14-00000 ~~ ~ 245 - 277/ the WH Division budget ce Py Probably Castro’ s attempt to export his revo- on Ee Tne acetal aed tmnt ar = sy lution reached its peak in 1962. The first Castro- A ? inspired guerrilla action in Latin America occurred ei = o a ene ee, in March of that year, when Indians in the interior <a ee ee ee of Peru attacked the towns of Huampani and Satipo. Zee A Lima Station penetration agent identified their leader as Cuban-trained and reported that radios and weapons var been smuggled in from Cuba to start the ' 278 attack. At year's end the US Government planned to ee Reeth i, assemble for the Organization of American States a white paper on Cuban subversion in Latin America, and in February 1963 WH Division chiefs of station ot aS ee met in Panama to discuss their contributions with - SS Ee Sa es nema ne the DCI. From this meeting came a picture of Castro's aie campaign of subversion. Hi | reported that left-wing Peronists fi were an attractive target for Cuba; police had cap- iil tured a group of terrorists organized and directed | by John William Cooke, an ex-Peronist then in Cuba. a | knew of 217 activists trained in Cuba within nine months and was looking forward to debriefing SECRET
14-00000 tae O £ FE vee Fee! shoe’ Boe aT ae fr? ee po AE 2 it FS pe, Si 1965 the New York Times front-paged a reasonably com- f SECRET Everyone breathed easier, and the Chief, WH Division, described the operation as “one of the \\ most tightly held of our Cuban activities." Two years later the hold was not so tight, for on 26 March plete and accurate account of the great sugar-sabotage operation under the headline: woe dan Dem Wi gle = PRESIDENT KENNEDY BALKED CIA PLOT ON RUSSIAN SUGAR an Sees Press services picked up the story. United if Press International doffed its cap to "enterprising _U.S. agents,” but added that “White House interven- mit ' tion: foiled the Central Intelligence Agency's Carib- 283/ Vi bean melodrama." CIA, as usual, had no comment. oe a —— os a Na not ge, ad a wee h te EE Re ye epee pene SE LSE oa ete 5 Eee ae For across- the- board coverage “of Cuba in the early 1960's the Mexico City Station was tops. Reporting on the Cuban Embassy, the COS said in Feb- ruary 1963: .. . We intercept their mail, photograph all the people who go in and out of the Embassy, cover their telephones completely, and within a few hours of the conversa- tions have resumes of all. the phone calls. We cover their trash, and this has been found to be useful. And included in the usefulness was the discovery of a man who ‘was doublecrossing us, who we thought was a good penetration of the Embassy. - 252 - SECRET
14-00009 ¥ CIA had seven different microphones in the Cuban Embassy, one hidden in a leg of the coffee table in the Ambassador's office. Like most audio operations, this one produced a lot of chaff, but it also yielded bits of operational information showing connections between the Embassy and local , | Communists and students. At the airport the station was getting photographs of all travellers to Cuba, plus about 300 photos per day of their passports and documents. 2 y [inctudea in’ the take from the Cuban Embassy were the serial numbers of weapons bought by Commu- nists for smuggling into Guatemala, plus the names and positions of the sellers. Complicating the ex-_ ploitation of this information was the fact that the weapons had been sold by Mexican officials, and while the station wanted to stop the smuggling and appre- ~ hend the Communist smugglers it had no desire to upset sensitive relations With the Mexican Government] g [Two high-level officers of the Cuban Embassy, were recruited CIA penetrations. The station had sent three agents into Cuba and was getting reports from them by secret ~ - 253 - SECRET
14-00000 eee ao Bee ae Te ce anced cle See aes’ Ts ewe wt Los Seas ee nh ean ae Sit maar ase ccnnen nent abe RET TANIA | Enmeteren E 3 Sa ort epee aoe == Tn ep eee ee Se ieee ee ces eiearceineete seein é Zr? s negengist Sey oy, [Fo Yo seh restraints was applied to Venezuela, if where Castro-supported terrorism was rampant. On writing. Meanwhile it was servicing 17 accommoda- tion addresses for Headquarters and Miami. In spite of all this, there was little exploi- table evidence that Cuba was using Mexico as a base for subversion in the rest of Latin America. Mexico was the only Latin American nation to maintain diplo- matic relations. with Cuba in the face of an OAS reso- lution intended to isolate the island. Anxious to retain this bridge to the Western Hemisphere, Castro had ordered his Embassy to do nothing which might 284)" 284 considered offensive by the Mexican Government. PEE poe 2 November 1963, on a tip from a campesino, the Servicio de Inteligencia de las Fuerzas Armadas (SIFA) found a cache of more than three tons of Cuban arms on a beach on the Paraguana Peninsula in northwest Venezuela. brought sample weapons to Washington, where CIA was able to raise the serial numbers and Cuban Army in- Signia which had been ground off. Richard Helms, - 254 - SECRET
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14-00000 SECRET Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, General: Maxwell Taylor of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Presidential Advisor McGeorge Bundy, DCI John A. McCone, DDP Richard Helms and FitzGerald. There was no question about charging CIA with the following types of activity: 1. Collection of intelligence. 2. Covert propaganda to encourage low-risk forms of active and passive resistance. . 3. Cooperation with other agencies in economic denial. 4. Attempts to identify and estab- lish contact with potential dissident elements inside Cuba. 5. Indirect economic sabotage. There was sharp disagreement, however, over whether CIA should continue infiltrating sabotage agents into Cuba. McNamara, Taylor and McCone favored more sabotage raids, but Rusk and Bundy feared that CIA: raids might undermine the US "clean hands" pos- ture in the OAS or give the Soviets an excuse for delaying turnover of their surface-to-air missile - 280 - SECRET
14-00000 SECRET (SAM) sites to the Cubans. Finally Rusk recommended that CIA's raiding assets be kept in being but not actually used--at least until the OAS and SAM sites problems could be clarified. The President accepted this recommenda- tion. Although CIA did try to keep its sabotage agents ready, the White House decision spelled the end of the Agency's. sabotage (though not support and intelligence-collecting) infiltrations of cubase Agency- sponsored radio propaganda aimed at Cuba reached its peak in early 1965 with an actual . expenditure of about $1,500,000 and expansion still planned. The semi-notional Cuban Freedom Committee served as cover for Radio Free Cuba,. which broad- cast a total of 77 hours weekly from transmitters. in Miami, Key West, and New. Orleans. Started in 1961, the Cuban Freedom Committee retained a public relations firm and spent. $7,000 annually to establish its cover by soliciting bona fide public contributions. In its first year these totalled $5,000, but by 1965. public support. had dwin- dled to $200. One of the difficulties was that any widespread US appeal for funds for Rddio Free Cuba - 281 - SECRET
SECRET would perforce have to attack Castro, and might there- fore be considered domestic propaganda exceeding CIA's charter. | Outside the committee, CIA operated a trans- mitter calling itself Radio Americas and broad- casting from Swan Island, and bought time for anti- Cuban broadcasts from three commercial stations. Programming on these four stations totalled 119 hours weekly in addition to the 77 on Radio Free 307/ Cuba. Swan Island, roughly a mile and a half long and three-quarters of a mile wide, lies in the Carib- bean 125 miles north of the Honduran coast. Both the United States and Honduras claimed sovereignty over the island in the 1960's. The US Weather Bureau-had manned a weather station there Since 1949, and CIA first set. up a covert transmitter in 1954 to support its propa- ganda against the Arbenz regime in Guatemala.* Apart from the question of its real impact~in Cuba and the psychological problems of a. staff living * Under a 1971 agreement the US relinquished its claim to sovereignty but retained the right to operate a weather station. - 282 - SECRET
14-00000 ior rene sy CIA \ propaganda mechanism. SECRET in almost total isolation, the Swan Island transmitter raised a nightmare of cover complications. Operating as Radio Americas, it was supposedly under cover of the Vanguard Service Corporation, an Agency proprie- tary which offered no services, and the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation, another proprietary which operated no steamships. A Boston millionaire who claimed to-own the island collected rent from the Vanguard Corporation, which could not afford to argue, but not from-the Weather Bureau, which disputed his claim. Vanguard contracted with Coastal Air of Miami for one light-aircraft supply flight a week and with the Logistics Service Corporation of Phila- delphia, a Philco subsidiary, to maintain the island facilities and transmitting equipment. All of this enabled CIA to play tapes and broadcast the commen- - taries of the three Cuban announcers stdtioned on ~ the island, but it did not prevent Radio Habana from pinpointing the transmitter and calling it a 308/ , tera rr Mee RE St eee ne crt peer Seimei tay Mien trent eR RTS | et “Nevertheless in early 1965 Congressman Roman | — C. Pucinski (D-I11.), a member of the Cuban Freedom Committee executive board, was pressing CIA to saturate j., - 283 - SECRET
14-00000 a { is i i [aie beste Smee I Yt he Op js Lh fo ! f ment of the Agency. __ we eee os screeds aug Ee TE on eT Sr ET ER SECRET the Cuban airwaves and smuggle or airdrop transistor radios into Cuba to expand the audience. Inside the Agency FitzGerald politely rejected the. congressional advice but pointed out that WH Division already was planning the University of the Air,* which would broadcast college-level courses to divide the loyalty of Cuban students I Another congressional critic was Senator Eugene McCarthy (D-Minn.), perennial sponsor of bills to create a CIA Watchdog Committee and author of a a January 1964 Saturday Evening Post article entitled i "The CIA Is Getting Out Of Hand."’ In April 1965 FitzGerald and of WH Division met with the Senator to discuss the Christian Democratic social and political programs of the Catholic Church in Latin America. After this meeting McCarthy, a ‘devout Catholic, considerably tempered his assess- US relations with Cuba entered a new phase after the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 when Agency * This project was abandoned following press expo- sure of CIA's relations with American universities and student groups. oe - 284 - SECRET
14-00000 SECRET facilities provided the Kennedy administration with positive information on the buildup of Soviet mis- sile capability on the island. This episode is docu- ‘mented elsewhere and is outside the scope of this present paper. One of FitzGerald's major successes against Cuba was in the field of economic warfare--called the MHVIPER program in CIA. After a hurricane ripped through the island in 1964, Castro's econo- mists and publicists began a campaign to persuade free-world sugar brokers that the Cuban sugar crop had been badly damaged and exports would be low. ‘The object, of course, was. to drive up sugar prices on the world market, on which Castro depended for hard currency to finance imports. At first the campaign worked and sugar prices did skyrocket. But FitzGerald was not convinced, and sent | to London to study economic reports from the British Embassy in Havana. Partly on the basis of her research, the US. Government's sugar-crop forecasters concluded that despite the hurricane Cuba would harvest more sugar than ever. FitzGerald arranged to have. a. Department of 285 -) SECRET
14-00000 | SCOT ee SECRET State official leak this general conclusion to the New York Times. Sugar prices dipped, but rallied when Castro indignantly denied the Times story. The Department then officially announced the US Govern- ment estimate that there would be no shortage of Cuban sugar. As it turned out, the US estimate was right. After the official announcement world sugar prices dropped several cents per pound, and this time they stayed down. At a time when fluctuations of one cent a pound meant millions of dollars to the Cuban economy, publication of the essentially correct estimate upset Castro's attempts to manipu- : ‘ late the market . ~ Late in the summer of 1964. the DDI told. Fitz- Gerald that the Department of State was inquiring informally about the possibility of setting up a CIA channel for plausibly deniable clandestine con- tacts with Cuba. FitzGerald replied: It seems to me that the establishment of a continuous two-way conversation with Fidel Castro at a time when we: have noth- ing to convey to him would he a serious mistake.... It may be that Secretary Rusk feels that. the present establishment of conversations with Fidel Castro should - 286 - - SECRET
14-00000 SECRET be considered in order to make sure that we will have the ability to speak to him when or if the.time comes. On this score I-do not feel there is any reason for worry. There are a number of ways in which'we can communicate to Fidel. Castro virtually at a moment's notice. 312/ art of CIA's economic warfare against Cuba involved an elaborate scheme to Supply tampered pet- ' roleum additives through an Agency mechanism | This was planned as subtle sabotage; after 4 being mixed with Soviet petroleum the additives would Surely but imperceptibly incapacitate Cuban machinery. Unfortunately, the doctored additives proved anything ‘but subtle and the Cubans promptly discovered they 313/ were unusable, Also a failure was an attempt by| ations Group (WH/COG) to persuade of the Cuban Oper- executives to produce spare parts: deliberately de- Signed to break down. went tol Joe —— | jin early March 1965 and explained to| | vice presidents that the defective parts | | could be-sent to Cuba through third-country suppliers. But. refused to cooperate; they feared that their companies' reputations would it _ - 287 - | | SECRET
14-00000 SECRET be ruined if the doctored parts accidentally got in- 314/ _.to the wrong channels. In the wake of the ill-fated Bay of Pigs in- vasion of 1961 and the active years of 1962-1964, anti-Castro operations began to diminish in 1965. Operations continued but at a slower pace. John L. Hart had the title of Deputy Chief, WH Division, for Cuba (DCWHD/C), and operated a.large base in Miami with virtual autonomy. A chain of safehouses, training sites and boat-moorages stretched through the Florida keys to Key West. From. these CIA . launched maritime operations which regularly placed and retrieved agents from the Cuban coast, but whose intelligence product often did not justify the 315/ effort. Meanwhile CIA ran a dwindling number of on-island intelligence agents, including some ' handled in cooperation with the US Navy base at j de Ahn ~ ~~~ -Guantanamo, where hundreds of-Cubans still worked = -—- >>> -by day and returned to Castroland at night. As the Cuban General Directorate of Intelligence (DGI) L improved and expanded under Soviet tutelage, CIA agent networks were rolled up and even singleton - 288 - OR] | SECRET
14-00000 , tS SS Se wR, SECRET agents dropped out of contact. Typical was Radio Habana's 12 May 1965 announcement that "31 counter- revolutionaries, members of a CIA espionage network" had been arrested. Of the 14 actually named in the broadcast, WH Division identified six who had worked with Juan Bautista Perez Luis (AMTAUP-10), chief gardener at the naval base and principal agent for CIA. Although he had been debriefed in Miami in Jan-. uary, Perez' location and status were not known in 316/ May. r MES Ob ab ly the most successful political oper- ation in WH Division's history was the Chilean elec- tion of 4 September 1964 in which Eduardo Frei of the Christian Democratic Party decisively defeated i, Salvador Allende, Marxist leader of a Communist- j dominated coalition.* Drawing on covert mechanisms established by Santiago Station years earlier, plus new procedures and assets developed for the election, 5 the campaign to assure Frei's victory cost CIA about Its success kept Allende at bay until 1970, when no such intervention by CIA was authorized. * For a full description, see "The Chilean Election Operation of 1964, a Case History, 1961-1964." ‘ CSHP-1. a - 289 - Up/ SECRET
14-00000 SECRET that FitzGerald had won the President's confidence in several meetings. who had been in Mexico only a few months, apparently simmered down after his |, 318/ ol LAT ee eS EERE Pt BROT The Mexico City Station devoted a major part \ of its time to running or supporting operations | against Cuba; 47 percent of its cable traffic con- cerned Cuban operations. Mexico was the only Latin American country maintaining diplomatic relations | ~ with Castro and had the only direct air link to Ha- vana. WH Division assigned top priority to recruit- | 7 ing agents in place in Cuba, and Mexico City Station not only ran its own operations but supported the tentative plans of other stations. | The variety and volume of technical operations created a heavy workload managing safehouses, listen- | _. 7 - ing posts, and vehicles. - For photography. alone the station had six base houses commanding the entrances | ~ to target embassies, two mobile photosurveillance ] trucks, and three agents trained in photosurveillance - on foot. It was such projects that provided informa- i tion on the visits of Lee Harvey Oswald, President -Kennedy's assassin, to the Cuban and Soviet Embassies - 293 - SECRET | Cp
14-00000 SECRET 19/ in Mexico. CIA's clandestine information on Oswald, in- cluding a photograph showing him in front of the Soviet Embassy, was turned over to the FBI, which promised to safeguard Agency sources and methods. Instead, the Bureau showed the photograph to Oswald's mother in Dallas and told her it was a CIA photo. The mother gave the press a garbled story about the photo, the FBI gave the press the correct story, and eventually CIA's clandestine information became part of the voluminous Warren Commission report on the Kennedy assassination. In the process Mexico City Station had to abandon its photosurveillance 320/ base houses, which had been thoroughly blown. - 294 -. SECRET