, were dropped on Cuba’s northern coast between the Varadero beach resort and Havana. They were picked up in cars driven by people belonging to the MRR underground.
Over the next month, Rodríguez and his friends met with the underground resistance in Havana and Camagüey, staying in safe houses and making preparations to receive a large airdrop of weapons from the CIA. After they got the arms and distributed them, their mission was to largely replicate what Che and Camilo had done in the last phase of the anti-Batista war: open up a guerrilla front in northern Las Villas and try to split the island in half, forcing the government to divert forces away from the south coast, where the invasion force was due to land. At one point in mid-March, Rodríguez helped the Cuban underground transfer some weapons kept in a safe house located next door to the State Security headquarters on Fifth Avenue between Fourteenth and Sixteenth Streets. Rodríguez wasn’t aware that Che Guevara lived less than two blocks away.
None of this activity would have come as a big surprise to Fidel. President Kennedy was determined to show his mettle, and, in the two months since he had taken office, it seemed clear that preparations were still under way for some kind of military intervention in Cuba. In fact, Kennedy had been briefed about the planned invasion soon after he won the election in November, and he had given CIA Director Dulles the go-ahead. Since taking office, Kennedy had studied the CIA’s beefed-up plans with a more tentative eye, expressing misgivings about their feasibility, but an effective combination of warnings and reassurances from the CIA had won out in the end, despite the opposition of some of the president’s closest civilian advisers.
The exile force was well trained and itching to fight, Dulles’s people told Kennedy. D-day had to come soon. As matters now stood, the CIA could take out Cuba’s small fleet of Sea Furies and B-26s before the invasion began,
but that window was rapidly closing. Cuban pilots were being trained to fly Soviet MiGs in Czechoslovakia, and, although no MiGs had yet been delivered to Cuba, some probably would be before long. The CIA had chosen a landing site on Cuba’s southern coast near Trinidad, in Las Villas province, but Kennedy thought that landing there would be too “spectacular.” He opted for a less visible spot farther west, at a remote beach called Playa Girón on the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy had been assured that if the rebels failed to hold their beachhead, they could make it to the “nearby” Escambray and, after meeting up with the rebels there, begin a guerrilla resistance movement.
The plan had many flaws. The Escambray mountains were actually more than 100 miles away, and the very isolation that made Playa Girón seem ideal for a surprise landing made it a death trap if Castro’s forces were able to get there quickly. There were only two ways out: along the narrow roads through the vast Zapata swamp or along the exposed strip of coastal beach. In either case, the invaders could easily be ambushed, pinned down, and massacred. Evidently, none of this occurred to the CIA strategists.
Despite his misgivings, Kennedy agreed to the plan, but he ruled out the direct involvement of U.S. troops or any large-scale American air support once the assault was under way. The CIA men apparently believed that once the action had begun, the president would relent. In any event, this crucial bit of news was not imparted to the Cuban exiles involved; they thought they would be going in backed up by the full weight of America’s military power.
The CIA didn’t have a clue about the extent to which their “covert” program had already been infiltrated by Castro’s intelligence service. At least one of the thirty-five Gray Team members in Cuba was a double agent for the Castro government, and there were undoubtedly others. In Miami, the general outline of the CIA’s plans was widely known throughout the exile community, where Fidel had a flourishing spy network. What’s more, he now had plenty of armor at his disposal. As Alexandr Alexiev gleefully confided years later, “We already had Soviet arms in Playa Girón. A lot of Soviet arms participated in Playa Girón.”
During this tense period of a rumored invasion, nocturnal air raids, and a spate of bombing attacks against expropriated stores in Havana, Che continued to give speeches, write articles, and receive foreign delegations. He attended the opening and closing ceremonies of the Chinese Economic Edification Exposition in the Hotel Habana Libre. He cut the ribbon at a
new pencil factory and visited the recently nationalized Nicaro nickel mine, urging its workers to “sacrifice to produce more.” Che’s most recent cause was volunteer labor. He had initiated the practice on a small scale when volunteers helped construct a school in Camilo’s memory, but it was the volunteer work brigades in Mao’s China that truly inspired him. After he returned from his trip abroad, he devoted his Saturdays to lending a hand in factory assembly lines, cutting sugarcane, and lifting bricks at construction sites. He urged his colleagues at the Ministry of Industries to set an example by volunteering during the sugar harvest. Before long, everyone at the ministry who wanted to remain in Che’s good graces began giving up Saturdays at home to join him in these work sessions. The program, which came to be called
emulación comunista
, was based on the idea that by working with no thought of remuneration, the individual takes an important step toward building a true Communist consciousness.